Older designs say bye-bye

According to Fudzilla, Intel will be EOL'ing (end-of-life) ten models of Core 2 processors.

Up for the proverbial chopping block are:

Quad Core Parts:

• QX6800 R.I.P.
• QX6850 to be replaced by Q9650
• QX9770 to be replaced by i7
• QX9650 to be replaced by i7

These changes make sense, why would one still buy Extreme Edition Kentsfield or even Penryn parts when the i7 Extremes come out?

Dual Core Parts:

• E6850
• E6750
• E6650
• E6450
• E4600
• E2180
• E2160
• E2140
• E1200

Totally makes sense... we are just seeing the transition from 65nm to 45nm; its cheaper to make 45nm parts.

More CPU's for everyone

According to Digitimes, AMD is planning to launch some more processors soon:

October:

Phenom X3 8850

• 2.5GHz
• 95W TDP
• 65nm

November:

Athlon 2650e:

• 1.6GHz
• 15W TDP
• 65nm

Athlon X2 3250e

• 1.6GHz
• 22W TDP
• dual core
• 65nm

December 2008:

Current target for Deneb is apparently late December, but may slip to January 2009

6 cores, lotsa cache for lotsa cash

CNet is saying that Intel is expected to announce its first six core Xeon processor on September 15th.

The "Dunnington" a.k.a. Xeon 7400 apparently has:

• six cores on one die
• Penryn based cores
• 16MB L3 shared cache
• 45nm high-k process

Mind you, this information is apparently based on what server vendors told Intel - who is either laughing at a successful disinformation campaign or sharpening knives for the server vendor once it locates the leak.

Competition is good for the consumer :-)

The Register reports that Intel is introducing some entry level processors:

• Core 2 Quad - Q8200 - 45nm, 2.66GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache for $224
• Core 2 Duo - E5200 - 45nm, 2.5GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache for $84
• Celeron D - 450 - 65nm, 2.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache for $53

Fudzilla says he has gotten a hold of some Bloomfield prices:

• Core i7 @ 3.2GHz, QPI @ 6.4 for $999 in Q4
• Core i7 @ 2.93GHz, QPI @ 4.8, 8MB cache, $530+
• Core i7 @ 2.66GHz, QPI @ 4.8, 8MB cache $284

And later he says that Core i7's will only support DDR3 800 and DDR3 1066 - a far cry from the high speed DDR3's on the market. Apparently this may be due to a requirement to run the DDR3 modules at the CPU core voltage, which is capped at 1.65V, which is lower than the voltage needed by high speed DDR3 modules.

Yummmy... cheaper processors!

The Inquirer has gotten hold of some new AMD OEM pricing:

• $189 Phenom X4 9950 BE (was $235)
• $180 Phenom X4 9850 BE (was $194)
• $170 Phenom X4 9750 (was $215)
• $156 Phenom X4 9650 (was $195)
• $134 Phenom X3 8750 (was $175)
• $123 Phenom X3 8650 (was $145)
• $95 Athlon X2 6000+ (was $112)
• $88 Athlon X2 5600+ (was $102)
• $78 Athlon X2 5400+ (was $87)
• $68 Athlon X2 5200+ (was $76)

Meanwhile, Fudzilla reports that AMD will soon start shipping a Kuma based dual core processor, the Athlon X2 6500 will apparently be a dual core K10 running at 2.3GHz with 2x512KB L2 cache and 3MB of L3 cache, and will sell for less than $200. A 45nm K10.5 version code name Regor may be available mid-2009.

Less than 5 GHz is pathetic!

'Shark Team', an overclocking team hailing from Italy, broke a new overclocking record recently. They managed to push an E8600 to an incredible 6526 MHz.

A great help in this adventure seems to be the DFI DK P45-T2RS PLUS motherboard, which is, by many reports, capable of some fierce overclocking.

Shark Team used the following BIOS settings to achieve this craziness:

"CPU VID Special +650.0mV (1.968 ... not limit yet)

DRAM Voltage 2.56V /2.54 Actual

SB Core 1.555V

NB COre Voltage 1.42V

CPU VTT Voltage 1.38V

Dram Speed 1200 @ Boot

Strap To NB : 400

Boot @ 610 X 10 / 652.2 SetFsb"

In addition, the team used a BIOS volt-modification program ('Dark CoreMod'), and the CPU cooling was taken care of "KingBlock Rev 1.0" which is presumably, a custom built liquid nitrogen cooling solution. They also used a 'Special Edition' overclockers version of Windows XP made by some character who goes by the name of Hiwa.

