Items tagged with Sandy Bridge
Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. That's double the speed of the old leader, the AMD/Nvidia powered Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new system draws significantly more power than the Titan, (17.8MW vs. 8.2MW) but overall power efficiency is fairly similar. The Titan's GFLOP/W ratio is 2.143, while the new Tianhe hits 1.935. Intel is putting its own major push behind heterogeneous computing with the Tianhe-2. Each node contains two Ivy Bridge sockets and three...
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It’s no secret that Intel is readying processors based in its Haswell microarchitecture. The new chips are due to be released in the not too distant future and feature a number of noteworthy enhancements, including a much more powerful integrated graphics core. When Haswell arrives though, it will supplant current Ivy Bridge-based processors, which target more mainstream market segments than the product we’ll be showing you today. For the foreseeable future, Intel’s big dog remains Sandy Bridge-E, the monstrous six-core beast which utilizes the X79 Express chipset and socket LGA 2011. Prior to the arrival of Haswell, we figured it would be a good idea to show you just what Intel’s...
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It’s no secret that Intel is readying processors based in its Haswell microarchitecture. The new chips are due to be released in the not too distant future and feature a number of noteworthy enhancements, including a much more powerful integrated graphics core. When Haswell arrives though, it will supplant current Ivy Bridge-based processors, which target more mainstream market segments than the product we’ll be showing you today. For the foreseeable future, Intel’s big dog remains Sandy Bridge-E, the monstrous six-core beast which utilizes the X79 Express chipset and socket LGA 2011. Prior to the arrival of Haswell, we figured it would be a good idea to show you just what...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even greater achievement, but hitting these targets requires a great deal of collaboration and cooperation... Intel's Game Changer, One Size Fits All Haswell...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even greater achievement, but hitting these targets requires a great deal of collaboration and cooperation. Intel's Dadi Perlmutter, Executive Vice President, Architecture Group with Xeon Phi and Atom CPUs For most of the past 40 years, power consumption was treated as an afterthought at virtually every level. Unless you were building specialized hardware for...
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Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off AMD's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of Sunnyvale's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part. Bulldozer, launched just over a year ago, was a major disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, made a number of important changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built 'Dozer in the first place. In the...
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If you're shopping a new system, the launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge platform can't come soon enough. In anticipation of the launch, Hewlett-Packard is getting its ducks in a row, which includes quietly revealing three new notebooks built around Intel's upcoming platform, as well as a fourth sporting Sandy Bridge hardware inside. The first is an HP Pavilion dv4-5000 with an Intel Core i7 3610QM processor clocked at 2.3GHz. Details are fairly light, but we know it's a 14-inch laptop with a 1TB hard drive (5400 RPM) and Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics. Then there's the HP Pavilion dv6-7000, a 15.6-inch laptop with the same processor and discrete graphics. Storage options include a 750GB (dv6-7019tx)...
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With Dell's XPS 13 and the Asus UX21 that we tested recently, we felt you definitely get what you pay for, but we all know the up-sell to an ultrabook, versus a standard 13 or 12-inch notebook, would be a lot easier if we could get closer to that $800 mark. The Lenovo IdeaPad U300s that we'll be looking at today doesn't get us any closer to clearing that magic $799 psychological MSRP hurdle, but like its brethren that we've put through their paces thus far, this ultrabook is a premium product through and through... Lenovo IdeaPad U300s Ultrabook Review...
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It's easy to understand why the fledgling ultrabook market is exploding with new offerings from virtually all of the major players. The new class of notebooks, seemingly reinvented by Intel's vision (and a $300 million dollar marketing fund) are designed to offer robust performance for everyday tasks and multimedia, in a wafer-thin and feather-weight footprint. These are MacBook Air competitors from the PC side of the fence, driven by Windows 7 and at least the goal of dropping in under the $1000 mark. Unfortunately, we haven't seen many ultrabooks hit that mark, save perhaps for a slightly lower-end Toshiba model we looked at recently, but there are many machines dropping in...
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MSI revealed the new QM77 mini-ITX motherboard designed for use with Intel's Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge processors. When an Intel Ivy Bridge mobile CPU is installed, this motherboard can support up to three displays by D-sub, DVI, HDMI, LVDS, or eDP. With an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, you'll get support for dual displays. Other key features include HD Audio, up to 16GB dual-channel DDR3 memory, Dual Gigabit Ethernet LANs, RS-232/422/485 serial ports for commercial applications, and optional TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Various storage interfaces are available on the MSI QM77 including SATAIII, mini SATA, Mini PCIe, Cfast, and USB connectors. MSI QM77, the Flagship mini-ITX IPC Board Taipei, Taiwan...
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Today we're continuing our coverage of the ultrabook onslaught with Dell's first effort in the space, the XPS 13... Dell does a nice job of striking a balance here, between features, performance and cost. The team obviously invested quite a bit in the display, however, as Dell's 13-inch edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass strapped LCD is arguably one of the nicer panels out there in this class of machine. Other tangible tradeoffs between build quality and cost are the XPS 13's machined aluminum, carbon fiber and magnesium alloy construction that definitely gives the little fella a solid, well-built and polished feel. Let's take a look at how Dell's new 13-inch slice of cutting-edge technology handles...
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Ultrabooks are an interesting phenomenon. It's like the industry took a long hard look at the emaciated netbook market and decided consumers deserved better. Thank God. We're big fans of the thin and light trend in notebooks, and netbook price points are something we all can appreciate. However, as performance enthusiasts, netbooks just leave us flat, to be honest; no matter how small they are, how inexpensive or how miserly they are on power consumption. It's encouraging to see the burgeoning ultrabook market take flight with virtually all of the major players behind the vision Intel helped inspire. Today we're continuing our coverage of the ultrabook onslaught...
