Processors - Page 119

To look, or not to look. Ah, come on. You know you're going to take a peek. What does it include? Well, the gist of it, there's not much exciting happening for CPUs (in my opinion) for 2012. The roadmap shows that Intel's superhero, the Core i7-3960K, won't be replaced any time throughout 2012. So, if you have one, you'll feel safe knowing you have the knees that are on those bees throughout the year.

But, there will be shifts in all other segments: premium (Core i7), mainstream (Core i5), transactional (Core i3), legacy (Pentium) and value (Celeron and Atom). The biggest change we'll see from Intel in 2012 is the launch of the 22nm-based Socket 1155. There will be a bunch of CPUs released under this new fabrication.

These chips include the Core i7-3770K which will sit at the top of the hill, clocked at 3.50GHz, sporting 8MB of cache, 8 threads, and a Turbo Boost speed of 3.90GHz. TDP sits at 77W and does so throughout the entire 22nm-based range. This is down from the 32nm-based chips with TDP's at a max of 95.

Every time I read the word "atom," I say to myself "up and Atom" from the character "Radioactive Man" from the Simpsons. Anyway, researchers from McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories have built a circuit that has two wires that are separated by just 150 atoms, built on a 15nm process.

Circuits of this size include the usual benefits of lower power consumption and heat, as well as bringing extra functionality due to the larger transistor density. The challenges at this level, as you can imagine, are great. Dan Olds, an analyst at The Gabriel Consulting Group said of this research:

AMD may not have released what people were expecting when they unleashed Bulldozer, but that has not stopped the CPU from selling out on retail shelves. AMD are selling out as soon as shops receive stock, even while they're not competitively priced against Intel's Core range.

Is it the "It's an 8-core CPU!!" marketing that is doing its magic here? Or are the uninformed customers grabbing it thinking this is somehow better than Intel's offerings? Most tech sites, magazines, forums, and what have you have taken a ride in the Bulldozer and not enjoyed it that much. It can beat Intel's Core i7 2600K in some tests, but overall, it's not in the same league.

Bulldozer has run over the Phenom II and Athlon II processors, which were relatively good chips with good pricing as well as selling well. Manufacturing plants however, share equipment between 45nm products and the new 32nm-based chips, so one has to be discontinued.

AMD's Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have not enjoyed the lime light lately, where we could replace lime light with poo flinging and we'd be more on the mark. We've covered it a few times now and even our reviewer Shane Baxtor was not that impressed.

It got its arse handed to it in most tests, with existing platforms like the Phenom II actually beating it sometimes. Sad. But, it seems as though AMD did not even know how many transistors the Bulldozer sported, with an e-mail from Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech, where AMD's PR department and Anand has shared his thoughts:

Some Ivy Bridge details have been leaked, and CPU World have them split across two articles that cover no less than 18 different CPU models. Ivy Bridge looks to be a native quad-core design with 8MB of last-level cache, just like Sandy Bridge.

Hyper-Threading makes its return, but only with the more expensive Core i7 range of processors, like Sandy Bridge. Turbo Boost also returns, but strangely, there is no mention of Core i3. The only dual-core chip amongst the 18 models is the Core i5-3470T, which sports four threads thanks to Hyper-Threading.

The high-end Core i7-3770K includes a stock frequency of 3.5GHz, ramped up to 3.9GHz when Turbo is enabled. More impressively, it will only feature a 77W thermal envelope, shading nearly 20W from the 95W TDP that the Core i7-2700K has. The Core i7-3770K's TDP is the highest in a range that goes down to 35W. Most of the chips fit into 77W, 65W, and 45W TDPs, with K, S, and T suffixes.

It looks as though Intel is preparing to retire the Celeron name and replace it with Pentium. Intel's Pentium name has been with us for over ten years now, and debuted as the high-end of processors for notebooks and desktops when it first stepped into the limelight.

Intel has positioned the Pentium line between the high-end Core range and the low-end Celeron range, but are reportedly aiming a new processor for its Pentium line in the server market. The new processor is the Pentium 350 and it is aimed at low-end servers. The Pentium 350 is a dual-core part, featuring 3MB cache and a low power draw of just 15W.

