Processors - Page 107

AMD is doubling down on their embedded G-Series SoC's, tiny APU's designed with industrial applications in mind. The newest members of the family are the 3rd generation of their embedded platform, putting Excavator based cores in the high-end and Jaguar-based cores in the low-end, and they're completely pin compatible with earlier iterations of the G series (and R for the high-end chips being announced), allowing easier upgrading for customers on older hardware.

The new G-Series LX fills in the low-end with two Jaguar cores with GCN and AMD's ARM-based security co-processor. It operates at a very low 6-15W and can withstand far harsher conditions than the typical desktop processor. Available in March, this new SoC is designed for the point-of-sale market and even arcade gaming market. With their ARM co-processor it might even make a good companion to industrial automation in the connected age.

The high-end G-Series marries two Excavator cores with four GCN compute units that allow for a much better compute load if OpenCL is used. AMD is targeting similar industries that need higher compute load at a low 6-15W TDP. They expect that it'll be a good fit for the digital signage and even set-top boxes, despite that arena being dominated by ARM. This too has an integrated ARM-based security co-processor.This new processor is actually pin compatible with the higher-end R series of SoC's letting customers choose between what sort of power-envelope they want.

MWC 2016 - Analogix is a company that never ceases to amaze me, with the announcement of their new SlimPort ANX7688 single-chip mobile transmitter. What makes the new SlimPort ANX7688 so special? Well now.

The SlimPort ANX7688 is capable of driving 4K 60FPS (4096x2160) or 1920x1080 at 120FPS - both from a smartphone or a tablet with full USB-C capabilities. Analogix is forward-thinking with its SlimPort ANX7688 with support and technological capabilities of driving AR and VR technologies, which require much more performance for video processing, and more.

Analogix has created the SlimPort ANX7688 with Qualcomm-based USB-C smartphones and tablets in mind, as it converts the HDMI and USB interfaces to DisplayPort. This is done with Analogix integrating a converter bridge, a high-speed mux, USB-PD support for fast-charging, and the latest HDCP 2.2 content protection. Andre Bouwer, VP of Marketing for Analogix, explains: "ANX7688 puts Analogix years ahead of the competition to enable DisplayPort over USB-C capability on smartphones and tablets".

There have been rumors of Intel delaying its 10nm technology, but the company has come out and squashed those rumors, in an ad.

Motley Fool spotted the ad, which has since been taken down, which had Intel saying that its 10nm CPU manufacturing technology would begin mass production "approximately two years" from the posting date. Intel said that the advert was wrong, reiterating that its "first 10-nanometer product is planned for the second half of 2017".

Intel should be positioning itself to have 10nm server processors ready for launch in the first half of 2018, with the consumer market to continue making good use of the 14nm CPUs until 10nm supplies become available in larger numbers.

Intel launched their new Broadwell-based Xeon D processors last week, led by the impressive Xeon D-1587. Intel's new Xeon D family includes a few system-on-chip (SoCs) that are aimed at the microserver and storage markets, thanks to Intel being able to make the new Xeon D family in a low TDP package.

The flagship Xeon D-1587 is a beast in itself, with 16 physical cores with 32 logical threads. It boasts 24MB of cache, and has its 16 cores clocked at 1.7GHz, best of all - it rocks this all at 65W. Impressive, eh? The next one down is the Xeon D-1577 which has the same specifications, 16 cores and the same 24MB cache, but a 1.3GHz clock speed and only 45W TDP. Last of all, is the Xeon D-1571 which features the same 16-core goodness, falling in line with the Xeon E5 V4 processors powered by Broadwell-EP. But, it gets a clock speed of 1.3GHz, 24MB cache, and same 45W TDP.

Intel's new Broadwell-powered Xeon D processors arrive in BGA packaging, so you'll need to purchase them directly from Intel's AIB partners, such as SuperMicro, GIGABYTE, or others. As for pricing, the Xeon D-1571 is priced at $1222, so expect the Xeon D-1587 to be priced a little higher than that. But the next question is: what about performance? Yeah well, Intel has you covered there, too. Before that, we have support for dual-channel DDR4 2133MHz, or DDR3L at 1600MHz. The system would support up to 128GB of RDIMM, 64GB of UDIMM/SO-DIMM in ECC or non-ECC. The SoC features a total of 24 x PCIe 3.0 lanes and 8 x PCIe 2.0 lanes, while we have dual 10GbE for networking, 4 x USB 3.0 and 4 x USB 2.0 ports, with 6 x SATA 6Gbps ports for HDD connectivity.

