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...
AMD CES 2022 Pre-Show Teaser: Ryzen 6000 Series Mobile Processors with RDNA2 & DDR5 Tech
Ahead of tomorrow’s big CES keynote, AMD is offering a spoiler of sorts for one of their product announcements. As it turns out, one of AMD’s forthcoming products, the...
23 by Ryan Smith on 1/3/2022AMD-Xilinx Acquisition Now Expected to Close in Q1 of 2022
AMD this afternoon has sent out a brief update to the public and investors, offering an update on the status of the ongoing Xilinx acquisition. AMD’s purchase of the...
28 by Ryan Smith on 12/30/2021CPU Year In Review 2021: Efficient Cores Are The New Bling
As far as most years ago, 2021 has been an up and down year when it comes to the desktop CPU market. At the beginning of the year, the...
89 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/30/2021AMD and GlobalFoundries Wafer Supply Agreement Updated Once More: Now $2.1B Through 2025
In a short note published by AMD this afternoon as part of an 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, AMD is disclosing that the company has...
71 by Ryan Smith on 12/23/2021Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 3 for Notebooks, Nuvia Core in 2022/2023
There are many column inches detailing Qualcomm’s design wins and marketing strategy, however to paint it all with a broad brush, it has often boiled down to ‘where can...
39 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/22/2021Imagination Launches Catapult Family of RISC-V CPU Cores: Breaking Into Heterogeneous SoCs
December is here, and with it comes several technical summits ahead of the holiday break. The most notable of which this week is the annual RISC-V summit, which is...
62 by Ryan Smith on 12/6/2021United States FTC Files Lawsuit to Block NVIDIA-Arm Acquisition
In the biggest roadblock yet to NVIDIA’s proposed acquisition of Arm, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced this afternoon that the regulatory body will be suing...
175 by Ryan Smith on 12/2/2021Qualcomm x Nuvia: Silicon Sampling in Late 2022, Products in 2023
One of the more curious acquisitions in the last couple of years has been that of Nuvia by Qualcomm. Nuvia was a Silicon Valley start-up founded by the key...
51 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/18/2021Intel: Sapphire Rapids With 64 GB of HBM2e, Ponte Vecchio with 408 MB L2 Cache
This week we have the annual Supercomputing event where all the major High Performance Computing players are putting their cards on the table when it comes to hardware, installations...
69 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/15/2021AMD Confirms Milan-X with 768 MB L3 Cache: Coming in Q1 2022
As an industry, we are slowly moving into an era where how we package the small pieces of silicon together is just as important as the silicon itself. New...
24 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/8/2021AMD Gives Details on EPYC Zen4: Genoa and Bergamo, up to 96 and 128 Cores
Since AMD’s relaunch into high-performance x86 processor design, one of the fundamental targets for the company was to be a competitive force in the data center. By having a...
36 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/8/2021VIA To Offload Parts of x86 Subsidiary Centaur to Intel For $125 Million
As part of their third quarter earnings release, VIA Technologies has announced this morning that the company is entering into an unusual agreement with Intel to offload parts of...
42 by Ryan Smith on 11/5/2021The Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K Review: Hybrid Performance Brings Hybrid Complexity
Today marks the official retail availability of Intel’s 12th Generation Core processors, starting with the overclockable versions this side of the New Year, and the rest in 2022. These...
474 by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on 11/4/2021Intel 12th Gen Core Alder Lake for Desktops: Top SKUs Only, Coming November 4th
Over the past few months, Intel has been drip-feeding information about its next-generation processor family. Alder Lake, commercially known as Intel’s 12th Generation Core architecture, is officially being announced...
395 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 10/27/2021AMD Reports Q3 2021 Earnings: Records All Around
Continuing our earnings season coverage for Q3’21, today we have the yin to Intel’s yang, AMD. The number-two x86 chip and discrete GPU maker has been enjoying explosive growth...
35 by Ryan Smith on 10/26/2021AnandTech Interviews Mike Clark, AMD’s Chief Architect of Zen
AMD is calling this time of the year as its ‘5 years of Zen’ time, indicating that back in 2016, it was starting to give the press the first...
115 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 10/26/2021Intel Reports Q3 2021 Earnings: Client Down, Data Center and IoT Up
Kicking off another earnings season, Intel is once again leading the pack of semiconductor companies in reporting their earnings for the most recent quarter. As the company gets ready...
32 by Ryan Smith on 10/21/2021The Arm DevSummit 2021 Keynote Live Blog: 8am PT (15:00 UTC)
This week seems to be Arm's week across the tech industry. Following yesterday's Arm SoC announcements from Apple, today sees Arm kick off their 2021 developer's summit, aptly named...
21 by Ryan Smith on 10/19/2021Samsung Foundry: 2nm Silicon in 2025
One of the key semiconductor technologies beyond 3D FinFET transistors are Gate-All-Around transistors, which show promise to help extend the ability to drive processors and components to higher performance...
29 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 10/6/2021An Interview with Intel Lab’s Mike Davies: The Next Generation of Neuromorphic Research
As part of the launch of the new Loihi 2 chip, built on a pre-production version of Intel’s 4 process node, the Intel Labs team behind its Neuromorphic efforts...
17 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/30/2021