Processors - Page 108

We've heard about Intel's incredible new Core i7-6950X processor, which features 10 x CPU cores joined by 10 x Hyper-Threaded cores for a total of 20 threads, but it looks like we'll get a better look at Intel's new CPUs at Computex in June 2016.

Intel's new 14nm Broadwell-E offerings will arrive next year with a slew of different SKUs, ranging from the 12-threaded CPUs to 20-threaded CPU beasts. The Core i7-6950X will lead the pack with 20 threads of 14nm CPU goodness, with a Base frequency of 2GHz, 25MB of cache and support for DDR4. It'll feature a 140W TDP, and up to 3.5GHz on Turbo Boost.

The Core i7-6900K will feature 16 threads at 3.2GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) and 20MB of cache, with the Core i7-6850K featuring 12 threads of CPU power at 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) with 15MB of cache. The last CPU to be unveiled should be the Core i7-6800K with 12 threads at 3.4GHz (3.6GHz Turbo Boost) with 15MB of cache.

Last month we reported on a leak confirming Intel would be releasing Broadwell-E CPUs in 2016 in three flavours of 6-core/12-threads, 8-core/16-threads, and 10-core/20-threads. Now further details have surfaced.

The flagship CPU, as previously mentioned, is the 10-core/20-thread i7 6950X. Now rumors from OC3D (who neglect to cite a source) tell us it features a 14nm process node, 25MB cache, 3.0GHz clock speed, 2400MHz memory clock, and 140W TDP. Furthermore, it comes unlocked, and supports the X99 chipset and DDR4 2400 RAM. As for the rest of the family, see for yourself below.

Broadwell-E is rumored to launch at this year's Computex in June at the $1,000 price point.

It seems as though Intel is in some trouble with its new Skylake processors, like the new Core i7-6700K, with reports that they're bending under pressure from third-party CPU coolers.

Some CPU coolers are putting too much pressure on the Skylake-based CPUs and the socket on the motherboard, causing damage. The problem begins when shipping or moving a PC, as well as other general shocks and movement - putting pressure on the mount point, bending the CPU. This can cause the pins on the motherboard to be damaged, which as you can imagine, is not good at all.

Intel talked with Tom's Hardware, confirming that their Skylake processors are thinner than previous designs, adding that they are looking into the issue as we speak. Cooler Master reached out to us today, saying: "Cooler Master has been at the forefront of Cooling Technology since its inception. With the Cooler Master designed heat-sink technology in your coolers, you are getting the best standards of thermal cooler in the world. Every cooler we ship meets Cooler Master's highest standards for providing incredible performance, regardless of the design or model".

There is quite a lot of excitement in the air over AMD's upcoming Zen architecture, but according to the latest rumors, AMD is preparing to launch it sooner than previous reported - as soon as March 2016.

The rumor is coming from Planet3DNow, which said AMD would launch the new flagship AM4 platform in March, much earlier than the previous release window of Q4 2016. The new Zen CPU would run on the AM4 platform, which will support both APUs and CPUs. Better yet, the new AM4 platform will reportedly last much longer than previous platforms, promising support for future AMD processors. The source of Planet3DNow said that "The internal timetable foresees a March 2016 launch".

Furthermore, the new AM4 platform will bring support for Bristol Ridge and Summit Ridge platforms, with the Summit Ridge range being the performance desktop processors under the FX branding on the Zen architecture. The Bristol Ridge range will be the mainstream/desktop mobility APU range, based on the Excavator architecture. Summit Ridge will be powered by the smaller, more power efficient 14nm process with up to 8 x CPU cores while the Bristol Ridge APUs will be made on the current 28nm process as quad-core processors. Both offerings will come in at 95W, while the APU will include GCN GPU cores, and the Summit Ridge offering featuring CPU cores only.

PCgameshardware.de has tested Intel's Skylake CPUs and found because of its thinner substrate versus its previous processors, coolers that apply a lot of pressure to the CPU and socket can damage both.

As of now, just Scythe -- who have confirmed damage to Skylake CPUs with their coolers is possible -- is the only company confirmed as affected by it as of yet. Arctic says it has verified no issues with its coolers, though it advises you don't travel with your cooler mounted; NZXT and EK Water Blocks both have stated their coolers do not experience the reported issues, with the exception of its older gen large tower coolers like the Havik 120/140 from NZXT and the older generation of compatible LGA-1151 water blocks with a "classic, undefined clamping force type mounting mechanism". These are compatible with Skylake CPUs, but both companies recommend erring on the side of caution and not using them with Skylake.

