Items tagged with Chipset
It's no secret that AMD has a trick up its sleeve that it's soon to pull out. The company itself admits this, as it has a big reveal event planned for Tuesday, December 13th. With the upcoming Vega Radeon architecture expected to be announced soon, there could be a slight reveal at this event, but based on everything we know right now, it seems certain that the major focus will be on Zen, as it should be. Zen has been a long-time coming. While AMD has had no shortage of new CPU releases in recent years, most of those are derived from older architectures. What we've been craving for is a revolutionary release, not just evolutionary ones. And Zen will be just that. Now, ahead of that December 13th...
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Although Intel is holding many of the architectural details regarding its latest Skylake-based, 6th generation Core processors back until the Intel Developers Forum goes down in San Francisco in a couple of weeks, the company is announcing a pair of new processors and a companion chipset today. Skylake is a “tock” in Intel’s release cadence, which signifies a new microarchitecture, built using a mature process—in this case the same 14nm process that brought us Broadwell. The new Skylake-based Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K squarely target performance enthusiasts, and pack all of the goodness we’ve come to expect from Intel’s unlocked K-SKUs, in addition to some things that are sure to please...
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Earlier this week, AMD's Chief Financial Officer, Devinder Kumar, gave a presentation at Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Global Technology Conference. He covered several aspects of AMD's several year turnaround, its focus on new product strategies, and the company's long-term goal to earn 50% of its revenue from the non-PC market by 2015. Obviously winning all three consoles was a major coup for AMD's business and underwrites a substantial section of its long-term revenue plan, but Kumar's answer when asked what AMD expects from the console market long term is rather interesting: Q: How do you see AMD’s view of the game console market? Are we headed to like one big year and then it sort...
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It's been a nice, long ride for the conventional PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot, but with the introduction of Intel's game-changing Haswell platform, the Santa Clara chip maker is reportedly doing away with support for the legacy ports. If you've been holding onto an earlier model Sound Blaster card or any other peripheral still using the old-school ports, go ahead and plan their retirement party now. Intel's Z87 chipset for Haswell isn't just about getting rid of old technologies. In a nod towards future-proofing, Z87 will reportedly boast support for half a dozen SATA 6Gbps connectors, rather than two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps as supported on the Z77 chipset. In other words,...
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AMD's turning in a banner year. The company really starting things off with a bang, as the Fusion chipset launched at CES and has continued to grow in popularity ever since. This week, the company's launching its 9-series chipset line, which aims to help PC builders to develop next generation high performance desktop platforms. The company also unveiled its 2011 HD Tablet Platform, based on the AMD Z-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), which looks to rival ARM-based alternatives as well as Intel in the market of Microsoft Windows-based tablets. And with Windows 8 being teased as well, this battle just got entirely more interesting. The chipset is a key component of AMD’s next generation...
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Last week, Intel announced it was temporarily halting shipments of its Sandy Bridge-compatible 6 Series Chipset due to a long-term reliability problem with the conventional SATA II ports on all P67 motherboards. Today, the company announced a partial reversal of that decision. The company's PR statement states: Intel subsequently initiated extensive discussions with computer makers about this topic...As a result of these discussions and specific requests from computer makers, Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel® 6 Series Chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue. Only computer makers who have committed to shipping the Intel® 6 Series...
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Unless your Internet's been down for past couple of days, then by now you're undoubtedly aware that something's amiss with Sandy Bridge, or more specifically, the 6-series chipset built into socket 1155 boards that Sandy Bridge processors plop into. The "design flaw," as Intel calls it, is estimated to cost the chip maker between $700 million and $1 billion, but who else is left holding the bag? What happens to end users who already purchased a Sandy Bridge motherboard only to find out that it's flawed? MSI isn't deaf to those questions and released a statement this week saying it is "working closely with Intel to minimize the inconvenience to customers and retail stores with regard to related...
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Intel announced this morning that it's been forced to stop shipping existing Sandy Bridge motherboards. The company recently discovered a design issue in its P67 (Cougar Point) chipset that, over time, could cause SATA performance to degrade and possibly fail altogether. The problem only affects older 3G SATA ports—Intel's 6G implementation is unaffected—but it's going to take several weeks for the company to implement and ramp the new motherboard revision. During its press conference, Intel explained that the erratum only appeared after its extensive validation process had concluded. Once Intel signs off of a chipset, it ships motherboards to OEMs who begin their own verification...
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Today’s pre-launch of Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based processors should come as no surprise to anyone who even remotely follows the PC tech scene. We, along with Intel and numerous other companies and media outlets, have been slowly leaking Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-related details for many months now. Heck, we’ve even showed off a number of Sandy Bridge compatible motherboards in the past, posted pics of actual processors, and discussed many of the microarchitecture’s features already. We obviously weren’t able to disclose all of the platform’s specifics, however, and boy is there a lot still to cover. We’ve had a few Core i5 and Core i7 Sandy Bridge...
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Today’s pre-launch of Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based processors should come as no surprise to anyone who even remotely follows the PC tech scene. We, along with Intel and numerous other companies and media outlets, have been slowly leaking Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-related details for many months now. Heck, we’ve even showed off a number of Sandy Bridge compatible motherboards in the past, posted pics of actual processors, and discussed many of the microarchitecture’s features already. We obviously weren’t able to disclose all of the platform’s specifics, however, and boy is there a lot still to cover. That’s what this article is for. We’ve had...
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When we published our comprehensive P55 motherboard roundup back in early April, one of the boards we discussed and really liked was the Asus P7P55D Deluxe. At $220, that particular board was priced significantly higher than some of the other LGA1156 options we considered. Fast forward a few months and we've got the LGA1156-based P7P55D-E Pro on the table. Its MSRP is considerably lower than the P7P55D Deluxe's ($179.99 vs. $219), and it offers features like USB 3.0 and SATA 6G, both of which aren't available on the other board. The P7P55D-E Pro's features and price make it an attractive option, but does it stand up against the newer LGA1156 boards from other manufacturers? Let's find out......
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When we published our comprehensive P55 motherboard roundup back in early April, one of the boards we discussed and really liked was the Asus P7P55D Deluxe. At $220, that particular board was priced significantly higher than some of the other LGA1156 options we considered. Fast forward a few months and we've got the LGA1156-based P7P55D-E Pro on the table. Its MSRP is considerably lower than the P7P55D Deluxe's ($179.99 vs. $219), and it offers features like USB 3.0 and SATA 6G, both of which aren't available on the other board. The P7P55D-E Pro's features and price make it an attractive option, but does it stand up against the newer LGA1156 boards from other manufacturers? Let's find...
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USB 3 is one of the best standard updates the computer industry has come up with, but reports indicate Intel may not support the standard natively until 2012. That's particularly surprising since Intel designed much of the USB 3 standard—by all rights, Santa Clara should have been one of the first companies out the door, not one of the last. While it's still only found on a relative handful of motherboards, it's impossible to the performance difference between it and USB 2, even under modest test conditions. One of the most useful features of USB 3, though it's not something we've seen vendors taking advantage of yet, is the fact that it allows external HDDs to run just as fast as they...
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We suppose even the best laid plans can fall apart, and it seems that one of Intel's most promising endeavors is no longer active as of today. In a new post by the company's own Bill Kircos, he addresses Intel's stance on graphics-related programs, giving vague updates to a broad variety of topics. But one area wasn't vague at all. When speaking about Larrabee, which the company has been talking about and showcasing for many years now, he noted that Intel is "executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips." He follows by saying that this "server product line expansion is optimized for a broader range of highly parallel workloads in...
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