CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

AMD is hard at work on its next-gen Zen 3 architecture, something we're going to be hearing about real soon -- like, on October 8 soon. But for now, we have some leaks.

In a new tweet from software engineer Patrick Shur, we have some new information on AMD's new Zen 3-based CPU family which will reportedly be called the Ryzen 5000 series. Most were expecting the Ryzen 4000 series (which is already inside of laptops) but it seems AMD could leave the Ryzen 4000 nomenclature for its Renoir FP6 (mobile) and Renoir AM4 (desktop) series.

Shur tweeted that we are to expect the flagship Ryzen 9 5900X as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU while the Ryzen 7 5800X is an 8-core, 16-thread design. Better yet, these new samples are reportedly hitting a huge 4.9GHz which should give Intel a run for its money with its 10th gen Core CPUs.

NVIDIA opened up a can of whoop ass over a decade ago, and it looks like that can of whoop ass just got much, much bigger.

The company acquired Arm just a couple of days ago in a record-breaking $40 billion deal, with NVIDIA's latest acquisition opening up some serious doors for the company. It now owns a world-class networking arm, world-class CPU arm, world-class GPU arm... so what next?

In an interview with Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Next Platform, NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang was asked: "Will you actually take an implementation of something like Neoverse first and make an Nvidia-branded CPU to drive it into the data center? Will you actually make the reference chip for those who just want it and actually help them run it?"

AMD announced that it will unveiling its next-gen Zen 3 CPU architecture and desktop Ryzen 4000 series CPUs at a new event on October 8.

We should expect a bunch of Ryzen 4000 seires desktop processors to be unveiled, and a deep dive on the new Zen 3 architecture itself. AMD has dubbed this event: "Next Generation Ryzen Desktop Processors".

Just over two weeks later on October 28, AMD will unveil its next-gen RDNA 2-based "Big Navi" Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. We've just seen leaks that tease the Radeon RX 6000 series engineering sample with 16GB of VRAM, you can read more about that here.

Qualcomm has just unveiled its new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 which has a slew of new upgrades that will super-boost its position in the market.

The company has detailed its new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 chip at IFA 2020, which packs their in-house Snapdragon X55 5G modem, Wi-Fi 6 support, and some upgraded Kryo 495 processor cores and support for LPDDR4 up to 2133MHz.

More importantly, the new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 now supports NVMe SSDs and UFS 3.0 storage, which is a great thing for super-fast storage on next-gen laptops. Especially so if you want that huge up to 25-hour battery life on a new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2-powered Windows 10 laptop.

Intel's new Xe GPU has made an appearance, spotted inside of a new Tiger Lake CPU. A new benchmark run was spotted by @TUM_APISAK, with a new Intel Xe logo, too.

Intel will be unveiling its new Xe GPU-powered Tiger Lake CPU architecture on September 2, where I'm sure it will try to steal some of NVIDIA's glorious Ampere thunder. The new benchmark has the Intel Xe GPU with 768 ALUs (cores) and a GPU clock of 1.65GHz.

1.65GHz is much faster than the touted 1.3GHz GPU clocks that we were expecting, and it should be interesting to see how the GPU performs alongside the new Willow Cove CPU architecture on Intel's finally-it-is-here-kinda 10nm SuperFIN process.

A new report from DigiTimes has outlined some incredibly exciting things for TSMC going into the future, all the way through to 2030 where it is battling with Samsung on semiconductor supremacy.

Well, in the middle of that battle between TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and Samsung we have their customers: AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei, Apple, and many others. These companies are some of the biggest in the world, and TSMC works with each of them closely.

But it appears as the nodes shrink, the work between the companies and their fab partner have become more of a collaboration. TSMC works with AMD on 7nm for example, or with Apple on 2nm, and now that same work is going into Qualcomm -- except, DigiTimes said Qualcomm reportedly "sought TSMC's help" on its next-gen products including the next-gen Snapdragon 885.

Cerebras has just unveiled the world's largest chip, which packs a mind boggling 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 cores.

The new Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) was unveiled at Hot Chips 2020, with Cerebras using TSMC's new 7nm process to cram the 850,000 cores onto the 2.6 trillion transistors. The previous-gen WSE had 1.2 trillion transistors, 400,000 cores, 18GB of on-chip memory, 9PB/sec memory banwidth, and 100Pb/s of total fabric bandwidth that consumed a total of 15kW of power.

How does this work? The Wafer Scale Engine magic is because instead of making the chip into a traditional monolithic processor die, Cerebras instead stitches the processor dies together with a communication fabric -- letting the many, many chips act as one unit.

Uh... so things have already gone from bad to worse with Intel in the last few years and recently, the last few months with disaster (7nm was already a mess, then it was delayed until 2022) after disaster (Intel hardware chief leaves after 7nm mess announced) -- but have we now reached peak Intel doom?

Intel is currently investigating a security breach that has seen 20GB of internal documents leaked, with some of these files market "confidential" or "restricted secret". The files were leaked and then uploaded onto the Kim Dotcom-created MEGA file sharing website.

Till Kottmann, a Swiss software engineer, published the data after receiving the files from an "anonymous hacker who claimed to have breached Intel earlier this year", reports ZDNet.

Intel is working on a successor to Snow Ridge, with the purported Grand Ridge architecture coming in 2021.

The new Grand Ridge architecture has been designed for 5G base stations, with some technological upgrades including dual-channel DDR5 support (up to 5600MHz) and PCIe 4.0 support. It'll also support Gracemount CPU cores, and will be manufactured on the 7nm HLL+ process.

Intel will be including up to 24 cores on the Atom design, offering the 24-core processor at up to 2.6GHz. This is 400MHz faster than the previous-gen Snow Ridge architecture.

We have right now some truly incredible news if it begins to turn into reality, with our very good friend Igor over at Igor's Lab exclusively reporting details on Vermeer -- or what you will eventually know as the AMD Ryzen 9 4950X processor.

Vermeer is the codename for AMD's upcoming Zen 3-based Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, which should see emerge the flagship Ryzen 9 4950X that Igor has some details on. Igor reports from his sources that AMD's next-gen Ryzen 9 4950X will be a 16-core, 32-thread CPU which could roll out with a 3.5GHz base clock and huge 4.8GHz boost clock.

Igor has noticed something interesting with Vermeer, with per core voltage adjustments that would be a huge sandbox for overclockers to play around with. We should expect AMD to build these features into their Ryzen Master Tool software.