Items tagged with CPUs
We have probably said a thousand times (slight exaggeration) that Intel is expected to launch its 11th Gen Core desktop processors at the end of March, and now we can finally confirm that to be the case. Or rather, Intel has confirmed it. The official launch date is set for March 30, exactly four weeks from now, and just one day before March comes to a close. What brought about the confirmation is an inquiry after German retailer Mindfactory had been accepting pre-orders for one of Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S processors, and specifically the Core i7-11700K. According to the product page, which is no longer taking orders, the retailer sold "over 120" units before Intel caught wind and told...
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Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to buy the latest generation PC and console hardware at regular pricing, from first-party vendors? Under normal circumstances, paying full price is not a lofty expectation. But this past year has been anything but normal, and product shortages combined with determined scalpers have made purchasing certain hardware a nearly impossible task. Famed game designer John Carmack thinks he has the solution—manufacturer auctions. Carmack posted his thoughts on Twitter, where he proposes a "transparent auction system" led by manufacturers for hard-to-buy items. You know, things like the newest generation graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, and the latest game...
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Do you think Intel is perhaps feeling the heat from AMD and its latest generation of Ryzen processors? Intel may not be willing to admit it publicly (not in so many words, anyway), but an admission of sorts could come in the form of another price cut, as is rumored to be the case. If true, the price cuts will come in the second half of the year. Price cuts in reaction to the competition have been relatively rare on Intel's part, especially ones of any significance. However, there is a changing of the tide, and Intel finds itself reacting to the market. Take for example its recent roll out of high-end desktop (HEDT) Cascade Lake-X processors. Those chips debuted at significantly lower MSRPs than...
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Who knows what the future holds, but for the current generation of Ryzen processors, AMD correctly surmised that it did not need to surpass Intel in IPC performance in order to offer customers a compelling a solution. It just needed to be competitive at the higher end of the spectrum. Combined with aggressive pricing, customers have responded by buying more AMD processors than Intel chips, according to data released by an online retailer in Germany. Before we go any further, caveats are in order. For one, a single online retailer in Germany is not necessarily indicative of the marketplace as a whole. It is also important to consider that the sales figures for individual CPUs mostly apply to do-it-yourself...
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AMD is expected to launch its Ryzen 3000 desktop processor family this summer. Otherwise known as Matisse, the upcoming chips are based on AMD's 7-nanometer Zen 2 architecture, which yields faster clockspeeds and an improved IPC for better overall performance. The new chips will also be accompanied by a new X570 chipset, and we are starting to see motherboard models based on that chipset leak out. If you plan on building a PC around a Ryzen 3000 series processor, an X570 motherboard makes the most sense—the upcoming chipset is said to offer PCI Express Gen 4 support and will likely include other goodies not found on the current batch of X470 motherboards. That said, Ryzen 3000 processors...
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The revelation that practically every processor made in the past couple of decades is affected by at least one variant of Meltdown and Spectre, the names given to multiple versions of the same general execution vulnerability, shook the tech industry pretty hard. It also led to further discoveries of similar bugs. The most of recent example is called SPOILER, and AMD has a message for anyone who is in the market for a CPU. "We are aware of the report of a new security exploit called SPOILER which can gain access to partial address information during load operations. We believe that our products are not susceptible to this issue because of our unique processor architecture," AMD says. That is not...
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Much of Intel's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday was centered around upcoming platforms, and providing reassurance that the chip maker is still on track with its 10-nanometer lithography process. Time will tell, of course. Intel also announced new additions to its 9th generation Core desktop processor family, with more than a half a dozen new SKUs. We had to do a little digging to find out which ones, along with the details. After the keynote, Intel published a press release that mentions the new 9th gen Core processor additions, but it only links to a single model, that being the Core i5-9400. Thankfully Intel's ARK database that contains product specifications and model numbers...
