Processor Technology Reviews, Analysis And News
Processors come in many types for different applications. However, when it comes to computing, whether mobile, on the desktop or in the Internet of Things, these chips are widely known as the "brains" of the operation. Here you'll find Hot Hardware reviews and news on products from the biggest names in PC and mobile processors from Intel and AMD, to Qualcomm, ARM and more.
David Perlmutter (Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mobility Group) delivered the final keynote of the first day of IDF. Perlmutter started out by declaring that notebook shipments are about to surpass desktop shipments. He predicts that within the next 10 years, Intel will be...
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While Craig Barrett delivered a rather non-technical, but socially-charged keynote earlier in the day, Pat Gelsinger's (Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group) keynote address by contrast was all about the...
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Craig Barrett highlights social responsibility as the key to technology innovationThis year's IDF kicked off in typical fashion with Pat Gelsinger, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group, taking the stage and giving a brief overview of what the event has to...
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VIA caused quite a stir a few months ago when the company first revealed initial details regarding their low-power Nano processor. At the time, the product was referred to by its internal codename of Isaiah. In addition, the President of VIA's design center that was tasked with...
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AMD is launching a three-pronged attack on the desktop CPU space today, with the introduction of three new quad-core Phenom X4 processors. One of the processors, the new Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition, is AMD's latest flagship desktop CPU. The other two, however, are somewhat surprisingly "green", low-power quad-cores dubbed the...
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When you visit NVIDIA’s Web site and hit the Products drop-down menu, a long list of the company’s offerings scrolls down in front of you—impressive for an organization that originally found notoriety by designing the fastest desktop display adapters.Graphics processors for the desktop...
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It has been surprising and frankly somewhat satisfying to see the success to date of the "Wolfdale" core architecture in Intel’s Core 2 lineup of processors. "Wolfdale" is Intel’s first 45nm based dual-core design, and is an interesting product beyond first glance. When it was first...
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Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9300 has some rather large shoes to fill. This newly shipping, relatively low-cost (~$270) quad-core processor from Intel is a replacement for their long-standing price to performance champ, the Core 2 Quad Q6600. The Q6600 was the first quad-core in Intel’s arsenal which was actually affordable, and even today, it...
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When AMD first announced plans to introduce triple-core processors back in September of last year, reaction to the news was mixed. Some felt that AMD was simply planning to pass off partially functional Phenom X4 processors as triple-core products, making lemonade from lemons if you will. Others thought it was a...
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Do you remember the original Pentium 4? It launched at 1.5 GHz and gave us our first bittersweet taste of the NetBurst microarchitecture, which Intel would use to replace the P6 design.When the Pentium 4 began its life, Intel manufactured the chips on a 180 nm node. The 42 million transistors that went into those first Pentium 4s - internally...
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It doesn't take a genius to figure out that AMD's initial Phenom processor launch didn't go exactly as planned. The first batch of retail-ready Phenom processors were clocked lower than expectations and in the days leading up to the launch, the now infamous TLB bug reared its ugly head. If you're not aware, all initial Phenom...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator...
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In an impromptu pre-IDF press briefing today, Intel disclosed a wealth of new information regarding its roadmap product efforts, upcoming multi-core processors and their associated platforms. The discussion, chaired by the Senior VP of Intel's Digital Enterprise...
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We generally don’t use integrated graphics. You might not use integrated graphics. But there are more motherboards with integrated graphics sold than discrete cards, according to data published last year by Jon Peddie Research. That means you probably have friends and family buying...
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Intel fans have been patiently waiting for the company to release their lineup of refreshed Core 2 Duo and Quad products. Intel started hyping these revised components late last year, and they were expected to hit the market in January of this year. While Intel technically hit that date with the release of one 45nm component, it was the...
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Intel started slowly leaking information about an ultra high-end enthusiast platform dubbed Skulltrail at right about the same time that AMD’s now defunct QuadFX platform was set to be released. Over time we learned that Skulltrail, like QuadFX, would be a dual-socket platform...
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With all the buzz around VIA's recent announcement of their next generation low power Isaiah mobile processor and the parade of online coverage of the recent press event VIA held at their Centaur design center in Texas, we felt rather than regurgitating the usual marketing fluff and press...
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A few days ago, AMD officially unveiled their RV670 GPU, the chip at the heart of the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series of graphics cards. Just in case you missed it on the day of the launch, our coverage of the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850 cards is available right here. While we...
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Thirty million transistors on the head of a pin. Think about that for a minute. Where on earth can you fit 30 million of anything in that amount of space? It used to be that 30 million transistors was a good-sized chip. These days, in a 45nm Hafnium-based...
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Over the course of the past few months, we've brought you detailed analysis on Intel's forward-looking products based on their 45nm Penryn core architecture. At the time, these products were not officially launched in the various sales...
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It seems like Intel started talking about the Penryn core as soon as the Conroe core launched in the form of the first Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors. Penryn was to be the next evolution in Intel’s Core microarchitecture and would be the foundation of a new class of mobile...
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Day 2 at this year’s IDF began with a mobility keynote hosted by Intel’s David “Dadi” Perlmutter and Anand Chandrasekher. The keynote was broken up into two parts; the first focused on notebooks and Intel’s mobile platforms as a whole and the second focused on “ultra mobility” featuring a...
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