Android is in a tricky spot within China. While the OS is run by practically every smartphone in China that’s not an iPhone, including of course handsets from domestic champions such as Xiaomi, the Chinese government maintains a near state of war against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Google, with its libertarian ethos, antagonized the Chinese government when it operated in the country by refusing to comply with censorship requests. When Google left China, the Chinese government began traffic shaping its packets before outright blocking Google late last year. Now trying to use Google or things like Gmail or Google Apps is impossible in China without a VPN (and the majority of which no longer work inside the country). The majority of Android platforms used by Chinese vendors are heavily forked. While this presents its own security problems, it’s the best vendors can do to still use Android without relying on Google.

China’s government recognizes the problem and is developing its own indigenous mobile OS as a way to remove the dependence Chinese companies have on Google.

For Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) part, the company says that it will assist China in developing this platform to ensure compatibility with the Intel platform (a must considering the investments Intel is making in Chinese smartphone vendors).

“We have and continue to collaborate on indigenous platforms. We have thousands of software engineers and leadership here in China,” Intel’s Doug Fisher, the company’s Vice President General Manager, Software and Services Group, said at IDF Shenzhen 2015. “We will work with China’s government industries to ensure that we participate in the creation of an indigenous operating environment here in China.”

He said that Intel’s role with the China OS Association, the industry group working with China’s government, will be to “enable” the OS.

It will be interesting to see how close China lets Intel get to the development process of the indigenous OS. On one hand China would need to consult with Intel to ensure compatibility with its platform. On the other hand, China might not want to let Intel get too close to the platform for fear that it would lose face letting a foreign firm in to help with the heavy lifting development work – or worse plant a backdoor.

The post Intel Onboard to Support Indigenous China Mobile OS appeared first on VR World.

Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

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 – Tianhe-2 is 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 has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

The 2015 Shenzhen Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) Developer Forum kicks off Tuesday, the second event Intel is hosting in the city.

Like its San Francisco counterpart, IDF Shenzhen was a very mobile-centric event. At last year’s event, Brian Krzanich, the company’s CEO, made some very aggressive promises.

But one year later, where is Intel on these promises?

40 Million Intel Tablets in 2014

Without a doubt the most aggressive promise Intel made at IDF Shenzhen 2014 was shipping 40 million Intel powered tablets in 2014.

The tablet SoC market is dominated by ARM’s (LON: ARM) silicon. To grow that much in one year would be a herculean task for any company, and many analysts thought it would be an impossible task. But in January 2015 Intel announced that it had met, and even beaten, its goal: 46 million.

But to get to that goal Intel paid a handsome cost that would be impossible for any of its competitors even consider undertaking. In its yearly earnings call in January Intel said that is mobile and communications division posted a loss of $4.21 billion for the 2014 fiscal year. Income for the division for the year was razor thin, only coming in at $202 million.

However for Intel this was total war. Posting this kind of loss was an acceptable cost for achieving victory.

This goal was intended to establish Intel Architecture in the marketplace,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said during the company’s earnings call. “We don’t need to go out and outpace the market for this year,” he continued. “A key goal for mobility is to improve profitability.”

This strategy pushed Intel’s x86 competitor out of the market entirely. Although AMD never really was a contender in the tablet space, the company decided to concede the market entirely once it realized the lengths Intel was willing to go to achieve dominance in the market.

“We’re evaluating [tablets] closely. It’s not our priority,” Kevin Lensing, senior director for mobility solutions at AMD, said in a November interview. Lensing explained that the margins just were not there for AMD to justify its attempts at entering the market, on top of Intel’s aggressive behavior.

Now that Intel has hit its goal, the question is: can it make a profit?

Intel’s $100 Million China Bet

The other big announcement from Intel at IDF Shenzhen 2014 was the establishment of a $100 million “China Smart Device Innovation Fund” and innovation center to help Chinese vendors jumpstart their mobile ambitions with Intel cash and know-how.

Tracking the deliverables surrounding this promise has been a bit tricky, as Intel’s bigger China-themed announcements this year such as the $1.5 billion investment in Tsinghua Unigroup have pushed it to the sidelines.

To date Intel has disbursed $28 million from the $100 million pot. The list of companies that have received the funds, and what projects they have used them for, has not been widely publicized.