While just about everything about this overclocking venture is impressive, perhaps the E8600 being even capable of hitting 6.5 GHz (or greater) is something worth drinking beer about. 

Not likely, but makes an interesting headline

The Inq reports that a small site purports to have some information on the upcoming Deneb chips.

Apparently Reviewage.co.uk claims that AMD will release an FX-80 and an FX-82 - both Deneb based, with 6MB of L3 cache and unlocked multipliers.

The FX-80 purportedly will run at 4.0GHz, and the FX-82 at 4.4GHz - difficult to  believe based on current AMD processor frequencies, but not quite impossible; however the same site also claims that the 4GHz FX-80 will outperform a 5GHz Kentsfield, which would make it roughly equivalent to a 4GHz Penryn.

They have some slides, and I hope this is true... however, I am definitely not holding my breath.

Quad cores are becoming very affordable

Quad cores CPUs have been out for a while now, but how many people do you know that have one? Quads have always been falling in price; but it seems that in the last few months they have really started to become quite afforadable.

If matched MHz to MHz, Intel Core 2 Quads are faster than AMD Phenoms -- so would you want to buy a Phenom? Well, it is pretty simple: they sell for less.

UK based Website Hexus garnered the following new pricing information from a certain Raj Suman, reportedly an "Euro product marketing director at distributor Avnet." Presumably these price changes will touch down in North America as well.

   A quad core Phenom for about $150? Sounds good to me.

   In addition to these refresh prices, the following new models are going to be introduced:

  - Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition 125W - $186

  - Phenom X3 8750 Black Edition 95W - $139

  - Athlon X2 6500 Black Edition 95W - $105

  - Athlon X2 5050e 45W -$90

  These new models and price cuts are due in the first week of September.

IDF tidbits from the net

Intel PDF mashup:

SATA3

• 6 Gbps
• Power over eSATA

Intel SSD

• SATA2
• 32GB SLC
• 80GB MLC
• 10 parallel flash channels
• improved wear levelling
• 1.2M hour MTBF
• up to 250MB/sec reads
• up to 70MB/sec writes

Extreme line:

• X18-M
• X25-M
• X25-E
• 2M hour MTBF
• up to 250MB/sec reads
• up to 170MB/sec writes
• 0.1ms access time

DDR3

Quimonda focusing on low voltage:

• DDR3-1333 @ 1.35V
• DDR3-1800 CL10 @ 1.5V

DDR4:

• Quimonda to introduce in 2012
• 30nm process
• 1.2V target
• DDR4-2133/2667/3200

Lucid multi-GPU

• Hydra 100 chip
• up to four GPU's by same manufacturer
• GPU's can have difference performance levels
• chip on mb "intercepts" DX/OGL commands and distributes work
• in-frame load balancing, not interleaved frames

Editor's note: I am VERY skeptical that they can make this work without GPU manufacturers support.

low power dual core goodness to come

Today at Intel Developers Forum, Intel introduced the Atom 330 - the first dual core Atom processor along with a new motherboard for it.

Atom 330:

• dual core
• 45nm
• low power
• 533MHz FSB

Complementing the Atom 330 is the new D945GCLF2 motherboard:

• mini-ITX form factor
• based on the 945GC chipset
• GMA 950 integrated graphics
• supports one DIMM of up to 2GB of 533MHz or 667MHz DDR2
• gigabit ethernet
• two SATAII ports
• six channel HD audio
• s-video out
• four USB2.0 ports on back I/O panel
• four addition USB2.0 ports on two headers

The board and processor may ship in September of this year.

A good idea for our contemporary transition from dual to quad cores

Some German technology enthusiasts at www.hardware-infos.com are reporting on a new feature that will be coming in the next series of CPUs coming from Intel, the recently named Core i7 series (or Nehalem.)

This new speedy processors will have a 'Turbo' feature. Long long ago, in this galaxy, PC computers used to have a 'turbo' mode which was this physical switch you could flick when you wanted to kick things into high gear with some extra processing power. This turbo feature was removed, (with the introduction of the first Pentium if I recall correctly), probably because most users just left there computer in turbo mode all the time, so having two separate modes was unnecessary. 