Scythe is redesigning its cooler mounting mechanism in light of it, changing screws to reduce mounting pressure. If you have a Scythe Ashura, Mugen 4, Mugen 4 PCGH-Edition, Fuma, Ninja 4, Grand Kama Cross 4, Mugen Max, or Kotetsu cooler, fill out this form to be sent a free set of these screws.

AMD has been teasing its Zen architecture for a little while now, but the new Zen-based APUs will be packing quite the performance punch when they drop in 2017.

It's said that we're looking at Xbox One and PS4 level performance, even when the Zen APU is found inside of notebooks - and personally, I think we might see it in VR headsets, too. Another exciting part of this news is that there's a rumor that AMD is working on a Zen APU that would feature High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM.

If AMD did this, it could really begin to make a dent in CPU sales for Intel, as people could choose a semi-powerful APU with HBM over a traditional CPU from Intel and DDR4 RAM.

We knew they were coming, but the 10-core/20-thread Broadwell-E CPUs have been confirmed through a leaked roadmap from Intel. We should expect the chipmaker to launch an entire family of Broadwell-E processors throughout 2016.

Intel is expected to launch 6-, 8-, and 10-core offerings - with the assistance of Hyper-Threading boosting those up to 12-, 16-, and 20-threaded processors. Not only that, but we should expect new Broadwell, Skylake-S, and Skylake-U processors throughout 2016, where in Q4 2016 it looks like we should see Skylake-S 4+4e and Kaby Lake-S offerings unveiled.

The Broadwell-E offerings from Intel will arrive as the Core i7-6950X, with this CPU being the flagship 20-threaded beast. Under that, we have the Core i7-6900K, Core i7-6850K, and Core i7-6800K.

Intel has provided more details on its second-generation Xeon Phi co-processor at the annual SC conference, with the new Knights Landing beast nearly ready to be shipped.

The company has said they've already sent out various pre-production systems to clients through its early ship program, with Cray enjoying the new Xeon Phi co-processor, with it handling multiple customer applications in preparation for supercomputer deployments at Los Alamos and NERSC. Intel has said that the new Knights Landing chip has various innovative features that provide unmatched performance.

For example, Xeon Phi co-processor powered systems will be capable of delivering single-precision performance that is over 8TFlops with double-precision performance sitting at around 3TFlops. Inside, the Xeon Phi co-processor features 16GB of stacked memory that Intel says has 5x the bandwidth of DDR5, and is also 5x more power efficient and 3x denser than GDDR5 that is used on today's video cards.

While we just found out some details on the upcoming Broadwell-E platform, including the flagship Core i7-6950X and Core i7-6900K SKUs, there is some more exciting stuff for the Xeon family of processors.

The Broadwell-EP update will arrive in Q1 2016, with the new Xeon E5-2600 v4 processor featuring up to 22 CPU cores, with 44 threads thanks to HyperThreading technology. Intel's new Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors will boast up to 55MB of L3 cache, and have TDPs of up to 145W. The new Xeon processors will be slotted into the Grantley family, with quad-channel DDR4 support to boot.

Over the next few years, we'll see the new Skylake-EP and Skylake-EX processors from Intel, with the Xeon CPUs featuring up to 56 and 64 CPU threads. From there, in 2018 we can expect the Cannonlake-EP and Cannonlake-EX processors to really hit their stride, being made on the incredibly small 10nm process on the new Socket P platform. These processors should rock up to 68 or more CPU threads and have between 80-85MB of L3 cache. Exciting times.

Intel's next generation Broadwell-E platform is on its way, where we're learning about the next-gen HEDT family that will still work on existing X99 platform, with an entire new SKU lineup of exciting processors.

The flagship CPU in the new Broadwell-E family will be the Core i7-6950X, which will feature 10 x CPU cores and thanks to Hyper-Threading, 20 threads. The Core i7-6950X should be clocked at around 3GHz, but this will change between now and its release which is expected in the first half of 2016. But can you imagine 20 x 4GHz processors being inside of your PC?