It’s also understood that the company’s innovation center is not going as planned. Sources said Kirk Skaugen’s platform development center in Shenzhen was supposed to have 600 engineers, and to date it’s understood that there are only 150. In addition key high-level R&D personnel have returned to the United States.

What’s in store for this year?

This year’s IDF event is a much shorter affair than last year. With Intel no longer as hungry for market wins as it was last year, it’s doubtful that it will be as high profile as the year prior.

The conference’s first keynote kicks off Wednesday morning.

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Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has shed further details on its second-generation Xeon Phi CPU, known as Knights Landing.

The processor features several technical achievements, starting with a 14nm manufacturing process, which is a first in this series. Designed to offer high-performance computing, Knights Landing differs from other server-based CPUs in that it uses lots of low-energy cores to run parallel tasks, whereas offerings from IBM (NYSE:IBM) or Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) use fewer but more powerful cores.

Built on Intel’s MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture with a total of 8 billion transistors, Knights Landing runs a modified version of the Atom Silvermont x86 core in a tile configuration, with a single tile featuring two cores and vector execution units along with shared L2 cache as well as a circuitry that connects the tile to the rest of the mesh network. Intel has mentioned that each Knights Landing package would include a processor with 30 or more tiles and eight on-chip memory modules. Another major highlight with Knights Landing is that it would be able to function as a host processor, meaning that it can boot and run x86 operating systems and application code without any need for recompilation. It can also act as a co-processor.

Talking about memory, the chip vendor has announced that Knights Landing would feature eight 2GB stacks of memory, totaling up to 16GB. The chip is manufactured at Micron, and looks to be a variant of the manufacturer’s Hybrid Memory Cube, which involves stacking memory and using an embedded logic chip to deliver higher bandwidth at a lower power. Micron has mentioned that its HMC modules will be able to transfer data 15 times faster than a standard DDR3 module, while utilizing 70% less energy. Along with on-chip memory, Knights Landing will come with six memory channels that can connect a total of 384GB DDR4 memory.

The result of the new manufacturing process, core design and memory is that Knights Landing will offer three times the performance as the current-gen Knights Corner, with Intel claiming 3 teraflops double-precision and 6 teraflops single-precision performance. That number is close to the 7 teraflops figure Nvidia (NASDAQ:INTC) touted during the launch of its latest video card, the Titan X.

It is no wonder, then, that Intel is aiming for the same use-cases as Nvidia for Knights Landing, with the chip vendor stating that the CPU can be used for deep learning and data analytics. Nvidia, however, has invested significant resources in its platform, and is offering tools such as the Digits software framework. Even if Intel does not manage to successfully challenge Nvidia in the Knights Landing, it is witnessing a great amount of demand, with over 50 companies set to sell server systems with the CPU as the host.

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Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced Thursday morning that it was downgrading its revenue prospects for its upcoming first-quarter earnings release due to the continued shift from desktop PCs to mobile.

Intel expects revenue to be approximately $12.8 billion, plus or minus $300 million, down from $13.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

“The change in revenue outlook is a result of weaker than expected demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels across the PC supply chain,” Intel wrote in a statement released Thursday morning. “The company believes the changes to demand and inventory patterns are caused by lower than expected Windows XP refresh in small and medium business and increasingly challenging macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe.”

Many vendors in the PC space, including Intel, have been the victim of a prolonged upgrade cycle. Though Windows XP has been pushed to its end of life, many large enterprises are hanging on to their Windows 7-based machines. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Intel and other vendors in the space hope that the upcoming release of Windows 10 will spur demand for upgrades.

The post Intel Chops $1 Billion From Revenue Expectations appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) hasn’t been as successful as Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) in the LTE modem segment, but that may all change in 2016 as it is being rumored that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is leaning toward the chip vendor’s XMM 7360 LTE modem in lieu of Qualcomm’s offerings, which have been in use in iPhones for several generations now.

Venturebeat, citing anonymous sources, revealed that a variant of the next-generation iPhone — aimed at Asian and other emerging markets —  will feature Intel’s new XMM 7360 modem:

Intel has been gunning hard during the past year for a place in the iPhone and now appears to have succeeded, at least partly. The 7360 chip will ship inside a special version of the iPhone that will be marketed to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, the sources said.

