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.

Slides from AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) event at the PC Cluster Consortium event in Osaka, Japan offer up details regarding the chip vendor’s roadmap for its GPUs and CPUs, with the takeaways including the launch of a 300W APU targeted at the HPC segment along with the launch of new CPU cores.

At the event, Junji Hayashi, Consumer and Commercial Business Lead at AMD Japan, shared details on the vendor’s K12 ARM as well as the x86 Zen CPU cores. AMD is looking to introduce both ARM as well as traditional x86 cores in a pin compatible platform that is codenamed SkyBridge. Aimed at the server, embedded, semi-custom and client markets, both the ARMv8 and the x86-powered cores will offer 64-bit computing and will be manufactured using a 14-nm FinFET process. SkyBridge will be launching before the end of the year, although an exact launch window was not provided.

The K12 core will feature Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is a departure from the Clustered Multi-Thread technology that is currently utilized in AMD’s offerings. SMT will offer larger CPU cores the ability to achieve a higher throughput by allocating underutilized resources to an additional, slower, execution thread.

As for GPUs, Hayashi mentioned that AMD would be moving to a two-year release cadence cycle for updating the GPU architecture of APUs. There was also a mention of a High Performance Computing APU, which is said to be radically different from existing designs in that is features the Stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) memory standard. The HPC APUs will slot in between the standard server cores and the FirePro line of cards.

The current generation HBM is nine times faster than GDDR5 memory and 128 times faster than DDR3. AMD is said to be utilizing the same standard in its Radeon 300 series, with the technology itself developed in collaboration with SK Hynix.

The post AMD Reveals Five-Year Roadmap For GPUs and CPUs appeared first on VR World.

Fractal, a Swedish computer hardware company just released a new set of Kelvin liquid CPU coolers.

The new Kelvin design has many great features including an expandable loop design, a dedicated fill port, standard G 1/4″ fittings, and a high pressure pump.  The Kelvin liquid CPU coolers are available in 120mm, 240mm, and 360mm radiator versions.

If users want to even upgrade the fittings they can do that because of the usage of industry standard design.  This means that you can add into the loop a GPU block or another radiator, or even a combination.

Fractal has made sure that the pump is more than capable of handling the loop with the inclusion of a ceramic high pressure pump.  The block and pump combination has a fillport on the side for easily filling of the loop after it has been upgraded.  The mounting supports all modern CPU sockets making it easy to swap this loop to another system in the future.

The Kelvin has a full copper CPU waterblock with strategic jet improvements, and the radiator is also a full copper design.  The usage of both full copper block and radiator will help to lower the galvanic corrosion potential over time, as it can increase with using different metals in the same loop.  The Kelvin liquid CPU coolers will indeed be a good option when shopping around for closed loop systems, that are currently a majority of Asetek re-branded units.

The post Fractal Releases A Trio Of Kelvin Liquid CPU Coolers appeared first on VR World.

Antec announced today that it has a new model coming out in the GX family of chassis: the GX300.  The case joins the GX900, GX700, and GX500 of which all are mid-tower cases.  The GX300 cases are the entry point into the GX family, and these cases will come in windowed and non-windowed styles.

 The case is painted black inside and out that will provide a much nicer looking setup, especially with the windowed variant.  The USB, audio jacks, and power/reset buttons are located on the top of the case  with a fan controller to switch the case fans between high and low speed operation.  This board supports graphics cards up to 400mm long, CPU coolers up to 140mm tall while supporting ATX, mATX, and mini-ITX motherboards.  For the price the case is a rather sharp looking case for the low cost that it will be retailing for.  The price and the looks of this case will definitely make it a popular option for those who are budget minded and looking for a new case.  The GX300 is covered by Antec’s standard  3 year limited warranty.

Specifications

• Chassis color: Black
• 6 drive bays
• 6 x 3.5″ / 2.5″ drive trays
• Motherboards: Standard ATX, microATX, Mini-ITX
• 7 expansion slots
• Maximum graphics card size: 15.7″ (400 mm)
• Maximum CPU cooler height: 5.5″ (140 mm)

Cooling System:

• 2 x 120 mm top exhaust fan (Optional)
• 1x120mm rear exhaust fan pre-installed
• 2 x 120 mm front intake fan (Optional)

Front I/O ports:

• 1x USB 3.0 High Speed USB port
• 1 x USB 2.0
• 1 x Audio I/O (HD97)

Unit Dimensions:

• 485 mm (H) x 180 mm (W) x 475 mm (D)
• 19.09″ (H) x 7.08″ (W) x 18.70″ (D)

Net Weight:

• 5.45 kg

The post Antec Announces The Budget-Minded GX300 Case appeared first on VR World.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

The post AMD Steals Forrest Norrod from Dell to Fill Lisa Su's Old Post appeared first on VR World.

Soft Machines is a startup that today is coming out of their stealthmode status into the public at the Linley Processor Conference.

Soft Machines is a company that has been around since 2006 and employs 250 people on three different continents, all with the expressed goal of working together to deliver their new VISC CPU architecture. The company’s CEO, Mahesh Lingareddy, comes from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) as did its co-founder Mohammad Abdallah, which would explain the company’s focus on single threaded performance. Soft Machines has raised over $125 million from various funding sources including multiple angel investors, multiple sovereign wealth funds and semiconductor companies, including AMD (NYSE: AMD).

The core of this technology is essentially the virtualization of multiple CPU cores into a single virtual core that enables much higher single threaded performance. That is why they call this technology a VISC CPU architecture as opposed to the RISC and CISC architectures that exist today. As you can see from the image above, there is a very specific way that they achieve this virtualized CPU architecture who’s goal is not only to abstract the cores but to also abstract the ISA, as they claim to be able to run virtually any ISA on their cores if needed, which is how they are able to demonstrate that they are running Android ICS (not Kit Kat) on their demonstration machine today at Linley.

With this architecture, they are able to essentially abstract whatever ISA is being run and then virtualize it so that they can run it on their virtual cores, which will then decide how many threads are needed and how many virtual cores need to be allocated. So, you can have a dual core or a quad core (physical) processor, but then you may only have one or two virtual cores depending on the workload being put on the processor. One metric we haven’t seen or know about is memory bandwidth, we still don’t know what kind of bandwidth they’re able to get with their cache or what frequency their DDR3 is capable of running at.

