CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 109

When it comes to whisper quiet CPU cooling, there is none finer and more respected than Noctua. Always striving for improvements, Noctua have announced the successors to the award-winning NH-L9a and NH-L12, the new and improved NH-L9a-AM4 and NH-L12S. These models feature support for AMD Ryzen processors to meet market demand.

"AMD has made a big impact on the market with its Ryzen architecture and the platform will become even more interesting for compact HTPC builds when the first Ryzen-based APUs are introduced next year," says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "We're thus updating two of our award-winning low-profile models to support Ryzen's AM4 socket."

Perfect for HTPC and other compact builds that require minimum clearance for a CPU cooler, the NH-L9a-AM4 is only 37mm tall. Including a custom designed SecuFirm2 mounting system, this allows for the AM4 socket to be easily installed and features a highly optimised NF-A9x14 92mm fan, that runs remarkably quiet thanks to fully automatic speed control via PWM.

Intel is weeks away from releasing yet another CPU family because they're definitely not scared of AMD's continued threat by Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper, with Coffee Lake-S led by the flagship Core i7-8700K which seems to overclock incredibly well.

Intel's new Core i7-8700K has been busted hitting 4.8GHz on all CPU cores (6C/12T) on air cooling, which is great to hear. But if you want to get past the 5GHz ceiling, you're going to need better cooling - and you'll need to delid the processor as well.

All in all, the Core i7-8700K hitting 4.8GHz on ALL 6C/12T threads is pretty damn good. It'll be interesting to see how much more it can be pushed, and whether 5GHz is something that will require watercooling, or more.

Intel's next-gen Coffee Lake-S architecture led by the flagship Core i7-8700K processor doesn't launch until October 5, but there are major leaks all over the place from performance, to a detailed run down of all of the new 8000-series CPUs.

First up, Intel is calling their new Core i7-8700K processor their "BEST gaming desktop processor" ever made, with 6C/12T of CPU power. We have up to 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes on X370, and DDR4 RAM support up to 2666MHz. Intel has also included hardware support for 4K HDR content, per-core overclocking, and so much more.

Intel's new 8th generation Core processors represent the best gaming processor Intel has ever made, the first 6-core Core i5 processor, the first 4-core Core i3 processor, and more. We have up to 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes on the platform, and support for Intel Optane memory.

Intel has been reacting to Ryzen for most of the year, but one of the bigger surprises could be that Chipzilla is working on a new dual-core Core i3-7360X processor.

Intel's purported Core i3-7360X processor will be a HEDT version of the current Core i3-7350K, which will be replaced by the Core i3-8350K.

The new Core i3-7360K will be a dual-core CPU with a turbo clock of 4.3GHz, while the TDP is a massive 112W. Great tech for a dual-core processor, which will be around 1.25% faster than the current-gen Core i3-7350K, let alone the new Core i3-8350K.

Update: Intel reached out to me for some clarification on this article, informing me they're talking to the original source of this article, Digitimes, too. Intel said that their 10nm production is "on track and not delayed", adding that: "We'll be shipping our first 10-nanometer products near the end of the year beginning with a lower volume SKU followed by a volume ramp in the first half of 2018".

Intel has been reacting to AMD for most of the year, but now their plans for 2018 just went into disarray as the once champion of the industry has hit yet another roadblock of its next-gen 10nm CPU node.

Intel's upcoming Cannon Lake CPU architecture has been delayed, for a third time, to the end of 2018. Cannon Lake was once pitched as a mid-2017 release, and is now 18 months behind. Digitimes is reporting that Intel's delay of Cannon Lake is hurting OEM partners, who are thinking of skipping Cannon Lake for Ice Lake, which is reportedly coming out very close to the release of Cannon Lake.

Intel's most expensive consumer processor in a very long time is nearly here, with the Core i9-7980XE boasting its 18C/36 of CPU power, beating AMD's current Ryzen Threadripper 1950X flagship CPU with 16C/32T.

There are now early benchmarks on the new Intel Core i9-7980XE processor, with 'Coolenjoy' releasing their data on the ASUS APEX motherboard, with the 18C/36T clocked at 4.2GHz on all CPU cores... impressive stuff. Intel has its new Turbo Boost Max 3.0 letting the Core i9-7980XE boost all CPU cores up to 4.4GHz.

Still, just look at these benchmarks... Intel's new Core i9-7980XE is a megatasking BEAST. Priced at $1999, you'll need to sell a kidney or two, but I'm sure it's worth it.

Intel is about to roll out its next reaction to Ryzen, with the upcoming Coffee Lake-S architecture and the 'new' Z370 chipset with a butt load of new Z370-based motherboards from the usual companies like ASRock, GIGABYTE, ASUS, MSI, and others.

But, one of the more interesting things to note here is that there will be some gates up when it comes to CPU compatibility between the sockets. If you have a Kaby Lake CPU right now and want to upgrade to a new Z370 board, for whatever reason, you simply can't - even though they are the same LGA 1151 socket.

Hardware.info has found that the new Z370 boards won't work with current-gen Kaby Lake CPUs, and it works the other way around yet, either. So if you run out and buy the upcoming Core i7-8700K, it won't work in your current-gen Z170/Z270 motherboard... but this should work after a BIOS update in the near future, hopefully.

Intel continues to react to AMD's feverish threat with Ryzen, with Chipzilla launching CPUs and new chipsets left, right, and center - and now... we're hearing more about Intel's next-next-gen Ice Lake CPU architecture.

Intel is preparing Ice Lake-based CPUs that will launch in the second half of 2018, with 8C/16T chips that will fight Ryzen 7 1800X, with a next-gen Z390 chipset that will sit side-by-side with the upcoming Z370 platform.

The big difference between Z370 and Z390 is that the latter will support higher CPU core counts, with Intel launching an offensive to compete against AMD's new Ryzen chips. This means that Intel will be waiting nearly an entire year before they can properly compete against the pure CPU thread count that AMD offers with Ryzen.

AMD will later this year rock the notebook world just as much as it did the desktop PC world with its new Ryzen Mobile APUs, something the company has teased for the last few months.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen Mobile APUs will be the first Zen-based APUs released by the company, which will rock Vega-based GPU technology and much longer battery life than previous APUs from AMD. We're told to expect over 50% more CPU performance, 40% more GPU performance, with 50% less power... pretty damn good numbers.

Fast forward to now, and we have the first benchmark leaks of the upcoming Raven Ridge-based Ryzen 5 2500U which scores 9723 in Geekbench 4.1.1's multi-core test, and 3625 on the single-threaded side. If we compare that against the previous-gen A12-9800B and its multi-core score of just 5115, we can see just how much of an improvement Ryzen Mobile is going to be over AMD's previous-gen APUs.

A few weeks ago there was a story that surfaced that AMD had intentionally disabled two entire CPU dies on their new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, but AMD denied this and the world kept spinning.

Well, weeks later and we're back with the same overclocker delidding AMD's champion, the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, with der8auer pulling it apart to find out that it really is an EPYC server CPU underneath. This means that the single CPU dies on Threadripper are Ryzen 7 1800X, with 8C/16T - but times this by four and we have a huge 32C/64T.

We saw this in those early photos of the four CPU dies, but they were said to be dummy/non-working CPU dies. It might not make sense, but AMD would be making their EPYC server CPUs and then whatever yields can't handle the full 4 x 8C/16T gets knocked down to Threadripper 1950X by easily disabling the bugged-out CPU dies.