Items tagged with processor
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...
Read more...
We reported earlier this week on a rumor which claims that Intel's next top-end enthusiast processor will pack an impressive 10 cores, along with a healthy 25MB of L3 cache. Unlike most enthusiast launches we've seen from Intel over the past few years, Broadwell-E will be special in that there will be four models to choose from; the "smallest" being a six-core chip clocked at 3.4GHz. Today, we get to peer into other plans Intel has for the coming year, including what we'll be seeing on the mainstream side. Earlier this summer, Intel released its long-overdue Broadwell desktop processors, which were the 14nm die shrink of Haswell. In September, the company followed-up with Skylake, also a 14nm...
Read more...
AMD has today announced a brand-new series of APUs that it targets at business use. Called AMD PRO, these A-series chips are designed to offer great performance and the dependability business environments require. A major focus of AMD PRO is rock-solid Windows 10 support. While overall, Windows 10 support is going to be expected, AMD is making a major commitment to make sure that when businesses roll out a new fleet of laptops with Microsoft's latest OS, it's going to be as stable as can be, and also offer important features businesses want, such as refined control over their company-issued machines. For small and medium-sized businesses that don't have their own system management tools, AMD...
Read more...
AMD has just lost another one of its great employees, legendary chip designer Jim Keller. Interestingly, AMD managed to lure Jim back to its stable just over three years ago, and at that time, it felt like the burst of hope we needed that AMD would in fact become competitive in the CPU market again. Well, that hope isn't quite waned because of Jim's departure, because he was brought on to help with AMD's next-gen Zen architecture, which has yet to be released. That's due next year and could very-well prove to be a very competitive offering. At least, we sure hope so, because AMD is long overdue for tasting genuine success on the processor side. It's hard to say whether its lack of delivering...
Read more...
A challenge some software developers must face is having to support more than one architecture - be it x86, ARM, or something else. Wouldn't it be great, then, if one processor could support more than one of them at once, potentially allowing developers to target just one base architecture? China's Loongson seems to agree, offering its 3A2000 and 3B2000 processors as proof. While this design might make you think that these chips are targeted at mobile devices, they're actually designed for desktops and workstations, as well as things like network routers. The 3B2000 could be used in dual or quad CPU servers. Loongson apparently really means business here. To add x86 and ARM support, Loongson...
Read more...
Qualcomm has been hyping the heck out of its Snapdragon 820 System-on-Chip (SoC) and if it lives up the hype, it's going to be one hell of a chip. It will have fast graphics processing, a new Spectra Camera Image Signal Processor (ISP) that can support up to three cameras simultaneously at up to 25MP, machine learning capabilities, and the list goes on. Oh, and it will offer twice the performance of the Snapdragon 810. That latter bit is the latest claim from Qualcomm. In a new blog post, Qualcomm explains that it's been designing custom mobile processors for over 25 years and gaining valuable heterogeneous computing experience along the way. All that experience culminates in the Snapdragon 820,...
Read more...
Intel is still keeping a number of details regarding its complete Skylake microarchitecture and product line-up under wraps for a few more weeks, but at a public session at IDF, some of the key technologies and design updates introduced with Skylake were discussed.During the session, Julius Mandelblat, Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, talked about changes to the CPU core in Skylake, along with some improvements made to the interconnects and memory interface, power and thermal characteristics, and platform level enhancements. Performance wasn’t discussed in detail, however; we’ve already tested the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K processor for desktop systems, so some early real-world numbers are...
Read more...
There have been many juicy bits of info to come out of this year's Black Hat conference, including hacking into autos, Macs that suffer a Thunderbolt bug, Microsoft boosting its bug bounty, and yet more vulnerabilities relating to Android. But wait - there's more! According to Christopher Domas, a researcher for Battelle Memorial Institute, all of Intel's (and possibly AMD's, and with the exception of its absolute latest) x86-based processors dating back to 1997 are vulnerable to an exploit that could grant someone access to the lowest-level firmware in a PC. The exact target is System Management Mode, the part of a PC that handles system errors and grants control to various subsystems, such...
