One of everlasting legacies from former President of The United States (POTUS) Mr. Barrack Obama will be the creation of Chinese semiconductor industry. Following the ban on completion of Tianhe-2 supercomputer in 2014, Chinese government did not double down, but decided to put semiconductor industry as one of top 3 national priorities, and started to infuse over a quarter of trillion U.S. dollars, i.e. 2 trillion RMB (Yuan) into the domestic semiconductor industry, creating not a train, but a “Hyperloop Express” that is changing the semiconductor industry landscape. First, we’re starting to see the power of homegrown computers with ShenWei 260-core CPU processors powering the
Microsoft Unveils ARM-based Windows 10 With Full X86 Compatibility
Four years ago, Microsoft was lead by Steve Ballmer, caught in a whirlwind of the “tablet tsunami” and eroding market share. The company wanted to ditch its traditional desktop apps in favor of new touch-based apps for tablets which featured ARM processors. A half-hearted project named Windows RT was born. “Windows on ARM” project debuted on Microsoft’s first Surface RT device featuring NVIDIA Tegra processor. It was a bold and confusing attempt to force people into a new world of touch apps, but Microsoft made the fatal mistake of providing something that looked like Windows but didn’t function like Windows. Windows RT couldn’t run traditional desktop apps, but
China Now Leads the Server Race: Meet the Phytium MARS Processor
Two decades ago, the US high end microprocessor industry was a lively, diverse market where about five various instruction set architectures battled it out across the workstation and server fields. You had choices like DEC’s Alpha – the speed leader; MIPS – the Silicon Graphics heart; SPARC from Sun Microsystems, IBM POWER, HP PA, the nascent X86, and a few custom architectures for MPP massive parallel processing, for instance. The rest of the world pretty much had nothing – British Transputer and German Hyperstone platforms died out due to lack of funding, while ARM was still keeping to the low end embedded arena after the end of the
Intel to Buy Imagination Technologies or AMD’s RTG?
This week started with a milestone announcement of Japanese SoftBank moving in to acquire ARM Holdings for a record $32 billion. Many analysts lamented that the takeover was a result of Brexit, even though everyone in their right minds should know that negotiations of this magnitude take years and typically are made in complete silence for 6-18 months (due dilligence and all that jazz). However, this might not be the only acquisition in the modest pool of British semiconductor players. As we reported on multiple occasions, Intel is reorganizing, i.e. restructuring the company. As a part of that reorganization, the company performed no less than three rounds
Nvidia Credits AMD for Unifying Game Development
During the Nvidia’s “Power of 10” event, Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corporation talked about the positive shift in mentality for game developers. Game development in the past segmented resources between consoles and PCs, often resulting in sub-par experiences on the more powerful hardware. PC-focused eSports today have an audience of over 300 million viewers, easily rivaling or even beating more established ‘real’ sports. In 2013, the situation for PC gaming was rather grim. The arrival of new, AMD powered consoles brought the x86 architecture back to Microsoft (Intel x86, IBM PowerPC, AMD x86), and marked the third architectural change for Sony (SGI MIPS, IBM PowerPC,
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich Publishes New Corporate Strategy
Intel is undergoing a transformation. The company, which at the point ballooned to over 140,000 employees is shedding 11% of its workforce and realigning itself into a new technology / product driven company which will not fight for the market by loosing billions of dollars (look at the ill-fated attempt to buy market share in mobile). Intel will push the ‘logic to memory’. The logic is now being focused around x86 and FPGAs, while the memory will evolve from SRAM / DRAM / NAND to new memory types such as 3D X-Point. In order to drive the (new) message home, Brian published another letter to its employees.
New AMD Corporate Strategy Starts to Pay Off
Over the course of last year, AMD’s upper management started to split the company into two key elements – one that would drive the technology forward (Radeon Technologies Group) and one to make sure the technology brings back ‘best bang for buck’, mostly through licensing agreements and new industry collaborations. Radeon Technologies Group is being lead by Raja Koduri and his management and engineering team, while Dr. Lisa T. Su is driving the monetization aspect of AMD as the corporate entity. Less than a year after making an announcement that AMD is ‘open for business’ by licensing the core IP technologies such as CPU or GPU cores. We’ve
AMD ZEN CPU and APU Specs Confirmed?
