CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 136

AMD will reportedly keep its next-gen Zen CPUs at the higher-end of the scale when they launch later this year, with 6- and 8-core variants being the status quo.

The dual- and quad-core variants of Zen won't launch at first, but AMD is expected to launch Bristol Ridge-based dual- and quad-core processors right away. AMD will reportedly be using 8-core dies in the fabrication process of Zen-based processors because it's the best way to get the most out of the production of its Summit Ridge processors.

This means AMD can not only provide a very powerful processor, but it'll cost the company less to only make a higher-end version at first, rather than multiple SKUs. This all falls onto the shoulders of the yields, which if they're not good - we might see dual- and quad-core versions of Zen quicker than normal. If the yields are good, AMD could finally find itself in a better position to fight Intel's unstoppable CPU dominance.

AMD's Wraith Cooler has been an unbridled success for them, and a way to show that the stock cooling system that comes with a boxed CPU doesn't have to be an afterthought. The Wraith cooler, however, was only available for certain processors despite it being a very good cooler. They've listened to the feedback from reviewers and gamers alike and have thoroughly expanded their in-house stock coolers to encompass more of their processor line.

The Wraith cooler itself is now included with the FX 8350 and the FX 6350 processors. Those aren't exactly the hottest processors at stock, though they do overclock well if they have the right solution connected to them. The Wraith cooler, though not the ultimate device, can still allow for raising the multiplier and the voltage by a bit for a modest overclock without melting your system or the CPU. Actually, it's pretty silent and does a great job of controlling thermals at stock and slightly beyond.

They've also developed other cooling solutions to include with their lower-end CPU and APU's as well. Those solutions aren't quite as spiffy as the Wraith, though they're far more efficient than what was included before. More fins and a better-designed fan mean lower temperatures at far more acceptable sound levels.

Intel's next-gen CPUs are right around the corner, with NCIX listing the new Core i7-6950X with a pre-order price of a wallet-busting $2349.99. The Core i7-6900K has a pre-order price of $1495, while the Core i7-6850K is $889, and the Core i7-6800K at $629.

These prices are not official and are inflated for pre-orders, with the normal pricing set to be somewhere around $1609, $1024, $602, and $422 for the Core i7-6950X, Core i7-6900K, Core i7-6850K and Core i7-6800K respectively. Why should we be excited about these new CPUs from Intel? Well, the new Broadwell-E processors will feature four variants, with the flagship being the 10-core/20-thread Core i7-6950X. The one below it will be the 8-core CPU found in the Core i7-6900K, while the other two CPUs will be 6-core variants.

Intel is expected to launch its new Broadwell-E family of processors in the coming months, with a big show at Computex 2016 in June.

Intel's Broadwell-E processors have already been listed on NCIX, available for pre-order, just ahead of the official release. The prices that are shown, however, are actually somewhat higher than what we think the actual MSRP to be once they hit the streets. If you're an early adopter, then you can now be among some of the first to receive your CPU's if you pre-order now.

The server-oriented Broadwell-EP parts have been released in full already and have shown incremental, though significant, increases in performance over their Haswell-EP counterparts. The real gain is power-efficiency, however, where the smaller node and accumulative changes have led to far better performance/watt numbers.

The new processors will be compatible with the 2011 v3 socket physically and also be compatible with Intel's X99 motherboard chipset, though the latter will require a BIOS update to be able to support the new microcode. That makes it an easy upgrade, though, for those looking for either power savings or wanting to continue to have the absolute fastest processor available. All four new processors were spotted, and their prices are after the break. The top-end 10 core i7-6950X is listed at $2349.98.

Intel has officially unveiled its new Apollo Lake platform, which is the next-generation family of Atom-based notebook SoCs. Apollo Lake uses a new x86 microarchitecture, as well as a new generation graphics core that will provide more performance.

The new Apollo Lake family is set to take on the affordable all-in-ones, mini PCs, hybrid devices, notebooks and even tablet PCs when it launches in the second half of this year. Apollo Lake is built on the new Atom-based x86 microarchitecture known as Goldmont, with a new graphics core that includes Intel's impressive 9th-generation architecture that is found in the current Skylake processors.

The new Apollo Lake family includes support for dual-channel DDR4, DD3L, and LPDDR3/4 memory which allows PC makers to make devices with all sorts of form factors, thanks to the impressive memory support. We also have support for the usual SATA drives, PCIe x4 drives and eMMC 5.0 - USB Type-C support is also included, as well as various wireless technologies.

Today isn't just about NVIDIA and their GTC event, AMD too has something new going on today as well. The 7th generation of the APU, based on the Excavator core and codenamed Bristol Ridge, are shipping far ahead of schedule. They're already shipping the new 28nm APU's in an updated HP Envy x360 2-in-1 laptop.

We were able to take a look at some Geekbench scores that inadvertently showed up yesterday in their online database and those seem to be just in time to announce the launch of their new processors that'll take the place of Kaveri based systems, and be along side of Carrizo based systems that also have the same Excavator cores.

