Intel Shows More Ivy Bridge

Last week Intel officially released Haswell, but there’s still life in good old Ivy Bridge. The chipmaker has announced a range of low-end Ivy parts and even a Sandy Bridge based Celeron.

The Celeron G470 is possibly the last consumer Sandy Bridge we will ever see. It is a single-core 35W part clocked at 2GHz and it’s priced at just $37.

However, Ivy Bridge parts are a bit more interesting. They include the Celeron 1017, a dual-core, dua-thread chip clocked at 1.6GHz, with a TDP of just 17W. It costs $86 and should be a nice part for low-end laptops and nettops. The Celeron 1005M also costs $86, but it has a 35W TDP and a 1.9GHz clock.

There are four new G2000 Pentiums as well. The G2140 and G2030 are 55W parts, clocked at 3GHz and 3.3GHz respectively. The G2120T and G2030T are 35W chips, clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz. They cost $64 and $75 respectively. Of course, Pentiums don’t feature Hyperthreading and all four of them are dual-core parts.

The Core i3 line-up also got some speed bumps. The Core i3-3245 and 3250 are clocked at 3.4 and 3.5GHz and both have a TDP of 55W. The 3245 features HD 4000 graphics and costs $134, while the 3250 ends up with HD 2500 graphics and a price tag of $138. Lastly, the Core i3-3250T is a 3GHz part with a 35W TDP, it costs $138, just like its 55W sibling.

Source

Will Qualcomm Be First?

We could not get the right timeframe for the launch of Qualcomm’s successor to the high-end Snapdragon 800, but there is no doubt that Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia and other ARM supporters are thinking about 20nm products where some of them will be based on Cortex A57.

Qualcomm has its own Krait core that can be adapted to 20nm and follow up the success of Snapdragon 600 and the soon to come Snapdragon 800. It turns out that it traditionally takes 18 to 24 months for the mobile industry to shift from one process to another and Qualcomm had its first 28nm part in April 2012, with the Snapdragon S4, used in the HTC One S. The first ever 28nm part from Qualcomm was the Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A that is now more than a year old and a relatively obsolete product.

Less than a year after the first 28nm product Qualcomm followed up with the Snapdragon 600 that is shipping in millions of high end devices right now. In a month or two it plans to release Snapdragon 800 based on new Krait 400 core and add a new core and get even better performance.

The next step is the 20nm core that should start shipping before the end of 1H 2014. We would not be surprised to see 20nm Krait demoed at CES 2014 already in January, see more of it at the Mobile World Congress in February and the volume shipment to follow in early Q2 2014. This is the expected schedule and not something we got from Qualcomm.

The only official world we got is that the new generation traditionally comes 18 to 24 months after the first iteration of a current one. This can give you an idea that Tegra 5, codenamed Logan, should show up at a similar time, along with Samsung’s 20nm Exynos.

Source

Does Haswell Need A Separate GPU?

Nvidia actually has a person with the catchy title of Chief Blogger and this person managed to get “an interview” with Rene Haas a VP and GM of computing products that currently takes care of Geforce mobile among other things.

Rene was asked to explain “why Gamers still need a discrete GPU with Haswell” and the answer is as logical as why do you use a seatbelt. Rene expects that Intel will continue to suck in graphics (our words not his ed.) and that that most popular games won’t play well on Haswell at standard resolution.

It seems that history really does repeat itself, as Intel had big claims for both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge had been struggling to run new games of their time. Any serious gamers know that the answer is a proper discrete GPU. Haswell won’t change that, claims Rene.

It looks like Nvidia will have at least as many design wins as with Ivy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge was the record number or design wins for Nvidia. Rene claims that with this refresh Nvidia will have as much as 95 per cent of the gaming notebook which is nothing short of spectacular.

Rene also attacks Intel boldly claiming that “Their (Intel) comparison is misleading on a number of fronts.” Commenting the fact that Intel claims that GT3e will be faster than Geforce GT 650M. Intel based its claims on synthetic benchmarks, something that can be optimised, while Nvidia prefers real games, and even if GT3 wins again Geforce GT650, the new Geforce GT 750 is much faster than its predecessor and will have double the performance of GT3e in games.

Rene reminds us that GT3e is only available in top quad core mobile cores such as Core i7 4880QM that usually find their place in $3,000 notebooks. Rene tells customers that getting a Core i5 of Core i3 notebook with a better discrete GPU is the right way to get better gaming performance, although the vast majority of consumers already know that.

We remember that the last time we sat down with Rene, he said that when Intel gets faster with Integrated, Nvidia will simply gets even better with its corresponding low-end products and offers something faster. The cat and mouse game never ends.

Source

Intel Releases More Celeron CPUs

Intel added three curious ultra-low voltage chips to its official price list and their official designations is strange.

