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Samsung Finally Starts 14nm FinFET
A company insider has spilled the beans in Korea, claiming that Samsung has started Apple A9 production in 14nm FinFET.
The A9 is the next generation SoC for Apple iPhone and iPad products and it is manufactured on the Samsung – GlobalFoundries 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. In the other news, Samsung’s Ki-nam, president of the company’s semiconductor business and head of System LSI business has confirmed that the company started production of 14-nanometre FinFET chips.
The report mentions Austin as a possible site for Apple products but we wonder if the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in New York State could become one of the partners for the 14nm FinFET manufacturing. Samsung didn’t officially reveal the client for the 14nm FinFET, but Apple is the most obvious candidate, while we expect to see 14 / 16nm FinFET graphics chips from AMD and Nvidia but most likely in the latter half of 2015 at best.
Qualcomm is likely to announce new LTE modem based on 14nm FinFET and the flagship SoC Snapdragon 810 is a 20nm chip. Qualcomm is manufacturing its 810 chips as we speak to meet demand for flagship Android phones coming in Q1 2015. Flagship Samsung, HTC and LG phones among others are likely to use Snapdragon 810 as a replacement for this year’s Snapdragon 801, a high end chip that ended up in millions of high-end phones.
Samsung / GlobalFoundries14nm FinFET process is 15 percent smaller, 20 percent faster, and 35 percent more power efficient compared to 20nm processors. This definitely sounds exiting and will bring more performance into phones, tablets, GPUs and will significantly decrease power consumption. The move from 28nm is long overdue.
We believe that Qualcomm’s LTE modem might be the first chip to officially come with this manufacturing process and Apple will probably take most of the 14nm production for an update in its tablets and phones scheduled for 2015.
ARM & Oracel Optimize Java
ARM’s upcoming ARMv8 architecture will form the basis for several processors that will end up in servers. Now the firm has announced that it will work with Oracle to optimise Java SE for the architecture to squeeze out as much performance as possible.
ARM’s chip licensees are looking to the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture to make a splash in the low-power server market and go up against Intel’s Atom processors. However unlike Intel that can make use of software already optimised for x86, ARM and its vendors need to work with software firms to ensure that the new architecture will be supported at launch.
Oracle’s Java is a vital piece of software that is used by enterprise firms to run back-end systems, so poor performance from the Java virtual machine could be a serious problem for ARM and its licensees. To prevent that, ARM said it will work with Oracle to improve performance, boot-up performance and power efficiency, and optimize libraries.
Henrik Stahl, VP of Java Product Management at Oracle said, “The long-standing relationship between ARM and Oracle has enabled our mutual technologies to be deployed across a broad spectrum of products and applications.
“By working closely with ARM to enhance the JVM, adding support for 64-bit ARM technology and optimizing other aspects of the Java SE product for the ARM architecture, enterprise and embedded customers can reap the benefits of high-performance, energy-efficient platforms based on ARM technology.”
A number of ARM vendors including x86 stalwart AMD are expected to bring out 64-bit ARMv8 processors in 2014, though it is thought that Applied Micro will be the first to market with an ARMv8 processor chip later this year.
AMD Debuts R5000
AMD has released its Firepro R5000 graphics card that has video over IP capabilities.
AMD typically promotes its workstation class Firepro cards using CAD/CAM software, however this time the company is relying on remote viewing as the big selling point for its latest workstation graphics card. AMD’s Firepro R5000 has a GPU that uses its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and Teradici PC video over IP technology to send graphics output over the network.
AMD used its Pitcarin GPU coupled to 2GB of GDDR5 memory in the Firepro R5000. However it isn’t AMD’s GPU that is the big selling point of the Firepro R5000 but rather Teradici’s Tera2240 chip that encrypts display output before sending it out on the network, while supporting up to 60fps (frames per second).
