Items tagged with Processors
AMD expanded its line of low-power G-series APUs with the GX-210JA, a full SoC design for x86-based embedded systems that the company says uses a third less energy than even its own previous embedded G-series chips, with a TDP of just 6W. Further, AMD says that the chip’s “average power” is a mere 3W. Like the recent Intel announcement about a Haswell chip with a 4.5W SDP (which, as we mentioned, is not an apples-to-apples comparison with TDP), the GX-210JA is designed for fanless designs. The AMD chip could find its way into fields ranging from industrial controls to digital gaming to digital signage and thin client computing. AMD G-Series platform block diagram "AMD Embedded...
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Hardcore gamers are more interested in raw horsepower than incremental thermal wins, but Intel is still proud to announce that it will release at least one Haswell Core chip that has an SDP of just 4.5 watts. This surpasses the company’s previous mark of 6W SDP, and both are far below Intel’s stated goal a year ago of producing chips under 10W SDP. It’s important to note, however, that SDP (Scenario Design Point) is not the same as TDP (Thermal Design Power). The latter has been the standard metric for determining the cooling needs of a given processor for some time, and SDP is a different (though related) metric. Thus, for those who have been following the decreasing thermal...
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Intel’s Skylake processors won’t launch for some time (the company still needs to release Broadwell at some point, which won’t be out until sometime next year at the earliest), but according to a leaked roadmap slide, we can see some juicy details about Skylake. The chips will be built on Intel's 14nm process node (which we’ll see first on Haswell-E processors), and they’ll also feature AVX 3.2. DDR4 support will be included, as well as support for PCIe 4.0, and Intel’s HD graphics will hit version 9 with reportedly significantly more robust performance. DDR4 memory will be out later this year and will offer far more density per module, twice the data rates,...
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There has been a gas leak at Intel’s plant in Chandler, Arizona, leaving at least 11 people hospitalized with nausea, breathing difficulties, and eye irritation, and a total of 43 that were ill enough to need on-scene treatment. Battalion Chief Tom Dwiggins of the local fire department identified the leak as nitrogen triflouride. Intel shut down the tool that caused the leak, and there is no further danger, according to Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Further, the area neighborhoods were not affected, and the plant has resumed operations as normal. "They monitored the air inside and outside the structure and in all cases the air was clean," said Mulloy. Intel's Chandler, AZ campus The Chandler...
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AMD is stepping up its efforts on the CPU front by announcing two new FX-series chips, the FX-9590 and FX-9370. The company claims that the FX-9590 is the world’s first commercially available processor clocked at 5GHz (Max Turbo), and the FX-9370 isn’t far behind at 4.7GHz(Max Turbo). Based on the Piledriver architecture, the 8-core processors are unlocked so gamers can push the already-high CPU clock even further. They also feature AMD Turbo Core 3.0, which is designed to optimize performance across all of the CPU’s cores. MAINGEAR SHIFT with AMD's New 5GHz CPU AMD isn’t offering up too many additional details on the FX-9590 and FX-9370, although of course they’re...
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We’re still not exactly sure what that Android Batman had to do with ASUS’ “We Transform” teaser campaign and event, but the company did unveil the new ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity running Tegra 4, NVIDIA’s latest and greatest mobile processor. The Transformer Pad Infinity offers a 10.1-inch LED-backlit IPS+ display with an impressive resolution of 2560x1600, onboard SonicMaster audio, and a 254mm chiclet-style QWERTY keyboard dock. The dock has its own additional battery as well as a multitouch pad, USB 3.0 port and SDXC card reader. It also sports 2GB of RAM, 32GB eMMC storage, 5MP front- and 1.2MP rear-facing cameras, and dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth...
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We knew that Sony had a PlayStation 4 brewing, and we knew a little something about the upcoming gaming console’s specifications, but now we know when we’ll know all the juicy details. In a teaser trailer for the PS4, Sony indicated that the big reveal will take place on June 10th at 6pm PDT at E3. The trailer itself leaves something to be desired, to say the least. It’s a short spot, and we see a blurry black box in the background that we never get to see in focus, and there are spliced-in bits showing closeups of the PlayStation 4 that don’t really tell us anything. (It will have some Christopher Nolan-era Batmobile-type angles, and at least part of it will have a sort...
