CPUs
Qualcomm this morning is taking the wraps off of a new smartphone SoC for the mid-range market, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. The second of Qualcomm’s down-market ‘S’ tier Snapdragon 7 parts, the 7s series is functionally the entry-level tier for the Snapdragon 7 family – and really, most Qualcomm-powered handsets in North America. With three tiers of Snapdragon 7 chips, the 7s can easily be lost in the noise that comes with more powerful chips. But the latest iteration of the 7s is a bit more interesting than usual, as rather than reusing an existing die, Qualcomm has seemingly minted a whole new die for this part. As a result, the company has upgraded the 7s family to use Arm’s current Armv9 CPU cores...
What We've Been Waiting For: Testing OpenCL Accelerated Handbrake with AMD's Trinity
AMD, and NVIDIA before it, has been trying to convince us of the usefulness of its GPUs for general purpose applications for years now. For a while it seemed...
60 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/15/2012Ask the Experts: Heterogeneous and GPU Compute with AMD’s Manju Hegde
AMD’s Manju Hegde is one of the rare folks I get to interact with who has an extensive background working at both AMD and NVIDIA. He was one of...
101 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/14/2012A First Look at Thunderbolt on Windows with MSI's Z77A-GD80
I finally made the transition to a notebook as my desktop last year, a move many had made years prior. Quad-core mobile Sandy Bridge and good SSDs made the...
98 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/11/2012MIPS Technologies Updates Processor IP Lineup with Aptiv Series
ARM has been making waves over the past two years with plenty of processor and graphics IP announcements, but they are not alone in the game. MIPS Technologies, almost...
41 by Ganesh T S on 5/10/2012Undervolting and Overclocking on Ivy Bridge
In the past, overclocking a processor for ‘free’ performance involved taking a cheap model and pushing it past the top end model. In the land of Intel, overclocking by...
84 by Ian Cutress on 4/23/2012The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review
The times, they are changing. In fact, the times have already changed, we're just waiting for the results. I remember the first time Intel brought me into a hotel...
173 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Ryan Smith on 4/23/2012AMD Q1’12 Earnings Report: $1.59B Revenue, $590M Net Loss
It’s the middle of April and that means it’s once again earnings season for the prior quarter. Late yesterday AMD released their earnings report for Q1 2012, and it turned...
27 by Ryan Smith on 4/20/2012ASUS Ivy Bridge/7-Series Chipset Q&A
Intel officially launched the Z77 platform earlier this week, and later this month we'll see the official launch of Ivy Bridge, Intel's 3rd generation Core processors. ASUS has agreed...
171 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/12/2012The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
I still remember hearing about Intel's tick-tock cadence and not having much faith that the company could pull it off. Granted Intel hasn't given us a new chip every...
198 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/6/2012GlobalFoundries Granted Independence, Acquires Remaining Stake from AMD
When AMD originally spun off its foundry business in 2008, the resulting Foundry Company (as it was called back then) was 55.6% ATIC owned and 44.4% AMD owned. Since...
34 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/4/2012AMD Executes on Promise of Agility, Intends to Acquire SeaMicro for $334M
At its 2012 Financial Analyst Day, AMD mentioned a conscious shift towards being a more agile company. Wanting a bigger piece of the high margin server market, AMD is...
5 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/2/2012AMD Releases FX-6200 and FX-4170 Processors; FX-8120 Gets a Price Cut
AMD sent word this morning that they’re doing some shuffling of their Bulldozer based FX processor lineup. Altogether in the near future AMD will be releasing a new CPU...
23 by Ryan Smith on 2/27/2012Intel at ISSCC '12: More Research into Near Threshold Voltage
At IDF last year Intel's Justin Rattner demonstrated a 32nm test chip based on Intel's original Pentium architecture that could operate near its threshold voltage. The power consumption of...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/20/2012Intel Demonstrates dual-core Atom SoC with Integrated WiFi Transceiver
This week is the annual International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) where chip companies from all walks of life present papers documenting everything from shipping architectures to future research projects...
9 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/20/2012Intel Releases Core i7-3820
Intel has finally filled out the Sandy Bridge E lineup by releasing the Core i7-3820. The initial Sandy Bridge E lineup launched back in November 2011 and it consisted...
30 by Kristian Vättö on 2/14/2012The Opteron 6276: a closer look
When we first looked at the Opteron 6276, our time was limited and we were only able to run our virtualization, compression, encryption, and rendering benchmarks. Most servers capable...
52 by Johan De Gelas on 2/9/2012AMD Releases Two Llano Based Athlon II X4 CPUs
AMD has quietly released two Athlon II X4 CPUs, the 638 and 641. These are based on Llano (i.e. Stars+/K10.5 architecture) but lack an integrated GPU. The socket is...
15 by Kristian Vättö on 2/8/2012AMD: The Flexibility is in the Fabric
A theme of the new AMD is modularity. We've of course heard this before as it has always been a goal of AMD's to bring to market more modular...
19 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/3/2012Understanding AMD's Roadmap & New Direction
We've been providing live coverage of AMD's 2012 Financial Analyst Day from Santa Clara today, but if you want a summary of the company's strategy under new CEO Rory...
84 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/2/2012AMD's Tablet Architectures: Hondo at 4.5W, Future Sub-2W SoC
In its client roadmap AMD revealed Hondo, a 4.5W APU with 1 - 2 low voltage Bobcat cores and an on-die DX11 GPU built on a 40nm process. Hondo...
26 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/2/2012