CPU

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 …

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 …

Intel Corp.’s NGPTIM [next-generation polymer thermal interface material], which was supposed to bring back record overclocking capabilities to the company’s processors is better than its predecessor, but is significantly worse than commercially available thermal interfaces, a new research has found out. Earlier this year Intel Corp.’s promised that its Core …

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. …

Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., once said that the company’s upcoming microprocessors code-named Broadwell would be available by the holiday season and “not at the last second of holiday.” According to a revised launch schedule of Intel’s 14nm chips, the Broadwell family of central processing units will …

Intel Corp. on Monday announced that it has entered into a manufacturing agreement with Panasonic Corp. The world’s largest chipmaker will produce Panasonic’s next-generation system-on-chips using 14nm low-power manufacturing process. Panasonic's future SoCs will target audio visual-based equipment markets (TVs, Blu-ray players, media players, etc.), and will enable higher levels of …

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), a China-based contract maker of chips, and Qualcomm on Thursday announced that SMIC will produce Qualcomm’s Snapdragon system-on-chips for mobile devices using 28nm process technology in China. The move will help Qualcomm to boost production of its advanced SoCs and lower their manufacturing costs. As …

In a bid to better compete against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Samsung Semiconductor and GlobalFoundries earlier this year agreed to unify one of their 14nm process technologies and offer their foundry services collaboratively. Apparently, the tactics has worked out and the two companies recently landed orders to make chips using the …

Intel Corp.’s Tick-Tock strategy has never let the company and its partners down throughout its eight years in place. Every year Intel released new chips that were either made using all-new process technology or featured brand-new micro-architecture. However, everything will be different next year when Intel releases both Broadwell and …

In the recent years Intel Corp. has been consistently reducing power consumption of its chips using different methods. The company not only developed very efficient low-power micro-architectures (such as the Silvermont), but it also managed to design special versions of its processors based on high-performance micro-architectures with extremely low power …

International Business Machines Corp. is expected to accomplish two important transactions this year: it is projected to complete sale of its x86 server division to Lenovo Group and it is rumoured that the company will also agree to sell its semiconductor manufacturing business to GlobalFoundries. However, the U.S. regulators may …

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, Intel Corp. unveiled additional details regarding its next-generation Xeon Phi co-processor code-named “Knights Landing.” As it appears, the KNL chip will not only offer breakthrough performance, but it will also provide breakthrough programmability thanks to the fact that it will feature modern …

Nvidia Corp. and Samsung Electronics have decided to withdraw from development of server-class system-on-chips based on the ARMv8 instruction set. Since there are too many similar server chips in development, the two companies most likely do not want to compete in an extremely crowded market. Both Nvidia and Samsung design …

The world of processing units is altering. With the ARM architecture entering the market of servers and the Power architecture available for licensing by third parties, a lot is going to change within the next five years. Thanks to the fact that similar processing technologies will be available from different …

Intel Corp. has asked its arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices to provide it access to the Mantle application programming interface (API), AMD said last week. While in its current form Mantle can hardly bring any tangible benefits to Intel, the latter could redesign the API in order to allow software developers …

A few days ago AMD’s Roy Taylor teased us on Twitter with a picture of an unnamed CPU from the FX series. However, the cat is out of the bag now and we know that AMD's mysterious CPU is in-fact going to be a re-launch of the 5GHz FX-9590 bundled with …

Our review of the new Intel Core i7 4790K. It has been some time coming even though we have had an Intel sample for some time now. We wanted to take our time and not only review the processor but create a little overclocking guide for our readers buying one. We found a lot of interesting things - including some processor degradation when we pushed it too hard, for too long. All things considered Is this the processor you want to consider for your next system? What about Intel's new Intel’s NGPTIM? How does it overclock? How is power consumption? How does it rate beside the 4770K?

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release another FX-series desktop microprocessor that will come bundled with closed-loop liquid cooling system, the firm said this week. The company did not unveil any details about the upcoming chip, but demonstrated its packaging and said that it will be available soon. Roy Taylor, vice …

The launch date of the of Intel Corp.’s next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) microprocessors code-named “Haswell-E” has been revealed by a web-site. The new chips as well as the new X99 desktop platform will be released in mid-September, just like their predecessors. Intel plans to officially release the Core i7-5960X, the …

For several years now Intel Corp. has configured some of its Xeon processors in accordance with demands of its large customers, such as Amazon or Facebook. Earlier this year Intel agreed to install FPGAs [field programmable gate arrays] into the package of its Xeon central processing units in order to …