CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 138

Apple has changed up its PC business considerably, with an announcement that they will be making their own chips in future Mac systems starting as early as 2020.

The new initiative is called Kalamata, and is still in "early developmental stages" reports Bloomberg. The site continues, where they said that Apple's new initiative "comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices -- including Macs, iPhones, and iPads -- work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition".

Intel gets hurt in the process because all of the hardware success of Apple Mac systems over the years have been through Intel CPUs, associated technologies, and innovation. Big enough that Apple's success with the Mac and Intel processors sees Apple responsible for 5% of Intel's revenue every year.

Now that we're just weeks away from the launch of AMD's new CPU architecture 'Pinnacle Ridge', we're seeing more leaks of performance and specifications on the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600.

Once again, a review was posted on SiSoftware's website but VideoCardz reports that it was "quickly removed", but they copy/pasted all of the important information. The review itself was between the Ryzen 7 2700X and current-gen Ryzen 7 1700X, with the largest change being AMD now supporting DDR4-2933MHz RAM, and the use of the 12nm node - down from the 14nm node.

The full skinny on Ryzen 7 2700X vs Ryzen 7 1700X is right here, but the SiSoftware reviewer said that Ryzen 2000 has improvements to bandwidth and latency, and this will only improve with future BIOS revisions. DDR4-2933MHz RAM support out of the box is also awesome, too.

AMD celebrated the "One Year Ryzen Anniversary" call yesterday, which saw the company reiterating its success since the release of Ryzen a year ago, and what is coming in 2018 and beyond.

Jim Anderson, SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics at AMD said that the company has near-term goals of reaching the market share levels of the glory days of AMD, the days of Athlon 64, in the early-2000s. Anderson said: "I don't see any reason we can't get back to historical share levels that AMD has enjoyed in the past".

AMD is wanting to see that success again by offering users more CPU cores for less money with Ryzen, all the while adding technology and improvements to their CPU architecture, like the introduction of the Vega GPU architecture on the recent release of Raven Ridge APUs.

It seems AMD is in some deep trouble, with an Israeli security firm publishing details on 13 critical security flaws, with CTS-Labs reporting that it affects Ryzen Workstation, Ryzen Pro, Ryzen Mobile, and EPYC processors.

These newly found vulnerabilities have some interesting codenames: Masterkey, Ryzenfall, Fallout, and Chimera. CNET reports that the security researchers gave AMD just 24 hours to look into what they found before they published their report, which is definitely an eye-opener. This seems very suspicious in its timing (new Ryzen CPUs are around the corner, and the fact that this report was thrown together, and even involves some fake CG backgrounds).

Researchers normally give the chipmakers months ahead of time to fix the vulnerability before announcing it publicly, and while AMD is most likely aware of Masterkey, Ryzenfall, Fallout, and Chimera, it'll be months and months from now that they'll have a patch ready.

We're getting lots of rumors and leaked decks on AMD's future processors in the last few days, but now we have some more concrete details (I guess???) on AMD's next-gen Threadripper CPUs.

Interestingly, AMD refers to Threadripper as "the monster truck of computing". Onto the slide, where in 2018 we're to expect the second-gen Threadripper CPU which will be made on the new 12nm node and feature Zen+ CPU cores, higher CPU clocks, and Precision Boost 2.0 technology.

Fast forward to 2019 where AMD will unleash the Castle Peak CPU architecture, which AMD says will see them with "dominant leadership in the HEDT market", much more performance and efficiency, and "new platform features" that will "take TR4 to the next level".

As soon as I hit my desk this morning I read "unconfirmed takeover rumors" that AMD was to be acquired, with rumors hitting Wall Street, according to Bloomberg.

AMD shares are up 5% from the takeover news, which is the largest single-day climb of AMD stock since January 3. There's nothing more to this rumor, but AMD is losing against NVIDIA in the gaming market - and at least keeping up in the cryptocurrency mining market. On the CPU side of things AMD has been banging some heads together, something that has sent Intel into a flurry.

I reached out to some of my usual contacts and asked if they had heard anything, with both of them not hearing much, or anything at all. I'm just reporting the news as usual, and right now I think an AMD acquisition makes sense for a few companies... but we'll have to wait and see.

Today is AMD day, with news of the Ryzen 7 2700X offering 8C/16T of CPU power at up to 4.35GHz for $369, as well as ASRock rumored to be entering the graphics card market as an AIB partner making AMD Radeon cards.

Now we have a leaked roadmap of AMD processors through to 2020, which covers this year and the releases of the next-gen Threadripper, upcoming Pinnacle Ridge, and the just-released Raven Ridge APUs.

Next year we can expect AMD's new Castle Peak CPU architecture, a new Ryzen range of processors built on the Matisse codename and exciting new Zen 2, while Picasso succeeds Raven Ridge on the APU side of things. But I think it is 2020 where the real excitement begins with a third-generation Threadripper, and new Vermeer CPU architecture that will succeed Matisse, and Renoir that will succeed Picasso.

Google has just unveiled its new Bristlecone chip, a new quantum processor that takes things to the next level. Google has made Bristlecone for researchers with a testbed for "for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning".

Quantum computers normally run at super-cold temperatures in the millikelvins, and are protected from the environment because quantum bits are very unstable, with errors occurring if there's any noise. The qubits in new quantum processors aren't individual qubits, but they are a collective of bits that work together to stop possible errors. Right now, quantum processors are limited to preserving their state for less than 100ms.

Google is taking a different approach to building their future in quantum processors with Bristlecone, with the new chip featuring 72 qubits - and considering the industry says that it will take 49 qubits to be the leader, Google is doing it differently. The company has said that it's not just about brute qubit numbers, but as "Operating a device such as Bristlecone at low system error requires harmony between a full stack of technology ranging from software and control electronics to the processor itself. Getting this right requires careful systems engineering over several iterations".

AMD might have had a good year in 2017 with its new Zen-based line up of CPUs through Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC, but this wasn't enough to impress OEMs from building machines round Ryzen.

Now we have Dell EMC's CTO, John Roese, saying that "Intel is the big player, AMD is the second player. There's enough diversity between them that there are use cases to have them both in our portfolio, but just the sheer breadth of the Intel processor portfolio is massive compared to even the accelerated AMD world". He's not wrong, but it's still surprising to see.

It's not all doom and gloom about AMD from Dell, as he added: "AMD is doing some interesting things, and by adding them to the portfolio we pick up a few extra areas, but let's be very clear: there is a huge, dominant player in compute semiconductors, and then there is a challenger which is doing some very good innovative work called AMD, but the gap between them is quite large in terms of market share and use-cases. So our portfolio is not going to change in any meaningful way".

AMD will be launching their refreshed Ryzen 7 2000-series later this year, with a new tease leaking out about the Ryzen 7 2700X that it will be packing the same 8C/16T as the current-gen Ryzen 7 1700X, but have turbo clocks of up to 4.2GHz.

AMD's current Ryzen 7 1700X is an 8C/16T processor with a base CPU clock of 3.4GHz and boost CPU clock of 3.8GHz, but the new Ryzen 7 2700X will have base clocks of 3.7GHz, while the boost clocks will not only hit 4GHz but fly a little higher to 4.1GHz.

There are other entries of the Ryzen 7 2700X at 4.2GHz, so we should expect a larger punch in the frequency department. My insider sources have told me there "won't be much performance" increases with the new Ryzen 7 2000-series processors, so we'll have to wait and see how big the difference is between 3.8GHz boost on the 1700X and the purported 4.2GHz on the 2700X.