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...
Intel at CES 2020: 45W 10th Gen Mobile CPUs Soon, Tiger Lake with Xe Graphics Later
As we move into 2020, there is a lot of talk about what Intel’s 2020 plans will be. Discussions about the expansion of Intel’s 10nm process node products, such...
57 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 1/6/2020An Interconnected Interview with Intel’s Ramune Nagisetty: A Future with Foveros
I’ve constantly stated for the last two years that the next battleground in performance for the semiconductor market is going to be in the interconnect – whether we’re speaking...
19 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 1/3/2020How to Tarnish Platinum: Sell It as Xeon 9200
in 2019, Intel announced its Cascade Lake family of enterprise processors, and sitting at the top of the stack was the Cascade Lake-AP family: a quartet of parts that...
99 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 1/2/2020An Interview with AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster: ‘There’s More Room At The Top’
On the back of a very busy 2019, AMD is gaining market share and is now a performance leader in a lot of CPU segments. The company has executed...
68 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/30/2019AnandTech Year In Review 2019: Lots of CPUs
Throughout 2019, we’ve had quite the reverse of performance when it comes to the competitiveness of the modern performance-oriented desktop processor. This year we’ve seen AMD introduce its Zen...
25 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/27/2019Western Digital Rolls-Out Two New SweRV RISC-V Cores For Microcontrollers
Western Digital has added two new processor cores — the SweRV Core EH2 and the SweRV Core EL2 — into its SweRV portfolio of microcontroller CPUs. And, keeping in...
14 by Anton Shilov on 12/13/2019The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown: AMD's Ryzen Picasso vs. Intel's Ice Lake
Occasionally the stars align. It is very rare in the laptop space that we're able to test two devices, with two very different CPU platforms, with the fewest number...
174 by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on 12/13/2019Samsung to Use SiFive RISC-V Cores for SoCs, Automotive, 5G Applications
At the annual RISC-V Summit this week, Samsung disclosed the use SiFive’s RISC-V cores for upcoming chips for a variety of applications. The company is joining a growing list...
18 by Anton Shilov on 12/12/2019Early TSMC 5nm Test Chip Yields 80%, HVM Coming in H1 2020
Today at the IEEE IEDM Conference, TSMC is presenting a paper giving an overview of the initial results it has achieved on its 5nm process. This process is going...
64 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/11/2019EUV Wafers Processed and TwinScan Machine Uptime: A Quick Look
One of the interesting elements that came out of some of our discussions at the IEDM conference this year revolve around the present deployment of EUV. Currently only one...
29 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/11/2019Intel’s Manufacturing Roadmap from 2019 to 2029: Back Porting, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm, 2nm, and 1.4 nm
One of the interesting disclosures here at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) has been around new and upcoming process node technologies. Almost every session so far this...
138 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/11/2019Intel: Lakefield in 2020, Possible 5G on Foveros
At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) 2019, Intel had two package integration presentations, one on its Omni-Directional Interconnect and one on its 3D stacking Foveros technology. In...
37 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/11/2019Intel Un-Discontinues Pentium G3420 ‘Haswell’ CPU
As spotted by ComputerBase.de, in a rare event, Intel has canceled its plan to EOL one of its low-end Haswell-generation processors, resuming processor shipments for the foreseeable future. Curiously...
49 by Anton Shilov on 12/9/2019Arm Server CPUs: You Can Now Buy Ampere’s eMAG in a Workstation
One of the critical elements to all these new server-class Arm processors is availability. We are not yet at the point where these chips are freely sold on the...
19 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 12/6/2019AWS Designing a 32-Core Arm Neoverse N1 CPU for Cloud Servers
Amazon Web Services’s CPU design unit is working on a new multi-core processor for AWS servers. The new CPU is said to use Arm’s new Neoverse N1 architecture and...
12 by Anton Shilov on 12/2/2019Dell: Intel CPU Shortages Worsened in Q4, Premium & Commercial PCs Impacted
Shortages of Intel’s CPUs have persisted for well over a year now, but according to Dell, they actually got worse in the ongoing quarter because of unexpectedly high demand...
82 by Anton Shilov on 11/27/2019The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm
One of the constant themes of 2019 has been to ask AMD employees about the future of its Threadripper line of products. Since the start of the year we’ve...
245 by Dr. Ian Cutress, Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on 11/25/2019It’s a Cascade of 14nm CPUs: AnandTech’s Intel Core i9-10980XE Review
The most profitable process node in the history of Intel has been its 14nm process. Since 2014, the company has been pumping out CPUs built on a variety of...
79 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/25/2019AMD Pre-Announces 64-core Threadripper 3990X: Time To Open Your Wallet
Ever since AMD announced its latest enterprise platform, Rome, and the EPYC 7002 series, one question that high-end desktop users have been wondering is when the 64-core hardware will...
52 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 11/25/2019AMD Clarifies "Best Cores" vs "Preferred Cores" Discrepancies For Ryzen CPUs
Over the last several weeks there’s been increasing discussions in the AMD enthusiast community about how the company’s new Ryzen 3000 processors interact with Windows, and in particular on...
62 by Andrei Frumusanu on 11/21/2019