Full specifications haven't quite been given yet, but we do know that the various 28nm processors will come in two and four core configurations with either Radeon R5 or R7 class GPU's with 8-10 compute units attached and support for DDR4. They're saying that compared to Kaveri, we should see a 50% increase in general performance. Gaming performance itself should definitely experience a nice boost. These processors are a stopgap until we see the Zen-based Summit Ridge APU's and CPU's later on. We're expecting more detailed information to come during Computex 2016, with the full break-down of clock speeds and all the other innovations that come along with it.

AMD's next generation Zen is still quite a ways off from being a reality in desktops or mobile products, but it look like their more mainstream series of mobile products based off of their 28nm Excavator core, codenamed Bristol Ridge, has been spotted in Geekbenches database. The results seem to point towards a slight improvement in performance, given the reported CPU frequencies.

The sample is the AMD FX 9800P installed in a Lenovo device of some kind. This particular chip has been rumored to have 4 28nm Excavator based cores that run at a nominal 2.7GHz with 8 GCN 1.2 compute units attached. Here, though, it's recorded as running at 1.85GHz and has a multi-cor score of 5596, which is on-par with an Intel i5-6200U running at 2.4GHz. That's not too shabby if the reported clock frequencies are correct.

You can also find scores for the A10-9600P and the A12-9700P in what could possibly be upcoming Lenovo laptops or test systems on the Geekbench website. Bristol Ridge will be the mainstream Excavator based APU's available both on the new AM4 socket as well as on mobile through the FP4 interface. There's no real difference between this and Carrizo aside from naming scheme and the switch to allow DDR4 instead of strictly DDR3. Otherwise, the corresponding A[x]-8xxx Carrizo SoC is virtually the same. The power-savings from moving to 28nm should prove advantageous, however. This will be a sort of stop-gap between Zen, which is still due sometime this summer, or so we hope.

Intel has teased its next-gen Core i7-6950X processor on its own website, with the entry for the "Intel Core i7-6950X Processor Extreme Edition" listed on the latest Management Engine software on its Support website.

If Intel hasn't stuffed something up, the Core i7-6950X should feature 10 CPU cores (20 threads thanks to HT), with 25MB of L3 cache and up to 3.5GHz for the clock speed. The other CPUs teased are the Core i7-6800 and the Core i7-6900 which are six- and eight-core CPUs, respectively.

These new CPUs are based on Intel's 14nm Broadwell-E silicon, but the new LGA 2011 v3 processors are set to be compatible with Intel's current X99 Express chipset motherboards, with future BIOS upgrades. We should hopefully hear more about Intel's next-gen CPUs soon, before they start shipping in the coming months.

Intel has just unleashed its new Broadwell-EP family of processors, starting with the huge Xeon E5-2600 V4 which features a huge 22 CPU cores. Thanks to Hyper-Threading technology, we have a total of 44 threads of CPU power, which is simply insane for the prosumer market - especially those who work in video editing.

The new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 hasn't been completely detailed by the company, but the enthusiast part will be the Xeon E5-2699 V4 which packs a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, 55MB of cache, and a pretty tame 145W TDP. What will this 44-threaded processor set you back? A hefty $4115, which works out to $187 per CPU core. If we consider the 8-core/16-threaded Core i7-5960X costs $1059 (which works out to $132 per CPU core) then the new Xeon E5-2699 V4 isn't too badly priced at all.

The new Broadwell-EP powered Xeon processors can take DDR4-2400, with up to 12 DIMMS per CPU socket. If you're using registered DIMMs, you can cram in up to 385GB of RAM per CPU, using 32GB DIMMs of DDR4. To put it simply: I want one, well - probably two.

IBM's Watson and other AI systems like it are very impressive showcases of the kind of learning that a well developed deep neural network is capable of. Even Tay, the rogue Microsoft millennial AI that favors the PS4 over the Xbox One and seems to dismiss the Holocaust, is a feat of software engineering and learning that's pretty fantastic. But compared to the human mind, it still takes these machines, which rely on GPU's CPU's and at times even specialized ASICS to process such enormous amounts of data in parallel, far longer to learn even simple tasks. And it can be energy intensive, far more so than the human brain. But IBM thinks, and knows, that there's a better way.

IBM and the crew at the T.J. Watson Research Center want to use a specialized processor called the resistive processing unit, which is a marriage of CPU with non-volatile memory, that could exponentially speed up machine learning. It does this, essentially, by allowing the different parts to communicate at rate that's at least 27x faster than a traditional DNN setup. Learning involves moving forward and backward, analyzing data that's stored in memory, making that a bottleneck in this application. It could then massively increase the ability of these networks to learn, making speech recognition and similar AI functions in what could almost be near-realtime.

This type of processor is only theoretical at the moment though solving this obstacle in even an incremental fashion could bring about a sizable speed increase. The researchers even mention the ability to see an advantage of up to 30,000 times should they design and implement a device made specifically for their own DNN software. "We propose and analyze a concept of Resistive Processing Unit (RPU) devices that can simultaneously store and process weights and are potentially scalable to billions of nodes with foundry CMOS technologies. Our estimates indicate that acceleration factors close to 30,000 are achievable on a single chip with realistic power and area constraints,"