They are currently running a test setup at the Linley CPU Conference, and we’ve found out that their target performance is currently low power mobile SoCs, but that they are also capable of scaling all the way up to high performance CPUs. They are showing a mobile SoC that is designed to illustrate their power efficiency and the SoC is being used as a test vehicle and they are also fabbing with TSMC at their 28nm process. This SoC, according to them, has 1 billion transistors with less than 20% of the SoC’s transistors being attributed to their own core IP. So, they’ve essentially already shown that their cores not only work, but can be integrated into an SoC and work. here are some of the performance figures.

According to the performance figures provided, using SPEC 2006 IPC, they are running much faster than almost all of their competition in single threaded performance. Do keep in mind that the demonstration that they are currently showing is a dual core implementation running as one virtual core. In this prototype VISC implementation, they are able to get a score of 2.1 versus all other single core implementations. Obviously, these numbers are going to be designed to make them look as good as possible, but there’s no denying the promise that they have. In fact, they are already working with multiple customers to integrate their core IP into SoCs and should have customer silicon out next year. Below, you can see their test setup at Linley.

Test Setup

Their focus is not only single threaded IPC, but also to ensure that power utilization is also much lower, in their SPEC/Watt comparison you can see that they are showing fairly significant gains for their dual core processor at the same wattage or lower wattage. The real question will be whether or not their architecture gains enough traction among CPU and SoC vendors that they actually become relevant. After all, MIPS is having a very hard time competing with ARM and Intel as it is already and they’re the ‘third’ architecture out there right now. If we have a fourth, are SoC vendors really going to want to have their resources spread across so many different architectures?

VISC Single Thread SPEC per Watt

As you can see, they already have working silicon, which is a huge step forward for any new architecture hoping to present itself as a viable alternative to existing architectures. The fact that they aren’t trying to build their own CPUs and sell those directly is very likely a smart idea, as both ARM and Imagination Technologies (MIPS) are licensing their cores out to SoC vendors willing to work with their IP. What will be important to see is how Soft Machines will support its customers with software and development and ensure that the end consumer has no idea what SoC is running under the hood and that the SoC vendor is happy with the performance and battery life of their devices. Increasingly these days, software is becoming a more and more important part of whether or not your hardware will gain adoption, so if the guys at Soft Machines have a solid software team and strategy, they may have a chance. Because there’s no denying that virtually everyone is going to be skeptical about a new CPU architecture gaining any traction.

Soft Machines also has tons of patents already filed and granted around its VISC architecture that you can look into yourself if you’re skeptical or want to know more details about the new architecture.

The post Soft Machines Unveils VISC CPU Architecture at Linley appeared first on VR World.

Today, as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launches the third generation of its Xeon E5 dual-CPU platform, many eyes are on the improvements it brings to the servers in the datacenter. However, the benefits are just as high – if not higher – on the high-end workstation front.

First of all, Haswell core means sped-up AVX floating point, by inclusion of fused multiply-add (FMA) ops for theoretical FP rate doubling in benchmarks like Linpack, for instance. Haswell’s AVX2 also, just as importantly, moves integer processing to the wide parallel AVX engines, essentially offloading anything aside the address calculations to the RISC-like, three-address AVX instruction format and wide register sets. For workstation apps, once re-compiled to take advantage of it, the benefits could be enormous, and also be another gradual move away from the antiquated X86 code base.

Then, the wide choice of a number of cores per SKU – from 8 all the way to 18 – enables you to pick the right balance of per-core speed (i.e. per-thread performance) and core number, depending on the parallelism of your application. Some apps scale less well across many cores, thus preferring high per-core speed, while others like ray tracing make the most out of many cores.

The initial workstation SKU in the Xeon-E5 v3 range, the E5 2687W v3 flavor, is a 3.1 GHz 10-core part that actually uses the 12-core die where 2 cores (and their associated caches) were turned off. Now, its predecessor, the 2687Wv2 on the Ivy Bridge platform, had full L3 caches even if some cores of the die were disabled, a benefit that, I guess, we will only see back in Broadwell-EP (E5 v4) SKUs next year.

Then we come to DDR4 – yes the initial DIMMs aren’t exactly speedy, especially latency-wise, but the lower voltage and other reliability features of DDR4, together with quick improvements in speed and latency expected over the next few quarters, should provide the users the never-before seen capacity on a dual-socket workstation, beyond 1.5 TB RAM, without sacrificing the bandwidth on high load situations like DDR3.

The improvements in the PCIe bandwidth, integrated voltage regulation, and sped-up QPI to 9.6 GT/s also round out the key extra benefits.

Putting it through its paces

Here we look at the initial reference workstation based on this SKU from Intel, packaged by BOXX. The machine itself is compact, using liquid cooling on a SuperMicro X10DAi workstation mainboard with three PCIe x16 v3 slots. This doesn’t max out the platforms theoretical quad-GPU full bandwidth capability, but should be enough for most users. In return, the board has space for 16 DDR4 DIMMs, i.e. a full terabyte of RAM if using 64 GB modules available early next year. The installed RAM was 128 GB, in 8 pcs of Samsung 16 GB ECC DDR4-2133 RDIMMs.

The system came with a Nvidia Quadro K2000, which I changed to AMD FirePro W9100, arguably the most powerful professional OpenGL card available as of today. With 16 GB VRAM and six DisplayPort outputs, the card is able to drive even 8K displays like the one from BOE Technology that we mentioned last week. Intel’s 240 GB + 400 GB (SATA + PCIe) SSD combo completed the picture.

The first benchmark was the brand new SPECwpc all-encompassing workstation productivity benchmark by SPEC, on this system. The suite, which takes a couple hours to run, covers everything from processor to graphics (a.k.a ViewPerf) to overall system performance, and seems to do the job with much less trouble than, for instance, BAPcO SysMark did years ago on the PCs.

Here are the first SPECwpc results, on the dual 3.1 GHz E5-2687W v3 system:

Next, we ran CineBench 15 – note that the system is about twice as fast as an overclocked 4+ GHz Core i7-5960X, the desktop Haswell-E brethren to these Xeons.

