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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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)...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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,...
Read more...