It seems that the Oculus website doesn't quite agree with AMD's current lineup of CPU's, and won't certify you as having a VR ready PC if you happen to have one, either. Now, it's well known, and not refuted by any means, that the performance is certainly not on par with Intel's current generation (and last generation) of CPU's, but that doesn't mean that they won't be able to provide a good VR experience, either. So AMD has released their own list of VR ready processors so that AMD owners, and fans, aren't left out.

The list contains CPU's that have been tested to a certain standard of performance, internally, when using VR. Essentially, Vishera is more than capable of handling the complex tasks in VR with higher clock speeds. The FX 8350 all the way to the FX 9590 make the list, as well as the higher clocked six core variants. A note, however, is that AMD has amended their list and take off the APU's and Athlon X4 880 an 870K, though not because they can't do VR, but because they haven't been qualified internally yet.

Going to the Oculus site definitely shows a lack of enthusiasm, perhaps rightfully so, for 32nm technology first introduced in 2012. The platform may be somewhat old, but it isn't lacking in it's ability to provide a good experience. They'll happily push Intel's products, of course, as well as NVIDIA's too. It's somewhat disconcerting for those that have already invested in AMD's parts to not see their processors mentioned anywhere regarding VR. So just remember that just because it isn't on the list, it doesn't mean it can't play VR with decent visuals, just that it probably hasn't been tested quite yet.

AMD's upcoming Zen architecture is exciting on its own, but what about the Opteron line of processors? According to the latest slides used by Liviu Valsan, a Computer Engineer with CERN, the Zen-based Opteron is going to be a beast.

The slide teases that the Zen-based Opteron would be made on the 14nm process, "expected to bring a 40% improvement for Instructions Per Clock compared to current generation AMD processors", and a huge 32 physical cores. We should also see 8-channel DDR4 support, up from the quad-channel DDR4 on enthusiast platforms from Intel.

With AMD offering its Zen-based Opteron with up to 32 CPU cores, it means the company can scale right down to SKUs with 8, 16, and 24 cores, too. This means on the consumer desktop platform, AMD will have 8-core FX series CPUs, but it would be nice to see 16-core processors based on Zen, too.

Deep neural-networks require a tremendous amount of power to actually be as effective as the human brain. Sure your Tesla Model S might ave a small DNN powered by NVIDIA inside, but it isn't nearly complex enough to to provide a full true-to-life aritifical intelligence experience. New breakthroughs from MIT might be able to provide full-on human-brain inspired AI experience on your phone.

Researchers at MIT presented a new chip mobile chip that's designed specifically for neural networks and it happens to be 10 times more efficient than any mobile GPU currently in production. They're calling it the "Eyeriss" and the researchers are hoping that it can potentially change small-device computing. Just imagine having Siri or Cortana being that much more useful because they've got the processing power local to them.

And beyond that this innovation could help to further develop the idea of the Internet of Things, where powerful AI programs can communicate with other devices and coordinate tasks to get things done nearly invisible to the user. The possiblities are endless with the way that individual small-machines needn't be connected to the Internet itself for the compute power itself, but instead merely for communication.

Announced in a recent press release, AMD has launched its new desktop processor cooler called Wraith alongside a slew of new near-silent operating CPUs and stock cooler packages.

The AMD Wraith cooler is designed to work in a whisper quiet way, further providing a white LED illuminated AMD logo on the black plastic shroud. Promising to operate at whisper-quiet sound levels, the Wraith is rated by AMD to clock only 39 decibels when operation.

Announced alongside the Wraith cooler are the all-new AMD 10-7860K and the Athlon X4 845 processors, both coming packed with a new 95W stock fan cooler. These two new processors are not the only models to share the updated cooler, with AMD A8 processors such as the 7670K and 7650K joining in the action alongside the Athlon X4 870K and X4 860K.

AMD has been in the headlines quite a bit this year, and we're only a month into 2016. According to the latest information, AMD is working on a new EHP (or Exascale Heterogeneous Processor) that has been confirmed by an AMD engineer, who has also confirmed the name of the processor, too: Zeppelin.

Zeppelin is a new Multi Chip Module, that features 32 Zen cores tied into AMD's impressive Coherent Fabric - which offers 100GB/sec of bandwidth - compared to PCIe that offers around 15GB/sec. The latency has also been reduced from 500ns to something much smaller, but the bigger question is whether Zeppelin refers to the Zen processor cluster or the MCM as a whole.

