Columnist Vince Freeman goes under the hood and takes a look at new Flex FP floating-point capabilities of AMD's Bulldozer microarchitecture.
It's nice that buyers are eagerly awaiting Intel's future "Sandy Bridge" and AMD's "Bulldozer" and "Fusion" processors, but the chipmakers would rather be selling product now. Hence a barrage of tempting new CPUs, including some of AMD's best values and some of Intel's fastest processors yet.
CPU guru Vince Freeman looks under the hood of Intel's next desktop, notebook, and server processor. Will features like an innovative ring interconnect and on-chip video encoder make 2011 the year of Sandy Bridge?
AMD adopts a radical new CPU architecture for 2011, promising 8- and 16-core "Bulldozer" processors with unmatched price/performance. But skeptics are already asking: Are AMD's innovative dual-core modules really just elegant one-and-a-half-core modules?
There's been bad news (server market share) and good news (mobile market share) for AMD lately, but Vince Freeman says the good is predominant in everything from killer CPU price cuts to the forthcoming release of AMD's Fusion chips.
IT managers looking for raw performance can check out AMD's existing eight- and 12-core server processors. The company's new four- and six-cores are all about energy efficiency -- as low as 5.3 watts per core -- and scalability for the cloud computing data center.
Will Apple's iPad pour cold water on conventional notebook sales? Not if notebook component suppliers can help it. From battery-thrifty new CPUs to USB 3.0, Vince Freeman checks out how laptop technology is changing for the battle ahead.
Intel wows the supercomputing crowd with a 32-core proof of concept for 50-plus-core future CPUs -- and more than wows the enthusiast crowd with overclockable desktop processors priced far below its unlocked Extreme Editions.
In 2006, AMD announced Fusion -- a plan to merge a PC's computing and graphics processors into one chip. Now it's close to shipping, but will the market settle for Intel's separate-chips, single-package approach?
Once just as important as the system processor, a PC's chipset has become an afterthought among computer hardware. Silicon sage Vince Freeman says the chipset introduced alongside the newest AMD CPU may mark the end of an era.
A six-core Intel CPU for the desktop costs a cool $1,000. Processor underdog AMD is introducing a hexa-core for a third of that, the Phenom II X6. Vince Freeman looks under the hood -- and foresees competition from Intel's Hyper-Threading quad-cores.
The newest Intel CPU goes where no x86 processor has gone before, with massively multithreaded performance for the most mission-critical server apps. How does the Xeon 7500 stack up for the datacenter and against AMD's latest?
What is AES-NI? According to Intel, it's IT hardware's latest line of defense against hackers and snoops -- support for the popular AES data encryption standard built into the company's newest processors. Columnist Vince Freeman takes a look.
2009 was a year to forget, but for the people who put the silicon in the Silicon Valley, 2010 could bring some needed successes. Chip market maven Andy Patrizio forecasts what's next for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and more.
You've got to draw the line somewhere, and AMD has drawn it between dual- and triple-core processors: While its newest dual-core has the same DNA as the chipmaker's Phenom X3 and X4, it carries the older Athlon name instead of the prestigious Phenom moniker. But while it's the new top of the Athlon line, it isn't the fastest. In other words, what gives?
It's not true that every new Intel processor brings a different new motherboard socket to dash upgrade hopes: The Core i7 brings two. Even so, Vince Freeman says, the new CPU shows such a combination of brute force and flair it might be called the i007. Here's a look under the hood, with some thoughts about why the Core i7 needs more than one chipset and why AMD might be more competitive than you think.
|
RSS Feed
The gigahertz wars may be over (or are they?) but plenty of innovation is being made in the tiny world of powerful PC processors. Hardware Central collected our articles and reviews on CPUs, chipsets and all things processor-related and placed them here, for your reading enjoyment.