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Today is outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s last day at the company, and although he’s left the company better off than when he found it, in an interview with The Atlantic he let slip one regret he had from his tenure--Intel could have made the chips for the iPhone. Apparently, Apple approached Intel about making chips for the then-unknown device, and Otellini said that although his gut was telling him to dive in, he couldn’t see how it would be profitable for Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they...
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Intel is finally offering up details on its Haswell integrated graphics offerings after teasing it at CES 2013, including branding and some performance metrics. With the release of the company’s 4th generation Core processors, Intel’s new integrated graphics will go by the “Iris” moniker. Meanwhile, Intel’s baseline HD Graphics will also see a bump in performance and capabilities. Now, we’ll see Intel HD 5000 graphics along with the higher-end Intel Iris Graphics 5100 and Iris Pro Graphics 5200; previously, these were codenamed GT3 (15W), GT3 (28W), and GT3e, respectively. Iris graphics are primarily designed for mobile devices, and we’ll be seeing them...
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AMD announced a pair of new FX-series processors, the AMD FX-4350 and AMD FX-6350, which will serve to add a couple of new SKUs to the Piledriver/Vishera mix. Previously, AMD’s latest crop of high-end desktop chips consisted of the 8-core FX-8350 and FX-8320, the 6-core FX-6300, and the 4-core FX-4300. The FX-4350 (four cores, 4.3GHz Max Turbo) purports to offer a 10% performance increase over the previous generation and features 12MB of L2 and L3 cache and a 125W thermal envelope. The FX-6350 (six cores, 4.2GHz Max Turbo) has 14MB of L2 and L3 cache. Both are unlocked to give overclockers a little something to work with beyond their high stock CPU clocks, and both are compatible with AM3+....
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We all love to see improvements in CPU performance generation to generation, and so we eagerly anticipate pitting the current top-of-the-line Intel Core offering, the Intel Core i7-3970X Sandy Bridge-E processor against an Ivy Bridge-E chip. Apparently, someone already has, and the results show up to an 11% performance increase. A poster to Chinese site Coolaler, named Toppc, claims to have benchmarked the aforementioned Sandy Bridge-E chip to the upcoming Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E processor. Sandy Bridge-E scores (click to enlarge) Ivy Bridge-E scores (click to enlarge) Toppc used Cinebench, CPUmark, Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage...
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The divorce between Apple and Samsung was written on the wall when the former first attacked the latter with a lawsuit, but the actual split has been gradual. Apple has relied heavily on Samsung components for its displays and mobile processors, but as we’ve heard a few times before, Samsung is not participating in the development of Apple’s upcoming A6X and A7 chips. The latest news on that front is that Apple has tapped TSMC to replace Samsung in developing the A7 chip (images leaked here), reports the Korea Times. The outlet quoted a Samsung partner executive as saying, “TSMC has begun ordering its contractors to supply equipment to produce Apple’s next processors using...
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Intel announced new drivers for its integrated HD 2500/4000 graphics (for 3rd generation Intel Core processors), and it did so in a somewhat refreshingly brief press release. The updates to the graphics drivers are for Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Intel says that versions 15.31.3.3071 (32-bit) and 15.31.3.64.3071 (64-bit) bring a new driver architecture as well as optimzations designed to boost game performance by as much as 10% in some popular titles including Starcraft II, Batman: Arkham City, and WoW: Mists of Pandaria. Intel HD 2500/4000 graphics now have reduced CPU overhead as well as support for OpenCL 1.2. Up to a 10% performance boost with new drivers The...
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After struggling as of late in the market, AMD is mounting an offensive against very stiff competition, and part of that effort is the next generation of the company’s APUs. Codenamed “Richland”, we knew that these chips will be built on Piledriver CPU cores just as the last generation Trinity APUs are, and that Richland APUs will have an updated graphics core. VR-Zone published a table of leaked specs that show more details. Assuming this information is correct, there will be at least six SKUs ranging from an A4 to an A10 with a mix of dual- and quad-core chips bearing 6000-series numbering. That “updated graphics core” turns out to be HD 8000-series graphics. Image...
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The luck o’ the Irish is going strong, apparently, as Intel is planning to build a plant in Ireland for the purpose of manufacturing 14nm chips which will reportedly create 800 permanent tech jobs and 3,500 construction jobs. According to Silicon Republic, the project should take two years to complete at a total cost of $4 billion. The new facility will be built at the existing Intel campus at Leixlip in Co Kildare. The total square footage (er, metre-age) will be 244,819 square metres and will include a three-story fab, a building for housing liquid chemicals and wastewater, a two-story boiler and chiller, emergency power facilities, a five-level parking garage, and more. Leixlip campus...