The processor is bare bones, with no integrated graphics. The new chip will be targeting the microservers rather than high-end servers where performance is required. The market is served by other parts in the Xeon line.

Personally, I think we're at the edge of where we'll see more performance from CPUs as games become more reliant on GPUs, console ports and better coding. Why would we require 12-cores at 4GHz each? When will it end?

Well, Intel's Ivy Bridge is the next step for Intel, coming spring 2012. Chinese website Coolaler has gotten their mits on an engineering sample of Intel's 22nm-based Ivy Bridge platform. They've scored a quad-core chip, and have some screenshots of CPU-Z and Task Manager (without HyperThreading enabled).

AIDA64 Cache & Memory benchmarks have also been run. The chip is a 2GHz sample, with CPU-Z reporting it's running at 2.4GHz thanks to turbo boost (20-percent OC) on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard. What to expect? Roughly the same performance as current Sandy Bridge-based CPUs, but with ramped up northbridge and graphics core.

If you're just getting over this week's launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, you might want to hold your breath just a little bit longer. Less than a week since its launch, Sandy Bridge-E is now sounding old with its successor taking shape over at Intel, with a release date for Q4 2012.

That's not the good part, the good part is that according to a leaked internal slide scored at XFastest, Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with today's Intel X79 platform, and LGA2011 socket. This makes a SB-E upgrade that much better, as 12 months from now you can just buy an Ivy Bridge-E CPU, slot it in and away you go. You might need a BIOS flash to get there, but it makes a SB-E upgrade not so scary.

Ivy Bridge-E will be built on a 22nm silicon fabrication process, and shouldn't be much more than a shrink of SB-E. We could see the shrink allowing some headroom for enabling some of its components that have been locked away for SB-E. The fastest SB-E silicon physically holds 8 cores and 20MB of L3 cache, but the fastest SB-E-based Core processor has just six of those cores, and 15MB L3 cache enabled.

NVIDIA have just announced that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is developing a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, uses energy-efficient, low-power NVIDIA Tegra ARM VCPUs, together with high-performance NVIDIA CUDA GPUs. BSC is in the planning stages and hopes to roll out the new ARM-based supercomputer, with a near-term goal of demonstrating two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared with today's most efficient systems.

BSC's ultimate research goal is to establish exascale-level performance while using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures. This so-called EU Mont-Blanc Project will explore next-generation HPC architectures and develop a portfolio of exascale applications that run efficiently on these kinds of energy-efficient, embedded mobile technologies.

As ARM gains more support around the world with ARM-based initiatives, NVIDIA have also announced plans to develop a new hardware and software development kit. NVIDIA's new kit, with hardware developed by SECO, will sport a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM CPU accelerated by a discrete NVIDIA GPU.

While suited toward a different crowd for the most part, AMD has made efforts to steal a bit of the limelight strongly shining on Intel and its Sandy Bridge-E/X79 platform by kicking out a big announcement of their own at the same time.

Adter several weeks of being delayed, today finally sees the launch of AMD's first 16-core Opteron server processors, the Bulldozer based Opteron 6200 series (formally known as Interlagos). According to John Fruehe, the director of product parketing at AMD, these new processors are said to be 25 to 30% faster than their 12-cored Opteron 6100 predecessors.

The new Opteron 6200 family of processors includes 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE models, running at clock rates of between 1.6 and 2.6GHz with pricing starting at $523 US and going up to $1,019 US. Power draw from the new processors starts at 85 watts and goes as high as 140 watts. The chips are compatible with existing server sockets to make upgrades from older 12-core chips a breeze.

Below, we have a picture of the AMD accelerated processing units in both FM1 and future FM2 packages, which the latter will be based on the next-generation Trinity APU. In the picture below, "Llano" FM1 APU is on the left, "Trinity" FM2 is on the right.

Both packages are pretty much identical, with the difference between them a set of blanked pins in the sub-central portion of the pin array. The FM2 package sports 904 pins whilst the FM1 package has 1 more at 905 pins. One pin is blanked, whilst a pair of blanked pins are arranged further away from the central cutout.