Like Qualcomm’s X12 modem, the Intel XMM 7360 offers LTE Category 10 connectivity, which is achieved through 3x carrier aggregation. The cellular modem can attain download speeds of 450 megabits per second. The modem was announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, with commercial availability slated for the second half of 2015. Apple engineers have allegedly traveled to Intel’s R&D facility in Munich, Germany to work with the chip vendor on the modem.

One of the major issues with Intel’s LTE offering in 2014, the XMM 7260, was finding manufacturers that were willing to use the modem in their SoCs. Samsung and LG used the modem in a few of their products, with a few versions of the Galaxy Alpha and Galaxy Note 4 featuring the XMM 7260 module, as well as LG’s first in-house SoC — Nuclun.

Managing to get its cellular modem on the iPhone will be a major win for Intel, and will be yet another blow for Qualcomm, which has already lost Samsung as a customer for its Snapdragon SoCs — at least in high-end devices — this year. Intel is readily acknowledging that it is far behind Qualcomm in the mobile application processor segment, but by making power efficient LTE modems and offering integrated solutions for mid-tier devices aimed at emerging markets, such as the Zenfone 2, it is turning into a credible threat in this space.

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And then the world economy melted down, killing or downsizing a lot of events world-wide. Intel downsized its’ Chinese IDF convention to a local-event status, but IDF Fall 2009 will be held in Moscone Center in San Francisco – in its full strenght. Sadly for Nvidia, the company decided to cancel this year’s event, making NVISION a one-off. Thus, when Jen-Hsun decided to openly attack Intel and open a “can of whoop-ass”, he probably didn’t thought of how the world turns.

According to some sources, the show’s cost ranged in millions of dollars, somewhere between three and six million greenbacks. But the damage done will be much worse than this money – Nvidia fails to establish themselves as a serious player and position themselves in the very same “also-ran” company as AMD.

Intel, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Google, Microsoft – all of these companies (and many more) have at least one conference where thousands of people gather and get overwhelmed by the information shown by numerous companies. Sadly for Nvidia, the company didn’t manage to secure enough exhibitors to continue.

We hope that NVISION will return in 2010, but for now, “Visual Computing Conference” went the way of do-do birds. For the end of this news, we leave you with this picture that explains NVISION 08 in three parts:

1... 2... 3... Houston, we don't have a lift-off.

1) The world is ours and we’re bigger than your hands can spread (with Nvidia’s head of PR on the right side of the picture)
2) Will Nvidia push the button for 2009?
3) Well, they did plan to…

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If we look at a chart above, we see that in December ’08, TSMC dipped as low as negative 31.5% compared to October, while second-tier foundry VIS crashed down to negative 42.1%. Looking at the stats right now, VIS is showing 16% growth compared to October 2008, UMC is showing negative 0.3% and TSMC is down 7.5%, but announcing a slew of rushed orders for March and April.

It will take couple of weeks to couple of months for these orders to become chips, but if contractors such as AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Philips, Qualcomm and numerous other players are now ordering chips, one cannot think about anything else but a recovery.

Some analysts estimate that semiconductor industry won’t recover until 2012, but more optimistic projections pitch 2009 and semiconductor industry as the first to return to black. According to DigiTimes story, this is slowly, but certainly happening. Will recession end during 2009? We certainly hope so.

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Probably the most humorous motherboard of them all was Intel’s own Bad Axe motherboard. Intel shipped out different revisions of the same motherboard with Pentium 4 EE955, Pentium EE965, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad – and every time, a new CPU would not work in older rev motherboard, even though power consumption was cut dramatically.

This is LGA-1156A, third Socket for i5 and the one that will be the standard... until LGA-1156B and LGA-1156C arrive.

Enter LGA-1156. According to friends at Fudzilla, next 18 months will see the debut of LGA-1156 for Core i5, LGA-1156B supporting integrated graphics and LGA-1156C. If we take into account that the company previously planned to manufacture this socket as LGA-1160 and LGA-1158, we should really take a good look at mighty Chipzilla.
If Nvidia is swaying the market with “smart” rebrands of their old products, how should we comment Socket policy at Intel? Perhaps a new spin on infamous Australian ad for chips – “Same sh*t, but won’t work package”?