In CPU-Z, you can see the data about the CPU.

Then we come to the newest version of SiSoft Sandra. Here is the report on the key performance data.

In our next round, we will be focusing on the changes in performance obtained when changing – and tuning – the main memory, as well as looking at the opportunity for even higher CPU speed. In my own opinion, the workstation market can easily justify higher TDP – and maybe even unlocked – Xeons, especially in both 8 core and 18 core per socket configurations.

The post Haswell-EP Workstation Preview: Xeon E5 v3 Rocks, But Still More To Go appeared first on VR World.

Today, as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launches the third generation of its Xeon E5 dual-CPU platform, many eyes are on the improvements it brings to the servers in the datacenter. However, the benefits are just as high – if not higher – on the high-end workstation front.

First of all, Haswell core means sped-up AVX floating point, by inclusion of fused multiply-add (FMA) ops for theoretical FP rate doubling in benchmarks like Linpack, for instance. Haswell’s AVX2 also, just as importantly, moves integer processing to the wide parallel AVX engines, essentially offloading anything aside the address calculations to the RISC-like, three-address AVX instruction format and wide register sets. For workstation apps, once re-compiled to take advantage of it, the benefits could be enormous, and also be another gradual move away from the antiquated X86 code base.

Then, the wide choice of a number of cores per SKU – from 8 all the way to 18 – enables you to pick the right balance of per-core speed (i.e. per-thread performance) and core number, depending on the parallelism of your application. Some apps scale less well across many cores, thus preferring high per-core speed, while others like ray tracing make the most out of many cores.

The initial workstation SKU in the Xeon-E5 v3 range, the E5 2687W v3 flavor, is a 3.1 GHz 10-core part that actually uses the 12-core die where 2 cores (and their associated caches) were turned off. Now, its predecessor, the 2687Wv2 on the Ivy Bridge platform, had full L3 caches even if some cores of the die were disabled, a benefit that, I guess, we will only see back in Broadwell-EP (E5 v4) SKUs next year.

Then we come to DDR4 – yes the initial DIMMs aren’t exactly speedy, especially latency-wise, but the lower voltage and other reliability features of DDR4, together with quick improvements in speed and latency expected over the next few quarters, should provide the users the never-before seen capacity on a dual-socket workstation, beyond 1.5 TB RAM, without sacrificing the bandwidth on high load situations like DDR3.

The improvements in the PCIe bandwidth, integrated voltage regulation, and sped-up QPI to 9.6 GT/s also round out the key extra benefits.

Putting it through its paces

Here we look at the initial reference workstation based on this SKU from Intel, packaged by BOXX. The machine itself is compact, using liquid cooling on a SuperMicro X10DAi workstation mainboard with three PCIe x16 v3 slots. This doesn’t max out the platforms theoretical quad-GPU full bandwidth capability, but should be enough for most users. In return, the board has space for 16 DDR4 DIMMs, i.e. a full terabyte of RAM if using 64 GB modules available early next year. The installed RAM was 128 GB, in 8 pcs of Samsung 16 GB ECC DDR4-2133 RDIMMs.

The system came with a Nvidia Quadro K2000, which I changed to AMD FirePro W9100, arguably the most powerful professional OpenGL card available as of today. With 16 GB VRAM and six DisplayPort outputs, the card is able to drive even 8K displays like the one from BOE Technology that we mentioned last week. Intel’s 240 GB + 400 GB (SATA + PCIe) SSD combo completed the picture.

The first benchmark was the brand new SPECwpc all-encompassing workstation productivity benchmark by SPEC, on this system. The suite, which takes a couple hours to run, covers everything from processor to graphics (a.k.a ViewPerf) to overall system performance, and seems to do the job with much less trouble than, for instance, BAPcO SysMark did years ago on the PCs.

Here are the first SPECwpc results, on the dual 3.1 GHz E5-2687W v3 system:

Next, we ran CineBench 15 – note that the system is about twice as fast as an overclocked 4+ GHz Core i7-5960X, the desktop Haswell-E brethren to these Xeons.

In CPU-Z, you can see the data about the CPU.

Then we come to the newest version of SiSoft Sandra. Here is the report on the key performance data.

In our next round, we will be focusing on the changes in performance obtained when changing – and tuning – the main memory, as well as looking at the opportunity for even higher CPU speed. In my own opinion, the workstation market can easily justify higher TDP – and maybe even unlocked – Xeons, especially in both 8 core and 18 core per socket configurations.

This post originally appeared on VR World.

The post Haswell-EP Workstation Preview: Xeon E5 v3 Rocks, But Still More To Go appeared first on VR World.

Imagination Technologies (LON: IMG), the company now in ownership of MIPS’ technologies, has announced a new 64-bit MIPS processor that goes by the name of the MIPS I6400.

The MIPS I6400 is Imagination Technologies’ and MIPS first 64-bit processor and actually one of the few 64-bit processors out there capable of running on a mobile device and run Android. This MIPS I6400 chip joins the MIPS Warrior family of processors which includes the Warrior M-class of entry-level MIPS cores for embedded and microcontroller applications and the Warrior P-class of high-performance MIPS processors. Based upon how Imagination Technologies is placing this new I-class of processors, it appears as though this will sit in the middle ground between the M-class and P-class of MIPS processors.

MIPS I6400 CPU block diagram

Imagination touts the MIPS I6400 as a scalable, highly efficient 64-bit processor that that can be implemented across a very wide range of performance and power limitations and is capable of high frequencies in more aggressive implementations.

Imagination also has hardware multi-threading which they believe results in higher utilization and CPU efficiency. The company states that its simultaneous multi-threaded (SMT) technology will allow for execution of multiple instructions from multiple threads for every clock cycle. The chips also support hardware virtualization, much like the rest of the MIPS Warrior family but the implementation in the MIPS I6400 allows for up to 15 secure/non-secure guests. Imagination is also quick to tout the high security capabilities of the MIPS I6400 as well as the advanced power management which allows for dedicated clock and voltage levels to each core, only waking cores when they’re needed. This chip also supports 128-bit SIMD based upon MIPS’ SIMD which is designed to support a wide variety of 32 and 64-bit integer and floating point data. This is designed to deliver high performance and high throughput for tasks that can properly utilize the efficiency of SIMD execution in data-parallel applications.

