CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 174

Intel had planned to jump into the 10nm processor game as early as next year, but it looks like its 10nm-based Cannonlake processor has been pushed back, indefinitely.

The chip giant planned on releasing its 10nm processor in 2016, delaying it into 2017 shortly after. But now the company has experienced serious issues with its 10nm process, deciding to intro the Kaby Lake platform instead. There's not much known on the Kaby Lake platform, other than it being a 14nm process, and the usual dual- and quad-core processors that Intel will surely offer. We should expect the same LGA1151 socket to be used, with power to sit somewhere between 4.5W and 91W.

We should take a lesson from this: while AMD isn't sitting in the best position when it comes to combating Intel in the CPU game, Intel is now at a stalemate when it comes to ushering in a next-generation processor. With 10nm off the table for the next few years, we're looking at nearly rehashed CPUs from Intel until a new technology can be released to market from the company.

Things have heated up in the AMD space hours before the launch of the Radeon R9 Fury X, with rumors circling that Qualcomm is interested in acquiring AMD, according to a report by Seeking Alpha.

Without a large amount of success in recent times there has been many claims by public and media alike of AMD beginning a struggle, without any reports pointing out a direction or solution that AMD might undergo in order to fix its 'issues'. However, in a report by investor company Seeking Alpha, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf mentioned that he is interested in taking over a larger portion of the server scene and adjacent markets - this saw AMD pointed out as the most realistic financial possibility.

There's a few assumptions made here that Qualcomm will either buy out the AMD server business solely or the complete company itself - however, it's one of the best theories put forward yet. AMD recently denied spin-off talk, which helps solidify the idea that it may sell up completely to Qualcomm, rather than pushing away parts of its business.

Despite previous reports that claim AMD plans to spin-off into two separate businesses, the company has been quick to deny those reports.

The Reuters report indicates AMD wants to focus on graphics and licensing away from its server business, with speculation that the ATI brand could be reborn once again.

"AMD provided official confirmation that we have not hired an outside agency to explore spinning-off/splitting the company," said Sarah Youngbauer, spokesperson at AMD, in a statement to eTeknix. "We remain committed to the long-term strategy we laid out for the company in May at our Financial Analyst Day, which encompasses all parts of the business."

Computex 2015 - Rockchip has just unveiled its new "world's lowest power Wi-Fi technology," boasting an 85% power decrease for Internet of Things (IoT) devices when compared to predecessors and claiming it to provide similar power figures to Bluetooth 4.0 LTE.

The patented RKi6000 chip out of this Chinese company was announced during a stint at Computex 2015, with Rockchip stating that its new device uses around 20 mAh of power during use across a more convenient platform than the often range-limited Bluetooth 4.0 option.

There is also the added feature of 'Adaptive Dynamic Power Control Technology' which claims to adjust the chip's power configuration depending on data transmission requirements at any given time. Allowing for a better overall power consumption model when in stand-by or low-use situations.

The race of smaller nodes is quite exciting, with Apple reporting tapping TSMC for its future 10nm processors. We could expect TSMC to handle all of Apple's future A10 processors, which should hit production towards the end of the year.

TSMC will reportedly test out at 10nm pilot line within its 12 factories located in Hsinchu, with the company already starting a semiconductor intellectual property program, where it will partner up with other clients as we get deeper into 2015. With Samsung announcing 10nm production for 2016, the South Korean giant might be falling behind its competitors.

Sources of UDN have stated that the factory locations of TSMC that are working on 10nm are incredibly important to the Taiwanese manufacturer if it wants to secure a super client like Apple. If TSMC can indeed get its 10nm node production up to scratch in time, Samsung might lose out in its future contracts to Apple for the A10 processor.

I really have to stop reading about Intel's upcoming Xeon platforms, as I'm just going to disappoint myself that I'll never own one. The chipmaker is teasing its next-gen Xeon Skylake platform: Purley. The new architecture is going to be quite the leap over the current generation, with support for 6-channel DDR4, up from the quad-channel DDR4 support we have today.