But this new Turbo mode is a bit different. Basically it is much like the on-the-fly overclocking you can do with the AMD Spider platform, and some other setups. With this new turbo mode, if only one or two of the four cores of your i7 are being used, the frequency of the active cores with be raised, as needed. This is a great idea because at this point in time, relatively few applications are actually capable of of supplying four threads to the four cores of your CPU. For example, the vast majority of games do not support quad-cores, so in this turbo mode, raising the speed of the two active cores running your game will grant you a performance increase, without subjecting the unwilling to fiddle with, and tweak, their BIOS settings.

As the Google translator says, adapting from the original German on Hardware-Infos: "This is done by the function of the heavily congested cores with more supplies and the clock Nichtstuenden goes to sleep banished. How high the bar syringe fails, will depend on the performance of the host processor."

Exactly how high the bar syringe fails is unknown at this point.

More cpu goodness...

Digitimes reports on some upcoming Intel moves:

New CPU's:

• $244 Q8200, 45nm quad core, 2.33GHz
• $84 E5200, 2.5GHz
• $53 Celeron 450, 2.2GHz (Conroe-L based)

October price cuts:

• Q8200 drops from $224 to $203
• Q6600 drops from $193 to $183
• E7300 drops from $133 to $113
• E2220 drops from $84 to $74
• E2200 drops from $74 to $64

Nehalem (Core i7) launches:

• 3.2GHz @ $999
• 2.93GHz @ $562
• 2.66GHz @ $284

All prices are said to be in 1000 piece tray quantities.

Q2 sees decline

CEO and President Jen-Hsun Huang revealed during NVIDIA's second quarter financial earnings call last evening the company's GPU shipments dropped 20 percent within the last quarter. Moreover, the average selling prices of the GPUs dropped by 25 percent. The loss incurred amounts to $120.9 million, contrasting the  $172.7 million of profit recorded the year previous.

All in all this hasn't boded well for NVIDIA's financial standings: company revenue decreased by five percent to $892.7 million (this time last year they stood at $935.3m).

This is particularly striking news because it's the first quarter in nearly six years they've recorded a loss. Reportedly the 'mood on the call was understandably sombre.' What goes up must come down, though, so it appears.

The losses weren't exactly unexpected, however: Huang pins it on a variety of factors: economic slowdown, large inventory of 65nm chips, over-pricing, underestimation of the competition (AMD), delays to integrated graphics chipsets for Intel processors, and more:

“The desktop PC market around the world weakened during the quarter. And our miscalculation of competitive price position further pressured our desktop GPU business. We have a great product line-up and, having taken the necessary pricing actions, we are strongly positioned again. Our focus now is to drive cost improvements and to further enhance our competitiveness through the many exciting initiatives we have planned for the rest of the year.”

This also follows the news of its higher-than-expected failure rates on some notebook GPUs in July (you can read the newest details on that situation here).

It seems it would be best for the company to look at this as an opportunity to learn from mistakes and move forward, however, this will take some time:

[W]hen asked about when he expects the market to recover and for desktop GPU shipments to grow again, [Huang] said “it’s hard to say when it will recover.” Huang mentioned that the company is ready to ship 55nm chips in volume, but because of a large inventory of 65nm products, 55nm products will not carpet bomb the market until later in the year – as soon as 65nm inventory has been worked through.

It's not all bad though: he said, “The notebook GPU, MCP, and Professional Solutions groups grew a combined 27 percent year-over year."

Ok, now what does i7 stand for?

Intel announced today that the upcoming desktop processors based on the "Nehalem" microarchitecture will be branded as "Intel® Core™" processors, with the first family - including an extreme edition - to be specified by an "i7"; so the complete branding will be "Intel® Core™ i7".

Apparently "i7" is only the first of new designations to come

“The Core name is and will be our flagship PC processor brand going forward,” said Sean Maloney, Intel Corporation executive vice president and general manager, Sales and Marketing Group. “Expect Intel to focus even more marketing resources around that name and
the Core i7 products starting now.”

Nehalem based processors are expected to be available starting the fourth quarter of this year.

GPU details arrive and process size comes forward

We've been riding the information around the AMD Fusion GPU quite a bit lately given that it's supposed to be on track for quite a few changes in the CPU industry. Today we get some updates on the processor and the features coming.

The latest out of TG Daily shows that AMD has been making quite a few trips to discuss the new chip with TSMC who will be producing the new processors for the company but not in way that would be anticipated (45, 32nm) but at 40nm for the first generation, on this die they will employ two Phenom CPU cores as well as a lower end ATI RV800 core into the package, a lot of speculation went on to point to a current generation chip going into the Fusion for the sake of design but it seems ATI has been hard at work with their next generation to the point where they can dump in their latest efforts. Details on the RV800 are faint with only basic information of DX10.1 compatibility and some minor performance changes outside of those yielded from shrinking the die itself.

