Processors - Page 91

AMD really raised the bar with multi-core processors with the successful launches of Ryzen and Threadripper, and while Intel sales are barely affected by it, it shouldn't stop AMD from continuing to push out new generations of these CPUs with many more cores.

The latest rumor is from WCCFTech so please take it with a grain of salt, that AMD will making the AM4 socket detect CPUs with greater than 8 cores, ushering in support for possibly 12- and 16-core CPUs. WCCFTech adds "according to private conversations we've had with incredibly knowledgeable people in the industry the actual core count figure might be closer to 12 cores" and not the 16C/32T that we're hearing with the latest rumors.

Ryzen 7 3700/X or Ryzen 7 3800/X with 12C/24T at over 4GHz would be quite the chip, quite the chip indeed. Having that type of power at the top of the Ryzen 7 mainstream lineup opens the flood gates to Threadripper ramping up to 20C/40T, 24C/48T, and even 32C/64T which will meet EPYC. EPYC can be opened up further with next-gen nodes and Zen architectures, where we will see beyond 32C/64T which will be very impressive, time will tell though.

It looks like Intel is set for a huge Computex this year with the launch of their beefed up Z390 chipset, but the tease of a new 8C/16T variant of its Coffee Lake CPU, a new processor that would succeed the already kick ass Core i7-8700K.

The Core i7-8700K is a 6C/12T gaming beast in its own right, but Intel will want to crush the 8C/16T space that AMD is shifting on with the Ryzen 7 2700. There's been a new listing on SiSoft's benchmark database, with the unnamed chip running at 2.6GHz with 8 cores in tow.

We should expect Intel to announce the new 8C/16T processor that should arrive during Computex, but there's one thing I'm concerned over: could Intel lock the new 8C/16T chip to only work on the new Z390 chipset? Or will they open up support for the new CFL processor on their other chipsets, too?

Intel is very close to the launch of its new Z390 chipset that has been rumored since last year, and will succeed the current Z370 chipset while keeping most of its features and expanding on some.

Intel is building Wireless-AC 802.11 AC and Bluetooth 5.0 into their new Z390 chipset, while also adding in 6 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports. Motherboard manufacturers might offer this connectivity on their Z370-based motherboards, but they rely on third-party controllers which increase the BOM of a motherboard.

Intel has rolled these features into the Z390 chipset, which is a win-win for Intel and motherboard partners. Until now, the Z370 featured integrated USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Thunderbolt 3 (Alpine Ridge) connectivity, while Z390 adds the integrated Wireless-AC and BT 5.0 controllers, as well as an integrated SDXC 3.0 controller and updated Thunderbolt 3.0 (Titan Ridge) with DP 1.4 connectivity.

Intel has been having serious troubles with its 10nm process, but it looks like we might see one of their new 10nm Cannonlake CPUs in the very near future.

According to a listing on a Chinese retail outlet, Lenovo is preparing their new Ideapad 330 that will be the first notebook to market with an Intel 10nm Cannonlake CPU. Lenovo's upcoming Ideapad 330 packs the Cannonlake-powered Core i3-8121U processor, AMD Radeon RX 540 2GB discrete graphics card, and up to 8GB of DDR4.

There will be up to 1TB 5400RPM mechanical HDD and 256GB SSD that will be included in the highest-end Ideapad 330, which will arrive for around $450. Lenovo's new Ideapad 330 features a 15.6-inch TN panel with a native resolution of 1366 x 768, so it won't be busting any records, that's for sure.

Intel is expected to launch its refreshed Z390 chipset in the next couple of months, where I'm sure Chipzilla will show off the Z390 during Computex 2018 next week.

We're now being exposed to some of the secrets behind the Z390 chipset, with SuperMicro's upcoming and always confusingly named C9Z390-CG-IW. The board packed a Core i7-8700T processor, a low-power 6C/12T chip that is already available, as well as the Core i7-8700K which is an 8C/16T chip.