MIPS I6400 Benchmark Performance

In the company’s blog about this new MIPS I6400 processor, the company makes some claims regarding 64-bit performance when compared against their competitor (ARM) and the Cortex-A53 64-bit processor. These include a 50% higher CoreMark and 30% higher DMIPS performance, which need to be independently verified. It would also be very interesting to see how these new processors stack up against ARM and Intel mobile chips in JavaScript performance (Sunspider, etc.) but Imagination Technologies has said that they will not release any benchmarks at this time.

Let’s remember, as of right now MIPS is currently natively supported within Android and will be capable of supporting 64-bit Android as well. While this is great for MIPS, it hasn’t necessarily translated into marketshare against ARM in mobile as the company has very few mobile MIPS licensees for the most current family of products. THe company does claim that they already have a multiple licensees across multiple markets but can’t name any names quite yet.

Does Imagination have what it takes?

Imagination Technologies has a lot of uphill work to do with MIPS and this is a clear indication that Imagination Technologies is not letting off the gas pedal with MIPS.

It clearly wants to be competitive with ARM and Intel, and there’s a good chance that it could nab some SoC licensees from current ARM licensees if its 64-bit CPUs are genuinely better than what ARM is currently offering. However, until its claims are substantiated, it will be very hard to really see them as a real competitor to ARM. Right now, most of MIPS consumer-facing processors are in Ingenic’s SoCs while ARM has tons of licensees. MIPS does have other licensees for other platforms including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Cavium and many others in embedded and networking applications. If it can convince some of their embedded customers to look at their MIPS I6400 series processors, they could seriously become a threat to ARM and give them more competition than Intel has managed to do. In fact, they may help ARM licensees gain more favorable licensing terms if they have room to negotiate thanks to the MIPS I6400 (if it really performs as well as they say it does).

The post Imagination Announces New 64-bit MIPS I6400 appeared first on VR World.

A10 7800, a new locked FM2+ APU. This new APU from AMD has 12 compute cores split between 4 CPU and 8 GPU. The Kaveri cores are clocked at 3.5GHz it can go up to a 3.9GHz with Turbo, and the GPU clock speed is 720MHz. The APU has a TDP of 65W making this a great choice for those wanting to build an energy efficient build. These would be well suited to a HTPC or entry level build. Today the 7800 will be put through its paces and see how it performs.

AMD A10 7800 APU – Bottom

Test System

• AMD A10 7800
• MSI A88X G45-GAMING
• Team Vulcan DDR3 2400 2x8GB
• Mushkin Chronos 240GB
• Silverstone Strider 1KW PSU
• Cooler Master TPC 812 cooler
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

The 7800 is a locked chip which makes this a good choice for those who are not looking to overclock the big brother; the 7850K as it will save some money and be close in performance. The GPU is overclockable which is nice since you can easily make it run over 1000MHz, thus gaining a lot of performance. The 7800 accommodates up to 2133MHz DDR3 and is capable of going over that when you overclock.

PCMARK 8

AIDA64 – Memory Benchmark

The performance is very good for something that is low power and an in an entry to mid-level tier. Playing Borderlands 2 at 1080p with great frame rates was a nice surprise, though it did take a bit of settings optimization. Media playback was very smooth when playing media files with multiple filters that leveraged the GPUs. One of the best uses of the 7800 is definitely going to be as a HTPC where heavy graphics load isn’t going to be used. It would be well suited to playing not as demanding games on the tv if used in that way.

3DMARK Benchmarks

Overclocking the 7800 was easily done by driving up the bus speed to 106 from 100; this also increased the RAM speed to 2260. The 106 bus speed was the max stable speed that was found, though 107.5 was achievable but was very unstable. This chip will overclock even better when put under sub-zero temps. On hwbot.org a speed of 4154MHz (119.45 bus speed) was achieved by Delly using a single stage phase change cooler on the same motherboard model. The GPU was easily pushed to 1018MHz with a little bump in GPU voltage.

Would I buy it?

This would definitely be on my personal shopping list for the heart of a HTPC build. The processor has a TDP 65W which is lower than that of the 7850K at 95W which is nice when you are looking to build a low wattage system. The price is also a nice factor since at $161,and being an APU you won’t need to spend extra money to play some of the latest games with acceptable frame-rates. If you are looking to tweak the system the 7850K would be the one to buy as it is unlocked at only a $8 premium. If not worried about things like power draw, then I would strongly recommend the 7850K as it will be easy to achieve overclocks of 4.5GHz for a great gain in performance.

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In its recent earnings report, Advanced Micro Devices  reported an improvement its second quarter of 2014, compared with the same period the previous year.

The company posted a loss of $36 million ($0.05 per share) during the period, a reduction, compared with $74 million loss ($0.10 per share)  in the same period the previous year. This comes amid a growth in sales in the second-quarter of 2014, as well as new product releases expected to grow the company’s market share in both consumer and commercial markets. The Sunnyvale chipmaker’s performance has fallen short of analyst expectations, although it is still within the company’s own forecast.

A sound strategy

AMD’s recent restructuring strategy is also considered to have had a positive impact on its nominal improvement in earnings. The company has finished the first two phases of this three-phase strategy, which include scaling back on manpower, improving its cash flow, and executing its 2013 roadmap.  By focusing its resources on high-growth markets like ultra-low processors, semi-custom platforms, professional graphics processors and embedded solutions, the company is banking on innovations targeted at addressing the current trends in high-performance, cloud and mobile computing.

AMD is said to be in a unique position amid the rise of mobility-oriented technologies popularized by smartphones and tablets that cater to both consumer and enterprise needs. The chipmaker straddles two industries: one is the predominantly x86-based desktop architecture business currently dominated by Intel, and the other is the ARM-based architecture that powers a majority of mobile devices and low-power applications in the market. It is in the latter that the chipmaker is likely to dominate or at least grow significantly.

