APU

ARM Holding this week said it has signed its 50th licensing agreement for its ARMv8-A technology, which includes support for 64-bit computing. The milestone indicates growing popularity of ARM’s 64-bit technology among developers of various system-on-chips. It is likely that going forward the adoption of the ARMv8-A will accelerate. ARM …

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is on-track to start volume production of chips in the first quarter of 2015, according to a media report. The first client to order 16nm chips from TSMC is expected to be Apple, which is a little bit surprising. TSMC has been making test chips using …

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced a new way to sell its microprocessors to local PC makers. The company plans to ship its chips in packs containing six CPUs/APUs with a discount. The deal will start with the AMD A8-6600K and the Athlon X4 760K processors. AMD claims that the chips were …

Intel Corp.’s code-named “Braswell” microprocessors promise to offer increased performance and improved feature-set to entry-level desktop PCs next year. Unfortunately, actual configurations or performance estimates for the “Braswell” chips have never been released. A good news is that thanks to an unofficial report we now know what to expect from …

Unity Technologies this week said it will add native support for Intel Corp.’s x86 microprocessors and system on chips to its Unity game engine for the Android operating system, which is used by loads of video games. The move will improve performance of games on devices based on Intel’s x86 …

One of the features of Intel Corp.’s Haswell micro-architecture (and Broadwell micro-architecture) were transactional synchronization extensions (TSX), which could significantly boost performance in multi-threaded applications that take advantage of them. As it appears, usage of the technology leads to unpredictable PC behaviour due to an erratum. As a result, Intel …

Advanced Micro Devices yet has to commercially ship its first ARMv8-based system-on-chip for servers code-named Seattle. Nonetheless, the company already says that it is ready to develop semi-custom server-class SoCs for servers based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. The company already offers customized Opteron chips powered by its x86 cores. …

Intel Corp. on Monday reaffirmed plans to start shipments of its next-generation code-named “Broadwell” microprocessors in late 2014 and to make them available in mass quantities in 2015. The announcement is made to persuade investors and partners that there will be no further delays with Intel’s new products as well …

As reported, the deal between International Business Machines Corp. and GlobalFoundries over chip manufacturing assets of the former has failed to materialize because the latter did not want to pay enough to the former. However, according to a new report, it was IBM, who was offering money to GlobalFoundries to take …

Today we look at the latest Kaveri from AMD – the AMD A10 7800. This new APU has a reduced TDP and is clocked slower than the unlocked A10 7850K – down from 3.7ghz to 3.5ghz. It is available in the UK today for £115.66 or around £9 less than …

It looks like the price war on the market of mobile system-on-chips is in full swing. Just a day after Allwinner announced a quad-core application processor that will be sold for $4, it transpired that Intel Corp. already sells its quad-core Atom products for $5. Without making any announcements, Intel has …

Advanced Micro Devices has reportedly chosen to take a rather conservative approach to development of its desktop platforms. Instead of adding support of the DDR4 memory to its next-generation code-named “Carrizo” accelerated processing unit, the company decided to stick to the DDR3 and therefore the FM2+ socket. While this is …

International Business Machines Corp. and GlobalFoundries have ended negotiations regarding acquisition of IBM’s semiconductor manufacturing assets by the contract maker of chips. The two companies failed to agree on the price, according to a media report. Earlier this year it was reported that IBM wanted $2 billion for its money-losing …

Advanced Micro Devices this week started a mysterious “Core is back” campaign by publishing a video on its Facebook page. The campaign is clearly designed to promote AMD’s Fusion accelerated processing units, heterogeneous chips containing x86 and highly-parallel graphics processing cores. The video shows how applications (depicted as monsters) fight …

ARM Holdings, the company whose microprocessor architectures power the vast majority of mobile devices, is working on the second-generation of 64-bit central processing units based on the ARMv8 micro-architecture. Not a lot of details are known about the chips now. What ARM has revealed so far is that they are …

Although there are rumours that Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia Corp. are not really happy with 20nm process technology of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., they will inevitably have to use it. A vice president of AMD said last week that the company’s 20nm chips would be out next year. “20nm …

Advanced Micro Devices this week reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2014. The company did not manage to take advantage of corporate PC replacements, like its rival Intel did, but sales of chips for video game consoles allowed the firm to post rather significant increase in revenue compared …

Last year Intel announced plans to accelerate its Atom roadmap and produce its low-power/low-cost products at the same nodes as its leading-edge chips for desktops and notebooks. Apparently, the widely-discussed issues with the 14nm general-purpose process technology seem to also affect Intel’s 14nm process for low-power system-on-chips. According to a …

Fujitsu Limited and United Microelectronics Corp. plan to form a joint venture that will operate Fujitsu’s semiconductor manufacturing complex in Mie prefecture in Japan. While initially Fujitsu will hold the control stake of the new company, it is going to gradually reduce it. The Japanese conglomerate has been winding down …

The first specifications as well as a block-diagram of AMD’s next-generation code-named “Carrizo” accelerated processing unit (APU) have been published by a web-site. Despite expectations, the “Carrizo” will not support high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies, at least, in its mainstream implementation. Nonetheless, the new chip will carry a fair amount of …

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said this week that it had begun to ship the first wafers processed using its 20nm fabrication technology to customers. The company began mass production of chips using 20nm manufacturing process in early January, the first commercial wafers were shipped to undisclosed customers in June. The …

Although Intel Corp. is behind the schedule with its 14nm manufacturing process, the company claims it has not made any changes to its 10nm schedule. Unfortunately, Intel has not officially revealed exact plans regarding production of chips using 10nm process technology. “We have done no changes or shift to our …

Thanks to strong sales of central processing units for personal computers, servers, tablets and other types of devices, Intel Corp. sold the record number of microprocessors in one quarter ever in the second quarter of its fiscal 2014. The company said that multiple factors affected demand for chips during the …

Chief executive officer of Intel Corp. said that replacement of Windows XP-based personal computers by businesses and enterprises will help the company to sell more microprocessors this fiscal year. While the company does not want to make predictions regarding next year, it does not exclude the possibility that the replacements …

Intel Corp. on Tuesday disclosed its financial results for the second quarter of the year. The company reported revenue of $13.8 billion, net income of $2.8 billion and gross margin of 64.5 per cent. As expected, Intel’s results improved because of better sales of personal computers and continued strong sales …

One of the advantages that some of Intel Corp.’s integrated graphics processors (IGPs) have compared to AMD’s IGPs is a large level four cache that is used to store frequently used data. While at present AMD’s integrate graphics adapters are still faster compared to Intel’s, in the future the latter …

Intel Corp.’s Quark microprocessor for ultra-low-power systems, wearable electronics and smart appliances, has not yet gained any traction on the market, but the world’s largest chipmaker is already working on its replacement that will be available in 2015. The new platform is code-named “Dublin Bay” and at present not a …

In a bid to convince its partners and investors that it is on-track with its Tick-Tock strategy, Intel Corp. reportedly plans to showcase several yet-unannounced products at the Intel Developer Forum event this September. While the company will demonstrate certain new things, it does not mean that everything goes truly …

In a bid to retain its leadership position on the market of contract semiconductor manufacturing, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is reportedly accelerating development of its 10nm FinFET process technology. At present TSMC is the leading contract maker of chips produced using 28nm process technology. It is believed that the company makes considerably …

Intel Corp. has reconsidered the launch schedule of its next-generation microprocessors code-named “Broadwell” and further delayed not only mainstream mobile parts, but also the high-end desktop and notebook models. Based on the new plan, the company may introduce the new Core i-series microprocessors only in July, or even September, 2015. …