What does this mean? It means that FM1 and FM2 are completely incompatible, and won't allow you to run today's A-Series APUs in the FM1 package on future socket AM2 boards, nor will you be able to run future FM2-based CPUs on today's FM1 motherboards.

Intel's new Sandy Bridge-E flagship processor, the Core i7 3960X has been thrown through a handful of benchmarks by Chinese website Inpai.com. The benchmarks put the i7 3960X head-to-head against the Sandy Bridge-based i7 2600K.

Intel's Core i7 3960X will be the bees knees of the Sandy Bridge-E series, featuring 6-cores and 12 threads clocked at stock clocks of 3.6GHz and 3.9GHz when using Turbo Boost. The chip uses a maximum TDP of 130W, features 15MB L3 cache and launches on November 14.

Inpai.com tested the i7 3960X and i7 2600K against each other in various benchmarks, such as X264 Benchmark, which saw the i7 3960X score 47.4 versus the 2600K's 37.21, a decent improvement. Cinebench sees a bigger improvement, with the i7 3960X scoring 10.4 and the 2600K trailing far behind with 6.92.

ARM have just announced its next-generation mobile GPU, the Mali-T658. ARM have said that this design is set to offer ten times the performance of their current Mali-400 MP which is found in smartphones such as the amazing Samsung Galaxy S II handset.

T658 is ARM's second GPU using an architecture it calls Midgard. Midgard is designed to support both 3D workloads using modern APIs, with support for both OpenGL ES and Microsoft's Direct3D 11, and computation workloads using OpenCL, Microsoft DirectCompute, and Google RenderScript. Compute tasks get some love, with Midgard supporting full IEEE 754 floating point.

The first Midgard design, the T604, was announced last year, and was licensed by companies such as Samsung and LG. The new T658 is quite the powerhouse, with each core having four arithmetic pipelines, and one each of load/store for texture, doubling the number of arithmetic pipelines found in the T604. Up to eight cores can be integrated into a single GPU, again representing a doubling in performance relative to T604, which allows up to four cores to be ganged together.

Ivy Bridge isn't even here yet, and we're seeing details on Intel's next-generation processor architecture, Haswell. Haswell will be a brand new architecture based on a 22nm fan process which will be matured by Sandy Bridge's successor, Ivy Bridge. This is Intel's "tick-tock" product development model, where we see a "tock" being a new x86 architecture, and a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process.

If Intel's 22nm process all goes to plan, Haswell has an ETA of Q2 2013, with Ivy Bridge taking the lead from Q2 2012 until then. Haswell will feature an all-new socket, LGA1150, which means it will not be compatible with LGA1155 boards. The reason behind this is that Intel have implemented drastic changes in the pin map of the package.

There has been a major change with the component arrangement in the platform that is affecting Haswell's pin map, more specifically, it's Haswell's higher bandwidth chipset bus, rearranged PCIe pins (with FDI pins), rearranged power pins, and miscellaneous pins. It also throws away the separate power domain for the integrated graphics controller.

AMD's Bulldozer just wasn't enough to not only topple Intel, but to impress customers enough to grab it while it was hot. AMD knows they need to turn it around, we know they need to turn it around and you know they need to turn it around. AMD has always focused on performance-per-watt, and while Fusion has pulled this off, Bulldozer when overclocked is pushing past an astonishing 400W.

The Bulldozer team needs to put their hard hats on and get dirty, with 2012 rolling into view, it needs to happen very soon. Piledriver is an update to current Bulldozer cores and the expected advantages are increased core capacity by up to 25-percent, making more cores available more of the time. Reduced power requirement, making Piledriver more efficient, real world performance boost by somewhere around 10-percent, making each core do more.

Will this be enough for AMD to at least catch up and possibly take a few swings at Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge? Can they bring it before Ivy Bridge, or at the same time? Can AMD release it at a competitive price point, seductive enough to draw customers into their web of CPU goodness? Bulldozer was roughly the same price as an Intel 2600K motherboard/CPU combo, so they really failed in that way.