All three are 22nm parts and their product numbers are N2805, N2810 and N2910, which seems to indicate that they are Atoms, but they are listed in the ULV Celeron M section, reports CPU World. The top SKU features four cores with no hyperthreading, which means that it is probably based on the new Valley View M core.

The N2805 is a dual-core clocked at 1.46GHz, with a single megabyte of cache. The N2810 is also a dual-core, but it’s clocked at 2GHz, while the N2910 is the previously mentioned quad-core, with 2MB of cache and a clock speed of 1.6GHz. All of them are priced at $132, which sounds like way too much for Atom branded parts.

With Temash and Kabini just around the corner, Intel needs to step up its game in the low-end low-voltage market fast, but at this point it seems that AMD be the first to market and it will enjoy at least a few months on top. Even when Intel launches its first 22nm Atoms, it won’t have an easy time matching AMD’s price or performance.

Source

Qualcomm surpasses AMD

It’s no secret that the mobile boom is taking a toll on makers of PC components and AMD is one of them. According to data from IC Insights, Qualcomm and Samsung have managed to pass AMD in microprocessor sales last year.

Intel still dominates the market, with $36.9 billion sales and a 65.3 percent market share. However, Qualcomm has managed to squeeze into second spot, with $5.3 billion in sales and a 9.4 percent share. Samsung ranked third, with $4.66 in sales and an 8.2 percent market share. Qualcomm and Samsung also recorded plenty of growth, 28 and 78 percent respectively.

However, AMD slumped 21 percent to take 6.4 percent of the market, with $3.6 billion in sales. It was still ahead of Freescale and Nvidia, as well as Texas Instruments and ST Ericsson.

It should be noted that about 83 percent of Samsung’s revenue came from chips churned out for Apple. In other words, had Apple built the chips on its own, it would have tied with AMD for the third spot.

Source

Haswell Core i7 Overclocked To 5GHz

As we draw closer to the launch of Intel’s 4th generation Core CPUs, or Haswell, it is no wonder that we are starting to see more leaks and one showing Intel’s Core i7 4770K overclocked to 5GHz at 0.9V certainly drew a lot of attention.

An impressive overclocking achievement was spotted by Ocaholic.ch and shows a CPU-Z validation of Core i7 4770K overclocked to exactly 5005.83MHz at just 0.904V. As far as we can tell, Hyper-threading was disabled and it is not clear if the CPU is actually stable enough to run anything, but in any case, it is still an impressive result, especially at such low voltage.

The rest of the specs include 4GB of DDR3 memory and ASRock’s upcoming Z87 Extreme4 motherboard.

Source

WD And Sandisk Join Forces

Western Digital and Sandisk have teamed up to create Western Digital’s first hybrid storage device that uses Sandisk’s iSSD and Western Digital’s Caviar Black hard drive.

Western Digital, which has dabbled in solid state disks (SSDs) for the enterprise market, has stayed away from hybrid drives that use relatively small SSDs to act as cache for hard drives. Now the firm has teamed with Sandisk to create its WD Black Solid State Hybrid drives with 500GB capacity.

Western Digital is pitching its hybrid drives at laptop makers, offering units with 5mm, 7mm and 9.5mm heights. The firm said Sandisk’s iSSD uses 19nm NAND flash and claimed it is the world’s “smallest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturing process”, a claim that Intel might question.

Kevin Conley, SVP and GM of client storage solutions at Sandisk said, “By combining SanDisk’s unparalleled flash memory expertise and technology with the hard drive know-how of Western Digital, WD Black SSHDs [solid state hard drives] offer outstanding hard drive-like capacity, and the slim form factor and the level of performance that you will only get with flash memory solutions.”

Seagate was first to introduce hybrid drives with its Momentus XT range, which offers an impressive performance boost over mechanical hard drives for certain workloads. The problem for Western Digital and Seagate is that hybrid drives are merely a stop-gap rather than a long term strategy, with SSD prices falling rapidly due to competition in the SSD industry as opposed to the hard drive industry, where Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have a comfortable ride.

Source

SOA’s New API Goes To The Cloud

SOA Software has launched an application programming interface (API) gateway today that allows businesses to expose their API’s with a built-in cloud based developer community, helping to grow their services and make it quicker for them to get up and running.

The firm’s CTO Alistair Farquharson said the API Gateway is unique due to it being a new concept in API and SOA management, aiming to “deliver new advantages in the application-level security space”.

“The new API Gateway provides monitory, security, and more uniquely, a developer community as well, so kind of a turnkey approach to an API gateway where a customer can buy that product, get it up and running, expose their API and expose the developer community to the outside world,” Farquharson said.

“[It will] support and manage the porting of mobile applications or web apps or B2B partnerships.”