AMD’s Firepro R5000 is intended to be used in render farms, with each final image being sent over an IP network to the end host, and the firm claims that the technology can be used in education, financial and media environments.
The Firepro R5000 is a single slot graphics card that has two mini Displayport outputs that can drive two 2500×1600 displays, however it can also drive a further four remote displays at 1920×1200 resolution by sending data over its RJ45 Ethernet port.
Both AMD and Teradici talked up the low configuration overheads of the Firepro R5000.
AMD Shows Piledriver Opteron
AMD’s Piledriver rollout is all but complete. With Trinity in the mobile and desktop space, new 3300 and 4300 Opterons are bringing the new architecture to data centers.
The Opteron 4300 series offers six different parts, in quad-, six- and eight-core flavours. Stock clocks range between 2.2GHz and 3.5GHz, with TDP’s in the 35W to 95W range. The cheapest Opteron 4334 costs $191, while the priciest 4332HE comes in at $501. The 3300 series consists of three quad- and eight-core SKUs, priced at $125 to $229. The pricing of both series is pretty aggressive.
But what’s next for AMD? Well things should be eerily quiet on the server front in 2013. Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Delhi/Orochi C should last throughout 2013 and even a good part of 2014. That’s when we can expect some major changes, as AMD transitions to 28nm and goes about transforming its Opteron lineup.
Future Low Power CPUs and APUs (as AMD calls them) should replace Dehli/Orochi-C in 1P and dense server markets, but AMD is also planning “Client APUs for market enablement,” and this sounds a lot like ARM-based low voltage parts. Of course, in the high end AMD plans to stick with big Steamroller cores, but mid-2014 is a long way off.
AMD Cuts Radeon Prices
After the recent price cut back in July, that included a $50 price cut for HD 7970, HD 7950 and HD 7870 graphics cards, AMD has apparently decided to cut some of these prices even further taking the HD 7950 3GB graphics card down to $320, or just in line with Nvidia’s recently release GTX 660 Ti graphics card.
AMD has already dropped the HD 7970 from $479 to $429, HD 7950 from $399 to US $349 and the HD 7870 down from $349 to $299. The new price cut skips the HD 7970 graphics card but includes the HD 7950, HD 7870 as well as the 1 and 2GB versions of the HD 7850.
The most important is probably the price cut for the 3GB HD 7950 which battles it out with Nvidia’s recently released GTX 660 Ti. The HD 7950 3GB is, according to the report, will receive a $30 price cut placing it at $320. The HD 7870 2GB graphics card got another $50 price cut pushing it down to $250 which probably makes it one of the most interesting mid-range graphics cards on the market.
AMD also decided to drop price on 1 and 2GB version of the HD 7850 graphics card taking them down by $40 to $190 and $210, respectively.
Will ARM Get OpenCL Certification?
ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU for OpenCL certification.
ARM’s Mali GPUs have so far shyed away from GPGPU support, however as smartphones and tablets are not expected to see an ever growing number of processor cores the cries for OpenCL support in its GPUs have been growing louder. Now ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU to the Khronos consortium for full profile OpenCL certification.
The Khronos consortium oversees the development of OpenCL and the high-level language is supported by a number of firms including AMD, Nvidia and Intel on their latest GPUs. However until now there hasn’t been an OpenCL certified GPU that is used in smartphones, though firms such as Zii Labs also boast OpenCL support for their chips.
ARM said, “Building on a scalable multicore, multi-pipeline architecture design, the Mali-T600 Series GPU includes a number of advanced features. In particular, native scalar and vector operations for OpenCL’s integer and floating point data types (including 64-bit); support for static and dynamic compilation; hardware accelerated image and sampler data types; fast atomic operations and compliance to IEEE754-2008 precision requirements.
AMD Shows Off New Radeon Chips
AMD has now officially updated its HD 7000M lineup of mobile GPUs with HD 7700M, HD 7800M and HD 7900M GPUs that are all based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture. The first in line that should show up in notebooks is the flagship HD 7970M GPU.
