Posts Tagged ‘CPU’

In its first public presentation, AMD’s new leadership explained a new direction of the company to align itself with an evolving CPU and GPU market. In 2013, AMD will be releasing its first SoCs for desktop and tablet computers. Execution will be key for the company to succeed in a highly competitive market that is dominated by ARM vendors and challenged by Intel.

Intel will try to prove its claims that it can be a powerful manufacturer of processors for smartphones and tablets when its Medfield platform emerges in commercial products in H2 this year. In the same time frame, ARM vendors will release their first notebooks that challenge, conceivably, Intel’s most important and profitable business today. Both Intel and ARM are staging aggressive launches and prepare for a fight that will be much more bloody than the historic processor battles between AMD and Intel. Does Intel have what it takes to dent ARM’s segmentation-driven application processor market? Can ARM deliver processors that are compelling enough to face Intel’s prestigious and performance-driven CPUs?

Intel unveiled at CES its much anticipated entry in the smartphone battle. Previously code-named Medfield, the Atom Z2460 lacks a snappy name, but it arrives with promising features. Intel has struck a partnership with Motorola as well as Lenovo to get the chip into a commercial devices as early as Q2, but only in China initially. There was also Clover Trail, Intel’s SoC for tablets and hybrids.

The technology market is fun to watch because, every few months, a vendor attempts to disrupt it with a new product. This week it is the AMD 8-Core FX processor, which signifies AMD’s willingness to take Intel on for the gaming performance crown. It is aggressively priced and impressively powerful. But is the market ready for an 8-core part?

Intel, Freescale and Marvell have been sued over a common power management system in modern processors that allows the control of power usage in an integrated circuit.

IBM announced that it has developed experimental cognitive computer chips that are based on the structure that were “inspired” by the human brain, which, if used in the future, could be much smaller and use less power than today’s chips.

AMD and Intel are driving their CPUs with integrated graphics processor (IGP) quickly into the market. More than half of all x86 processors shipped in the second quarter of the year were heterogeneous CPUs.

Intel apparently did not suffer any negative impact from its $700 million Sandy Bridge flaw that was disclosed earlier this year. The contrary was the case: Intel was able to increase its microprocessor market share considerably in Q1, while AMD’s share nosedived.

The market seems to think that the folks at ARM and its licensees (TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Marvel, Apple, et. al.) are on the verge of attacking Intel where it is most susceptible – the PC and server space. Indeed, ARM is making inroads with low power designs, and has a virtual monopoly on mobile devices. But the path to PCs and Servers is a very different path than smartphones and tablets. And clearly, Intel doesn’t think it can afford to concede any territory, which is why it is pushing back hard on the mobile heartland of ARM. So let’s step back and see what Intel has going for it vs. the ARM ecosystem.

Intel has big supercomputing plans and claims that exascale supercomputers, which are more than 120 times faster than today’s fastest supercomputer, will arrive within 7 years and 2 years earlier than previously predicted.

There are a handful of events that will go down in my mind as earth shattering. The launch of Windows 95, the return of Steve Jobs to the Apple stage, the launch of the iPod, iPad, iPhone, the launch of the Palm Pre, Nvidia’s first developer’s conference and now the launch of AMD’s Llano processor.

The first Samsung Chromebooks are making their way to consumers much earlier than expected. Their high retail prices seem to be justified, given their high production cost.