New releases

In the recent weeks, AMD launched a few technologies targeted at improving its position in the commercial and enthusiast market, particularly with the FirePro S9150 server card, which delivers up to 2.53 TFLOPS of peak double-precision compute performance, at a TDP of 235 Watts. According to AMD, this is the company’s first architecture designed specifically with high performance computing (HPC) workloads in mind, and is actually the first to break the 2.0 TFLOPS barrier. The new platform caters to cloud computing providers, enterprise clients, as well as the enthusiast market.

AMD has also launched its Opetron 64-bit ARM-based developer kits. Codenamed “Seattle”, the ultra-low power ARM-based kits are supposedly faster and more powerful than current low-power x86 chipsets. This chipset targets cloud services and data center providers.

Meanwhile, AMD is also targeting the emerging markets with its launch of two accelerated processing units (APUs) in China: the FX-8300 CPU and the Athlon X4 860K. The FX-8300 is geared toward providing multi-threaded performance at a low price point, targeting OEMs. The Athlon X4 860K is targeted at the gaming and enthusiast market, pushing four Steamroller cores clocked at 3.7 GHz with 2MB L2 cache.

Can the market share hold?

As it stands, AMD’s market share in the server industry has declined to 5% since its peak of 24% in 2006, although the company itself forecasts a gain toward 20% by end 2015 or by 2016. The chipmaker has traditionally been viewed to compete directly with Intel, although its recent thrust in focusing on high-performance and ultra-low power offerings may be seen as the company’s saving grace. AMD’s stock price fell 15% to  when it announced Q3 forecasts, which are largely conservative. However, the stock price rose 5% in the week after the company announced its latest Opetron and FirePro series, signaling that there could be interest in strong financials if the third phase of AMD’s restructuring plan is a deemed to be a success.

AMD expects that by 2016, the company will focus 50% of its business on high-growth markets by 2016, thereby leaving the other half to focus on the traditional PC market — a sound decision considering it is in the high-growth portion where the company’s strength now lies. It will now depend on the computing market’s uptake of AMD products and platforms, whether the company can follow through with its last phase of restructuring, which is geared toward ensuring profitability from an improved market position.

AMD’s stock is currently trading at $4.10, with volume picking up in the wake of its second-quarter 2014 earnings announcement.

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Nvidia has been doing a lot of their own consumer products lately, with the original Shield handheld gaming console and the Tegra Note 7 tablet. Each of these devices was actually surprisingly good and they were very good values for the money, especially if you got them at their cheapest ($199 each). Nvidia has learned a lot of lessons from each device and they’ve done a fantastic job of updating both the Shield and the Tegra Note 7. Their updates are so frequent and regular that I almost feel like they’ve got the leg up on almost every other Android manufacturer out there. They are also some of the first if not the first to release a new version of the Android OS for their devices as it becomes available.

Nvidia Shield family

So, it comes as little surprise that Nvidia has today announced the Shield tablet, a converging device that combines the best of the Tegra Note 7 and the Shield portable gaming console into a portable gaming tablet. The Shield Tablet’s core innovation is that it sports a Tegra K1 SoC with a Kepler GPU inside rather than the previous generation Tegra 4 SoC, which was a few generations of GPU architecture behind. Tegra K1 promises to be vastly faster than anything Nvidia has ever made before and it will come in two CPU flavors with the first one being an ARM A15 implementation and the second being Nvidia’s own custom 64-bit CPU design.

The Nvidia Shield Tablet will have an 8″ Full HD IPS display capable of supporting DirectStylus 2 (an improvement over DirectStylus) and will feature a dual front-facing speaker setup much like the Tegra Note 7, but with a higher resolution because the Tegra Note 7 was only 720P and the Shield Tablet is 1080P. However, it will now have bass ports to allow for more bass to come from the speakers, a feature that many gamers will appreciate. It also has two 5MP cameras, one front and one back along with SmugMug’s Camera Awesome app built-into the phone. The tablet will support up to 128GB of SDXC memory card storage and wil come in a 16GB and 32GB versions with built-in memory. The 16GB variant of the Shield Tablet will be Wi-Fi only while the 32GB will support LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile through Nvidia’s Icera i500 modem. It will also have a 20 watt hour battery, which should suffice for about 8-10 hours of medium to light use and probably 5 hours or less of actual gaming.

Nvidia claims that the Shield Tablet will support 4K as it is “4K ready” however they are outputting the video for 4K over miniHDMI which is basically a dead standard in the mobile industry and hasn’t been used by anyone in a phone for a while. The fact that Nvidia chose to go with miniHDMI instead of MHL 3.0 is a perplexing one because with MHL 3.0 they can not only support 4K video streaming but they are also able to charge the device as it plays video back to the TV through the USB port.

The tablet will also feature Bluetooth 4.0 LE and 802.11n Wi-Fi, which is a bit of a disappointment like the Shield portable console was because in order to really get a solid gaming experience you really want to have something like 802.11ac. And yes, it will increase the overall cost of materials, but maybe Nvidia needs to develop their own because the lack of it in this tablet is almost unforgivable at this point.

Nvidia Shield Tablet Pricing

Nvidia will price the Shield Tablet at $299 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model and $399 for the 32GB LTE model. They will also be selling a flip cover that will also double as a stand for the Shield Tablet as well as the Shield Controller which operates via Wi-Fi direct for $59. What makes this launch even more interesting is that the tablet will be available globally, the first time for any Nvidia Tegra consumer product. First the launch will begin on July 29th in the US (pre-order open today) and then Europe on August 14th and then the rest of the world this fall.

Overall, this tablet looks fairly promising as a standalone product, the real question will be how it will perform as a gaming tablet and whether or not people really want a separate tablet and game controller setup. I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to want to see if Nvidia releases a Shield portable gaming console with the Tegra K1 updated SoC inside. A gaming tablet is cool and all, but I just don’t see very many scenarios where carrying around a controller and a tablet is something a consumer would enjoy.

