CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 172

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,"

It's an end of an era: Intel has confirmed through their latest K-10 filing that its infamous 'tick-tock' process development cycle is dead.

Instead of having two processor families on each die shrink, Intel will be using three or more over the coming years. The K-10 filing states that Intel will "expect to lengthen the amount of time we will utilize our 14 [nanometer] and our next-generation 10 [nanometer] process technologies".

Intel will continue to release new products each year, but there will be a tighter control over architecture optimization, as the development of process technology slows. So... what does this mean? It confirms that Intel's next-gen 'Kaby Lake' platform will be made on 14nm. It also confirms that the release window for 10nm from Intel will be 2017 at the earliest, and 7nm - well, that's 2019-2020 or beyond now.

One of the fastest APUs from the Bristol Ridge family will be just as fast as the Xbox One, according to a new rumor from Bitsnchips.

AMD's new Bristol Ridge family will feature a powerful APU that will be quite powerful, easily taking on the consoles in providing a 1080p gaming experience, in a small package and price. AMD is expected to launch its new Bristol Ridge family at Computex, so we should expect more details in June.

As for the rumor, the flagship Bristol Ridge-based APU would feature 16 compute units that are based on the GCN 1.3 architecture. The 16 compute units would include 1024 stream processors, which is the same SP count as AMD's Radeon HD 7850. The HD 7850 launched in 2012, and was a great budget/mid-range GPU - if we see this performance in an APU, things could get very exciting for AMD.

Marvell just expanded their line of ARMADA SoC ecosystem, that are frequently used in NAS and other networking devices, to include native support for open-source software platforms like OpenWRT and openSUSE.

Before now Marvell didn't officially support any other software than that which was initially installed on their platforms. Adding support in the kernel of the various open-source OS's required a lot of time from volunteers to make it work properly. Because of that, support was always a bit precarious, and it could take quite awhile for new devices to be added to the compatibility lists.

Now, however, their 64-bit ARMv8 powered ARMADA 3700 Cortex-A53 device family and ARMADA 7K and ARMADA 8K Cortex-A72 device families are getting full-fledged support for the Linux kernel as well as U-Boot support. That means that it'll be compatible with a much wider range of OS's, anything that has ARM support baked in can run on their chips, essentially.

AMD is doubling down on their embedded G-Series SoC's, tiny APU's designed with industrial applications in mind. The newest members of the family are the 3rd generation of their embedded platform, putting Excavator based cores in the high-end and Jaguar-based cores in the low-end, and they're completely pin compatible with earlier iterations of the G series (and R for the high-end chips being announced), allowing easier upgrading for customers on older hardware.

The new G-Series LX fills in the low-end with two Jaguar cores with GCN and AMD's ARM-based security co-processor. It operates at a very low 6-15W and can withstand far harsher conditions than the typical desktop processor. Available in March, this new SoC is designed for the point-of-sale market and even arcade gaming market. With their ARM co-processor it might even make a good companion to industrial automation in the connected age.

The high-end G-Series marries two Excavator cores with four GCN compute units that allow for a much better compute load if OpenCL is used. AMD is targeting similar industries that need higher compute load at a low 6-15W TDP. They expect that it'll be a good fit for the digital signage and even set-top boxes, despite that arena being dominated by ARM. This too has an integrated ARM-based security co-processor.This new processor is actually pin compatible with the higher-end R series of SoC's letting customers choose between what sort of power-envelope they want.