Processors - Page 112

AMD has quite the claim for the future, where the chipmaker wants to see the power efficiency in mainstream processors increased by 25x, with a goal of 2020 to reach this point. The company wants to see laptops and other devices with "several days of battery life" according to AMD Researcher Sam Naffziger.

Naffziger says that larger gains for the world are capable with more power efficiency in its processors, noting that there are over 3 billion PCs in the world that consume 1% of the entire power output of the planet, with 20 million servers consuming another 1.5%. Naffziger also said that power management is improving so quickly that soon a CPU will be capable of shifting into low-power between user keystrokes, or between frames in a video.

This concept, is something called "race to idle" which turns off portions of the processor rapidly, or as quick as possible following a processor-intensive job. Mark Papermaster, AMD's Chief Technology Officer says that this is a big move away from the process-based improvements that we have been seeing until now, something that makes up the framework of Moore's Law. Papermaster says that power management and efficiency improvements are "going to have a big impact on the industry".

Nick Shih, legendary overclocker who now works with ASRock, has just posted on his wall a CPU-Z screenshot validating one of the biggest overclocks I've seen in quite sometime: an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU clocked at an incredible 7GHz, or 7003.38 MHz.

Shih used the ASRock Z97 OC Formula motherboard to get there, and a huge 1.792V on the CPU to reach the milestone. The Core i7-4790K used was an Engineering Sample (like most for these overclocks) with two cores disabled. But still, 7GHz! Wow.

The picture above is what Shih is working with, just as a teaser. Shih has even teased that 7.2GHz "is coming" - we await your overclocking skills, Nick!

Computex 2014 - In typical Computex fashion, embargos-be-damned! At the show we saw a handful of X99 boards behind closed doors but a few brave decision makers publicly displayed the upcoming chipset in bold fashion.

ASRock had two boards on display, Extreme4 and Extreme6. Both utilize new technology standards designed to decrease system latency while optimizing power consumption and increasing the user experience.

First up is the Extreme6. As you can see the board doesn't have a heat sink on the PCH but the company has some time left to iron out the details as this chipset shouildn't hit the market till later this year.

More details about the Intel's next generation HEDT processor lineup 'Haswell-E' has surfaced. The new HEDT lineups will be launched at three price segments to replace Core i7-4820K, i7-4930K and i7-4960K processors. The newer lineups will be using Intel X99 chipset and will have 2011 pins. However it is being reported that it won't be compatible with the existing LGA 2011 socket.

It is also known that Haswell-E will be the first to use DDR4-SDRAM memory, and therefore will support DDR4-2133 MHz out of the box. All three processors have a TDP rated at 140W.

It is expected that the HEDT processor lineups will be launched later this year.

New details have surfaced that sheds more light over the upcoming Devil's Canyon CPU and the unlocked Pentium series processors. It was previously reported that the Devil's Canyon will use a new packaging and better thermal paste.

There are two of such CPUs: i7 with Quad Core and hyper threading, and i5 which uses quad-core. The i7-4690K is clocked at 4 GHz with turbo boost up to 4.4 GHz, along with 8MB L3 Cache and 88w TDP. This is said to be priced for around $362.

The i5-4960K has a base clock of 3.5 GHz with turbo boost of up to 3.9 GHz paired with a 6MB L3 Cache and also has a TDP of 88w. This processor will be priced for ~$254.

Intel is expected to launch its new Devil Canyon-based CPUs at Computex on June 2, but it looks like this will just be a show-and-tell, and not a full release. Retail availability on the Devil Canyon chips will reportedly now be late September.

The new Devil Canyon CPUs were expected to bring forward faster clock speeds, better packaging materials, design that is better for overclocking, and better TIM between the IHS and die of the processor which would result in higher overclocks. The Core i7-4790K was meant to be the star of the show, but along with the Core i5-4690K and Pentium G3258 CPUs, retail launches won't happen until later in the year.

This is why we haven't seen the high-end enthusiast boards on the Z97 chipset unveiled yet, as motherboard makers are waiting for Intel to launch its Devil Cayon CPUs - but with this delay, we might not see much of these motherboards unveiled. But, at Computex, we should see the new LGA 2011-3 motherboards, which will feature the enthusiast X99 chipset - something we look forward to seeing ourselves.

According to an Intel PDF that Chinese tech site EXP Review got its hands-on, Intel's upcoming "Devil's Canyon" CPUs could easily do 5GHz on air-cooling. The new Core i7-4790K and Core i5-4690K CPUs will be more than just a clock speed increase when compared to the upcoming Haswell refresh chips.