There will be plenty of other CPUs released in the Broadwell-E family, including the new Core i7-6900K. The new Core i7-6900K will also be manufactured on Intel's impressive 14nm technology, with 16 threads of power behind it. The Core i7-6900K should rock a frequency of 3.3GHz, and 20MB of L3 cache. It will reportedly land on the X99 platform, which will confuse most people as the Core i7-6700K fits onto the Z170 chipset.

GlobalFoundries has achieved its first success in producing AMD products using the performance-enhanced version of its 14nm FinFET process technology known as 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP).

With that, the tech will be officially integrated into a new set of AMD compute and graphics products, which it's said will be simultaneously high-performing and power-efficient.

Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, said of the milestone, "FinFET technology is expected to play a critical foundational role across multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2016. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has worked tirelessly to reach this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to GLOBALFOUNDRIES' continued progress towards full production readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a broad set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products."

AMD has a new Embedded single-chip system-on-chip (SOC) processor family on the scene with its new R-Series. It's aimed at the high-end market, and packs its latest 64-bit CPU core "Excavator", as well as a third-gen GCN GPU architecture. It's also the first of its kind to support dual-channel 64-bit DDR4 (with speeds as high as DDR4-2400; DDR3 is also supported with speeds up to 2133).

On the graphics and video front, the R-Series supports High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)1 for full 4K decode and DirectX 12; the specifications note up to eight compute units and two rendering blocks and GPU clock speeds up to 800MHz resulting in 819 GFLOPS. The company claims 22 percent better performance over the 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APU2 and 58 percent better performance over the Intel Broadwell Core i7 in graphics-intensive benches.

As for efficiency, AMD boasts full HSA implementation and hUMA utilization for what they feel results in great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Additionally, thermal design power is configurable, and power usage is said to be reduced 35 percent compared to the 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APU.

AMD CEO and President Lisa Su affirmed her company's commitment to high performance x86 CPUs in its earnings call last week, for anyone in doubt following the recent news of financial troubles.

"In terms of long-term roadmap we are extremely committed to high performance x86 CPUs," she says. "And there should be no confusion on that point. [Chief Technology Officer] Mark Papermaster is currently directly engaging with the team on that execution and we'll have more details to come. But [we're] overall pleased with the execution and it continues to be our number one priority for the company."

More, she states Zen's impressive target 40% IPC performance is "on track" and that multiple FinFET designs have been taped out (meaning design is finalized, and the chips need only be produced).

It looks like AMD is preparing to launch a new 8-core server SoC codenamed "Hierofalcon", based on a 64-bit ARM design using eight A57 cores clocked at 2GHz each. AMD's new Hierofalcon SoC has a TDP of 30W, so we should expect some decent performance from the new chip.

An engineering sample of the new 8-core "Hierofalcon" processor has been spotted, where it has been put up against a bunch of desktop processors from both Intel and AMD. We have those results above. These results are looking at the performance on a single core, at a normalized clock speed. The new Hierofalcon processor does quite well, taking swings at some of AMD's desktop chips.

When it comes to "Whetstone" performance, the desktop processors kick some serious ass, but that's to be expected. The same thing goes for the Execl benchmark and the kCopy and kPipe results.

Qualcomm has just unveiled its plans to enter the server CPU market with a new custom processor based on an ARM design. Qualcomm's latest chip is being aimed at the likes of hyper-scale customers like Google and Facebook, as well as many service providers and large enterprises.

The new chip was shown off last week, with the CPU being a purpose-built system-on-chip that is different to other Snapdragon processors. The first version of Qualcomm's new chip is a 24-core processor, combining PCIe, storage and other features into the SoC. According to Qualcomm Senior Vice President Anand CHandrasekher, the first pre-production processor has 24 cores, but future chips will have many more.

The chipmaker is now shipping its processor to big customers for testing, but Qualcomm isn't naming names. The company said it would provide a release window for the chip, but it would update the world in 2016.

Intel isn't far away from releasing its Skylake Purley-powered Xeon processors, with the new platform set to feature a huge 28 Skylake cores, and thanks to Hyper-Threading, a total of 56 threads of CPU power.