Digging into Zeppelin, we find the Vega 10-based MCM. Vega 10 will sport up to 4 GMIs (Global Memory Interconnects), which allow the CPU to talk to the GPU at 100GB/sec, courtesy of the Coherent Fabric. The MCM is also capable of communicating with the RAM at 100GB/sec too, which allows for a super-fast system with magnitudes more bandwidth than we have right now.

During TSMC's earning's call, they revealed that they're expecting to begin the process of switching over to 10nm production, ramping it up fully into 2017.

16nm and FinFet are relatively new processes with GPU manufacturers just now taking advantage of a more complete production process and higher yields. Now that those are mature processes they can concentrate on perfecting 10nm, which will likely be somewhat of a challenge, though the market should transition to the new process as demand for 20nm and even 16nm slowly drops as they ramp up. They plan on capturing a large part of the market share with their early introduction of the process.

They've already taped out working devices based on the node, but aren't quite ready for full production. They did invest heavily into research into 10nm back in 2014. We should see actual hardware using this process, likely mobile hardware first, in 2017. Intel is also slated to have their 10nm node ready in 2017 after delaying it past their initial 2016 release date.

We now know that AMD will be launching its Zen-powered Summit Ridge FX CPUs late this year, after being in development for the last two years.

AMD will launch its new processor families; Summit Ridge and Bristol Ridge, later this year - both hitting the enthusiast and mainstream markets. The news came from AMD's recent earnings call - where they reported a 28% decline in revenue. The Zen architecture is super-exicting, as it will be a completely revised design, more CPU cores, Simultaneous Multithreading Support (SMT), high-bandwidth, low-latency cache on the FinFET process, and so much more.

Next year, Intel will launch its new 10nm processor family with the Cannonlake CPUs, replacing the current 14nm processors. The CPU family to replace Cannonlake in 2018 will be Ice Lake, which is also based on the 10nm node, which will be followed by Tiger Lake in 2019.

Intel has been having issues in getting their 10nm-based Cannonlake CPUs to the market, but we had these issues with the 14nm-based Broadwell processors - where they were delayed by months in both the desktop, and mobile markets. Intel will launch the Cannonlake processors in 2017, a year after the upcoming Kaby Lake CPUs debut. After that, we'll see Intel introduce its 10nm-based Ice Lake processors in 2018, followed by the Tiger Lake processors in 2019 - both based on 10nm.

But now Intel is facing competition in TSMC, which has just announced their 7nm node for 2017, which will be followed through with 5nm in 2020.

Last week we reported on a discovered bug with Intel Skylake CPUs causing freezing in specific usage scenarios. If you're running Skylake in combination with an MSI motherboard, you'll be pleased to know MSI has released a fix for its Z170A XPower Gaming Titanium and Z170A Gaming M7 boards and will be releasing it for the rest of its Skylake lineup later on.

The company has confirmed the bug and says it will very rarely affect typical users. But, as they say, it's better to be safe than sorry.

You can grab the update here. Note it is a beta BIOS update, so if everything has been running smoothly for you, we recommend waiting for a non-beta update, given how delicate the BIOS can be.

Samsung not long ago elected to use its in-house Exynos chip over Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge; today it confirms it has begun manufacturing Snapdragon 820 mobile processors utilizing its new 14nm LPP process for the semiconductor company. The new process is said to deliver up to 15 percent faster speeds and 15 percent less power consumption over its 14mn LPE process (found in the Exynos 7 Octa chip).

Samsung wouldn't say whether the new chip would find its way into its future phones, but rumors indicate a Galaxy S7 is on the horizon and will indeed contain the 820. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy (and formerly of AMD), says, "I do believe Samsung must use the 820 to be more competitive with Apple. 820 hits performance per watt levels Exynos just can't hit."

A new family of Opterons from AMD has arrived, and they fill a growing niche of low-power, dense and highly available devices in datacenters. The Opteron A1100 SoC combines 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores with 10GbE networking solutions for their first entry into the ARM datacenter market.

The Opteron A1100 SoC has been in the news in the past when we first heard about the revival of the Opteron brand and a new direction that AMD wanted to head in the server market. A1100 is part of a plan to saturate all aspects of the market from the bottom on up to the high-performance.

