CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 145

As the first devices with Samsung's 10nm process start to hit the market, like the Galaxy S8, the company is already starting to spin up the next generation of their 10nm process in Korea.

Samsung has announced that they have already qualified their 10nm LPP manufacturing process which is expected to offer double digit improvements to performance or power.

Samsung started production for the current LPE process in October with devices hitting the market this week. That puts us at around a six month lead time between the beginning of production and an actual availability date. However, much of the equipment and processes should be the same as 10nm LPE, the current lead manufacturing process at Samsung which could mean a shorter time to market.

AMD never needed to knock Intel off its CPU leadership position to win, it just needed to disrupt the market enough so that it forced their main competitor out of a zombie-like dominant state. Intel has been winning for far too long, and within weeks of AMD's launch of the Ryzen CPU family - now available in Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5, Intel has reacted in multiple ways. The 52% IPC improvement in the Zen architecture must have taken Intel by surprise, with some amazing value for money in the Ryzen 7 1800X as it's a 8C/16T part on the cheap.

First, were the rumors of the next-gen X299 platform - and then the news of the weirdly-placed Core i7-7740K, a HEDT part on LGA2011, but with 4C/8T. Intel launching an 8-threaded CPU, a little faster than the much cheaper LGA1151-based Core i7-7700K, but on the more expensive LGA2011 platform, strange. Then the news of Intel cancelling its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) convention, after nearly 20 years in operation. IDF17 was cancelled in the process.

Now there is news that continues this strange Bizarro world that we're living in, with Team Blue now rumored to be bringing the launch of its Basin Falls platform by two months, with the new family bringing us the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors. The new Basin Falls platform will arrive with the new X299 chipset, while the 'accelerated launch' of the next-gen Coffee Lake architecture is reportedly primed for an August 2017 release, pulled up 5 months from January 2018.

I've been testing the new Ryzen 5 1600X extensively over the last week or so, and have come to really love what AMD has achieved with it - offering 6C/12T of CPU performance for $249.

But now the 6C/12T processor has been overclocked to 5.9GHz on LN2 by overclocker der8auer. He used the ASUS ROG Crosshair IV Hero X370 motherboard with a BIOS from February 8, alongside G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 RAM, a Samsung SSD, and Windows 7.

With most of these huge overclocks under LN2, it's with one core enabled - leaving the other 3 (and the four Hyper-Threading cores) disabled. AMD's new Ryzen 5 1600X has its full 6C/12T enabled, with all of them running at 5.9GHz der8auer broke all of the records for Cinebench, Geekbench, and GPUPi. AMD's Ryzen 5 1600X @ 5.9GHz beats out the Intel Core i7-5820K from the 6-threaded awards it used to have.

AMD has well and truly shaken up the consumer CPU market with its new Ryzen processors, and it seems it has had a profound effect on Chipzilla - which has reportedly rescheduled the launch of their next-gen X299 platform, bringing the launch up to June.

Intel was reportedly planning to launch X299 and their new Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors sometime in the first week of August, but now Intel will reportedly launch Skylake X in late-June. This means we should see it fully unveiled during Computex in late-May/early-June, with the new CPUs arriving on the LGA2066 socket (Socket R4) - without integrated graphics.

The difference between Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X is that Kaby Lake-X will offer 4 cores, while Skylake-X offers up to 10 cores.

AMD launched its new Ryzen offensive into the high-end/enthusiast markets with the Ryzen 7 family, led by the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X processor - but the fight for the mid-range is going to be huge when Ryzen 5 launches next week.

AMD is launching 4 new Ryzen 5 processors, ranging from the Ryzen 5 1400 for $169 (offering 4C/8T @ 3.4GHz) up to the Ryzen 5 1600X for $249 (6C/12T @ 4GHz).

But now there's news from HardOCP that they've clocked their Ryzen 5 1600 processor up to 4GHz, or 3.975GHz to be exact, at 1.45V and LLC 5. They added that "Once you get past 3.8GHz on these processors, the voltage usage and heat emitted just gets exponential with them. So they get very hot, very quickly".

