Items tagged with processor
The core wars are heating up, and right now AMD has the upper hand, as it pertains to providing more cores for mainstream consumers to play with. Conventional wisdom says it is only a matter of time before Intel releases an 8-core chip that is not part of its high-end desktop (HEDT) or Xeon product lines. The question is, when will that happen? Well, rumor has it that Intel is prepping an 8-core Coffee Lake processor for a September launch. There was no such announcement at Computex earlier this month, so take all this with a pinch of salt. Word of the upcoming launch comes by way of an author...
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When AMD launched its 2nd Generation Ryzen processors, we initially examined to the two top-end “X” variants -- the current flagship 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X and its 6-core cousin, the Ryzen 5 2600X. Of course, we love looking at the latest and greatest high-end hardware around here, but as is often the case, scaled-down versions of a particular product commonly offer significant value, without sacrificing much in terms of performance or features. With that in mind, we were eager to see what the lower-priced Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 5 2600 could do. These processor are virtually identical...
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Last week, Arm showed off the inner workings of its new Machine Learning Processor design, but that is not all that company had waiting in the wings. Arm is also detailing more cutting-edge technology in the form of its Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU, and Mali-V76 VPU designs. All three chips are slated to be heavy-hitters in their respective categories, and thanks to some on-campus, in depth briefings earlier this month, we have all of the details to share... Cortex A-76 The Cortex-A76 represents Arm’s most radical overhaul over previous designs. The A76’s brand-new architecture...
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AMD initially announced its 2nd Generation Ryzen desktop processors back at CES earlier this year. Our coverage of the event is available for you here, but to quickly recap, 2nd Generation Ryzen processors are based on a refined update to the Zen architecture, dubbed Zen+, that offers higher clocks, lower latencies, and a more intelligent Precision Boost 2 algorithm that improves performance, system responsiveness, and power efficiency characteristics. The chips are also manufactured using a more advanced process, however, they still leverage the existing AM4 infrastructure and are compatible with...
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To say that 2017 was an interesting year for CPUs would be a gross understatement. With Ryzen, AMD delivered its most impressive processor family in a decade, and soon after, Intel unveiled its high-end Core X series. That was then followed by another Intel launch: the mainstream-targeted 8th generation "Coffee Lake" Core series. Now, and thanks to a couple of leaks found on SiSoft's Sandra results repository, we know that a few more 8th generatopm Core models are en route. In addition, Coffee Lake is soon to welcome its first Pentium models, aimed at folks with simpler computing needs. All five...
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The upheaval of the high-end desktop processor segment continues today with the official release of Intel’s latest Coffee Lake-based 8th Generation Core processors. 2017 easily been one of the most exciting years in a decade for desktop processors, thanks in no small part to AMD’s entire line-up of Ryzen products, including the monstrous Threadripper, which propelled the company back into contention at virtually every price point.Intel was at the ready with a host of ultra-high-end processors – namely the Core X series – that allow the company to lay claim to the fastest desktop processor on the...
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Over the last few months, Intel slowly divulged a number of details regarding the two processors we’ll be covering today, its flagship 18-core, behemoth Core i9-7980XE and its slightly smaller sibling, the 16-core Core i9-7960X. The fact that these two processors were in the works was officially disclosed all the way back in May, no doubt in an attempt to quell the impending AMD Threadripper firestorm, but specifics like frequencies, cache, and TDP were initially held back.Those specifications were eventually revealed, and some benchmarks leaked as well, but today we’ve got the full, official scoop....
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Back in late June, AMD announced that it would be rolling out a Ryzen Pro line of CPUs aimed at desktops in the professional workplace. Today is the day that products with Ryzen Pro inside launch and AMD counts some of the biggest names in the computer industry as partners with workstations and desktops from Dell, Lenovo, and HP coming. AMD's Kevin Lensing spent a bit of time laying out what AMD is cooking up with Ryzen Pro noting that this is part of AMD's "return to innovation for high-performance PCs." Ryzen Pro is a commercial CPU for AMD with the consumer Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3...
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AMD’s unrelenting attack on the desktop CPU market continues today, with the official launch of the company's beastly Ryzen Threadripper processors. If, by some cruel joke, you are unfamiliar with Threadripper, it is AMD’s premium, high-end, many-core desktop processor, that leverages the same Zen microarchitecture that debuted with the Ryzen 7 series a few months back. The flagship chip in the initial AMD Ryzen Threadripper line-up packs 16 physical processor cores and supports 32 threads through the use of SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). To date, the largest number of cores supported on standard...
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AMD is officially launching its latest series of Ryzen processors today, the affordably priced Ryzen 3. As the branding suggests, Ryzen 3 will complement the previously launched Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 series of desktop processors, but will target lower cost, entry-level price points. Ryzen 3 isn’t your typical, entry-level processor, however. Ryzen 3 actually utilizes the same die as its higher-end siblings, but has fewer active cores and symmetrical multi-threading (SMT) has been disabled. Ryzen 3 processors feature quad-core configurations, however, they leverage the same socket and packaging, have...
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When AMD released its first Zen-based processors this past spring, which came to us in the form of Ryzen, it would be an understatement to say the company had a lot riding on the new family of CPUs. Post-launch, it was clear that AMD succeeded in its goal of making the battlefield competitive again. Fast-forward to today and it's fair to speculate that because Ryzen has proven so potent, that it has forced Intel's hand at expediting the release of some of its upcoming products. Intel's Core X series just launched a few weeks ago, giving Intel yet another edge and a performance lead over AMD -...
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System builders—both professional and do-it-yourself types—have been waiting a long time for AMD to be competitive again with Intel. Over the years, each new architecture launch from AMD seemed to come with big promises that would ultimately turn out to be empty, but then Zen came along. Finally, AMD built an architecture that lived up to the hype, and with Ryzen getting off to a strong start, it appears the chip designer has been able to chisel away at a not-so-insignificant chunk of Intel's market share in the enthusiast market.We can see this by examining the market share figures collected by...
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Today marks the launch of AMD's EPYC family of processors for data center servers. Based on the company's Zen microarchitecture, it has become abundantly clear that AMD was targeting the lucrative data center market first and foremost with its new CPU architecture and the highly scalable Naples platform that leverages it. Of course Zen scales well for client/consumer desktop applications, as we've seen with AMD's successful Ryzen processor launch. However, the data center is near and dear to the AMD's heart, due to significantly higher chip pricing and better profit margins; not to mention the...
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Over the next few months, Intel will be releasing an array of new high-end desktop processors in the recently-announced Core X Series, based on the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X micro-architectures. The first chips in the series to arrive in the lab are the 10-core Core i9-7900X and quad-core Core i7-7740X. We’ve got an array of benchmarks and overclocking data on tap with the processors, but due to some unexpected shipping issues, we weren't able to complete all of the test we would have liked. Rest assured, we’ll update this piece as soon as we can with a full set of numbers -- it will just take...
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