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...
TSMC Q1 2021 Process Node Revenue: More 7nm, No More 20nm
This week TSMC has disclosed its full quarterly financial results for Q1 2021. In those results the company often explains where the revenue demand is for its technologies, and...
40 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 4/15/2021AMD Ryzen 5000G APUs: OEM Only For Now, Full Release Later This Year
With the high demand for semiconductors causing most companies to focus on their high margin, high profitability components, I wasn’t expecting to see many launches of low-to-mid range hardware...
67 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 4/13/2021NVIDIA Unveils Grace: A High-Performance Arm Server CPU For Use In Big AI Systems
Kicking off another busy Spring GPU Technology Conference for NVIDIA, this morning the graphics and accelerator designer is announcing that they are going to once again design their own...
119 by Ryan Smith on 4/12/2021AMD Issues Updated Speculative Spectre Security Status: Predictive Store Forwarding
The mention of Spectre and Meltdown is enough to send chills down any InfoSec spine. A number of these batches of security vulnerabilities deal with speculative execution, and how...
63 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 4/8/2021Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake SP) Review: Generationally Big, Competitively Small
The launch of Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors has been in the wings for a number of years. The delays to Intel’s 10nm manufacturing process have given a...
169 by Andrei Frumusanu on 4/6/2021Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade
Today, as part of Arm’s Vision Day event, the company is announcing the first details of the company’s new Armv9 architecture, setting the foundation for what Arm hopes to...
74 by Andrei Frumusanu on 3/30/2021Intel Rocket Lake (14nm) Review: Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K, and Core i5-11600K
Today is the official launch of Intel’s 11th Generation Core processor family, given the internal name ‘Rocket Lake’. Rocket Lake showcases new performance gains for Intel in the desktop...
279 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/30/2021Intel’s x86 Designs No Longer Limited to Intel on Intel: IP Blocks for Foundry, Cores on TSMC
Today Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger has outlined two key changes to Intel policy: one derived from Intel’s plans to offer foundry services to external partners, and the other from...
70 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/23/2021Intel to Revive ‘Tick-Tock’ Model, Unquestioned CPU Leadership Performance in 2024/2025
As part of today’s announcements, during Intel’s Q&A session after the prepared remarks, CEO Pat Gelsinger explained how Intel is going to revive its fortunes when it comes to...
110 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/23/2021Intel’s New IDM 2.0 Strategy: $20b for Two Fabs, Meteor Lake 7nm Tiles, New Foundry Services, IBM Collaboration, Return of IDF
The new CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, has today outlined his vision for Intel over the coming years. During an online presentation entitled ‘Intel Unleashed: Engineering The Future’, Pat...
159 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/23/2021Intel’s DPG Launch Event April 6th: Early Look at 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake)
Today Intel has announced that it will be holding a launch event on April 6th for the new vision of its Data Platform Group. This event is set to...
29 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/19/2021Intel’s New Adaptive Boost Technology: Floating Turbo Comes to Rocket Lake
A couple of days after Intel officially announced its 11th Generation Core Rocket Lake, the press received an email about a new feature coming to the platform that wasn’t...
123 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/19/2021Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger To Host Webcast About Intel’s Future On March 23rd
Intel today has announced that the company will be holding an event on March 23rd to discuss the future of engineering at the company. Dubbed “Intel Unleashed: Engineering the...
33 by Ryan Smith on 3/17/2021Qualcomm Completes Acquisition of NUVIA: Immediate focus on Laptops (Updated)
Today Qualcomm is announcing that the company has completed the acquisition of NUVIA, a start-up company consisting of industry veterans who were behind the creation of Apple’s high-performance CPU...
25 by Andrei Frumusanu on 3/16/2021Intel Launches Rocket Lake 11th Gen Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5
In the myriad of news and early reviews, Intel is today officially launching its 11th Generation Core family of desktop processors, also known as Rocket Lake, built on Intel’s...
156 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/16/2021AMD Ryzen Pro 5000 Mobile: Zen 3 comes to Commercial Notebooks
Alongside every launch of AMD’s consumer processors, the commercial offerings for business come along a few months after. Today we see the commercial launch of the Ryzen 5000 Mobile...
18 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/16/2021The Tour of Italy with EPYC Milan: Interview with AMD's Forrest Norrod
As AMD initiates the official global launch of its 3rd Generation EPYC enterprise processor family, codename Milan, we spend some time with AMD’s Forrest Norrod to discuss the new...
19 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/15/2021AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review: A Peak vs Per Core Performance Balance
The arrival of AMD’s 3rd Generation EPYC processor family, using the new Zen 3 core, has been hotly anticipated. The promise of a new processor core microarchitecture, updates to...
120 by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on 3/15/2021Rocket Lake Redux: 0x34 Microcode Offers Small Performance Gains on Core i7-11700K
One of the leading questions as to our original Core i7-11700K review was the validity of those results given that, as usual with launches, motherboard vendors push BIOS updates...
90 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/14/2021Intel Ice Lake Xeon Scalable Shipments To Date: 30 Customers, 100k+ Units
We’re gearing up for a busy time when it comes to server announcements, with the recent news that AMD will be launching its next generation platform on March 15th...
30 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 3/9/2021