AMD launched its next-gen Ryzen CPUs with a huge marketing train, but the gaming performance on Ryzen hasn't been so great so far - but, AMD have been quick on their 'Community Update' rollouts, with the third one now out.

AMD first launched Ryzen with tweaks to the High Performance power plan in Windows 10, and now with the third Community Update, AMD made tweaks to the Ryzen Balanced plan, which can be download here. AMD says that with the new Ryzen Balanced plan, there should be performance close to that of the High Performance setting - with AMD providing a graph that shows there's only a few percentage points between the Balanced and High Performance plans.

In the near future, AMD will make this new Balanced power plan part of the chipset drivers for Ryzen CPUs - while the power plan changes sometimes providing less performance in games - but AMD states "there are enough [affected] games to warrant a change".

AMD shook up the enthusiast level CPU market with the release of its Ryzen 7 1800X, a new 8C/16T processor that has some pretty good legs in multi-threaded applications - but what about the 4C/8T and 6C/12T parts? That's where the new mid-range Ryzen 5 family comes into play, with the first early review on AMD's upcoming Ryzen 5 1600 processor comes into play.

The new AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is quite the beast, with 6C/12T of performance - and priced at just $219... considering the Core i7-7700K (4C/8T, but it is a faster gaming CPU) costs $345. If we compare 6C/12T between AMD and Intel, then we look at the Core i7-5930K which still costs a huge $599 on Amazon. AMD is offering the Ryzen 5 1600 for nearly 1/3 the price, but offering 6C/12T performance for multi-threaded CPU performance, and now we have some leaked benchmarks to look over.

First up, some multi-threaded CPU-Z testing, where it beats the 4C/8T processor from Intel in the Core i7-7700K.

Intel's next-gen Kaby Lake-G processors might be something to get excited about for Chipzilla, with the latest rumors pointing towards Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake-G architecture featuring a massive integrated GPU, with HBM2 technology.

The leaked slides tease that Kaby Lake-G will feature a massive iGPU, all built on the 14nm process, and a dedicated PCIe link to a separate discrete GPU with HBM2 tech. The news was revealed during Intel's recent Technology and Manufacturing Day, with two SKUs teased on the BGA design: one for embedded systems, and the other for next-gen laptops.

Intel's next-gen Kaby Lake-G processors will reportedly come in 4C/8T with a 65W and 100W model, and since there's no on-package cache, the 65/100W TDPs are weird - but, it makes sense if they rock powerful integrated GPU + HBM2 tech. The separate GPU will be connected to the CPU through a dedicated PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, while the HBM2 memory will be the main on-board VRAM for the iGPU.

AMD have been working around the clock on their new Ryzen platform, and have been working with developer Oxide Games on better optimizing Ashes of the Singularity - and now AMD has something worth talking about.

AMD has been optimizing as many games as it could, working with Stardock and Oxide Games to improve Ryzen performance on Ashes of the Singularity - by a pretty decent amount. We have up to 30% more performance on the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X processor with the new update, and then there's more performance improvements promised for the upcoming v2.20.x major update.

DOTA 2 improvements are also found on Ryzen 7 1800X, with the pre-March 20 patch seeing performance sitting at 79FPS - while the new update boosts Ryzen 7 1800X performance up to 91FPS - a damn good update, for free.

When we delivered the world exclusive news that AMD would be calling its next-gen CPUs Ryzen, some very early details arrived on something called 'ThreadRipper', and at the time we thought ThreadRipper was AMD's version of SMT, which Intel calls Hyper-Threading.

But now we are seeing different reports that ThreadRipper is the name of AMD's upcoming HEDT platform, with the teased 12C/24T and 16C/32T processors coming over from the Naples CPU family (which teases 32C/64T). A post on Reddit teases that the new CPUs will include 64 PCIe lanes, and up to 180W TDP with the 16C/32T version.

AMD will reportedly deploy ThreadRipper onto a new LGA SP3 socket, with up to 32MB of L3 cache, and up to 4GHz boost on certain ThreadRipper processors. There's an announcement reportedly planned for Computex, which is only two months away, and a retail launch in the weeks after Computex, into the end of June.