If IT industry needs one thing, it would be to wake the heck up and start making products that won’t confuse the consumer. Is it that hard to estimate what envelopes your products need to work within Tic-Toc model and make a single socket that would, by some crazy imagination, work with every CPU that comes out for it?

In the end, it will truly end up with AMD being right about Socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3, while Intel’s single socket policy failed miserably on both Socket 775 and LGA-1156. And that is sad, given the size of chip giant from Santa Clara.

The post Intel doesn’t know how to make a CPU Socket? appeared first on VR World.

If I recall correctly, a while ago AMD claimed world’s first OpenCL demo, but it was done on a single core (and then scaled up to all four) on a Phenom II X4 CPU. If this video is correct, Nvidia gets the pole position for being the first company to demonstrate OpenCL working on a GPU, which is “usage as intended”.

Judging from the video, Nvidia showed Nbody simulation changing following parameters: point size, velocity damping, softening factor, time step, cluster scale, and velocity scale. The company used a laptop equipped with Quadro FX 570M graphics card, e.g. GeForce 8600M after a “GL” tune-up. As far as the official debut of OpenCL go, KHRONOS Group launched the API on Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singapore, from where both AMD & Nvidia videos came from.

But don’t expect OpenCL drivers until both companies supply drivers to Apple. It looks like Snow Leopard will be the beginning of OpenCL on a PC platform and Windows Vista is sitting on backburner… that’s what Microsoft get for botching OS development and sucking up to allmighty Chipzilla.

The post Youtube video shows OpenCL running on Nvidia GPU appeared first on VR World.

As company description explains, this company has extremely long lead-times, needed for implementation into designs of computers from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer and many others. If we take into account that the mainstream Nehalem platform (Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors, probably branded as Core i3 & i5) is set to debut this summer, it’s no wonder that i5 design appeared on AVC’s website five months before introduction.

This cooler fits almost all sockets on the market - including the upcoming LGA-1156 ;)

The company now lists several products compatible with LGA-1156 socket, from OEM solutions (competing for the boxed cooler contract) to a retail multi-heatpiped beast called Napoleon (Plus). In order to win the OEM contracts for enthusiast-class machines, Napoleon (Plus) fits inside the Intel Socket Load Limit policies – e.g. weighs in exactly 450g. A lot of enthusiast coolers weigh more than double that, and while it may be ok to keep a 1000 gram cooler mounted vertically on a horizontally mounted motherboard (e.g. testbed configuration), it is definitely not ok to keep such a monster in a chassis. Napoleon (Plus) has no such issues and can be mounted on any LGA-1156 motherboard without additional strengthening.

For the end of this post, we can probably state that most or even all LGA-1366-compatible coolers can support LGA-1156 processors as well.

The post AVC launches a cooler for upcoming Intel Core i5 processor appeared first on VR World.

How Nvidia came into the Intel chipset market is another story – at the time, Intel was seriously hurting with its Prescott marchitecture and didn’t had anything to show in gaming and enthusiast segment. The company was playing around Nvidia and in the end – Nvidia launched “nForce 4 SLI for Intel” chipset (famous for the fact that it didn’t work with low-end Pentium D 820 processor) and started to pave way for the creation of “Axis of Evil” (comment by former ATI PR manager): Intel Core 2 CPU + GeForce 8800GTX + nForce 680i.

Also, this wasn’t the first time Chipzilla asked for help. When the company got struck with Rambus RDRAM gremlins in infamous Caminogate, Taiwanese VIA Computer skyrocketed to a shocking 60% worldwide chipset market share (for two quarters). Lack of confidence in Intel’s chipsets was proven with the launch of Intel-based workstations from Silicon Graphics. Imagine my surprise when I opened up my flashy Visual Workstation 550 (an $8,000 machine) featuring 2GB of PC-133 memory, Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz processor, first Quadro card and VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset. You will probably agree it was a very weird experience. Intel pushed VIA from the market with lawsuit regarding Pentium 4 license. By the time trials came to an end, VIA was less than also-ran in the Intel-chipset arena.

Coming back to Core 2 architecture, Nvidia enjoyed its success with 650i/680i and didn’t invest in the platform (780i was nothing else but 680i with PCIe Gen2 chip). At the same time, Intel grew stronger, releasing P35/X38/X48/P45 series of chipsets and Nvidia was no longer needed. Thus, it is logical that the company wants to squeeze out pesky Santa Clara neighbor for its Core i5 and i7 series.