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You don’t hear a lot about MIPS Technologies, Inc., but the company’s technology is important to the embedded processor industry and is found in millions of devices. It’s also apparently important to chip designers Imagination Technologies and Ceva, Inc. The former has now outbid the latter and is buying MIPS for $100 million. The two companies had been embroiled in a bidding war, but Reuters reports that in the end, Ceva wasn’t willing to pony up any more cash and conceded victory to Imagination. Imagination is taking a bit of a risk here, as the company will reportedly need to borrow as much as $22 million to complete the purchase. It will be competing with ARM in the...
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Intel’s upcoming fourth-generation Core-i7 CPUs (codenamed Haswell) promise to be game-changers, and we’ve reported on some of the specifications of its accompanying Z87 chipset, as well. Apparently, VR-Zone has gotten its hands on leaked details of the impending processor line, including the targeted launch date of April 2013. The naming scheme should pick up where the third-generation Ivy Bridge chips did, using “3000” and “4000” numbering for third- and fourth-generation CPUs, respectively, which will be helpful in identifying the fourteen individual SKUs that Intel plans to release. Intel's Dadi Perlmutter Standard voltage processors (which should come...
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Intel has been promising it for months, and now the company has officially announced the Intel Atom S1200 SoC. The ultra low power chip is designed for the datacenter and provides a high-density solution designed to lower TCO and improve scalability. The 64-bit, dual-core (four total threads with Hyper-Threading technology) Atom S1200 underpins the third generation of Intel’s commercial microservers and feature a mere 6W TDP that allows a density of over 1,000 nodes per rack. The chip also includes ECC and supports Intel Virtualization technology, and per Intel’s overall datacenter strategy, it leverages all of the existing software platforms in the datacenter. The Atom S1200 is designed...
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If you’ve been losing sleep over rumors that Intel was planning to do away with socketed CPUs and move to soldered-in-place ball grid array chips, rest easy; the company told Maximum PC that it would stick with LGA sockets for the foreseeable future. Although noting that Intel can’t really comment on its long-term roadmap for processors, Intel’s Dan Snyder stated, “Intel remains committed to the growing desktop enthusiast and channel markets, and will continue to offer socketed parts in the LGA package for the foreseeable future for our customers and the Enthusiast DIY market.” Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) This is excellent news for computer tinkerers, modders,...
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A team of overclockers dubbed “The Killers” broke the record for the fastest overclock of an AMD Trinity APU at the AMD Extreme OC show in Taiwan and also took out the record for AMD’s Vishera platform for good measure. Using a Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 motherboard, the crew cranked an AMD 5800K APU with a stock speed of 3.8GHz all the way up to 7.86GHz. “We are extremely excited with this OC result because the F2A85X-UP4 is the first motherboard from GIGABYTE to use our new Ultra Durable 5 technology,” said Henry Kao, Vice President of the GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit in a press release. “These results solidify GIGABYTE’s position as the go-to platform...
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The Green500 ranks the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, and the latest list has an Intel-powered system at the top: “Beacon”, a supercomputer located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), is the world’s most efficient supercomputer. Notably, Beacon uses Intel’s new Xeon Phi 5110p coprocessors(running its MIC architecture) along with Intel Xeon E5-2670 chips to drink just 44.89kW of power while offering almost two-and-a-half billion floating-point operations per second per watt (2.49 GFlops/Watt) and hits 112,200 gigaflops at peak performance. Intel has to be feeling pretty good about that ranking, because it firmly believes that...
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The answer to the question of which CPU/motherboard combo from Intel delivers the most extreme desktop performance is the Intel Extreme Edition Core i7-3970X (3.5GHz, 4GHz Turbo) CPU and the Extreme Series Intel Desktop Board DX79SR (Stormville), which are now available. The 6-core Ivy Bridge beast of a processor offers up 15MB cache, 4 channels of DDR3 memory, integrated graphics, and of course it supports Hyper-Threading. The chip costs $1,059 in the box. As for the DX79SR motherboard, it features 8 DIMM slots and support for up to 64GB of system memory (DDR3-2400+ OC) as well as three PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots, two PCIe x1 slots, one PCI slot, up to six USB 3.0 and fourteen USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire...
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