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AMD revealed its 7nm Zen 2 CPUs last week with the promise of big performance gains over current Zen+ products. However, a benchmark claim recently discovered deeply nestled in the footnotes at the bottom of the the company's official announcement gives us a little more insight intothe performance expectations of Zen 2. AMD performed an internal test on one of its Zen 2 CPUs using the benchmark tool DKERN +RSA. This test utilizes a mixture of floating point and integer tests to determine a processors IPC performance. The unidentified Zen 2 processor managed to achieve a score of 4.53 IPC. AMD ran the same test on one of its 1st Gen Zen CPUs for comparison purposes, and that CPU returned a score...
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AMD is on a roll with its Zen architecture, and especially its second generation Ryzen processor family for the mainstream market. Buyers now have competitive solutions from both AMD and Intel at practically every price point. That hasn't always been the case before Ryzen—AMD wasn't really competing at the higher end of the performance spectrum—but it is now, and it's paying off. Evidence of this can be found at a German retailer's breakdown of CPU sales. Every so often, Mindfactory puts out a bunch of graphs and sales data comparing CPU sales from AMD and Intel processors. Over the course of the year, AMD has been catching up with Intel at that specific retailer, having grabbed 45...
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As we sit here and ponder how much longer it will be until Intel refines its 10-nanometer technology and delivers Cannon Lake on a mass scale, there are other processor releases that will fill the gap between now and then. One of them is Intel's impending 9th Generation Core processor launch. Said to be a refresh of Coffee Lake, the latest rumor points to Intel introducing these chips next month. In case you have not been following the rumor scene, these 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh (Coffee Lake-R) chips will counter AMD's first and second generation Ryzen lineup with what will be Intel's first mainstream 8-core CPU options. Not all of the 9th Gen parts will be 8-core chips, but if the leaked...
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Separating fact from fiction prior to a product's release is no easy task. We bring that disclaimer up because there is yet another Ryzen leak making the rounds, one that details an extensive lineup of 17 processors. It is really a continuation of a previous leak supposedly outing AMD's top-to-bottom retail launch lineup, only now with individual part numbers and TDP ratings for every SKU.The source of the leak, WCCFTech, doesn't exactly have a reputation for vetting its information and erring on the side of accuracy. Its approach is more akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. In this case, the site says the new details surrounding AMD's entire Ryzen CPU lineup "has been...
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AMD boss Dr. Lisa Su recently confirmed that Ryzen, the company's highly anticipated next generation CPU architecture, will launch to retail in early March. Up to this point AMD has been tight lipped about the processor lineup that will comprise Ryzen, though a Chinese-language website is posting what it says is a leaked list of AMD's full Ryzen launch featuring no less than 17 CPUs. Take this with a slab of salt, but if the leaked list is accurate, AMD will have quad-core, six-core, and eight-core Ryzen processors ready next month. These are broken down into three categories: R3, R5, and R7. Oddly enough, the leaked list has AMD using model numbers that are similar to its GPU lineup, which could...
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Yesterday at IoT World 2015 in San Francisco Samsung debuted ARTIK, a set of new technologies centered on tiny circuit boards crammed with processing and communications components that they designed to juke developers to create and configure new Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as personal trackers, drones, robots, security systems, and the like. Of course, Samsung also intends to enhance their own product lines with ARTIK, including televisions, home appliances, and smartphones. In a blog post Samsung said of their new platform, "ARTIK provides a platform for developers who simply want to focus on building and testing new ideas for IoT. Rather than spend your time writing low-level...
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The Consumer Electronics Show is about to get underway, and Intel is leading the pack with a set of CPU announcements. It has been six months since the company took the lid off its first 14nm processor, the Core M, but that CPU is designed for the ultramobile, low-power market. Consumers who wanted to tap Intel's 14nm products in more mainstream notebook hardware had to wait a bit longer until the Q1 2015 time frame.This new SoC is a "tick" in Intel's tick-tock plan, which means it's mostly a die shrink of the existing Haswell architecture -- at least, on the CPU side. On the GPU side, there's a bevy of improvements and advances, and the video decoder block has been beefed up with dual bit...
