Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm Introduce New Multi-Core Processors at Computex

The PC market has been the focus of chip mmanufacturers at the Computex tech show in Taipei this week, with both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices promising significant boosts in core count in upcoming processors and Qualcomm unveiling a new chip aimed at Windows 10 Always Connected PCs.

At the show, Gregory Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Client Computing Group, introduced two chips in the company’s eighth-generation Core processor family, the Lake U Series for midrange and high-end laptops and Amber Lake Series for ultra-thin laptops and tablets. Intel featured new chips for desktop PCs, including a 28-core processor that can run at 5GHz and that will surpass the current 18-core Core i9 chip. It’s due to come to market in the fourth quarter.

Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Business Group, announced the next generation of the company’s Ryzen Threadripper high-end chip based on the Zen architecture. Threadripper 2 reportedly will be based on AMD’s 12-nanometer Zen+ architecture and will sport up to 32 cores and 64 threads. It is scheduled to be released in the third quarter.

Qualcomm officials announced the company’s Snapdragon 850 mobile platform, which is the follow-on to the Snapdragon 835. The 10nm Snapdragon 850, which includes the Snapdragon X20 LTE modem, is designed to bring to highly portable, fanless PCs some of the features found in smartphones, including long battery life and sleeker designs. It also delivers 30 percent better system performance than its predecessor as well as better battery life and data speeds. Systems powered by the Snapdragon 850 will be available later this year, including in one from Samsung.

Qualcomm officials also stressed connectivity for the Snapdragon 850, which can support both WiFi and Gigabit LTE, giving the systems the “always connected” capabilities. The X20 LTE modem delivers up to 1.2G-bps LTE speeds and fast connectivity.

The increases in performance, speed and connectivity are necessary to enable PCs to handle emerging modern workloads, such as artificial intelligence (AI). Intel’s Bryant said the company will help bring AI to PCs through tools and resources given to developers and working with OEMs to put AI capabilities in systems. Intel introduced the AI on PC Developer Program, and at Computex, Asus and Intel introduced a concept dua
l-screen notebook called Project Recog that includes intelligent features. Qualcomm will arm the Snapdragon with its AI Engine, which was introduced in February and includes hardware and software components to enable on-device AI-enabled user experiences.

According to Bob O’Donnell, principal analyst with TECHnalysis Research, the announcements coming out of Computex show a global PC market that, while not what it once was, is still significant. “What we’re seeing is a real revitalization of the core PC components,” O’Donnell told eWEEK.

Read more on Computex here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EOQ Calculations in Excel

Image
Last week in Operations Management we used Excel to calculate the Economic Order Quantity and graph Carrying Costs, Ordering Costs, and Total Costs. The Economic Order Quantity or "EOQ" is the order size that "minimizes" Total Costs. Any more or less and you are spending too much on ordering or too much on keeping inventory. For example, in the Excel spreadsheet below, if you had an Annual Demand of 12000 units, Ordering Costs of $10 per order, and Holding costs of $4 per unit per year, the EOQ would be 245 units and Total Costs would be $980.00: We used the following formula in Excel to calculate EOQ: =SQRT((2*B2*B3)/B4) And the following formula to calculate Total Costs at this point: =$B$6/2*$B$4+$B$2/B6*$B$3 To create the graph, we used the following formulas and simply copied them over a range of 100 to 500 units. Ordering Costs: =$B$2/D2*$B$3 Holding Costs: =D2/2*$B$4 Total Costs: =F2+G2 Looking at this chart, we can clearly see that our order size of 245 is ...
Read more

Reliability Calculations in Excel

Image
In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex...
Read more

“How Are We Doing?” Efficiency, Utilization, and Productivity

Image
In business, knowing how we are performing in relation to our competition is vital. Internally we want to know if we are using resources effectively and getting the most out of what we have. Efficiency and Productivity are two calculations that are fundamental to the success of any organization. While the calculations are simple, choosing what measures to use and collecting the necessary data requires a thorough understanding of your industry. To calculate Efficiency you will have to first decide what to use as a base for comparison. Does your company already have a “target” of some kind? Like total units produced? If so then you can compare everything to that. Once you have that, there are a couple of basic formulas that can be used: Efficiency = Actual Output/Effective Capacity X 100% Utilization = Actual Output/Design Capacity X 100% Design Capacity is the maximum output achieved under ideal conditions. Effective Capacity is always less than Design Capacity because of factors...
Read more