CPU Archives - Page 3 of 3 - VR World

2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, VR World

Intel Unleashes Devil's Canyon, Boosts the Desktop

Intel has made it quite clear that they are dead set on reviving the PC market, especially from the high performance desktop point of view. They are showing their commitment to that vision today with the announcement of their new Devil’s Canyon refresh to the Haswell CPUs that they had launched last year. These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to accompany the company’s newly launched Z97 chipset, which adds a few minor features to the already existing Z87 chipset that Haswell had launched with. In fact, Gigabyte launched their full Z97 line of motherboards yesterday incorporating some of the new features of the Z97

2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Hardware, VR World

Gigabyte Introduces New 9 Series Z97 Motherboards

As you would expect, Gigabyte has announced their new line of 9 series Intel chipset motherboards, with the primary focus being on their Z97 chipset motherboards. This time around, Gigabyte will have four different flavors of Z97 boards, which will support both 4th and 5th generation Intel Core processors. Gigabyte has rolled over a lot of the things from their Z87 line of motherboards, but also made some modifications and improvements to make the Z97 a worthwhile upgrade. Gigabyte’s four different lines are their Gaming line, Ultra Durable line, Overclocking line and a new Black Edition line. The bulk of Gigabyte’s boards are going to

Enterprise, Hardware, Rumors

Intel Skylake and 100 Series Chipset Details Leak

The guys over at VR-Zone have scored what appears to be a roadmap document that details the changeover from Broadwell and Haswell over to Skylake. In the document, there is a vast amount of information, including the disclosure of the fact that there will be one chipset for consumer and server. This may ultimately mean that consumers will no longer have to suffer with inferior chipsets and enterprise won’t lose certain features that aren’t deemed ‘enterprise’. Not to mention, by having one chipset for both consumer and server, Intel can drive better volumes of that single chip and improve inefficiencies and profitability. If you

Hardware, Mobile Computing, VR World

AMD Launches Beema and Mullins Low Power APUs

AMD has been working on enabling their customers and partners to be able to create new and exciting products that utilize their technology, and with the final launch of Beema and Mullins we finally see what all the hubub is all about. These are going to be AMD’s latest offerings for the mainstream APUs and for low-power with Beema being the mainstream APU and Mullins being the low-power APU, even though both of them are fairly low power as it is already. With the introduction of these new chips we will be seeing AMD increasing the CPU and GPU performance while simultaneously reducing power consumption

Analysis, Business, Graphics, Hardware, VR World

AMD Reports Expected Improvement in Q1 2014 Earnings

After Intel reported their earnings for the first quarter of 2014, many people expected AMD’s earnings to mirror that of Intel’s or to do worse. Well, by the looks of it, AMD’s earnings have mirrored that of Intel’s in terms of remaining fairly stable and ensuring that their core business is strong. AMD reported a net loss of $20 million (or a non-GAAP profit of $12 million) on $1.4 billion in revenue which translates to a loss per share of about $0.02 or a non-GAAP profit per share of about $0.02. Wall Street’s estimates for AMD’s non-GAAP earnings were at an EPS of $0.00 and

Hardware, Mobile Computing, VR World

Qualcomm Announces 20nm Snapdragon 808 and Snapdragon 810 64-Bit Chips

Qualcomm has been fairly quiet about their high-end ambitions after what is expected to follow the soon-to-launch Snapdragon 805 chipset. The Snapdragon 805 is Qualcomm’s chip that will likely ship in devices next quarter and is marketed by Qualcomm as their 4K chip with the Adreno 420 GPU. Now, even though the Snapdragon 805 (APQ8084) is a very powerful chip, it lacks 64-bit capability and doesn’t have an integrated modem, requiring a separate modem like Qualcomm’s 20nm MDM9x35 to enable cellular capability. It also sports an improved Krait CPU with a Krait 450 CPU compared to the Snapdragon 801 and 800’s Krait 400. However, it

3D, Business, CPU, Hardware, Internet

Israeli-backed company completes acquisition of Transmeta

The suffering is finally over and the acquisition of Transmeta is completed.