Plans after point to the Fusion chip stepping down to 32nm in 2010 so those getting in early don't have much to worry about for getting burned being an early adopter, at least the company is staying to a real projection of about a year before they take the next major plunge into technology changes with the Bulldozer series. The future chips will also make use of the TSMC SOI process at 32nm.

Overall the news is good, AMD moving their latest architecture to their new lines instead of recycling K8 or K8.5 style architecture when Intel has been bringing new changes to their entire line since they cranked out the Core 2. Phenom should prove to be a pretty intriguing  choice on the mobile platform especially when using a 40nm process given the past limits of the processor have often shown that the larger process size has given then speed issues as well as power consumption problems. If the company can knock down their power draw even from current PUMA based systems then they should be in a much better state. Right now many fear the move to a mobile platform simply based on power consumption during power sessions on the go.

Nehalem to launch early?

Digitimes reports that Intel will apparently launch its upcoming Nehalem processor and x58 chipset in September, with products available in the channel in early October.

If this is true... let the benchmarking begin!

Cheap speed

Intel has announced some price cuts on a bunch of popular processors. The largest of price cuts come close to 33% percent.

The great overclocker, the E8500 (3.16) was cut from $266 to $183. The more inexpensive (and also great for overclocked) E7200 (2.53 GHz) gets a %15 price reduction, going from $133 to $113. The E8400 goes from $183 to $163, and the E3110 (3GHz) got a similar price cut, now selling for $167 instead of $183.

And Intel had some love for their quad-cores as well: the Q6600 (2.4 GHz) falls from $223 to $193.

The Xeon line also benefited from some price reductions. The X3220 (2.4 GHz) dropped to $198 from $224, while the X3210 (2.13 GHz) took a similar cut.

The pricing for all the "Extreme" branded processors has not been changed. 

Click on the image below for a listing of all the price changes.

Is AMD about to launch a competitor to the Atom and Nano?

The Register is reporting that AMD CEO Dirk Meyer has let the Bobcat out of the bag - so to speak.

Apparently AMD intends to sell a chip, codename Bobcat, for nettops and other low power consumption / low performance boxes.

Past leaks about the Bobcat suggest the following feature set:

• single Athlon core
• 128KB of L1 cache
• 256KB of L2 cache
• 800MHz (1600MHz effective) HT link
• DDR2-800 support
• 8W TDP
• 812-pin 27mm2 BGA package
• 1GHz

If Bobcat is really a shrunk Athlon, it should give the Atom a run for its money.

Surprisingly affordable

Digitimes reports that Intel is planning to drop the price of its "Extreme" edition back to $999 with the introduction of the Bloomfield (Nehalem) processor. Apparently the 3.2GHz processor will be priced at $999 (in trays of 1000 pieces) down fromt he current $1,499 price for the present top chip, the QX9770.

There are apparently going to be three Nehalems introduced at first:

• 3.2GHz $999
• 2.93GHz $562
• 2.66GHz $284

All will use the new LGA 1366 socket, and require a new X58 chipset based motherboard.

Here comes a new socket...

Dailytech reports that AMD's newest roadmap has some interesting tidbits:

• Socekt G34 - over 1900 pins
• "San Paulo" - 8 core (dual 4 core in one package) processor
• "Magny-Cours" - 12 core processor

First, the new socket will accomodate DDR3  for future AMD processors. The new socket will apparently allow for four Hypertransport 3 interconnects, and quad DDR3 channels.

Taking a leaf from Intel's playbook, with San Paulo AMD will apparently introduce an 8 core processor which is made by placing two native quad core dies into the same package; and the processor will apparently have 12MB of L3 cache and 512KB of L2 cache per core.

Later, Magny-Cours will apparently take us to a processor with twelve cores - it is not yet known if it will be a native 12 core part, or two 6 core devices in one package.

It will be interesting to benchmark these new parts :-)

Continuing problems plague the company even after after the merger

While it's no secret that many felt that the AMD / ATI merger wasn't going to be good, I don't think many saw it spiraling out like this, today reports come in from the AMD camp about Q2 bringing down a $950 million hit. The company plans to take an $880 million impairment charge on parts of it's ATI acquisition relating to handheld and DTV units of their Consumer Electronics Group, this added with other charges bring the total filing to just short of the $1 billion mark with the SEC.