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Our buddies over at Origin PC are having a pretty sweet Back to School deal, depending on which product you buy from them. If you’re in the market for a sweet gaming desktop or a high-end EON gaming notebook from them, then you can expect to get a free upgrade to a 240 GB SSD from VisionTek as well as a free copy of Watch Dogs. Or, if you’re in the market for something like their EVO15-S gaming laptop, then you can get free ground shipping across the US, a free 2 year part replacement warranty (standard is one year), and a free copy of Watch Dogs. However, it appears that their 2 year warranty that they’re including here does not include the cost of shipping or labor for the laptop, so it may not actually be as good of a warranty as it may seem.

Back 2 School Origin PC

We’ll be watching out for other good Back to School deals for you guys as they start to heat up, leading to the beginning of the school year. We’re already working on some guides for the best laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets for this back to school season so that you’ve got most of your decisions covered. But as of right now, Origin PC is the only company that’s launched their back to school deals so far. And while the 2 year part replacement warranty may not seem so great, most gaming laptops dong really last that long to begin with and any repairs are mostly going to be the cost of parts and not really labor. That’s primarily because replacement parts for most laptops are incredibly expensive and usually drive people towards just buying a new laptop. But even with that caveat, the Origin PC desktop and EON Laptop deal isn’t a bad one because they’re basically throwing in a free SSD and game which is actually worth about what they say it is.

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Yesterday, AMD reported their earnings for the second quarter of 2014, with a lot of investors watching to see if AMD can complete their turnaround. They reported a net loss of $36 million even though they had an operating income of $63 million on $1.44 billion in revenue. Their non-GAAP operating income was $67 million and a non-GAAP profit of $17 million with the exclusion of the $49 million loss from debt redemption in the quarter, pushing the company’s GAAP earnings figures into the negative once again. Based upon these figures, this translates to a loss per share of $0.05, slightly more than what some investors and analysts were expecting.

The good news is that AMD’s revenue was up 3% sequentially and 24% year over year, thanks mostly to their increased semi-custom business bringing in vast console revenues. While these revenues are great for AMD, they are still fairly low margin and as a result, AMD’s gross margin is at 35%, nearly half of what Intel’s was last quarter. This margin disparity is partly what differentiates the two companies so drastically financially, but there are a lot of things that really separate the two even though they are the only two vendors of x86 chips for PCs.

Now, looking at AMD’s two different divisions from the last quarter, they had Computing Solutions and GVS (Graphics and Visual Solutions) each reporting increases in revenue and operating profitability. So, if you look at AMD’s business they are actually generating a profit, but due to the fact that they took a $49 million interest charge, they ended up losing money. Computing solutions reported $9 million in operating income on $669 million in revenue while GVS reported $82 million on $772 million in revenue. Clearly, AMD’s computing solutions business still needs some serious work in terms of operating income, but has improved from a $3 million operating loss last quarter. However, AMD’s strongsuit, GPUs, faltered a bit this quarter as they had reported $91 million in operating income last quarter compared to the $82 million this quarter. Most of this decrease was due to lower GPU sales, partially tied to the inevitable slowdown of cryptocurrency mining and the lack of excess demand from that community.

AMD also issued an outlook for Q3 2014 as well as the whole year of 2014. They expect that revenue will grow 2% sequentially, plus or minus 3% (???), which is honestly quite odd because I don’t remember the last time a company’s projected growth was smaller than the swing that they predict. They predict a growth of 2% with a swing of 6% (up 3% or down 3%). Ignoring this bizarre revenue projection, their projects for the rest of the year are incredibly conservative and muted, something their competitors in the same industry aren’t necessarily reporting. After all, there’s no denying that people will always look at Intel and AMD and if Intel is doing well, the expectation is that AMD should be too, unless they’re swapping market share.

However, AMD’s stock plunged 19% after earnings were announced, and today the stock has barely recovered as it currently sits down 16.85% at the time of writing. AMD obviously has a lot of shorts, probably more than almost any other stock in the semiconductor industry. So, whenever there’s bad news, even if not entirely all that bad, the stock seems to plummet. Now, the stock sits beneath $4, once again. The simple moving average for the majority of this year was at or below $4 and unless AMD does something seriously innovative or aggressive I don’t see that stock moving away from $4 any time soon. Upgrade, downgrade or neither, AMD simply does not have anything that can genuinely excite investors until 2016. We will see if AMD can actually complete this turnaround, I’m just not sure people want to keep hearing about non-GAAP profitability quarter over quarter when GAAP is really what gets looked at in a lot of cases. Additionally, I don’t know if AMD can continue to have lukewarm outlooks through 2014 as they don’t appear to have anything heavy hitting quite yet. Not to mention, Intel and Nvidia are not standing still, which means that AMD will not only have to innovate but do it at a faster pace than their competitors if they even want to have a chance in the future.

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So, AMD announced that they would be reshuffling the company’s corporate structure which includes some business unite consolidation and executive shuffling. First and foremost, they would be appointing Dr. Lisa Su as the COO from her current position as Senior Vice President and GM of Global Business Units. Anyone that knows how AMD works and what Dr. Lisa Su has been doing already knows that she’s effectively been the COO for quite some time and that the company had actually vacated that position a long time ago. Keep in mind that AMD’s current CEO, Rory Read, was once COO of Lenovo before he came from IBM (which is where Lisa Su spent most of her career before she worked at Freescale).

So, that point is merely nothing more than a technicality. Now, there have been a few organizational adjustments made within the company as they’ve consolidated the entire company into two divisions.

AMD will have a Computing and Graphics Business Group as well as an Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group. This effectively separates the professional and consumer graphics divisions as well as the consumer processors from the server processors. AMD’s current CSO, John Byrne, will be made the Senior Vice President and GM responsible for leading the entire division and will report directly to Dr. Lisa Su.

Now, for the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group, the company will have Dr. Lisa Su herself as the acting lead of the division. This includes AMD’s server, embedded, dense server and semi-custom businesses (consoles), it also includes the related product engineering and sales functions necessary for these various businesses.

There have been rumors within AMD that the company would be grooming a new CEO to replace Rory Read, their caretaker CEO. Rory Read has done exactly what he was brought on to do, keep the company stable, and more importantly, alive. We’ve been hearing rumors that John Byrne may be one of the front runners for the CEO position, which makes sense with today’s announcement even though he was already CSO. And Lisa Su’s role within the company already groomed her for the position and her involvement in the company’s public events further makes this seem plausible.