Read more...
We have covered Intel’s Broadwell microarchitecture extensively over the last few months. The relatively high-performance and low-power characteristics of Broadwell make it a good fit for a wide range of devices and systems. And as such, Broadwell has found its way into everything from notebooks and tablets, to an array of All-In-Ones and Intel’s own NUC ultra-small-form-factor systems.Broadwell, however, just recently—as in the last few weeks—made it to the DIY and full-sized desktop market. 14nm Broadwell processors weren’t originally destined for the channel, but Intel ultimately changed course and launched a handful of 5th Generation Core processors, the most powerful of which we’ll show...
Read more...
As the year's pass, the iconic Moore's Law becomes more and more challenged. With Intel's Cannonlake, a 10nm architecture originally expected to release in 2016, we can see proof of that. During the company's latest financial earnings call, Intel admitted that it will require more time to deliver processors built on the smaller process. While this is no doubt disappointing, Intel is still well ahead of most of its competitors. AMD's latest (and greatest?) processors are still built at 28nm -- a process size that'd seem gargantuan at this point if not for the fact that both AMD's and NVIDIA's GPUs are also built at 28nm. Nonetheless, for the next couple of years, Intel will be sticking...
Read more...
Had Paul Revere been a computer geek living in the modern era, he'd have just flown in from Computex and hopped on his Harley so he could cruise the streets yelling, "Iris Pro Graphics is coming! Iris Pro Graphics is coming!" That's because Intel today fleshed out its fifth generation Core processor lineup with 10 new desktop and mobile Broadwell-H CPUs, each infused with Iris Pro Graphics 6200. The unofficial hope is that these new CPUs will hold users over until Skylake arrives. Intel's also aiming at a segment that is content to roll with integrated graphics, but want something better than what's currently available, at least in Intel's camp (AMD has some compelling integrated graphics options)....
Read more...
Many of the higher end and flagship devices on tap for the coming weeks and months will sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor inside, a 64-bit System-on-Chip (SoC) featuring quad-core ARM Cortex A57 and A53 CPUs. But what's potentially even more exciting is a cognitive platform Qualcomm is working on that will be supported by its forthcoming Snapdragon 820 processor. More on that in a moment, but first a few details about the chip itself. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 is being designed on a leading edge FinFET process node, though the company didn't say if it's using TSMC's 16nm manufacturing process or Samsung's 14nm technology. It also didn't provide speeds or go into technical details, though...
Read more...
Apple and Samsung will probably never be friends, and truth be told, the former doesn't even want to be business partners with the latter. Nevertheless, Apple isn't going to let its contempt for Samsung get in the way of a good business decision, and so it will again rely on the South Korean electronics giant to supply custom chips for its next iPhone, according to multiple reports.This is an ongoing arrangement between the two, though with each new generation of iPhone, there's always talk that Apple is trying to sever ties with Samsung. To an extent, it finally happened with the iPhone 6 -- Apple welcomed Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) to the fold and awarded the company the...
Read more...
LG is no small name in the smartphone space, and its G-series of flagship Android devices have raised the bar year after year. Going forward, however, LG's phones will involve a twist: the silicon within will be LG's own handiwork. The company is revealing this week its first mobile application processor, which features an eight core architecture and LTE-A network capabilities. The new AP is being dubbed NUCLUN, and it'll make its debut in the G3 Screen (shown below), a phone engineered specifically for the Korean market (at least for now). As you'd likely expect, NUCLUN is built around ARM's big.LITTLE technology. It employs a foursome of 1.5GHz cores (ARM Cortex-A15) for high performance tasks,...
Read more...
While there’s no guarantee for traction in the market, lowering the price to a point where consumers can’t help but notice is surely a step in the right direction. AMD’s doing just that with its A-series APUs this week, which is hopes will enable more mainstream PC builders to snag a twelve compute core (4CPU + 8GPU) A-series APU without completely breaking the bank. It’s also suggesting that these products will support DX12, OpenCL 2.0, and Project FreeSync in the future, which should ease any concerns about their ability to handle what’s just around the bend. The A10-7850K will see its suggested e-tail pricing his $143, while the lower-end A6-7400K can be found...
