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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.
ARM Profits On The Rise
ARM has reported good second quarter financial results, with profit rising by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM has been riding high in the public consciousness thanks to firms such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia pushing its chip architecture into smartphones and tablets. The firm announced it managed to take in $209.78 millio in revenue during the second quarter, a 15 per cent increase from the same period last year, while net income rose even faster by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM said two billion chips using the firm’s various design models were shipped during the quarter, which represented a nine per cent increase from last year. The firm revealed that its core money making operation, processor royalties, rose by 14 per cent.
Warren East, CEO of ARM said, “ARM’s royalty revenues continued to outperform the overall semiconductor industry as our customers gained market share within existing markets and launched products which are taking ARM technology into new markets.
“This quarter we have seen multiple market leaders announce exciting new products including computers and servers from Dell and Microsoft, and embedded applications from Freescale and Toshiba. In addition, ARM and TSMC announced a partnership to optimise next generation ARM processors and physical IP and TSMC’s FinFET process technology.”
Intel Goes Wireless
Maho Bay is a desktop platform wrapped around the recently launched Ivy Bridge desktop processor and Intel plans to enrich this platform with a Wireless mini card offer of its own.
The plan is to make new SKUs based on half Minicard (mPCIe) standard and offer it with its boards that have support for PCIe 1X or faster. Maho Bay also allows some combinations with Sandy Bridge processors and will allow the use of these mini Wireless cards on older processors with new boards. It looks like the Panther Point chipset is necessary even for older Sandy Bridge processors on Maho Bay platform.
The top range card with premium performance is Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300, and the card has virtually the same specification like its mobile brother. It supports Intel Wireless Display as well as Intel My Wifi technology and quick driver connect.
Since it is using 3×3 antennas and MIMO standard it us capable of achieving speeds of 450Mbits per second and it does support multiple streams. It supports dual band 2.4 + 5 GHz and Intel Vpro. This is still a 802.11n based product as Intel hasn’t really jumped the gun to support 802.11ac in 2012.
It looks like it is too early for Intel to embrace this new standard due to its very limited market penetration.
AMD’s 8350 Clocked At 4.0GHz
We have got some information about AMD’s upcoming FX 8350.
However, today we learned that AMD will push this CPU from Q3 to early Q4 2012 as now it claims that it can launch this processor in late October. AMD FX 8350 is an eight-core with 16MB cache, Vishera based 32nm core with 4.0GHz default clock and ability to jump to 4.2GHz with turbo core automatic overclocking.
This is an impressive frequency jump as the AMD FX 8150 works at 3.6GHz default and with turbo gets to 4.2GHz. The FX 8350 is supposed to replace the 8150 as AMD’s flagship processor.
According to current schedule production ready samples are expected in roughly a month (early August). Mass production starts in early August, probably days after they finalize the clocks and give it a green light for mass production but the launch is pushed for late October 2012.
Intel Increasing Supplier Audits
Intel has audited almost five times as many of its suppliers in 2011 than it did the previous year.
Chipzilla set itself a target of visiting 50 on-site, third-party audits of its suppliers during the last year. It had that target last year as well, but missed it by only carrying out 49 audits, while one had to be rescheduled.
In comparison Intel only carried out eight visits in 2010. The company also conducted 249 in-depth assessments and 289 self-assessments by suppliers.
But the findings were not that great. Intel found 426 priority and major findings, the highest class of non-compliance as defined by the company.
Most of the non-compliance related to management systems such as a lack of documentation and systems for CSR, inadequate communication with workers or suppliers and a lack of audits. But there were also 112 instances of labour abuse, which included working hours of more than 60 hours per week, and workers not being given at least one day off a week. There were also 28 issues relating to ethics, such as not having an anonymous reporting line for employees to raise issues or concerns through.
The report was interesting because it must have covered Foxconn, which has been the subject of criticism over its treatment of workers. During 2011, Intel carried out audits at three Foxconn facilities and found them about as bad as others in the region. Most of the breaches of rules were in the areas of labour conditions, safety systems, and management systems.