Dr. Lisa Su (center) pictured along with John Byrne (left of her) and Colette LaForce (to her right) at last week’s Computex 2014

However, there is no denying that the constant presence of both John Byrne and Lisa Su at company announcements and launches is without a clear sign that the job for CEO is effectively between the two of them. This is why I believe AMD has decided to split the company up in two and has essentially given each of them a chance to show who of them is more capable of making AMD a successful company.

One weird thing that AMD did was mention the ages of everyone involved including Rory Read (52), Lisa Su (44) and John Byrne (43), which even further clarifies that this is more of a CEO race than anything. However, some investors and members of the board may be concerned that Lisa Su and John Byrne may be ‘too young’ to run the company even though they are clearly the two most qualified people to do so. It just adds another drop into the CEO race bucket.

I honestly didn’t see it coming down to this, as normally the CEO position is mostly politically battled from within the halls of the companies in question. If this is indeed the board of AMD’s way of giving each of them a chance to show their stuff, they may have just telegraphed it to the entire world and we will probably be able to pick the next CEO of AMD purely based upon the performance of these two divisions of AMD over the next year or two. Until then, we’ll just have to keep watching. These changes will be reflected starting July 1st.

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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 chipset, including future compatibility with 5th Generation Core CPUs.

Intel 9 Series Chipset Overview

These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to slot in where the old Haswell CPUs sat in terms of price, while delivering a new level of performance on the CPU end. And yes, these new CPUs do have a 4w higher TDP at 88W vs. 84W. But in reality Devil’s Canyon is merely an overclocked version of the Core i7 4770K and Core i7 4670K. The only real differences are that the clock speeds are higher on the 4790K with the base clock being 4.0 GHz, Intel’s first chip that has all four cores running at 4 GHz stock speed. The boost clock is also 4.4 GHz versus the 4770K’s 3.9, but that’s only for a single CPU core in most cases.

Intel Devil’s Canyon

Devil’s Canyon Improvements

As you can see above, the primary changes that Intel has made with Devil’s Canyon are seen through their decision to add more resistors on the bottom of the GPU to help smooth out power delivery to the CPU. They also changed the thermal interface material (TIM) to their new Next-Generation Polmer Thermal Interface Material. They did this because a lot of overclockers complained about the TIM in Haswell because it simply didn’t overclock as well as many had expected it to. So, in fact, Devil’s Canyon is really a re-do more than anything really and Intel is sponsoring a ton of overclocking events here at Computex in order to see how high they can get overclockers to push these new CPUs.

Devil’s Canyon Pricing

In addition to the new Devil’s Canyon chips being supported on Z97, Intel has also made it clear that these new chips should work no problem with the previous Z87 chipset, a reversal of what we were originally told back at GDC earlier this year. Back then, we criticized Intel for forcing people into a new motherboard for no reason and it looks like they listened and most Z87 boards will probably support the Devil’s Canyon chips with a simple microcode update to the BIOS. While Devil’s Canyon isn’t necessarily much of a change for Intel in terms of architecture, it does show that they’re committed to improving and listening to consumers which is important. And if you build a Z97 system with a Devil’s Canyon chip, you can always upgrade to Broadwell when it comes out next year.

Now, last but not least, Intel is also announcing a Pentium Anniversary edition, which they also had pre-announced at GDC. This new processor is merely an unlocked higher clocked version of the Pentium processor designed to commemorate the processor’s 20 year anniversary and to give overclockers something to mess with and push with some overclocking to see how high they can get the CPU to go. We’ve got pricing for this new CPU below with the 1000 piece pricing being $72.

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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 be in their Ultra Durable line, which comes as a result of the fact that Gigabyte has decided to do away with the Ultra Durable numbering scheme, a good decision. In addition to that, Gigabyte is bringing more and more of their gaming and overclocking premium board features into their mainstream Ultra Durable line of boards. This is a welcome move because it simply improves the overall value of buying virtually any Gigabyte board. Some of those features include improved audio codecs and isolation as well as dual NICs and other gamer-focused innovations.

Gigabyte’s Z97 Gaming G1 Black Edition

However, in terms of excitement, Gigabyte’s most interesting announcement was the announcement of their Z97-OC LN2 board which is strictly an LN2 overclocking motherboard (or HE3). This board is especially interesting because of the way it was designed for optimal memory overclocking. This board recently broke the world record for the fastest memory, ever at 4.5 GHz, beating the previous record of 4.4 GHz on an ASUS board. It is a bit curious, though, that this new record isn’t being posted on HWBot, but maybe it will shortly… This Z97-OC LN2 board is special because it only has two memory slots and no mounting holes for the CPU. Because of these two major design decisions, this board is capable of overclocking memory higher than any board before it. And it was all done using Kingston memory, too.

The rest of Gigabyte’s line pretty much stays the same, gaining a few incremental upgrades here and there with the addition of M.2 connector and SATA Express support with the Z97 chipset. Obviously, not all boards will have these features but they will come and go through the product stack. The only new addition to Gigabyte’s line of boards are their Black Edition boards, which are Gigabyte’s premier quality boards designed and tested to last. All of Gigabyte’s Z97 Black Edition boards are designed for the ultimate durability, enduring 168 hours of grueling testing before being sent out to the customer accompanied by a 5 year warranty. Currently, Gigabyte only has three Black Edition boards, starting with a UD3 board, followed by a UD5 and finally completed with a G1 Gaming Z97 board which pretty much fills the Black Edition lineup with boards from all three different price and feature levels from Gigabyte.

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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.