These new Xeon processors are not destined for the consumer desktop, as they will include multi-processor setups. The new Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 processor ranges will see the Xeon E5 range packing between two and four CPUs on a motherboard, while the Xeon E7 steps it up, considerably. The upcoming Xeon E7 range will pack an 8-socket design, allowing for an insane amount of CPU horsepower, especially when each CPU has 56 threads.

Intel will be unleashing its new Omnipath Architecture inside of the new Skylake-powered Xeon processors, something it calls Storm Lake (Generation 1). This new PCH will be codenamed Lewisburg, where it will include updated Ethernet controllers. The Skylake Purley update will also pave the way for Socket P, with a TDP that's configurable between 45W and 165W. The PCIe slots will have 48 lanes of bandwidth to play with, but this could change at any time.

Intel took everyone by surprise when they launched the Broadwell 5775C and 5675C desktop SKUs around Computex. The CPUs not only took the crown with the fastest desktop integrated graphics, but they also were able to overclock.

Building upon the success of their Iris Pro line with integrated eDRAM, Intel is adding eDRAM to their more affordable Iris lineup as well. For Skylake, both GT3 and GT4 integrated graphics will feature 22nm eDRAM. The eDRAM will be treated as normal system memory (instead of cache), but should prove to be beneficial for graphics performance.

While the 5775C and 5675C were both launched months ago, only recently did they start to sell. Their prices are also sky high, but we hear that there is demand for desktop CPUs with strong integrated graphics. The overclocking potential of the "C" SKUs was also low, the CPUs didn't overclock well. Intel told us that this was due to the mobile nature of Broadwell; transforming the BGA CPU to an LGA CPU proved to be cumbersome because of the eDRAM implementation and expected overclocking capabilities.

As of August 9th Intel had shipped 1 million Skylake CPUs worldwide. The new CPUs will go on sale on September 1st in Asia and in 6 weeks will be available worldwide. While Intel already launched their K series Skylake desktop SKUs last month, they are now announcing the launch of their entire introductory Skylake lineup including both desktop and mobile segments.

Intel predicts that Skylake will last approximately 4 years, meaning that we should expect even more SKUs in the future. A lot of microarchitecture information was disclosed during technical sessions at IDF and I already wrote that up here.

Skylake features a broad range of designs. The microarchitecture can scale all the way from Y-Series mobile chips (SoC) all the way to Xeons and powerful desktop models. The new lineup will feature a Y-Series for tablets and compute sticks, a U-Series for mini PCs and notebooks, an H-Series for more powerful mobile devices, and the S-Series for desktop. The desktop SKUs will maintain the same Core i3/i5/i7 naming scheme. The CoreM lineup has been further segmented into Core M3/M5/M7 to better identify performance and power packages.

Intel is about to drop the rest of its Skylake processors into the market, after the release of the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K just recently. There will be eight more processors released, but the rest of them will not be unlocked models for overclocking.

The chipmaker will be offering up 10 total SKUs, with two of them already in the wild. The remaining 8 processors will be made up of four 65W, and four 35W low TDP chips. All of these processors will slot into the new LGA 1151 motherboards using the Z170, H170 and B150 chipsets. The new Skylake-S processors are as follows:

The most noteworthy chips out of the Skylake-S lineup are definitely the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K as they are the unlocked, overclocking ready CPUs. But, the Core i7-6700 will feature a 3.4GHz frequency with 4GHz boost making it a viable alternative to the 6700K if you don't want to overclock. The 'low TDP' chips in the form of the Core i7-6700T, and the three other Core i5 processors with the 'T' moniker will be decent processors for low-power devices.

IDF 2015 - One of the new features of Intel's Skylake architecture is that it is always listening for your voice, ready for voice commands to wake your PC up, similar to how Cortana works in Windows 10, or Google's various voice-controlled features in Android.

Intel has packed a new digital signal processor (DSP) into the Skylake processors, where you can wake your PC up by talking to it. The feature was shown off at the Intel Developer Forum, where you can wake your PC up from sleep, or have a program launched - all with your voice. The chipmaker hasn't mentioned if any additional hardware will be required, obviously outside of a microphone, but integration of this technology will work perfectly in most laptops.

The question is, will people want this feature turned on by default? Do you want your Skylake-powered PC to be always listening out for your voice? What type of security is there? There are more questions being raised over security, than it being just a cool feature for Intel's new processors.