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Will Intel Haswell V2 Be Efficient?
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It is being said that Intel made a bold battery life claim that hasn’t been really advertised by the company so far.
At this point it doesn’t benefit Intel to announce it, as such news can change in a heartbeat, but it looks as if the Haswell 2 chip platform, a part of Shark Bay 2013 platform, should have significantly better battery life than the previous Ivy Bridge 2012 generation.
Our sources close to Intel claim that we can expect as much as up to 70 percent more battery life compared to an equivalent Chief River (Ivy Bridge) platform. This is a huge success. Compared to an existing generation platform and even in the Shark bay Ultrabook baseline feature Intel dares to share that we can expect whole-day battery life.
When Intel and other companies talk about all-day battery life, it usually means a working day, or eight hours, so don’t be tricked into thinking that whole day battery life means 24 hours. Most Ultrabooks today can deliver 5 to 6 hours and it looks like this is about to change with Shark Bay Ultrabooks, that are expected in Q3 2013.
Haswell just got a bit more attractive in our eyes as it will bring a lot of computing power and decent battery life that makes it much more competitive against tablets. It appears that Haswell convertible notebooks really have a chance in the war against ARM based tablets, but they will still be pricier.
AMD Delays Cards
While some people are packing in smoking, AMD thinks it is a good idea to pack in releasing new graphics cards, at least for a year or so.
AMD marketing manager Robert Hallock told Megagames that the company has no intentions to release Radeon HD 8000 series cards for the foreseeable future.
“The HD 7000 Series will remain our primary focus for quite some time,” he said.
When pressed he said that AMD and its partners are happy with the HD 7000 Series, and it will continue to be its emphasis in the channel for the foreseeable future. There had been some rumours that an HD 8000 Series was being developed. However AMD has never confirmed it and so far there has been no proof that any were ready to show up.
Hallock’s comments lend credibility to rumours that the HD 8000 family won’t be out before Q4 2013.
No LTE On IBM’s SoC Until 2014
Intel is working on integrated LTE modems for its upcoming SoC designs, but CEO Paul Otellini claims they will not be ready for prime time until 2014.
In a recent conference call Otellini was directly asked about Intel’s plans for LTE integration and said “higher levels of integration” are expected next year. He went on to say that the first Intel-based phones with LTE should launch in early 2014, in time for the Mobile World Congress.
Otellini said Intel’s wireless team, formerly a business unit of Infineon, is making good progress in LTE.
“We believe we have a very competitive solution. The Infineon team is known for not necessarily being first to market, but being really good at engineering a very solid solution and being cost effective and cost competitive and I think that they are doing a very good job with respect to this product,” said Otellini.
Intel Makes Changes To Haswell
Intel has started dividing its mobile market segments into processors lines, where the Y processor line goes up to 11.5W TDP, U line covers chips in the 15W to 25W range, while the M line covers 37W, 47W as well as 57W TDP space, with two to four cores and graphics up to GT2.
The high performance H processor line is yet another BGA package processor line that also aims for 37W, 47W and 57W TDPs, with quad-core processors and up to GT3 graphics with on-package cache memory.
Intel expects that high performing gaming and workstation PCs will go use these processors and they fit some thick clamshell designs, no Ultrabooks with 57W unless you would want to use one for welding.
Intel currently doesn’t detail the processor number and the number of SKUs but it is obvious that they will end up with quad-core Core i7 branding for QC1+ and QC2+ market segments.
Broadcom Goes UltraHD
January 16, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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As TV manufacturers show off UltraHD TVs at CES, communications chip maker Broadcom is introducing the guts of future gateways that will be able to deliver video for those sets into viewers’ homes.
Broadcom’s BCM7445 silicon platform, announced just hours before the show opened on Tuesday morning, will be able to process incoming video from cable, carrier and satellite services that has four times the resolution of typical 1080p video offered today, according to the company.
Like the eye-catching but expensive TVs on the show floor in Las Vegas, the BCM7445 is just one of the first of many steps to consumers watching UltraHD shows at home. New content, displays and delivery technologies will all be required for the new resolution, which is also known as 4K.
Broadcom expects its chip to be in volume production by the middle of next year, in time for mainstream UltraHD TVs that will probably hit the market for the late 2014 holiday season, said Joe Del Rio, associate product line manager at Broadcom. However, service providers, which will probably be the distributors of most of the gateways built with the BCM7445, may take longer to start sending UltraHD video to their subscribers, Del Rio said.
Sharp Says No To Intel
January 15, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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While Sharp is desperately looking for more cash, it appears that it will try busking outside CES with a dog on a string before it takes money from Intel.
A senior senior executive from the Japanese company told the Mercury News denied that the company was looking for money from Intel. Industry analysts had speculated that Intel and Sharp, which supplies screens to Apple (AAPL) for its latest iPhonem, were in investment discussions.
