CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

The global client-based CPU market showed impressive growth in Q1 2024, with John Peddie Research reporting that shipments hit 62 million units - a 33% increase compared to Q1 2023. However, compared to the previous quarter, this figure represents a 9.4% decrease.

Even though the dip compared to the previous quarter bucks the recent growth trend, the report notes that the Q1 dip, when viewed with the context of year-over-year growth, "is an indication that the market has stabilized and has returned to its traditional cyclic behavior."

Looking into the numbers more closely, Notebooks and Laptops are driving the growth as desktop market share has declined. A year ago, the split between Notebooks and Desktops was 68% and 32%, with this figure changing to 73% Notebooks and 27% Desktops in Q1 2024. With integrated graphics being a key part of the mobile CPU space, iGPU shipments increased by 30% year-over-year.

Apple has announced the latest iteration of its custom processor, the new M4 chip, which will power the new iPad Pro line-up. The M4 chip is the second generation of Apple's 3-nanometer technology (28 billion transistors), and the company is touting a brand-new display engine that will utilize the Ultra Retina XDR OLED display on iPad Pro.

The new M4 CPU features up to 10 cores (4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores), with a next-gen 10-core GPU that "builds on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced in M3" with new caching tech called Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It's the most powerful GPU ever to hit the iPad, so it will be interesting to see how it fares with modern games.

Of course, AI is a vital component of the new M4 chip - it's "Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever," sporting an AI performance of 38 TOPS, higher than Intel's current Core Ultra and AMD's current Ryzen offerings. The M4 also features faster memory bandwidth to help push AI performance even further.

It looks like we could be in for a huge naming scheme change for AMD's upcoming "Strix Point" APUs, with the new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptops featuring an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor.

We've never heard of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor, but ASUS lists it as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks at up to 5.1GHz with 36MB of cache and Ryzen AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Until now, no "AI" wording has made it into any processor from AMD like this, so it looks like we could see the Ryzen AI 5, Ryzen AI 7, and Ryzen AI 9 series CPUs in the near future.

ASUS will unveil the new VivoBook S16 laptops at Computex 2024 next month, and I'm sure we're going to get the official naming from AMD at their Computex 2024 press conference. The new Strix Point CPUs aka Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor will deliver up to 77 TOPS of AI performance from its beefed-up XDNA2-based Ryzen AI NPU and newer RDNA 3.5 GPU. The NPU on its own will provide 45 TOPS of AI workload performance.

Last month, Intel launched an investigation into the recent reports of game crashes for owners of the company's high-end CPU.

A report from BenchLife via VideoCardz, claims that Intel has sent guidance to motherboard partners to roll out the Intel Default Settings on Z789 motherboards. These new default settings will restrict a PL2 of 188 watts, which is the maximum boost power that the CPU can draw sparingly during heavy loads. For context, PL1 is the base power the CPU can sustain for longer periods of time.

The report claims Intel's guidance is to restrict the performance of its high-end CPUs, particularly the Core i9-14900K, which appeared to be the CPU getting the most reports of instability issues. Notably, GIGABYTE has already rolled out its update for PL2, being restricted to 188W on the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, and according to testing conducted by Hardware Unboxed, it resulted in an overall 20% performance reduction for both CPUs.

Someone has purchased an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor with 3D V-Cache stacks on both Zen4 core dies, which is 64MB more L3 cache than a retail 7950X3D chip.

A user posted on Bilibili, with their purported Ryzen 9 7950X3D featuring 192MB of L3 cache, which is 64MB more L3 cache than retail Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The obvious red flags: this could be an error with CPU-Z which lists 192MB, it could be a modification, or something else.

This could be an engineering sample Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 3D V-Cache stacks on both Zen 4 core dies, as the Ryzen 9 7950X3D (and Ryzen 9 7900X3D) feature just one 3D V-Cache stack. Maybe this is a bigger discovery, an engineering sample 7950X3D with 192MB of L3 cache that never hit the market... very cool. Or, to spoil the party, this could just be a simple error.

Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" CPU has a rumored 5.5GHz boost clock, compared to up to 6.2GHz on the current-gen flagship Core i9-14900KS processor.

The news on the Core Ultra 9 285K processor is coming from some posts by MebiuW on Weibo, where the big architectural changes that Intel will be bringing with Arrow Lake -- as well as the new Core Ultra 200 series branding -- will see a hefty CPU frequency reduction.

Intel's current-gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs can boost at up to 6.2GHz out of the box with the Core i9-14900KS, while even the Raptor Lake CPUs before it with the Core i9-13900KS we saw 6.0GHz. The new Arrow Lake CPUs however, seem to be topping out at 5.5GHz, but will feature a new tile-based design with an integrated NPU for AI workloads... something desktop Core CPUs didn't have until Meteor Lake hit laptops late last year.

Intel's Arrow Lake desktop processors might pitch up earlier than expected, or at least ahead of what the rumor mill seems to have been floating as the most likely arrival timeframe recently.

If you've been following the chatter around Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200), you won't have missed a certain amount of pessimism creeping in of late.

In the early days of leaks, there was talk of massive performance gains, and while that's still true to an extent, enthusiasm about Arrow Lake seems to have been waning somewhat with suggestions that Intel is struggling to finish the next-gen desktop silicon, and that it might even get pushed to 2025. (Or at least that volume production may not happen until next year, anyway).

Intel has just announced that it has surpassed 500 AI models running optimized on its Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs.

The company issued a press release today, saying that the industry's leading AI PC processor is available right now enabling new AI experiences, immersive graphics and optimal battery life. This significant milestone is a result of the investments by Intel in client AI, the AI PC transformation, framework optimizations and AI tools including OpenVINO toolkit.

Intel said that the 500 AI models that were trained can be deployed across the CPU, GPU, or NPU, with models drawing from categories of local AI inferencing, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection, image classification/segmentation, computer vision, and more.

Intel's next-generation Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" desktop processors will launch later this year, with 6 different SKUs and a flagship 24-core CPU based on next-gen P-Core and E-Core architectures.

Now we've got some new information regarding upcoming SKUs in the Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU family, with the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 245K. The new Core Ultra 9 285K will be the successor to the Core i9-14900K, the Core Ultra 7 265K is the successor to the Core i7-14700K, and finally, the Core Ultra 5 245K is the successor to the Core i5-14600K.

We'll also see non-K variants of these processors, with the Core Ultra 9 275, Core Ultra 7 255, and Core Ultra 5 240 processors. The leaks are coming from "OneRaichi" on X, who said that "the rules of names look like a little change".

AMD is preparing a huge wave of next-gen Zen 5 processors in the coming months, with its Strix Halo APUs shaping up to be beasts.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, we're hearing whispers of AMD's new Strix Halo-LP APU, which would be a low-power version of Strix Halo with 6 to 8 cores, and 20 CUs of GPU power that would provide RTX 3050 performance-per-watt-style power.

MLID says that AMD's new Zen 5-powered Strix Halo APUs will come in four different SKUs: Best, Better, Good, and the new LP model we're talking about today. The Strix Halo "Best" APU will feature 8, 12, or 16 cores based on the new Zen 5 architecture, with 40 CUs of RDNA 3.5-based GPU power that provides RTX 4070-class performance. We'll see a 256-bit memory bus on the Strix Halo "Best" APU with around 270GB/sec of memory bandwidth.