The new Core i7-4790K CPU will have a Base clock of 4GHz, boosting up to 4.4GHz - this chip will have 8 threads (4 physical cores, 4 x Hyper-Threaded cores), 8MB of cache and a TDP of 88W. Its little brother, the Core i5-4690K will have a Base clock of 3.5GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. It will not feature Hyper-Threading, so we're stuck with four cores. It will chip the cache down to 6MB, but contain the same 88W TDP.

Both of the new Devil's Canyon-based chips will support 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, too. The biggest thing to take away here is that the new Devil's Canyon CPUs will be the first CPUs from Intel that will have a huge off-the-shelf clock speed - 4GHz. With a Turbo Boost of 4.4GHz, EXP Review and now myself, will bring the "air-cooled 5GHz era back". 5GHz shouldn't be a problem on air-cooling, but if you were to use an aftermarket cooler - such as a Corsair H110i for example, 5GHz and beyond shouldn't be a problem. We should expect Intel to better unveil its Devil's Canyon chips at Computex, which kicks off in just a couple of weeks time.

According to a new report, Amazon is looking for engineering so that the company can build its own server chips. According to the job listing, the company is looking forward to integrate ARM chips and have been hiring many engineers for this project.

Most of the employees that Amazon have hired so far are former employees of a Texas-based company called 'Calxeda' which makes ARM-based servers. The online retail giant will also be hiring Calxeda's former CTO.

Many employees have taken positions such as Principal engineer, silicon optimization and hardware design engineer, director of silicon optimizations at Amazon web services. Currently, there's a job listing for a CPU architect/Micro-architect. Seeing that the company is very aggressive in its hiring spree and people have started working since this month, its a no-brainer that the company is really into it.

It looks like Intel is heading into the mass production of its next-generation processor codenamed Skylake. Skylake will be manufactured on Intel's 14nm process, and will be released next year.

Intel's Chief Executive Officer, Brian Krzanich, said during a conference call with financial analysts and investors: "We have a lot going on, the ramp of Broadwell, the ramp of Skylake in the second half of next year". The Skylake-based processors will be the second lineup of processors based on Intel's 14nm process.

We don't know much about Intel's upcoming Skylake processors, but we should expect four x64 cores, a high-performance integrated graphics engine, and multiple special purpose accelerators. On top of that, we should expect DDR4 support, AVX 3.2 (512-bit instructions), SHA extensions (SHA-1 and SHA-256, secure hash algorithms), MPX (memory protection extensions), ADX (multi-precision add-carry instruction extensions) and other innovations.

AMD's Athlon and Sempron lines are back and now in APU form. This morning AMD announced the launch of its new quad-core and dual-core Kabini APUs, and the new Socket AM1 platform. Kabini brings back the legendary Athlon and Sempron brands and pairs them up with AMD's award-winning Graphics Core Next architecture and Jaguar CPU cores to form a flexible and powerful APU platform.

"AMD consistently builds on its industry leading technology by continuing to offer a diversified product stack which is proven today with the availability ofthe AM1 platform with "sockete" Sempron and Athlon APUs designed for the mainstream market," said Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD. "With quad-core performance and AMD Radeon graphics the AM1 platform is an affordable solution that provides great flexibility due to an infrastructure built to deliver a multitude of options to our end users and system builders."

The new quad-core Athlon 5150 and 5350 APUs feature a 25W TDP and feature a 2.05GHz and 1.6GHz CPU clock respectively. Both Athlon APUs feature Radeon R3 graphics with 128 GCN cores each which is clocked at 600MHz with a 1600MHz memory clock. Each Athlon APU is capable of supporting two USB 3.0, 8 USB 2.0, and 2 SATA 6GB/s ports. MSRP on the Athlon 5350 is set at $59 while the 5150 will retail for $49.

Qualcomm already power countless smart devices, but the competition is heating up with Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, Samsung and much more wanting to change the game with their own devices.

The company behind the Snapdragon range of system-on-chips (SoC) has already announced its 64-bit capable Snapdragon 810 and 808 processors, which are high performance hardware designed for the best of the best Android-powered devices. Both chips are baked on a 20nm process, meaning they will use less power, will be lighter and smaller, and deliver more performance.

The eight-core Snapdragon 810 is the star of the show, featuring four Cortex-A57 cores for power-hungry tasks, while four lower-power Cortex-A53 cores will be used for everything else. We will have LPDDR4 RAM show up for the party, as well as 4K display support. There'll also be voice activation and dual Image Signal Processors for better imaging.