Ultimatively, this is a battle that customers will lose. Regardless of what court decides, incertanties are costing both companies money. Truth to be told, we saw interesting papers about the actual financial situation in Intel, and it is no wonder that the company is now attacking everybody. But to play around with chipset licenses and patents – ultimately, this is a losing game. Once that you hit the “lawsuit-trigger”, path of innovation takes the backseat and development begins to be closely monitored by legal departments.

All I can conclude here is that Nvidia has patents that could block a lot of Intel’s products. AMD could stop Intel’s CPU production, so could Intel stop AMD. And then there is a case of 3rd party companies that nobody takes seriously, yet they can change the landscape of IT industry for good. When I spoke with couple of engineers from IBM, I was told that Big Blue could block Intel, AMD, Freescale, Motorola, even Texas Instruments – “in a jiffie”.

The post Intel’s license attack on Nvidia is an old “Thank You” appeared first on VR World.

Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.

15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...

Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?

On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?

My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.

This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.

All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.

On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager )?

The post STEAM: Intel 8-core Skulltrail almost outsold 3-core Phenom X3 appeared first on VR World.

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New benchmark/system utility offers plethora of information...

New feature is also Alert – sensor monitoring utility that triggers audio visual alert on overheating, voltage drop, overvoltage or cooling fan failure. This might prove quite useful in checking is your power supply good enough. Standard features include support for the latest processors and chipsets, such as  Core i7, Atom, Phenom II and others. Support for OpenAL and High Definition Audio were also added. UI also underwent some changes – Windows 7 users should be happy, and if you use Vista Sidebar, you should like the newly designed information “widget”.

Everest 5.0 is available now at www.lavalys.com.

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System consisted out of AMD Phenom X4 9950, ASUS M3A78-T motherboard and 2x1GB GeIL DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12-1T memory. That memory worked either at these specs, or you could push it down to 3-3-3-7-1T on DDR2-800 and quite frankly, was the best memory I ever tested. These two year old memory sticks worked flawlessly in Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and EVGA 680i motherboard, but paired with Phenom 9950, they decided to give up the ghost after two months.

Modules died without any spectacular event happening – shut the computer down, turned it back on a day later and the system refused to POST. After typical debug session (clear CMOS, replace memory, replace the CPU) it turned out that the memory died, thus I replaced it with alternative DDR2 modules and turned the computer back on.
What I was greeted was nothing nice, Phenom X4 9950 recognizing just one core and system crashed at boot. It turns out that memory doesn’t want to work in 128-bit “gangbanged” mode, thus we enabled the single-channel 64-bit ungangbanged mode.

I managed to get four cores working, but multi-threading capability just wasn’t there. Loading two applications would crash the system, and while single-threaded games worked, multi-threaded games such as Call of Duty or Far Cry would cause a BSOD. After replacing the CPU, system is working again 100% stable, but Phenom X4 9950 is a gonner. Thus, if you plan to use old DDR3 memory in your future Phenom II or Core I7 build, be careful what modules are you putting in the system. Both 1st Gen DDR2 and DDR3 modules came with high-voltage settings even written in SPD chip, so the newer CPUs might not like those settings.
Anyways, I can trash and recycle lowest-latency modules I ever had, and they’re sadly joined by a scorching hot 140W-eating Phenom X4 9950. Damn.

The post Something weird happened… RAM dies, CPU dies too? appeared first on VR World.

Afore mentioned three models are almost identical to already existing Core i7 920, 940 and 965, but for the QPI inteface, which is allegidly set at 5.4 GT/s on all parts. G Also, very interesting part is the similarity in names between Core and Xeon series, something we haven’t seen recently. 2.66GHz Nehalem corresponds to the name Core i7 920 and Xeon 3520, i7 940 is Xeon 3540, while the 3.2 GHz part is known as Core i7 965 and Xeon 3570. We estimate this small change in number is due to QPI link.

We all saw the execellent scores that appeared in legally leaked benchmark results on several sites on the ‘Net. Thus, AMD’s Shanghai should better brace for impact, because Nehalem is coming from high altitude.