Read more...
It's been a busy week in mobile. To recap, Google added a couple of Nexus devices to its lineup courtesy of Motorola and HTC, there's a new version of Android (Lollipop), and Apple rolled out new iPad tablets. Given how hectic it's been, one can forgive Samsung for quietly updating its processor page with its new Exynos 7 Octa. Believed to be the same SoC found in the Galaxy Note 4, the Exynos 7 Octa rocks four ARM-based Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores, which combine for a 57 percent boost in CPU performance compared to the previous generation Exynos 5 Octa. Like before, Samsung's chip utilizes ARM's big.LITTLE Heterogeneous Multi Processing (HMP) to dump loads on the appropriate set of...
Read more...
Apple knows better than to cut off its nose to spite its face, as the saying goes, hence why it still contracts Samsung to build the custom System-on-Chips (SoCs) that end up in iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. Will that relationship continue between these two bitter rivals? It would appear so, based on comments made by Kim Ki-nam, present of Samsung's semiconductor business. Ki-nam told reporters that once Samsung begins to supply Apple with SoCs using its latest technology, profits "will improve positively," ZDNet reports. While that's not an outright confirmation that Samsung will have a hand in building Apple's custom A9 SoC based on its 14nm manufacturing process, it's about as close...
Read more...
As you can imagine, we tend to get a lot of boxes here at Hot Hardware. Some packages are small, some larger, some fancy, some pretty ho-hum. Intel shipped us a package this week. It came in a typical, brown cardboard box. However, inside that box was something more than a little flashy (it flashed us quite a bit actually), it was downright freaky... Behold, it's some sort of spacey, alien cargo capsule... I think. Now typically we don't open what looks to be at least a twelve pack of Halo plasma grenades; well, not one that is shipped from strangers anyway. Since this one came from our friends (?) at Intel, rather than take it straight to the bomb squad for detonation, we decided...
Read more...
Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its repeated delays and with its IDF show ramping up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming hardware, features and performance characteristics of its new 14nm mobile platform. We've previously offered up a 14nm deep-dive on how Broadwell Y came to be from a design, process and manufacturing standpoint. Today, we'll look more closely at how the new Core M processor's feature list, how it will be productized and some high level performance expectations as well. The Core M is a dual-core processor with...
Read more...
Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its repeated delays and with its IDF show ramping up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming hardware, features and performance characteristics of its new 14nm mobile platform. We've previously offered up a 14nm deep-dive on how Broadwell Y came to be from a design, process and manufacturing standpoint. Today, we'll look more closely at how the new Core M processor's feature list, how it will be productized and some high level performance expectations as well... Intel Core M Broadwell Speeds, Feeds And Performance...
Read more...
It has been more than a year since AMD launched its last major update to the top end FX processor line -- the FX-9590. The company has been quiet in the face of Intel's high-end launches, but today AMD is shipping a new CPU that's aimed at multi-core performance enthusiasts who don't want a furnace sitting on their motherboards, and prefer more modest power consumption and quiet computing. The new FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E are familiar in many ways. These cores are still based on the older Piledriver architecture that debuted in 2012, they can still process two threads per module and four modules total for eight CPU cores, and they still rely on AMD's Socket AM3+. AMD FX-8370 and FX-8370E...
Read more...
It has been more than a year since AMD launched its last major update to the top end FX processor line -- the FX-9590. The company has been quiet in the face of Intel's high-end launches, but today AMD is shipping a new CPU that's aimed at multi-core performance enthusiasts who don't want a furnace sitting on their motherboards, and prefer more modest power consumption and quiet computing. The new FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E are familiar in many ways. These cores are still based on the older Piledriver architecture that debuted in 2012, they can still process two threads per module and four modules total for eight CPU cores, and they still rely on AMD's Socket AM3+. What's new today is the...
Read more...