This new A1100 SoC starts off with an off the shelf ARM Cortex-A57 that hasn't been modified and has 4MB of shared L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache. For memory it has two channels of either DDR3 or DDR4 and can support up to 128GB of ECC memory as fast as 1866MHz. The most exciting feature is the dual 10GbE network connections and 14 SATA III ports, making it a natural choice for web servers and even databases of a certain size. There are also 8 lanes of PCIe gen 3., but this isn't intended as a GPU compute platform.

CES 2016 - In a meeting room at Intel's CES 2016 Mega-Booth, I had a chance to go hands-on with Intel's latest small and tiny form factor PC offerings. This includes the new line-up of Compute Sticks, the latest 4th generation NUCs, and a secret NUC which we reported on last month called Skull Canyon.

The new lineup of Intel Compute Sticks is said to be night and day compared to the original model, which many agree has limited applications outside turning dumb-TVs into smart-TVs with a Windows OS. The original compute stick fell short in a few tasks, and Intel has worked to remedy these pitfalls. For starters, the entry Compute Stick, based on a Cherry Trail SoC, will have much more powerful graphics. One issue with the original was that the fan would turn on if it was stuck behind a TV after about 15-30 minutes of streaming, but Intel focused heavily on improving the graphics processor, so tasks such as streaming do not make the SoC work too much harder.

Intel has also introduced more powerful Core m3 and Core m5 (with vPro) variants, which they hope, will satisfy the demands for digital signage. All three new Compute Sticks address the slow Wireless N WIFI on the original with 2x2 Wireless AC. All three variants will also have a microSD card slot for storage expansion.

Online retail giant Amazon will soon sell its own brand of silicon on its digital storefront.

According to reports from Bloomberg, Amazon will start selling its own custom platform-on-chip and semiconductor line as part of its move into the data-center market.

The chips--called Alpine--are based on ARM's 32-bit v7 and 64-bit v8 chips, and are being manufactured by the Israel-based Annapurna Labs facility which Amazon acquired in January 2015 for an estimated $360 million. The Seattle-based retailer purchased the facility to bolster its Amazon Web Services and fold in IC technology into its ever-expanding brand.

Intel has just finished their acquisition of Altera, another chip designer that focuses on FPGA's, for a whopping $16.7 billion. This is one of the largest acquisitions that Intel has ever made, and is one that is designed to allow them to compete in a variety of new areas without having to completely reinvent the wheel.

FPGA cards have become highly useful for some industries, particularly the financial sector, for intense computational tasks. Drop-in cards are sometimes used that bypass the host machine and are connected directly to the network via an RJ45 connection. This'll allow them to enter that highly specialized market with products that are already developed. They also want to use this to help with their presence with connected devices and the Internet of Things.

In regards to the acquisition, Intel said that "We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of the future possible â€" experiences like autonomous driving and machine learning." Intel continues by explaining that "In addition to strengthening the existing FPGA business, PSG will work closely with Intel's Data Center Group and IoT Group to deliver the next generation of highly customized, integrated products and solutions."

AMD's next-gen AM4 platform is beginning to take shape, with the Bristol Ridge-based family of CPUs and APUs appearing on the Zauba shipping database.

The leaked processors have been sent over to AMD's testing facilities in India, with one batch being the quad-core APU prototypes with a 65W TDP, while the other batch are quad-core CPUs with the same 65W TDP. Both the CPUs and APUs were shipped in late October, with the new AM4-based motherboard shipping on November 16. You'll notice that the motherboard was shipping with "FOC" stamped on it, which stands for Full Operational Capacity - meaning the AM4 motherboard is ready for action.

AMD's new Bristol Ridge parts will allow for DDR4 support, with big performance-per-watt gains, and more.

If you're currently rocking a non-K Intel Skylake processor and are interested in doing a little overclocking of your own, ASRock might just be the next motherboard manufacturer for you.

Providing what ASRock has named in its recently issued press release as "a nice Christmas present for the overclocking community named SKY OC," this new SKY OC technology means that you're able to update your BIOS through the official ASRock website and play around with overclocking values on various Intel Z170 chipset processors, including Intel i7, i5, i3 and Pentium chips.

This update has been tested in-house on an Intel Core i5-6400 processor, with MSI engineers being able to push a 60% frequency boost out of the chip, sitting on an ASRock Z170 Pro4 motherboard. As with most great news, there are also some minor negatives, explained by this Taiwanese manufacturer as coming in two forms. Firstly, the Intel onboard graphics will be disabled when SKY OC is running, meaning you'll have to run a video card, in addition to the CPU Turbo Ratio and C-State becoming disabled when using this new technology.