Intel’s Roadmap for Skylake

If you look at the roadmap above you can see that Intel is drastically simplifying their chipsets and CPU offerings, they are offering fewer variants of their CPUs with Skylake and consolidating the 100 series chipset as mentioned above. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t appear to be any mention of high-performance parts, which means that this is likely more of a mainstream chipset roadmap and excludes enthusiast and enterprise since most of the parts mentioned above are BGA like their Haswell and Broadwell predecessors. All of Intel’s truly high performance parts are still LGA-based, which means this clearly isn’t a full roadmap for all of Intel’s products, but even so we get a pretty good idea of what kind of capabilities Intel is aiming for with their newest chipsets and what codenames we’re looking at. That includes Alpine Ridge, which is going to the the latest version of Thunderbolt, delivering 40 Gbps of bandwidth, however it isn’t quite clear if that’ll be accomplished with a single cable or with dual cables like Intel is doing now (even though it looks to be a single cable). It will deliver up to 100W of charging capability, which means that most external hard drives wouldn’t really require a power connector anymore and a Thunderbolt cable should be enough to power the entire device. The same should go for monitors, even those with 4K support, as Thunderbolt claims true dual 4K display support.

Alpine Ridge

Skylake looks to be pretty promising, considering that it’ll be coming in 2015 and will be the first consumer parts to be using DDR4 and PCI-Express 4.0, which hasn’t even been ratified yet as a standard. Skylake will surely resolve any sort of bandwidth issues that might exist virtually anywhere on the system considering the sheer amounts of bandwidth coming from the use of DDR4, PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 3.0.

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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 and improving overall performance per watt to levels that AMD has never seen before. AMD claims that their new APUs are capable of compute performance per watt levels that their competition can’t even touch, even though there are realistically very few scenarios today where you can easily compare compute performance in applications. Compute performance is going to be important, it is just a matter of time until it happens and it seems to be taking longer than everyone had thought.

With the introduction of both of these new APUs you are getting new Puma+ cores, updated GCN cores, system-aware power management (and battery boost), the Cortex A5-based hardware security platform, DDR3-1866 support and some pretty decent overall frequency improvements at lower TDPs.

Below, you can see that there are going to be four Beema series APUs, with two being A-Series and two being E-Series with varying GPU and CPU clocks but fairly similar TDP. Meanwhile, Mullins will be shipping in three different SKUs with two being A-Series APUs and one being an E-Series. All of Mullins’ TDPs are sub 5w and their SDP (I don’t like that they’re going along with this) is sub 3w.

In addition to the bumps to CPU and GPU clocks and performance, they have included the AMD Platform Security Processor, which is a dedicated hardware security ARM Cortex A5 chip designed along with ARM’s TrustZone in order to follow industry standards and to enable better usability in the enterprise. This is the 1st and only x86 processor to integrate an ARM core on-die.

In Futuremark’s PCMark 8 and 3DMark, AMD’s Beema APU takes some competition to Intel’s lower-end parts, which bodes well for AMD’s ability to sell cheap chips, but the lack of a real high-performance low-power part is still a bit concerning. And yes, we know AMD crushes in OpenCL they always have against Intel and Nvidia.

Here you can see how Beema compares against Kabini in terms of power consumption and battery life, delivering a reduction of upto 20% power reduction.

AMD also introduced some really interesting power management and power reductions with Beema and Mullins, especially with Mullins in the tablet formfactors. The creaction of the STAPM or Skin Temperature Aware Power management is definitely something that a lot of companies should take into consideration and shows some real creativity on the part of AMD to utilize as much available TDP comfortable to the user as they can.

Here you can also see the CPU and GPU core architecture enhancements that AMD made in order to reduce power consumption while simultaneously increasing clocks and performance. AMD reduced the leakage of their Puma+ cores by 19% and their GCN GPU cores by more than 38% which attributes to a lot of lower level power consumption savings.

AMD also says that Beema and Mullins APUs are merely the beginning of the company’s strategy towards reducing power, increasing overall performance and making things smaller, but for us, the most interesting thing to see will be how they get HSA to work in lower power parts and when we can really see some real HSA applications across AMD’s entire product stack.

I personally can’t wait to see what kinds of products come out of AMD’s partners as a result of these developments and what interesting formfactors they’ll come in. Because at CES, AMD had some really impressive prototypes for gaming, TV and much more. Hopefully some of their partners are encouraged by these prototypes to think of something even better.

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AMD’s earnings broken down by revenue per division also spoke to how the company was able to beat the street’s expectations.

Computing Solutions: In their Computing Solutions business, which primarily focuses on CPUs and chipsets, AMD saw a decline of 8% quarter over quarter and 12% year over year, indicating that the PC market did shrink overall year over year, but an 8% decrease sequentially is almost to be expected going from the company’s busiest quarter (as was the case with Intel). They managed to post an operating loss of $3 million rather than an operating loss of $7 million in the previous quarter, primarily driven by lower operating expenses. This is compared to an operating loss of $39 million in the same period a year ago, clearly indicating AMD’s ability to adjust, slowly. Additionally, their CPU ASP remained flat sequentially but down ‘slightly’ year over year (no percentage provided).

Graphics and Visual Solutions: In AMD’s Graphics and Visual solutions division, which includes console APUs, AMD saw their revenue in the first quarter of 2014 decrease 15% sequentially and increase 118% year over year. This is clearly being driven by their ‘semi-custom’ SoC business and their GPU business which saw revenue increase both sequentially and year over year, indicating AMD’s thirst to improve their graphics strength. They reported that GPU sales were improved due to strong demand for their AMD Radeon R7 and R9 series of graphics cards. However, AMD still has a lot of room for improvement here with most of the GPU marketshare still being in Nvidia’s hands. Additionally, it appears as though the Xbox One’s slow-down in sales may have been the biggest factor in this change from quarter to quarter as Sony’s PlayStation 4 sales are strong as ever.

AMD also reported stronger operating income with an operating income of $91 million, compared to $121 million in Q4 2013, however, when compared to the same quarter a year ago at $16 million, AMD looks to be doing much better. The sequential decline was blamed by AMD on decreased revenue from ‘semi-custom’ SoCs while the year over year increase was also driven by higher sales of ‘semi-custom’ SoCs, basically consoles drove sales very strongly.

AMD’s outlook for 2014 was also a bit rosier than expected as they did report that they expected to see revenue for 2014 to increase year over year and that they expected their gross margin to remain around 35% which is exactly where they reported it for this quarter. Based on these slightly better than expected earnings, improved outlook and GPU sales strength, AMD’s stock is currently up 6% in after hours trading, clearly indicating investors’ happiness with this quarter’s earnings.

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