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Looks like the Ivy Bridge won't be completed as early as construction workers thought. DOT jokes aside, Intel's next-gen microprocessor range will reportedly be pushed back "eight to ten weeks later than planned," according to Sean Maloney, executive vice-president of Intel and chairman of Intel China. The news comes courtesy of the Financial Times. Mr. Maloney stated that the 22nm CPU (which is set to take the place of Sandy Bridge) had seen its start date pushed back until June. The exact quote? "I think maybe it's June now," not April. Not a huge difference, but one that will certainly hit investors and consumers who were waiting it out. The reasons weren't surrounding a lack of demand, but...
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Intel has posted an updated processor price list with prices that went into effect at the end of January, but if you were hoping for any big drops, you're going to be disappointed. In fact, there weren't any price reductions at all, big, small, or in between. Intel did, however, add seven new processors to its Sandy Bridge lineup. From top to bottom, they include: Core i5 2550K (four cores, 3.4GHz, 6MB cache): $225 Core i5 2450P (four cores, 3.2GHz, 6MB cache): $195 Core i5 2380P (four cores, 3.1GHz, 6MB cache): $177 Celeron B815 (two coures, 1.6GHz, 2MB cache): $86 Celeron T3500 (two cores, 2.1GHz, 1MB cache): $80 Celeron M 867 (two cores, 1.3GHz, 2MB cache): $134 Celeron M 797 (one core, 1.4GHz,...
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The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is interesting; its presentation is marred by questionable conceptualizing and suspect analytics. The Multicore Problem: There are three limiting factors, or walls, that limit the scaling of modern microprocessors. First, there's the memory wall, defined as the gap between the CPU and DRAM clock speed. Second, there's the ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism)...
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Intel announced its Q4 and end-of-year results with $54B in revenue and $17.5 billion in operating income, both records for the CPU giant. Q4 income was $13.9B, driven by a 17% rise in sales from the PC Client Group. Revenue growth was positive across all sectors save for Atom; sales of the diminutive processor fell 57% year on year, to $167 million. Growth continues to be driven primarily by the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries; sales in Indonesia and India grew 22% and 37% year-on-year, while China now accounts for 20% of Intel's worldwide demand. 2011 was an excellent year all around for Intel, and the company had quite a bit to crow about on its earnings call, including...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at the Core i7-3960X, Intel’s first desktop processor to feature the company’s Sandy Bridge-E microarchitecture. If you're unfamiliar with the chip, Sandy Bridge-E is the ‘tock’ in Intel’s tick-tock release schedule cadence that bridges the gap between first-gen Sandy Bridge-based processors and next year’s Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. Sandy Bridge-E shares many of the same features of the original Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, but as the “E” denotes, SBE is a more extreme derivative, targeted at enthusiasts. We briefly discussed the Core i7-3820 we’ll be showing you today in our Core i7-3960X coverage,...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at the Core i7-3960X, Intel’s first desktop processor to feature the company’s Sandy Bridge-E microarchitecture. If you're unfamiliar with the chip, Sandy Bridge-E is the ‘tock’ in Intel’s tick-tock release schedule cadence that bridges the gap between first-gen Sandy Bridge-based processors like the Core i7-2700K and next year’s Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. Sandy Bridge-E shares many of the same features of the original Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, but as the “E” denotes, SBE is a more extreme derivative, targeted at enthusiasts. In our launch coverage of the Intel Core i7-3960X, we take a deep-dive...
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Weak consumer demand and a limited impact from the Thailand floods in the last part of the year drove PC sales down significantly in the US, while the global market saw a smaller 1.4 percent decline. The impact of the HDD shortage is expected to bite partly in Q1; while the floods hit in Q4, most manufacturers had sufficient inventory levels to see them through much of the end of the year. “Continuously low consumer PC demand resulted in weak holiday PC shipments,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “While economic uncertainty in Western Europe had an effect on consumer PC shipments, expectations of a healthier economic outlook in North America could not stimulate...
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The thin-and-light market is seriously heating up, and with CES 2012 just around the corner, Lenovo's hoping to sneak some sales in during the last few weeks of the 2011 holiday season. The IdeaPad U400 is a sleek, sexy machine, understated from top to bottom and aimed at mid-range buyers who have never had so many options. You can't really call this an Ultrabook (you'll need to ogle at Lenovo's IdeaPad U300s for that honor), but it's still super slick. And in its roomier 14-inch weight class, you actually have fewer options to pick from. Of course, looks are only half of the story; is the entire package worthy of consideration this holiday season? Let's dig in and find out....
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AMD has announced the immediate availability of new 12-16 core 32nm Opteron processors based on the company's new Bulldozer architecture. According to AMD, these new chips will provide better performance, virtualization scaling, and efficient economics. “Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualization has provided a new level of reliable consolidation and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency. We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. “The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over....
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Get your Sandy Bridge-E, hot of the presses. While Intel doesn't always unleash chips and ship dates at the same time, today's a lucky day for those who just so happen to have spare cash laying around and a desire to pop the newest silicon from Intel into their rig. The Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU is a robust new i7; one that reviewed just earlier today. Once you've read that and made up your mind, NewEgg already has the chip available for consumer sales, with $599.99 buying the 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) processor in quantities of 1. No need to become a business and buy a truckload, phew! Hit the Via below to get your order in -- who knows how long that "In Stock" will remain as such....
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