Skylake Purley will be one of the biggest updates to the Xeon platform in quite a long time, with Skylake EX Purley supporting not just 6-channel DDR4, but up to eight processors that support 28 cores per chip, too. We also have the AVX 512 instruction set that will include the 100G OmniPath interconnect.

The OmniPath interconnect is something you've probably never heard of before, which is something that will be called Storm Lake. The PCH itself will be codenamed Lewisburg, with it sporting updated Ethernet controllers. The TDP that Skylake EX Purley processors will have will be between 45W and 165W, with CPUs slotting into something called Socket P. Another major update to the platform will see the number of PCIe slots increased to 48, with x4, x8 and x16 divisions allowed, which is a big upgrade to the platform.

Intel has said that the development of its 10nm technology is coming along well, with the chipmaker to begin talking about its plans for the future using 10nm later in the year.

President of Intel, Renee James, said during a recent Q&A session with stockholders at Intel's annual meeting: "The 10nm development is progressing very well. You will start to see start-up cost in the second half of the year on 10nm. We will talk about the timing of [10nm] later this year - the early part of next year about when that will happen".

We don't know much about Intel and its 10nm manufacturing process, but the company is wanting to increase transistor density, while reducing per transistor cost. This is something that other companies have failed to do with their shift into 14nm and 16nm FinFET processes, but Intel will hopefully see much more success with its 10nm technology.

Samsung is currently sitting at 14nm technology inside of its Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge smartphones, but we won't stay there for long if ARM has any say in the matter.

ARM is reporting set for the Ares core to hit just 10nm, something that will "reach smartphone and tablet makers by the end of next year". Ares will be here first with 10nm, but ARM is already teasing its successor: Prometheus. Prometheus will consume just 600-750mW of power, but Linley Gwenapp from analyst firm The Linley Group, believes that Ares will still have a place in the world.

Gwenapp said: "Ares core could reach smartphone and tablet makers by the end of next year. ARM is already well advanced on a next-generation high-end CPU that will follow the A72. In fact, this project is so far along that the A72 team could 'steal' some portions of the next-generation design. For example, a new floating-point unit reduces latency by 33%. The prefetcher, also from the next-gen design, improves the data-cache hit rate to boost performance. The next-gen branch predictor reduces mispredictions by 20%".

We aren't even half way through the year but we're hearing about what Intel will be releasing in the second half of 2016, according to a new leaked roadmap from the chipmaker.

Intel is expected to launch the Skylake architecture during Computex 2015 next month, something that will include the flagship Core i7-6700K processor. But what about 2016? Well, we are looking at Intel moving into their first 10nm processors with the new Cannonlake architecture, which should be an extremely low-power CPU, something that is going to really take flight in Ultrabooks. The mobile parts will come out in 10nm first, with desktop CPUs made on the 10nm arriving sometime in 2017.

Moving onto the HEDT side of things, Intel will release its next-gen High-End Desktop processor in Q3 2016 in the form of Skylake-E. Before that, we should expect Broadwell-E in Q1 2016, which will work on the current LGA 2011-3 socket. The new Skylake-E architecture will launch sometime in the second half of 2016.

Intel has just launched its new line of Haswell-EX Xeon CPUs, which include up to 36 threads (with the 18-core model), with up to 45MB of L3 cache, depending on the model.

The flagship Xeon E7-8890 V4 processor has 18 cores (36 threads), 45MB of L3 cache (LLC) and clock speeds that float between 2.5GHz and 3.3GHz in AVX workloads, and between 2.1GHz and 3.3GHz normally. This Haswell-EX powered Xeon CPU has a massive 165W TDP, packing some 5.6 billion transistors. All of this results in a wallet-busting price of $7175 or so.

The new Haswell-EX powered Xeon platform can handle up to 24 DIMMs per socket of either DDR3 or DDR4, with a full 8S server rack capable of consuming up to 12TB of DDR4 RAM. These new systems can handle up to 32 sockets, with 8-socket systems capable of taking 12TB of RAM, too.