This means that the new Z390 chipset will support all current-gen Coffee Lake S (CFS) parts, as it uses the same LGA1151 socket found in current-gen 300-series motherboards. We should expect Intel to show off more about the Z390 next month at Computex, and we'll be there bringing you the news as it happens.

Intel didn't really have a good time with their Kaby Lake-X line of processors, with Chipzilla announcing that they are discontinuing the CPUs after only 11 months on the market.

Originally, Kaby Lake-X were designed and marketed as an enthusiast HEDT platform to give quad-core CPUs on the 14nm+ architecture, but after a lack of sales and enthusiasm around them, Intel has put Kaby Lake-X into EOL (end of life).

At the time, Intel announced the X299 platform and two quad-core SKUs of KLX that were based on the enhanced 14nm+ node, but had less PCIe lanes, dual-channel DDR4 support, and next to no performance gains over the Skylake-X family of CPUs at the time on the much cheaper Z270 platform.

AMD will be continuing their onslaught of CPU releases throughout 2018, starting the year out with a bang with the Ryzen 2000 series processors led by the flagship Ryzen 7 2700X.

But now we're hearing about new Ryzen desktop CPUs with the Ryzen 2100, 2300X, and 2500X. These processors will join the Ryzen 2200 and 2400 processors, so we should expect the Ryzen 5 2500X to be a 4C/8T chip for mainstream consumers and gamers.

Moving onto the mobile offerings with Ryzen Mobile 2000U, 2600U, and 2800U. The interesting note here is the Ryzen 7 2800U that is a full Ryzen 7 flagship offering in mobile designs, very cool to see, but will it be very hot under full load? That's what I want to see out of it all.

Intel has delayed its 10nm node yet again, but during AMD's recent Q1 2018 earnings call the company teased that they have not just their 7nm Radeon GPUs being tested in their labs, but upcoming 7nm server CPUs as well.

AMD President and CEO Lisa Su explained: "We have 7nm GPU based on Vega that we'll sample later this year. We have a 7nm server CPU that we'll sample later this year. And then, obviously, we have a number of products that are planned for 2019 as well. So it's a very, very busy product season for us. But we're pleased with the sort of the execution on the product roadmap".

Where we normally see Intel nailing the process node game, AMD is ahead here with what seems to be Globalfoundries' mature 7nm LP node that will power desktop Ryzen 3000 series CPUs in 2019.

Intel has delayed its upcoming 10nm processors yet again, with Cannon Lake stuck back in the firing line with mass production delayed until 2019, instead of late-2018 like Intel promised.

The company promised 10nm back in 2015, but delayed it into 2017 and then again into 2018, so this new delay marks the fourth delay in a row for Chipzilla. Instead, the company has been reworking its seventh-gen 14nm+ node (Kaby Lake R) and their newer 14nm++ (Coffee Lake). We were meant to have eighth-gen parts in 10nm Cannon Lake node, but yeah that won't be happening until 2019 now.

Intel revealed the fourth delay to its 10nm node in their recent earnings report, and while they nailed it with record Q1 revenue of $16.8 billion (up 16% year-over-year), high-volume 10nm production has been delayed until sometime in 2019, with no specifics provided at all.

It might look like Intel has the CPU game in its hands, but Chipzilla was dealt a pretty big blow by delaying its 10nm node yet again, and now we're hearing about what is coming next, the next big thing that could see us with a truly next-gen leap in CPU architecture technology.

Intel has a job listing looking for a Senior CPU microarchitect that would join their Ocean Cove team in Hillsboro, Oregon where they would begin work on the next-gen Core architecture.

Ashraf Essa from The Motley Fool tweeted that Intel's next-gen Ocean Cove CPU core "comes after the core inside of ADL" which is the Alder Lake generation. This means we can expect the launch of Ocean Cove to take place sometime after 2020, and could arrive as the 11th generation Core family of CPUs from Intel.

Jim Keller is best known as the chip architect behind Athlon and the smash hit Ryzen CPUs for AMD, who joined Tesla to look over their Autopilot self-driving technology back in 2015. Well, he's leaving and he's joining Team Blue.