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It was a mixed set of announcements from AMD last night, with some positive news for the chip manufacturer, but some long-term projections that sent investors skittering. This was Lisa Su's first quarterly announcement after taking over the CEO position barely a week ago, and she opened with good news -- not only did AMD turn a small profit on the quarter -- $17M net income ($63M operating income) on revenue of $1.43B -- it's secured two new semi-custom deals expected to provide roughly $1B in revenue over the next three years. That works out to around $84M per quarter -- not an enormous amount, no, but a nice feather in AMD's overall business cap. AMD expects to ship this hardware for revenue...
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This week, Broadcom announced that it would exit the LTE modem market and shut down its LTE research division. The move comes less than a year after Broadcom bought Renesas' (formerly known as NEC) LTE modem -- and that purchase was supposed to give Broadcom a leg up in modem design after its own in-house LTE product had failed to ship. With Broadcom gone, Qualcomm is, for all intents and purposes, the Emperor of LTE mountain. The market shift has happened quickly -- look at where revenue share sat in 2009, when 4G was still on the horizon and 3G modems were the norm. Qualcomm is still the leading provider, no question, but ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek, and Infineon all have...
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The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005 and the 20nm process node is set to be more expensive than the 28nm node was for the first time ever. Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again -- by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. No, really. Stop laughing. Once upon a time, vacuum tubes were the fundamental...
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Ever since AMD announced it would build an ARM processor, there've been questions about how the company would balance its x86 and ARM obligations and product lines. Today, the company gave a major update to how it sees the future of these products. This year, AMD will debut its first Cortex-A57 based server (codenamed Seattle). In 2015, AMD will launch a 20nm SoC family around the new Puma+ core and a second-gen Cortex-A57 chip -- and those two CPUs will be drop-in compatible with each other (codenamed Project Skybridge). In 2016, AMD will follow up with its own custom ARM architecture implementation. One of the major changes coming next year is that both the ARM and x86 chips will apparently...
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After a quick search of Newegg’s site, we’ve found that Intel’s trio of initial Core i7 processors and an array of X58 Express chipset-based motherboards have been made available, just shy of two weeks since our launch article hit the web. The Core i7 920 (2.66GHz), 940 (2.93GHz) and Core i7 Extreme 965 (3.2GHz) are all selling for a small premium at the moment--$319, $599, and 1069, respectively—but the X58 motherboards are priced right in line with expectations. MSI’s offering is the least expensive at the moment at about $220, and ASUS’ flagship Rampage II Extreme is currently the most expensive at almost $400. Coincidentally, we’ve got MSI’s X58 Platinum and ASUS’ Rampage II Extreme in the...
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CNET blogger, Brooke Crothers, reports that AMD is running into compatibility issues with its quad-core Phenom CPU. Some motherboard makers and system builders are mistakingly trying to pair the 125-watt, quad-core Phenon with motherboards that only support the lower-power, 95-watt AMD processors. Crothers includes these quotes from AMD spokesman, Jake Whitman: "They've taken an enthusiast-class quad-core part and paired it with a mainstream motherboard..." "And not all motherboard manufacturers have tweaked their boards to support a 125-watt TDP..." "We've never made claims that 780G motherboards are enthusiast-class motherboards." Enthusiasts and hobbyists have dealt with just these sort...
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Despite many programs still struggling to take full advantage of 2 or more cores, AMD appears to be planning on jumping past 8 cores and going straight for 12! AMD has dropped more than a few clues that something like this was coming:"The first breadcrumb comes with a new "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently codenamed Istanbul. This processor is clearly targeted at Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor."The second clue was when AMD execs and engineers began to stop referring derisively to Intel’s practice of putting two chips on a single die, and began to examine using that approach themselves.There are no early performance estimates worth reporting at this...
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The ultimate demise of the single-core desktop chip from AMD will have to be postponed for a little while longer. AMD is still phasing out chips such as the Sempron LE-1150, but they're actually planning a higher-frequency replacement part called the LE-1660. Intel is currently in the process of phasing out all single-core CPUs from their desktop lineup, which could provide AMD with a little breathing room at the ultra-low end of the spectrum.Sadly the LE-1150 isn't the only CPU we'll be saying goodbye to soon:“In addition to the Athlon 64 X2 6400+, 6000+ and 5600+, the company has also informed customers that final orders for its Athlon 64 X2 4200+ will be taken at the end of this...
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