This also practically confirms the rumors of faster Core i7 Extreme processor, since Intel had the tradition of launching higher-clocked desktop part as soon as server parts reach the clocks of desktop versions (at least, up to Core 2 Quad era).

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First engineers that started to work on the 22nm node were deployed all the way back in Q3’2006, when AMD finished its acquisition of ATI Technologies. If you recall, it was at the time when AMD planned to aggressively finish the work on Fab4X in New York and switch GPU manufacturing from TSMC first to Fab38 in Dresden, with 45nm and 32nm SOI, alongside K10.5 (codename Shanghai/Deneb).

A lot of things changed, but still, we managed to learn several interesting bits. Manufacturing-wise, AMD’s Dresden division is consisted out of former 200mm-wafer Fab30 and 300mm-wafer Fab36. AMD sold all of the Fab30 equipment and plans to put the 32nm 300mm-wafer node by the end of this year, and bring Fab38 online next year, with first CPUs manufactured using 32nm process. Fab36 will begin winding down the 45nm production when Fab38 takes over and start introducing 32nm nodes one by one. Fab38 will peak at 22nm manufacturing process, destiny of Fab36 still isn’t decided, but it is expected to continue beyond 2012 and 22nm process.

On the other hand, Fab4x in Luther Park, NY is being built specifically for “22nm and beyond” process using 300mm wafers. Fab4x is planned as the native 22nm Fab and first chips will be manufactured using the 22nm process. It is still undecided will that “honor” go to AMD’s CPU/GPU or perhaps customers product, it is still too early to see.

Rise of Fab38 and Fab4x will mean that manufacturing nightmares could finally end for AMD, because this company was always hurting on two levels – when manufacturing was up, AMD didn’t had the architecture to pull it off, and when AMD had the architecture to win the market, the company didn’t had the manufacturing capabilities. With CPU, GPU and chipset being manufactured under the same roof, and yet offering technologies such as SOI, High-K, Low-Power in 45nm, 32nm and 22nm to various customers, seeing 3rd party vendors manufacturing their processors at The Foundry Company or should we write “MAD AMD” (Mubadala Abu Dhabi hearts Advanced Micro Devices or simply, Arab Micro Devices).

For anyone interested in why ATIC and Mubadala Abu Dhabi invested in AMD and that “that investment was a dead end”, might want to think twice. AMD has world-leading facilities in Dresden (claim proved with numerous industry awards) and space to build three more clean rooms (“Fabs”) in Dresden. At the same time, future Luther Park facility is capable of expanding from one clean room (Fab4x) to three (probably Fab 5x, 5x and 6x… sometime in the next 20 years).

My only worry is the fact that the CEO of TFC/Arab Micro Devices is no other than Hector Jesus Ruiz, former CEO of AMD. After witnessing disasteros decisions in Motorola’s semiconductor division (which became known as Freescale Semiconductor) and well, you decide how to call AMD’s era between 2005 and 2008, can Hector actually “see the light” and create a manufacturing giant? His credibility in the industry is very low, and the only CEO with less credibility in semico industry was Alex Leupp, former CEO of Siemens AG and 3Dfx Inc. Yep, the same guy that chopped off Siemens to bits, turned 3Dfx into 3dfx, killed partner relationships and drove 3dfx into the ground. This is less than flattering company for future boss of TFC. Time will tell if he’ll finally deliver, or ruin another company.

Future capacity estimates are a bit murky. By the end of 2012, MAD AMD (TFC) should have the capability to manufacture between 55-75,000 wafer starts a month. AMD’s internal documents went between 650,000 and 900,000 wafer starts a year after the complete ramp-up in New York. Currently, papers are stating that out of theoretical 75,000 wspm, around 50% should be in 22nm, 35% in 32nm and 15% in 45nm. Is this 2012 or 2013, time will tell. This manufacturing capacity should be able to turn the tide not just for AMD, but for other manufacturers as well. I have seen plans about potential customers, and without going into further details, we can say that at least one next-gen console will have its CPU and GPU manufactured by The Foundry Company. Can you guess which one?

UPDATE Feb 4, 00:47AM CET – Edited references to capacity in respect to documents from AMD’s manufacturing slides for Financial Analyst and Technology Days 2007 and 2008.

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Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1’2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3’2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.

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