Today, at the Electronics Engineering Live! Conference and Expo in San Jose, CA, Silicon Motion Technology Corporation (NasdaqGS: SIMO), manufacturer of NAND flash controllers for solid state storage devices, will announce new additions to its Ferri portfolio with single-package Ferri-eMMCâ„¢ and ultra-high performance SATA 6Gb/s FerriSSD embedded memory solutions.

The Ferri-eMMC is available in two flavors, the SM667 for applications that require up to 30K P/E cycles and the SM661 for applications that do not require such high reliability. The new controllers are designed for a wide range of embedded applications and provide for more flexible PCB design and low-cost manufacturing. They are available in configurations ranging from 2GB to 32GB.

The new SATA 6Gb/s Ferri-SSD embedded memory series also has two models, the SM659 and SM619. Embedded DRAM extends the SSD life and delivers best-in-class performance of up to 80K random IOPs. These solutions leverage Silicon Motion technologies including PowerShield, DataPhoenix, Intelligent Scan DataRefresh, SSDLifeGuard health-monitoring, and remote firmware updates. They are available in 8GB to 64GB configurations.

Reports have indicated that Intel confirmed its specifications for the upcoming 9-Series chipsets for LGA-1150 and LGA 2011-E HEDT platform- H97, Z97 and Intel X99 desktop chipsets. Intel Z97 and H97 chipsets are available for LGA 1150 package, whereas the Z97 will be paired with current generation 'Haswell Processors, followed by its refreshed versions and 'Devil's Canyon' processor families. Intel X99 will be paired with the upcoming 'Haswell-E' HEDT platform with LGA 2011-3 package.

Motherboards with Intel Z97 chipsets will have up to PCI-Express 3.0 slots wired to the CPU, and have configurations of x16/NC/NC, x8/x8/NC and x8/x4/x4 for GPU setups. What should be noted that unlike the previous generation, H97 will support overclocking, though it will not have the same PCIe configuration that Z97 allows. Along with this, both chips will have up to 8 PCI-e 2.0 lanes for series of onboard devices and 14 USB ports, out of which 6 are for USB 3.0.

Both the H and B version of 9 series chips will allow PCI-e M.2 storage drives that provides 66.6% more bandwidth compared to SATA 6Gb/s standard. This should accelerate manufacturer's plans to release a series of high-performance SSDs by 2014- 2015. These two chipsets also will allow RAID, AHCI and Rapid Storage Technology. Intel Z97 will have Dynamic Storage Accelerator (DST)whereas Intel H97 will have Small Business Advantage (SBA) feature.

Intel unveiled its plans for its entire lineup of desktop processors and All-in-One PC systems as the company believes that desktop PC is getting stronger. The company started by pointing some facts observed during 2013 and 2014, which some people may not (or may) find it surprising.

According to The Vice President and General Manager for Desktop Client Platform Group Lisa Graff, Intel's desktop processor volume was up by 7% on a Year-on-Year basis as per Q4 2013's results. The following month, Intel observed that they've made an All-time record for its Core i5 and Core i7 unit shipments, as said by Brian Krzanich in January 2014.

This should explain why Intel accelerated its plans to release its Haswell-E lineups and Intel X99 lineups well before than previously expected. Since the company sees a certain upward growth in the DIY PC and enthusiast market, it only makes sense to offer the best they have as quick as possible, provided its all ready for retail.

It looks like we could expect Intel to surprise the world by releasing its Haswell-E processors at Computex in Taipei, in just a few months time. The chipmaker is preparing its new Core i7 Extreme CPU, as well as its X99 chipset.

Intel's Haswell-E processor will be the company's first desktop processor to feature eight cores, for a total of 16 threads. We should also expect 20MB of L3 cache, quad-channel DDR4 memory support, Turbo Boost 2 technology, an 40 integrated PCI Express 3.0 lanes. The new Haswell-E CPUs will be made on Intel's 22nm process.

The new Haswell-E processors will arrive as the 5000-series, compatible only with the X99 chipset and LGA2011-3 socket. The platform is being targeted toward enthusiasts, so we should see some exotic motherboards unveiled at Computex by the usual players: ASUS, GIGABYTE, ASRock and so forth. The new X99 chipset should deliver some great new features and technologies, too.

It looks like AMD is forging through with plans to dominate the desktop in emerging markets, where the chipmaker has just announced its new AM1 chipset. The AM1 chipset is a system-on-chip (SoC) for the developing market.