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel

TSMC introduces 40nm volume production, advances in front of Intel

A while ago, I spoke with my sources at TSMC, who were quite decisive to make it to the front on the field of chip manufacturing. Heads of this Taiwanese giant decided to invest more than 10 billion USD in order to become world’s most advanced manufacturer, and their roadmap is more aggressive than anyone in the industry. The results of that investment are slowly coming to life, and as of today, TSMC has more advanced manufacturing process than any other competitor in the manufacturing business. Intel will argue its (very important, though) Hafnium or High-K material, but ever since I became a journalist, Intel

AMD, Business, Companies, CPU, Hardware, Intel

Arctic Silver 5 goes whoopsie or “No silver paste for me”

Recently, my friend decided to upgrade his system from AMD Athlon 5000+ Black Edition and GigaByte 7-Series motherboard to Core 2 Duo E8500, hopefully to run at 3.8 GHz (FSB1600). 5000+ worked hard for almost a year at 3GHz, a nice speed bump from default clocks. Back in July, he replaced previous cooler with OCZ Vendetta, and bought Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste (high density one) for better heat transfer. Fast forward to November, and the time for upgrade has come. Ivan decided to keep his OCZ Vendetta cooler, and we removed the motherboard from the case. This was followed by CPU cooler removal, but

AMD, Companies, CPU, Hardware, Intel

Intel starts to phase out 65nm CPUs

If anyone doubts Intel’s leadership in the world of CPUs and manufacturing, just think of the following: its nearest competitor is yet to ship its 45nm products in any volume, while Chipzilla started to phase out 65nm CPUs as 45nm ones took over. While the world is waiting on AMD’s Shanghai and Deneb, Intel’s 45nm Core and Xeon processors overtook 65nm ones and the company decided to phase out or EOL (End Of Life) no less than 31 different 65nm processors. Intel claims the company has achieved break point between 45nm and 65 and that majority (roughly 60%) of CPUs in Q4 will be manufactured

3D, AMD, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel, Software Programs

Badaboom’s CPU utilization issue explained

After the first look here, I managed to again speak with Sam and Mike of Elemental fame, who got back to me regarding my comments on high CPU utilization. I’ve experienced close to 100% load on AMD’s dual-core processor, while AMD’s quad-core worked normally. According to Elemental, CPU utilization can be high on a dual-core processor if you do low-resolution transcodes (which is kinda the natural purpose of this application). This is a natural latency between the CPU and the GPU that happens during moving frames between the GPU video memory and the CPU and its (system) memory. Guys haven’t experienced this on Intel platform,

3D, CPU, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Mobile Computing, Software Programs, Uncategorized

UPDATED: Elemental’s video transcoder rocks the world

Back in May 2008, Nvidia’s Editors Day hosted a presentation by young guys from Elemental Technologies Inc (ETI). The demonstrated software was Badaboom, CUDA-powered video transcoder that demolished Intel’s Core 2 Quad processor when used in conjuction with GeForce 8800GTS. Months have passed, and guys worked hard on developing Badaboom in order to be ready for August release. But, their second project, RapiHD encoder for Premiere CS4 Pro needed some engineering help. So, the guys pushed back the release of Badaboom and Badaboom Pro until after the launch of CS4. It was a tough call, but with the release of Adobe Creative Studio 4 over

3D, Software Programs

The ultimate picture stitch/texture maker app is here!

If you ever worked with combining multiple pictures or creating textures, most of you remember what royal PITA it was. But, with imageSynth utility from Luxology that became a thing of the past – and it didn’t stop there. Luxology just announced imageSynth 2, application that works either as plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4, or as a stand-alone application. Maker claims that imageSynth brings 10x speed increase over previous version, but we wonder how that could be if the company is not supporting GPU acceleration. Well…the secret lies in the fact that Luxology works hard on optimizing threading on all the CPUs, so a quad-core

3D, Hardware, Software Programs, VR World

Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)

I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, Graphics, Intel

AMD reports $1.78B revenue, records first profit in years (non-GAAP)

On Thursday, AMD reported its Q3’2008 results and the company managed to “Experience Black” (marketing slogan behind 4870X2). When we look at overall (non-GAAP) numbers, AMD filed $1.776 billion revenue and a profit of 80 million dollars. This was the first filed profit in seven quarters, and in a way, Hector J. Ruiz kept its promise of AMD becoming profitable by Q3’08. However, the results that Wall Street calculates are GAAP ones, and without that one-time revenue of $191 million (selling equipment to JSC Angstrem, as I first reported here), the company filed a net loss of $67 million on a revenue of $1.56 billion.

Business, Companies, Intel

Atom helps Intel to score a big one, beats expectations

In a stark contrast to conservative projections by analysts, Intel (stock: INTC) announced that the company achieved a revenue of $10.22 billion, beating the estimates. Chipzilla achieved clear two billion dollar profit in Q3’08, or 35 cents per share. The reason for this 12% jump in profits is no other than Intel Atom, chip that reportedly costs only $8 to make, giving Intel additional $200 million in its Q3 revenue. Without Atom and associated chipsets, their revenue would dip below 10 billion. This only goes to show that Intel executed properly and went for the segment of market that has just started to expand. Cheap