Displaying items by tag: CPU

Intel intends to introduce three lower-end processors for the lower segment of the market very soon which will be based on existing architectures. In the plan are the Celeron G470 chipset, Core i3-3245 and Core i3-3250, with the Celeron model based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, and the remaining two have Ivy Bridge processor design.

AMD has introduced another processor within the Vishera platform for AM3 + socket. It is a quad-core FX-4130 chip with a Piledriver architecture. This new CPU inherits the old model name FX-4100 and it is very similar in price and performance. It looks like AMD wants to give at least a small upgrade for users of this older socket.

The Irish agency for construction planning An Bord Pleanala approved Intel’s plans to build a new factory for the production of processors. It is a facility in which they should produce processors built on the 14 nanometer process, and should be located in the Intel campus in Leixlip County Kildare.

The rise of the ARM architecture has been a meteoric one and came as something of a shock to many of the mainstream players in the mobile industry. The concept for the ARM based SoC (System on Chip) is pretty simple: build a small, energy efficient device that is able to use memory and processor cycles as efficiently as possible.  This is what x86 CPU manufacturers are trying to do as well.  So why are there more manufacturers of ARM based SoCs than there are x86? Well, the problem here is one of licensing. You see, it is much easier and less expensive to license the ARM architecture than it is x86. Right now there are very few players that even have an x86 license. This limits the competition down quite a bit and also (unfortunately) slows progress. However, the fight between Intel and ARM is just heating up. And despite the small number of players in the x86 market, things are far from certain in this area as we enter into a new round of combat between RISC and CISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing and Complete Instruction Set Computing).

Intel plans to launch another line of processors specifically designed for tablets in the first quarter next year. This is a core chip from their Y series based on the Ivy Bridge architecture and in BGA packaging, while in the third quarter of next year Haswell versions of the same series should appear.

Rumors of the demise of Scythe USA may be just that.  In a press release yesterday, Masahiro Sakai, CEO of Scythe USA Inc., published a post on their website stating in part that "Scythe USA had to make the difficult decision to end its operations as a result of the closure of its parent company."

Yesterday there was a flurry of news posts with dire warnings that Intel would soon be removing the ability to upgrade your CPU. The news talked about the future of Intel CPUs and their associated sockets after Haswell.  When we first saw some of these posts they read like the latest Facebook update rumors, but as with many rumors there is a nugget of truth somewhere in them (at least most of the time). We did reach out to Intel, but as expected they were not able to comment on unannounced products and had nothing more to say. So exactly what is going on with Intel and the future of the DIY market, let’s take a look and see if we can make some sense of the rumor that is going around.

AMD has lowered the prices for a total of eighteen processors from older generations, mainly for FM1 and AM3 sockets. Within the A Series APU chips for FM1 socket prices were changed for six processors, ranging from a minimum of 3.7% for A6-3670K (from $80 to $77) to 21.7% ($46 to $36) for A4-3300.

The recently introduced AMD FX processors codenamed Vishera could remain on the market throughout the next year. Unofficial sources have said in part of the presentation that showed AMD's processor roadmap for the coming year, apparently FX chips for desktop computers will stagnate on Vishera solutions with the Piledriver core.

While today's high-end smartphones feature dual-core and quad-core processors, one day in smartphones and tablets Intel would like to see their future 48-core processors. It is no surprise considering that Intel at this point is largely ignored  from mobile platforms in the market, which is dominated by the ARM architecture.