Marvell Outs New WiFi Chip
Marvell has shed some light on its new Avastar 88W8897 802.11ac low power WiFi chip. In addition to up to 867Mbps of WiFi transfer throughput, the new chip also integrates Bluetooth 4.0, near field communications (NFC) as well as Wi-Fi certified Miracast and integrated location engine. Aimed at notebooks, ultrabooks, tablets, gaming consoles and smart TVs, the new Avastar 88W8897 is expected to show up in various devices around this time next year.
The implementation of 802.11ac standard and Bluetooth 4.0 in the same chip is not something that we have not seen so far, but with NFC, it is certainly becomes a quite interesting chip. As noted, the new Avastar 88W8897 will feature 867Mbps of transfer throughput which is not as fast as we are other chip manufacturers but still faster than 802.11n. Marvell reckons that 802.11ac is still young but should become a big thing as of next year.
Marvell also claims that the Avastar 88W8897 SoC offers the highest level of integration available enabling a rest of bill of materials footprint reduction of 40 to 50 percent and cost reduction of 75 percent when combined to previous wireless solutions. The Wi-Fi certified Miracast, expected to be certified later this year, 802.11ac transfer speeds and Marvell’s dynamic rapid channel switching (DRCS) technology will allow users to stream video from a smaller device like tablet to a larger display while simultaneously surfing the net without losing the connection in 2.4GHz. The last, but not least, is the integrated location engine that enables accurate indoor positioning by implementing 802.11v time of flight protocol inside the hardware.
AMD Officially Launches Trinity Mobile
AMD has finally and officially lifted an NDA veil off its mobile Trinity A-series APU lineup based on the 2nd-gen Bulldozer CPU core, aka Piledriver, and VLIW4 Northern Islands GPU squeezed together on a 32nm SOI die.
Architecture-wise, AMD’s Trinity combines two to four Piledriver x86 cores combined with up to 384 VLIW4 Radeon cores on a 32nm die which ends up as a 246mm2 chip with 1.303B transistors, slightly more than Llano’s 228mm2/1.178B. Since it is made in the same 32nm manufacturing process as Llano, the greatest win for Trinity are actual CPU and GPU performance improvements as well as impressive power consumption improvements when compared to Llano APUs.
Same as the FX-series desktop parts based on the Bulldozer architecture, AMD’s Trinity CPU part has a 2+1 integer/floating point design where you get two integer cores that share a single floating point scheduler. Although it appears to the OS as two cores, each Piledriver module actually has less resources than traditional core design. But with Piledriver, those Bulldozer kinks got ironed out as much as possible, improving IPC (instruction per cycle), reducing leakage, reducing CAC and giving it a slight frequency uplift.
As far as the GPU is concerned, we are looking at quite familiar Northern Islands VLIW4 part, a same one that was behind Cayman Radeon HD 6970 graphics card. Of course, the GPU has been cut down to up to 384 stream processors (organized in 6 SIMDs) with 24 texture units and 8 ROPs. The clocks have also gone down to 497MHz base clock that can “turbo” up to 686MHz.
Trinity Launching On Desktops This Summer
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AMD is expected to introduce its new mobile Trinity APU in a week or so and now we are hearing some timeframes for desktop parts as well.
According to Digitimes, desktop Trinity parts are coming in August, while Brazos 2.0 chips are expected in June. There is no word on Trinity ULV parts yet and we believe they will be the most interesting of the lot.
Is Moore’s Law Dead?
May 11, 2012 by admin
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Physicist Michio Kaku says that Moore’s law will be dead within about 10 years.
Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York told BigThink.com that we are already seeing a slowing down of Moore’s Law. He said that computing power simply cannot maintain this rapid, exponential rise using standard silicon technology.
Kaku said that the latest CPUs from Intel, which use a unique three-dimensional design, do continue roughly doubling processors. But he points out that the new design is nonetheless proof that the Law is winding down.
The two basic problems are heat and leakage and that is why the age of silicon will eventually come to a close.
By continuing to shrink the parts that go into processors, heat becomes concentrated. At a point in the near future, the heat generated will be so intense that the chip will melt. You can literally fry an egg on top of the chip, and the chip itself begins to disintegrate, he said.