According to my industry sources Keller will be announcing he's joining Intel in the morning, with Intel securing another important ex-AMD staffer that will work closely with Raja Koduri, who left AMD as the boss of Radeon Technologies Group. Tesla very quietly hired Keller from AMD in 2016 after he was finished with the Ryzen architecture.

Keller was the brains behind Athlon when theGHz race between AMD and Intel was in full swing, and then he came back again to develop Ryzen. So we have Keller making a processor that had a higher frequency than Intel to beat them, left to join AMD when they made Ryzen which hurt Intel in the multi-threaded race on the consumer side of things, and now back to Intel.

AMD had quite the successful launch this week with their new flagship Ryzen 7 2700X processor, with the 8C/16T chip taking swings in the right areas with Pinnacle Ridge, but what about the Ryzen 7 2800X?

Right now AMD has the game locked tight in price/performance with the Ryzen 7 2700X against Intel's gaming powerhouse in the Core i7-8700K which is only a 6C/12T offering. If Intel strikes back with an 8C/16T model with the speeds of the 8700K, it looks like AMD is ready for such a thing with a purported Ryzen 7 2800X.

AMD can't just increase the TDP and clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 2700X and make it into an even beefier chip in the Ryzen 7 2800X, it wouldn't be enough. AMD could easily scale the Ryzen 7 2800X up with a surprise 10C/20T offering at over 4GHz, enough to counter Intel and keep the prices low enough without gutting the just-released Ryzen 7 2700X with its 8C/16T of 4GHz CPU power.

AMD has now officially released their new Ryzen 7 2700X processor, and within 24 hours we're seeing new overclocking world records with Der8auer and Neo overclocking the Ryzen 7 2700X to incredible heights.

The team completed the massive overclock at the ASUS ROG Taiwan HQ, where they used LN2 and the ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero motherboard to drive the Ryzen 7 2700X to a huge 6GHz, on all 8C/16T of Pinnacle Ridge processing power. The team used 1.85V of power, and isn't perfectly stable, but it shows the improvements that AMD made over the first-gen Ryzen CPUs.

AMD's new Ryzen 7 2700X was cooled to an incredible -190C with LN2, as the refreshed Ryzen chip doesn't have an OC bug meaning that it can be driven to super sub-zero temps.

For those of you old enough you might remember the iconic 8086 processor from Intel, well we're getting close to the 40th anniversary of the 8086 and it looks like Intel could celebrate it in the best way possible: releasing a new CPU in the Core i7-8086K.

Intel's purported Core i7-8086K is an Anniversary Edition SKU, just like the Pentium G3258 which was a 20th anniversary celebration of the Pentium CPU. The Core i7-8086K would be very similar to the Core i7-8700K, being a 6C/12T processor with 12MB of L3 cache and same 95W TDP.

But under the hood the purported Core i7-8086K would rock a higher base clock of 4GHz and boost clock of up to 5.1GHz or more, compared to the 3.7/4.7GHz base and boost clocks respectively on the 8700K. If this processor is indeed real, it would be the best 6C/12T processor available, with a launch window of June - perfect timing for Computex.

Intel is fighting in a new battlefield where sleeping dragon AMD has erupted and awoken with their EPYC range of server CPUs, with Chipzilla's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon CPUs being teased and leaked by Power Stamp Alliance.

The new Ice Lake Xeon processors are set to release sometime later this year or in early 2019, with a new LGA 4189 socket and SKUs that will offer a huge 230W TDP, up from the max 205W offerings with both Skylake and Cascade Lake Xeon CPUs. Why the higher TDP? We should expect next-gen Xeon CPUs with even more cores and higher clock counts, all driving up the power consumption.

Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon CPUs will reportedly rock 8-channel DDR4 support, with Cascade Lake already supporting 2933MHz DDR4, we should expect the same or higher-end DDR4 support from Ice Lake. Cascade Lake supports 768GB of DDR4, so with the additional slots (16 x DDR4 in 8-channel mode) will drive memory support on Ice Lake through to a huge 1TB.

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".