The AM1 part is a sibling of the Kabini family of chips, something that AMD launched last year with both dual- and quad-core CPUs and GPUs on the same chipset. This is similar to what was baked into Sony's PlayStation 4, and Microsoft's Xbox One. Kabini was developed mostly for portables, but AMD wants to see the new AM1 take on the low-cost, expandable desktop market.

Where AMD has it in the bag is the price, which starts at just $60 for the chipset and motherboard combined. We should see AM1 limited to just 25W maximum power draw from the chipset, but a restriction of PCIe 2.0. AMD has taken some swings at Intel, comparing it to Intel's Bay Trail platform, which AMD says AM1 beats with higher memory speeds, 16GB memory support, an upgradeable socket, and Windows XP support. AMD declares: "Avoid a dead-end platform and choose AMD".

MWC 2104 - SoC's centered around smartphones were a big topic at this years Mobile World Congress with big hitters like Qualcomm and Broadcom announcing several new chips designed to carry mobile communications into the next-generation. Samsung was not to be left out of the party either and has announced two new additions to its Exynos line of mobile SoCs.

The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5422 is an updated version of the Exynos 5 Octa 5420. The SoC features four ARM Cortex-A15 cores and four ARM Cortex-A7 cores in what is known as a big.LITTLE configurations. Clock speeds are set to 2.1GHz and 1.5GHz respectively, and the SoC supports heterogeneous multi-processing just like its predecessor. This means that the computationally intensive task are handled by the ARM Cortex A-15 cores while the low-level duties are passed off to the lighter Cortex A-7 cores. Additionally a dual-channel 32-bit LPDDR3-1866 memory controller is featured as well as a Mali-T628 MP6 GPU. An integrated modem is not present in the SoC though, which means manufacturers will have to look to solutions such as Intel's recently-announced XMM 7160 chip for LTE connectivity.

Samsung also unveiled the new Exynos 5 Hexa 5260, a six-core SoC which also utilizes a big.LITTLE configuration. Two ARM Cortex-A15 cores are paired up with four ARM Cortex-A7 cores with clock speeds at 1.7GHz and 1.3GHz respectively. The 5260 also features a 32-bit LPDDR3-1600 memory controller and HMP support, making it a very tempting processor for applications where low-power draw is ideal. Word on the street is that the Exynos 5 Hexa 5260 will make its way into the Galaxy Note 3 Neo which is slated for a spring launch.

Intel is preparing a new 15-core Xeon CPU, which will feature 4.31 billion transistors, a 3.8GHz Turbo Frequency, 155W TDP, 40 PCIe lanes, and will join the Xeon E7 line-up.

This means we can expect the new native 15-core processor to be joined by seven other CPUs for a total of eight CPUs, with Hyper-Threading thrown into the mix we can expect up to 240 threads being capable thanks to this new processor. The new Ivy Bridge-EX processor will feature 15 cores/30 threads, 37.5MB of L3 cache, will support DDR3-1600MHz RAM and most likely come in at over $5000 when it lands.

The new 15-core CPU will use the LGA2011 socket and arrive as the Xeon E7-8890 v2 CPU, we will see 8 members in the Xeon E7-8xxx v2 range.

I still remember watching The Terminator, where they needed to smash the chip inside of the Terminator's head in order to fully destroy it. Well, DARPA on its path for ultimate robotic takeover of the world, is working with IBM on a self-destructing chip - something out of a sci-fi movie.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a contract to IBM that will see the company develop a CMOS chip that will self-destruct on command. The project is called Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR), that will prevent expensive, next-gen, classified military systems - such as a Terminator - from being captured, and reverse engineered by the enemy.

DARPA states on the webpage for VAPR: "It is nearly impossible to track and recover every [electronic] device [on the battlefield], resulting in unintended accumulation in the environment and potential unauthorized use and compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage".

Qualcomm is reportedly hard at work on a new processor, something that should blow most other chips away when it comes out. The chipmaker is rumored to be working on a new SoC that would feature 8 processing cores, and would be 64-bit compatible.

The new SoC would feature eight Krait64 general-purpose cores designed in-house at Qualcomm, and would be compatible with ARMv8 architecture with up to 4MB of cache and a 2.5GHz clock speed. We should also expect Adreno 430 graphics on-board (up from the 330 series) with a 500MHz frequency, LPDDR3/LPDDR4 memory controller, and various special purpose hardware/accelerators.

Qualcomm's new SoC would be made on the 20nm process over at TSMC. We should expect it to arrive as the Snapdragon 810 series, with two versions: MSM8994 with integrated baseband and APQ8094 that will require an external telecommunications chip.