The apparent upside is that while this is only a preview of things to come the 17th the company is planning to make an impact on that number when it closes sales of some of their 200mm wafer fabrication tools for a $190 million jump allowing the company to hopefully spin it into something productive as they are in the midst of restructuring the company to get it back in the game. Shareholders seem to have felt some reassurance with the company stock rising from $4.80 to $5 although this falls short of even their double digit pricing last year.

The news would probably bring some bit of joy to NVIDIA but they currently face their own issues with a price war taking tolls, entire batches of GPU's being labeled as defective and a new lawsuit on the floor from Rambus relating to patent violations in their memory controllers. It seems that all camps are taking hits right now in the marketplace in the midst of an already troubled economy. One would hope that these companies find resolve to keep technology going and rise out of the trouble they're currently dangling in right now.

We'll follow up with more as AMD makes their disclosure on July 17th. Hopefully there's more details to what entirely brought about the $880 million charge.

More quad core goodness from AMD

AMD has released three new quad core Phenom processors today.

Phenom 9950 Black Edition:

• $235
• 2.6GHz
• unlocked
• "Clock Multiplier Control"

Supposedly motherboards with the new AMD 750 Southbridge will support better overclocking of Phenoms by supporting the "Clock Multiplier Control" pins.

Phenom 9350e:

• $195
• 2GHz
• 65W TDP

Phenom 9150e:

• $175
• 1.8GHz
• 65W TDP

Warp speed ahead...

Fudzilla claims to have the final Nehalem specs:

• 3.2GHz will be the highest initial speed grade
• four cores
• two threads per core
• triple channel memory
• DDR3-1333 will be the maximum official memory speed at 3.2GHz
• 6.4GT/s QPI transactions per second
• 8MB of total cache
• 130W TDP
• LGA1366 socket
• Q4 2008 launch

The "6.4GT/s transactions" for the QuickPath Interconnect may refer to 3.2GT simultaneous input and output transactions; and it is interesting to see that it will be launched at the same clock speed as the top Penryn - Intel must be confident in the architectural improvements getting at least a 15%-20% performance advantage to launch at the same clock speed.

In a second article, Fudzilla says two other Nelahems will also be released, a "low end" model at 2.66GHz, and a "medium" model at 2.93GHz.

LVPC / ULVPC chip slide leaked, clarity forms.

It seems to always be a race to find out what on earth is going on with slides and announcements coming from companies. In weeks prior we brought a piece out about the 8W combo package that AMD was planning to launch, the chip aiming to fight the Atom on the overall consumption front as the chipset is still a power hog right now for Intel, given the low frequency report it seemed to be a bit confusing about what it would be able to deliver but that ends now with "Shrike" now on the table.

Shrike brings new features that help make it a contender for the LV or ULV space, the main being that this isn't just a CPU but it's a Fusion CPU featuring 2 cores and a real dedicated GPU on the chip instead of something sub-par such as the Intel GMA series. It also seems to be acting as a direct evolution from the Puma chipset that AMD had earlier announced given that all these percentage improvements are over the Puma platform which does chase me off a bit from considering an AMD portable if they're already passing it by on a chip targeted for a much smaller platform.

As a new entry to the marketplace though, it looks like this will do well with the upcoming Netbook systems from companies like Dell, Fujitsu and Lenovo as producers will see the CPU, GPU and Southbridge all integrated into a single chip. AMD will be looking into making this part of phase 2 in their mobile initiative, Puma is currently leading that plan right now but will take a back seat to this Fusion processor when it arrives next year after the company starts moving their server and desktop parts down to 45nm allowing for lower power consumption and higher frequencies so that they can have a good battle against Intel in the marketplace without overheating or coming up short on clockspeed.

Unfortunately most won't have much to talk about since the company says the platform will be hitting about midway through 2009, leaving the marketplace to Intel and VIA for the time being. Hopefully the company ramps up development and really does carry out something since they've been talking about Fusion on paper for years now with nothing really to show for it, if they can beat Intel to the punch with something noteworthy then they'll help themselves get a larger piece of the market and be able to capitalize on it by being a step ahead.

Some roadmap changes

Digitimes reports that Intel has tweaked its road map.

In July, Intel plans to start phasing out the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 as well as the Core 2 6800, and will phase out the quad core Q9550 and Q9650 in the first quarter of next year.

The launch of dual core Atom processors has apparently been pushed back to at least September of this year - it was originally supposed to be released this July.