CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 144

The Russian Industry and Trade Ministry has announced plans to replace the US-made processors from companies like Intel and AMD, with its own x86-based processors. These new processors will run on a new Linux-based system, with a CPU built-in Russia called Baikal.

Baikal is being made by an electronics division of T-Platforms, a supercomputer maker, and looks to have some serious funding being pumped into it. Rosnano, a technology firm, and Rostec, a rather large defense contractor, are both chipping into the project. The first processors off the production line will feature an ARM Cortex A-57 at 2GHz, and will run both PCs and servers.

Each and every year, the Russian government reportedly purchases 700,000 PCs which costs around $500 million. On top of this, the government spends a further $300 million acquiring 300,000 servers per year. The new Baikal processors should begin replacing the Intel- and AMD-powered machines starting in early 2015.

Intel is about to launch its 16-threaded (but 8-core) processor in September, and while that is for consumers, what is being played with behind closed doors in experiments is incredibly exciting - with a new 36-core processor teased by researchers at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

Li-Shiuan Peh, the Singapore Research Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, has said that the future of massively multi-core processors will be more like little Internets, where every core packs a router, with data travelling between cores in packets of fixed size. Peh's group unveiled a titanic 36-core processor that features this "network-on-chip" at the event.

Today's processors are connected by a single wire, and feature between 2 and 6 cores, with the multiple cores needing to talk to each other through exclusive access to the bus. But, this way won't work as the core count increases, as the other cores will be waiting for the bus to free up, rather than performing the duties you've set it out to do. With the network-on-chip, each and every CPU core is connected only to those that are directly next to it. Bhavya Daya, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science explains: "You can reach your neighbors really quickly. You can also have multiple paths to your destination. So if you're going way across, rather than having one congested path, you could have multiple ones".

After watching season three of Game of Thrones, Intel's Knights Landing just reads and sounds like Kings Landing... but, onto the news. Intel has just announced its next-gen Xeon Phi chips, codenamed Knights Landing, at the International Supercomputing Conference being held in Leipzig, Germany.

The new processors will be capable of delivering close to three times the peak performance power of its predecessor, Knights Corner. The new Xeon Phi CPUs will use a new high-speed fabric technology - Intel's own Omni Scale fabric - that should help with performance, scalability, reliability, power and density requirements to speed up the rate of scientific discovery.

Intel's new Knights Landing processors will use 16GB of stacked memory, something that will be based on Micron's incredibly fast Hybrid Memory Cube technology. This technology is capable of 15x the bandwidth provided by DDR3, and 5x the bandwidth of DDR4, all while being 5x more power efficient, and only requiring 1/3 of the space.

Intel will reportedly launch its next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) processors in mid-September, with the new Haswell-E chips arriving with the new X99 desktop platform too. We should see Intel officially launch its Core i7-5960X, the Core i7-5930K and the Core i7-5820K on the 14th of September.

On the same day, we should expect the chipmaker to launch its new X99 chipset, designed to power the new CPUs. One of the exciting new things about Haswell-E and X99 is that it supports DDR4 RAM, and that the top of the line Core i7-5960X is a 16-theaded CPU (8 cores, 8 HT threads = 16 threads total). The Core i7-5960X will arrive with a base clock of 3GHz, 20MB of L3 cache, support quad-channel DDR4 RAM up to 2133MHz, and will be an unlocked part for overclockers to have some fun with.

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.