Farquharson explained that there are three main components within the Gateway, which SOA Software has termed a “unified services gateway”, including a runtime component, a policy manager, and a developer community.

The runtime component handles the message traffic, whereas the policy manager component is capable of managing a range of different policies, such as threat protection, authentication, authorisation, anti-virus, monitorin, auditing, logging, for example.

“The whole objective here is to get a customer up and running with API’s as quickly as possible to meet some kind of a business need that they have, whether that’s mobile an application initiative or a web application, integration or syndication,” Farquharson added.

The third component is the API’s cloud-based “developer community”, which exposes an organisation to the outside world so developers can come take a look at its API, read its documentation, and see what APIs it has to figure out how to interact with them.

It’s this component that sets SOA Software’s Gateway apart form other firms doing similar appliances on the market, claims Farquharson.

“It essentially becomes the developer site for your organisation, with it all running on a single appliance which is rather unique,”  he added.

“The interesting thing about the gateway is that it does API’s as well as services [that are] needed for mobile devices so you have old and the new  encapsulated in the single appliance, which is very important to our customers.”

The developer community is offered through the API as a service, “like the Salesforce of APIs”, Farquharson said.

“Developers can go there and build their community and it provides them with high level service and availability and saglobla infrastructure and leverage the strength of their community to get themselves going.”

Source

Will Intel Buy AMD?

A few years ago it would have been impossible for Intel to acquire AMD, simply due to regulatory constraints put in place by the FTC and the European Union. Intel had more than a 60 percent of the PC and notebook market, so picking up AMD, a company that has some 20 percent of the market, would make Intel a real monopoly.

In the last two years the iPad, smartphones and ARM based tablets have changed the landscape, eating up Intel’s revenue and market share. It is true that most people, especially professionals and the business crowd, use x86 processors, but this is rapidly changing as home users are happy with emailing, browsing and playing some games on their iPad or other tablets. This puts Intel in a world trouble, as the PC market nosedived by 14 percent last quarter, due to a lack of interest for new devices and upgrade.

Tablets are becoming couch browsing devices, people use their smartphones to read news on the go and sometimes at home. More and more users don’t even touch their notebooks or desktops at home. With ARM staying the dominant instruction set in the phone and tablet space, Intel is facing a serious issue as Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia are all making money on ARM chips.

With this in mind, this would be the main reason for Intel to pick up AMD. AMD would not cost them that much, as Intel still has billions in bank, but with AMD, Intel would gain great graphics, something that the company has been struggling to crack for many years. It would make Intel slightly more competitive, but it would not solve all of its problems.

ARM manufacturers also face challenges, they need to produce more powerful chips and deliver a better user experience in order to win more notebooks and detachable devices, but this is going well with non-Apple based tablets. Apple uses ARM, so in the tablet world ARM is winning this fight, but Qualcomm and Nvidia as two independent chip manufactures could do a much better job at getting popular design wins. The Snapdragon S800 and Tegra 4 will get these two companies a step closer, while Apple will continue making good chips for iPads and iPhones. Let’s not forget about Samsung, as it makes many chips for its phones and tablets.

AMD gained 14 percent on May 1st, and an additional 5.9 percent yesterday, getting its stocks up to $3.41. Back on April 30th, AMD stock was trading at $2.68. In last three days of trading AMD gained 27.24 percent or $0.73 per share, which is a huge leap for a company with a 52-week low of just $1.81.

Source

Intel’s Haswell Arriving In June

Intel has announced that it will launch its next generation Haswell processors at Computex.

Intel showed running Haswell silicon to journalists last month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in a bid to talk up the upcoming chip’s GPU. Last Friday the firm announced what some already knew and many had already guessed, that it will launch Haswell at Computex in June.

Intel published a blog post on 26 April saying that the fourth generation Core processor known as Haswell would arrive in 3,337,200,000,000,000 nanoseconds, which worked out to just under 39 days. The countdown figure matched perfectly with the start of Computex on 4 June, and confirmed what an Intel insider said that the chip would be launched at Computex.

The fact that Intel is using Computex to launch its next generation chip is not surprising, given that there are few big IT shows during the summer and launching the chip later will not give the firm’s system builder and OEM partners enough time to gear up marketing for the lucrative back to school and holiday buying seasons.

While Intel’s Haswell launch is a big event for the firm, it isn’t the most important. Rather, the firm is expected to launch updated low-power Atom chips that it hopes will help it compete in the tablet market, a market that is growing, as opposed to the PC market that Haswell addresses.

Intel’s decision to launch at Computex means that the late spring computer industry show should be awash with updated notebook and desktop PCs, as well as the firm’s preferred ultrabook branded laptops.

Source

« Previous Page — Next Page »