As noted, the entire lineup is based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture, but as always, the naming scheme of the AMD mobile parts has nothing to do with the desktop ones. The HD 7900M, codename Wimbledon, is actually based on 28nm Pitcairn destkop GPU that features 1280 stream processors, 80 texture units, 32 ROPs and up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
The HD 7800M series, codename Heathrow and the Radeon HD 7700M series, codename Chelsea, are both based on Cape Verde desktop GPU but with a slight twist. While Heathrow, HD 7800M series features fully enabled Cape Verde GPU with 640 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, the Chelsea HD 7700M series is based on a “crippled” Cape Verde core with 512 stream processors and 32 texture units. Both the HD 7800M series and the HD 7700M series will feature up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. Of course, we expect at least two SKUs for both HD 7700M and HD 7800M series.
AMD also decided to ditch the PCI-Express 3.0 support on the HD 7700M series mainly as this one is aimed at lower-performance platforms that are all about power saving, and performance gain was simply too low.
For now, AMD has only shed precise details regarding the HD 7970M GPU that is based on the fully enabled Pitcairn GPU with 1280 stream processors that will end up clocked at 850MHz for the GPU and 4.8GHz for 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
As you can notice, the HD 7970M has lower GPU clocks than its HD 7870 desktop counterpart, but AMD also decided to keep the memory at the same level resulting in 153.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. According to AMD slides, HD 7970M should end up to be anywhere between 30 and 60% faster than HD 6990M and anywhere between 16 and 76 percent when compared to Nvidia current high-end GTX 675M GPU.
Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
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It is certain that Korean electronics giant Samsung will soon be entering the server chip market.
Reports are coming in that the company has been picking up key server personnel from Intel and AMD. Samsung has been focused on developing ARM chips and stayed clear of the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
But the companies latest hires seem to indicate that might change.
Samsung’s latest recruits include veterans of the chip business like Jim Mergard, Frank Helms, who is a Fusion APU architect, Brad Burgess who designed the Bobcat APU and Patrick Patla (VP of AMD’s server business). Patla was behind the success of the Opteron chip set and has done well using the x86-server system.
Is Intel Ready For The USB 3.0 Standard?
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The USB Implementers Forum has ruled that the Ivy Bridge 7 Series Chipset and other Intel chipsets have achieved USB 3.0 certification. USB 3.0 delivers up to 10 times the data transfer rate of USB 2.0, as well as improved power efficiency. Intel’s Ivy Bridge will ship in Windows PCs in the April and will be the first to have USB 3.0 as a standard feature for the first time. USB 3.0 has been seen on laptops and desktops from AMD or NEC.
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Will Samsung Release A Quad-Core Processor?
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Samsung is reportedly developing a new quad-core chip that will power its next generation Galaxy series flagship smartphone.
According to androidandme.com, the Korean giant is preparing a new 32nm quad-core chip, the Exynos 4412. The new chip is based on the A9 architecture and it will run at speeds of up to 1.5GHz. Moreover, Samsung went for ARM Mali-400 graphics in the current Exynos 4210, so there is a good chance the new chip will include next generation Mali-604 graphics.
In terms of performance, the new chip could be a rather impressive beast. Compared to Nvidia’s Tegra 3, the Exynos could squeeze out a bit more performance per watt, thanks to its superior manufacturing process. On the graphics front, it could also sneak ahead of both Tegra 3 and Apple’s A5, with the SGX 543MP2 graphics core. The new chip should debut in early 2012 if all goes well.
Interestingly, Samsung has been keen to embrace processors and graphics solutions from a number of companies in the past. Even now, the company is selling a rather awkward mix of phones and tablets based on Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments chips. Basically Samsung is in bed with everyone, but it is obviously taking mobile chip development seriously and we could see some if not all third-party suppliers phased out sometime in the future.
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