We recently saw quite the breath taking overclocking record out of an AMD FX-8150 CPU from world renowned overclocker Andre Yang, cranking it up to a whopping 8.46GHz, above that of AMD's own previous record (at 8.43GHz).

With only 30 odd MHz separating it, Andre Yang has given it another crank and has produced a new record result, taking the processor to an incredible 8584.8MHz exactly; 123.3GHz higher than his previous achievement. We're still waiting to see the new overclock result appear on CPU-Z's validation database, but its authenticity looks good enough for us.

A bit about how the massive overclock was achieved, Andre used the same Crosshair V Formula for the job, though the core voltage was bumped slightly for this new record to 2.076V (up from 1.992V on his previous). Of course, extreme cooling measures were used for the task at hand; liquid nitrogen. But considering you can go one better by opting for liquid helium which liquefies at -269 Celsius (vs the -253 of nitrogen) in astosphere pressure, there's possibly higher clock rates to be seen from Bulldozer yet; not to mention the upcoming B3 stepping which may well improve overclockability even further.

ARM Ltd is getting serious against Intel and AMD, and are now going to compete with the chip giants in the high-end and server computing market, where competition is tight. ARM has announced their new ARMv8 architecture, the first one to include a 64-bit instruction set. ARM CTO, Mike Mullar says:

ARMv8 will have both 32- and 64-bit modes, like todays x86/x64 CPUs, and this should help transition ARM into the 64-bit world for existing applications. ARM have dubbed the 32-bit mode "AArch32" and the 64-bit mode "AArch64".

The folks over at OCWorkbench were lucky enough to have witnessed a Sandy Bridge-E processor being overclocked earlier today and kindly shared some details that help give us an idea of how well these chips will clock up.

The specific LGA2011 Core i7 model used was not mentioned, so it's possible it was only a quad core offering. Alas, using a "regular" air cooler it still managed to cruise along just shy of 5GHz (4.92GHz to be exact) with its idle temp holding at 45c.

This was made easily possible via the BClk that can be increased on Sandy E without any dramas. This particular result was achieved by setting the BClk to 120MHz, using a multi of 41X and a core voltage of 1.51v. As for the memory, this was DDR3-2400MHz RAM with a CAS latency of 10T.

A bunch more details have surfaced today on AMD's upcoming "Virgo" PC platform which comprises their next-gen mobile "Trinity" APU using an FM2 package. The latest details confirm that Trinity will in fact be compatible with AMD's current-gen A75 "Hudson-D" chipset, but we are yet to learn whether or not FM1 and FM2 are pin compatible.

AMD's Trinity mobile APUs are 32nm based and run a TDP of up to 35W. The four x86-64 cores used are based on AMD's next-gen "Piledriver" architecture (rumoured to be between 10 and 15% quicker on average when compared to Bulldozer) and these four cores are arranged in two modules. Each of the two modules holds two cores and is given certain shared and dedicated resources.

The new APUs sport an integrated DDR3-2133MHz memory controller, up to 4MB (2MB per module) of L2 cache and Radeon HD 7000 series IGP (said to be about 30% quicker than Llano's iGPU). AMD is talking a 20% performance improvement over current-gen Llano APUs which comprise K10 "Stars" cores. A new 3rd generation form of TurboCore technology will also be included that gives superior power management and overclocking features.

As we learned about a month ago, Intel has been planning the release of a new processor model to rest atop the i7-2x00 line; that being the 2700K. And we we had also established at that time, the processor's release date is today.

The Core i7-2700K looks not to seperate itself much at all from the 2600K on paper with its quad-core, LGA1155 package on 32nm Sandy Bridge silicon, 256KB L2 cache per core and 8MB L3 shared cache. It clocks in at 3.5GHz, but does of course sport an unlocked base clock ratio multiplier, as denoted by the 'K'.

While we won't know for sure this early into its release, it's been rumoured that these 2700K chips are essentially cherry picked Sandy Bridge processors that could well give even higher overclocking ceilings on average when compared to the 2600K. But while it would be nice to say you'll get a guarenteed 5.0GHz on air when picking up one of these puppies, we'll have to wait a little bit first and see what the general consensus is from peoples overclocking experiences.