Sharp is fighting for survival after years of losses. In November, it said it may not be able to survive on its own after full-year net losses to doubled to $5.6 billion. Sharp Vice President Kozo Takahashi told reporters at a roundtable briefing on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the company’s finances have been weakened considerably and we are considering ways to deal with that.
Intel’s Haswell Goes 13W
Intel’s Haswell Y-series processors as we said a few weeks ago have yet launch. The current plan is to launch two Ivy SKUs in Q1 2013, both dual-cores, and later in 2013 Intel plans to replace them with Haswell Y series parts, with even lower TDP.
The faster one is called Core i7 3689Y and has two cores and two threads, as well as a base clock of 1.5GHz. With the help of Intel Turbo Boost 2.0, the top single-core turbo clock is an impressive 2.6GHz, while the maximum dual-core turbo clock stops at 2.4GHz, which is still impressive. This core comes with Intel HD graphics 4000 clocked between 350MHz and 860MHz with turbo.
This new core supports both DDR3 and DDR3L at 1600MHz, has 4MB of cache and impressively low 13W TDP. We have explained that SDP stands for Standard Dissipation Power and Intel expect it to be at 7W for this part.
The runner up is called Core i5 3439Y and has the same two cores and two threads with 1.5GHz base clock, but the single core turbo clock stops at 2.3GHz, while the dual-core top clock is 2.10GHz. The graphics speed, TDP and memory support remain the same, but there is a difference in cache size. Core i5 3439Y comes with 3MB instead of 4MB for Core i7 Y series 3689Y part.
Raspberry Pi Gets A Store
Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened a store to enable users to easily download applications that run on the credit-card sized computer.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation said it partnered with Indiecity and Velocix to create a store for applications that run on the Raspberry Pi computer. The Foundation said that the store itself is an application that runs under its Raspbian Linux distribution and at launch has 23 applications available for download.
The Raspberry Pi Store contains games such as Freeciv alongside applications such as Libreoffice and Asterisk. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said its store accepts compiled binaries, Python code, images, audio and video.
The Raspberry Pi Store will allow developers to charge for applications, with the Foundation saying that it hopes to see a mix of hobbyist and commercial software. The Foundation also asked users that download applications to review them in order to improve the results put out by its recommendations system.
While the Raspberry Pi was initially intended to help teach people how to program, the device has gained wider popularity due to the fact that its hardware can run many typical PC desktop applications. The Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Store will make it easier for users to find and install applications on the device, which can only be a good thing for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Linux adoption.
AMD Offers More Radeon Chips
AMD has announced four Radeon HD 8000M series GPU chips sporting its latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
AMD’s GCN architecture made its first appearance in the firm’s ultra high-end mobile chips, however next month’s CES show will see the firm show off laptops featuring four Radeon HD 8000M series chips. The firm’s four Radeon HD 8000M chips are pitched at the mainstream and gaming laptop markets, though the company said that Asus already has a laptop announced that will use the chips in an ‘ultrathin’ design.
AMD’s Radeon HD 8000M series sees the firm split three chips with the same number of stream processors and memory clock speeds that scale up to 1.25GHz but differentiated by their core speeds. The firm’s Radeon HD 8500M, Radeon HD 8600M and Radeon HD 8700M all have 384 stream processors but are clocked up to 650MHz, 775MHz and between 650MHz and 850MHz, respectively.
Topping AMD’s present range is the Radeon HD 8800M, which has 640 stream processors and is clocked at between 650MHz and 700MHz, while its GDDR5 memory is also clocked at 1.25GHz. All of the firm’s chips, by virtue of being based on the GCN architecture, support DirectX 11.1.
AMD said it will launch three more chips in the Radeon HD 8000M series in the second quarter of 2013. According to the firm’s roadmap, two of those chips will sit above the Radeon HD 8800M in terms of performance while the third will straddle somewhere between the Radeon HD 8600M and Radeon HD 8700M.
AMD was tight-lipped on the power figures for its chips, saying that full details of its Radeon HD 8000M series chips will appear at CES, where its partners will tip up with laptops sporting the chips.
Intel Details 22nm SoC
Thanks to a long spate of bad luck over at AMD, Intel now finds itself in a rather safe market lead, at least in high-end and server markets. However, in the low-end and mobile, Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
ARM still dominates the mobile market and Intel is looking to take on the British chip designer with new 22nm SoCs of its own. Intel outlined its SoC strategy at the 2012 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco the other day.
The cunning plan involves 3D tri gate transistors and Intel’s 22nm fabrication process, or in other words it is a brute force approach. Intel can afford to integrate the latest tech in cheep and cheerful 22nm Atoms, thus making them more competitive in terms of power efficiency.
Since Intel leads the way with new manufacturing processes it already has roughly a year of experience with 22nm chips, while ARM partners rely on 28nm, 32nm and more often than not, 40nm processes. Intel’s next generation SoCs will also benefit from other off-the-shelf Intel tech, such as 3D tri-gate transistors.