It looks like 2016 is turning into a year of anticipation and redemption for AMD, not just to its consumers, but also to customers which purchased millions of dollars of AMD hardware in the past, and then felt left out. We all saw Oak Ridge National Laboratories, one of first Opteron adopters – ditching a decade old AMD collaboration for IBM+NVIDIA team up. Luckily for all involved, AMD seems to have finally “get their s*** together” and started a sales campaign which might be the most successful since Henri Richard led the sales team taking over more than 50% market share from Intel (albeit only in 4P and 8P
Next Gen Processor Performance Revealed
There is a trend of large companies snapping up smaller chip designers, all at the time when several next=generation processor designers are starting to exit stealth modes and gain traction. Over the last couple of months, companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle – all have acquired at least one promising hardware designer or manufacturer. Soft Machines is one of the ‘new kids on the silicon block’, planning to do a ‘one up’ and build all-new processing architecture. Variable Instruction Set Computing or VISC is their brainchild, and on paper, we’re talking about a seriously efficient and flexible processor architecture which just may take sweep the rug
AMD’s Loss Deepens After Disastrous Quarter
Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China
Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opened the regular staff meeting before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 conference, in Shenzhen, China – it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business. Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers with their mixed architectures – Tianhe-2 is a fully Intel based machine, the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators. Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70% discount on its processors and accelerators, it
AMD Reveals Five-Year Roadmap For GPUs and CPUs
AMD will launch its next-generation GPU in 2016, with the SkyBridge platform set to debut later this year.
Intel CFO: ‘Apple is a Great Partner of Ours’
Motorola Acquisition Sets up Lenovo For Big Wins in 2015
Lenovo is looking to integrate Motorola and IBM’s server business this year, and is targeting to become the number one server vendor by the end of the decade.
AMD Steals Forrest Norrod from Dell to Fill Lisa Su's Old Post
AMD has found a successor to Lisa Su’s vacant position after ascending to CEO in former Dell Server VP and GM Forrest Norrod
PC Market Sees Resurgence in EU and US, Shrinkage in Asia
The global PC market has essentially been flat for the third quarter of this year, but Europe and the US are bright spots, indicating that the PC is strong
Intel’s Richard Dwyer Talks the Intel Embedded Advantage in the Internet of Things
Without Intel’s embedded technology there would be no Internet of Things. VR World talks to Intel’s Rick Dwyer about the company’s advantage in IoT.
Intel Partners with Rockchip to Accelerate x86 Mobile Adoption
Intel today announced that they would be partnering with Rockchip to launch a series of Android-focused mobile SoCs based on Intel’s SoFIA architecture which combines Intel’s x86 architecture with their own modem technology into a single SoC. This would include Intel providing Rockchip with quadcore SoCs running Intel’s own x86 architecture and modems. The SoFIA is essentially a culmination of all of Intel’s work in the mobile space but lacks Intel’s own GPU IP because it utilizes Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics architecture instead. Intel has traditionally used PowerVR graphics in their mobile chips for many years but as their desktop and laptop GPUs got better
Intel to Show a Dozen Mobile Design Wins at Computex?
According to some of our sources within Intel, there will be a multitude of Intel mobile design wins being shown at Computex 2014 in Taipei many of which will be running on Android. This includes all of the chips that Intel launched back at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona where we covered Intel’s Merrifield launch. They even showed us one of their reference devices, which were quite prevalent at Computex to get an idea of what could be expected with Merrifield. Even though Mobile World Congress is generally accepted as the place to launch smartphone and tablet design wins, Intel’s product design cycle simply
AMD keeps on killing its saviors, continues malicious benchmark practice
When it comes to AMD, this is the one company that is really a talent when it comes to destroying its own golden gooses. Sometimes out of knowledge, sometimes out of pure malice, the company’s heart is far from one that was the core when Colonel Sanders was in charge. The company that Sanders lead was always on the edge, but it was that edge that created AMD K7 and K8 architecture (NexGen), it was the edge that went into sponsorship deal with Ferrari and commanded with 45% of 4P server space (for a while). Reactive AMD was the one that stopped investment in 65nm
