Intel officially took the wraps off of its upcoming Cascade Lake-X based HEDT processors back in early October, revealed its updated pricing strategy, and the new features coming to its flagship desktop processor line-up. If you missed the original announcement and array of leaked performance data since then, Cascade Lake-X is a essentially a refresh of Skylake-X (the processor cores are mostly unchanged), but with official support for faster memory, more aggressive clocking and boost algorithms, and DL Boost integration, to help accelerate and array of AI workloads.
Cascade Lake-X will work in existing X299-based motherboards (with the proper BIOS support), its peak core count is unchanged (18), and despite higher boost clocks, its power envelope remains the same as well. Where Intel has really shaken things up, however, is pricing. Whereas the previous-generation flagship Core i9-9980XE launched at $1,979, the new 10th Gen Core i9-10980XE we’ll be showing you here today arrives with an MSRP of only $979. As you’ll see, the Core i9-10980XE is faster than the previous-gen in almost every way, and our power numbers were somewhat surprising as well, but pricing has been slashed by more than half. Intense pressure from rival AMD has clearly had an impact on Intel’s desktop processor strategy, and AMD plans to release some new HEDT (High-End Desktop) processors of its own a few hours after this article goes live. However, since Intel has officially lifted the embargo on the Core i9-10980XE we thought we’d show the goods ASAP. So, here goes...
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As noted, Intel's 10th-Generation HEDT Core X processors are based on the company's Cascade Lake-X architecture. At its core, Cascade Lake-X is similar to Skylake-X, save for a few tweaks. Updates made to Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 will allow for two cores to achieve max boost simultaneously, not just one like 9th-gen parts. DL Boost has been integrated into the processors as well, and the total number of platform PCIe lanes will remain consistent at 72 (processor + chipset) across all SKUs. Intel is also adding in support for Wi-Fi 6 and multi-gig Ethernet, increasing maximum memory support to 256GB, and is boosting the peak official memory frequency to DDR4-2933, though higher frequencies are possible with overclocking. Cascade Lake-X features monolithic many-core designs, with the same restructured cache hierarchy and a high-speed mesh interconnect distributed between the cores as Skylake-X. It is not Intel’s newest microarchitecture – that designation is currently reserved for the Coffee Lake refresh on desktops and Ice Lake in notebooks – but Cascade Lake-X is the foundation of Intel’s top-end HEDT and many-core Xeon processors for the time being. The 10th Gen Core X line-up's configurations correlate closely with Intel's 9th Generation, though Intel has streamlined the line-up to pick up where the mainstream Core i9-9900K leaves off. These 10th Gen parts are manufactured using Intel’s 14nm++ process, they feature higher base and Turbo Boost frequencies than their predecessors, and they are also outfitted with soldered thermal interface material (STIM) to better wick away heat from the CPU die into the integrated heat spreader. All the chips have the same number of PCIe lanes (44), but some have more smart cache than others due to their Core configurations. The Core i9-10900X, i9-10920X,and9-10940X all have 19.25MB, while the top end Core i9-10980XE we'll be showing you here has 24.75MB. In terms of clock speed, the entire line-up bumps things up a few bins versus their predecessors, though expect the biggest performance deltas with single or lightly-threaded workloads. All-core boost on the flagship Core i9-10980XE is still 3.8GHz, though it will boost up to 4.8GHz with some workloads. Intel Core i9-10980XE CPU-Z Core, Cache, And Clock Details The Core i9-10980XE features 18 Cascade Lake-X cores (36 threads with HyperThreading) with a base clock of 3.1GHz, which is 100MHz higher than the 9980XE. The Core i9-10980XE also offers max Turbo Boost 2.0 and Turbo Boost Max 3.0 frequencies of 4.6GHz and 4.8GHz, which are 200MHz and 300MHz higher than the 9980XE, respectively. As mentioned, max all-core boost is 3.8GHz, which is similar to what we saw with the 9980XE when taxed in benchmarks like Cinebench and Blender that will utilize every core. The Core i9-10980XE has 24.75MB of shared L3 cache, 1MB of L2 cache per core, and a TDP of 165W, which is the same as the previous-gen. Now, let’s see how this thing performs... Read More Intel Core i9-10980XE Review: 18-Core Cascade Lake-X Battles AMD - Hot Hardware : https://ift.tt/34j5yf5
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Investors really want to believe Intel is finally putting its failures in the rearview mirror. The Santa Clara, Calif., company reported better-than-expected financial results Oct. 24. Shares of the semiconductor giant promptly surged 8% as managers raised guidance for the rest of the year. ![]() It is human nature be drawn to comeback stories. The reemergence of Intel as a tech chieftain would be a great story. It would be like Microsoft remaking itself into the largest tech company in the world after completely missing the smartphone revolution. It feels good. However, Microsoft’s comeback stemmed from accomplished managers relentlessly executing well. Under the leadership of then-CEO Satya Nadella, the company moved aggressively to the cloud in 2014. Product managers strategically pivoted away from the “Windows everywhere” business model. With a more platform agnostic approach, the company was free to build products around enterprise customer needs. Sales boomed. Today Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, has $20 billion in annual sales. That business is growing at 63% annually, according to Christopher Eberle, an analyst at Nomura. When bundled with its cloud software products — Office 365 and Dynamics 365, a customer relationship management suite, gross profit margins soar to 66%. And that’s only the beginning. The company is developing saleable Azure add-ons for artificial intelligence, data analytics and the Internet of Things to connect devices to the edge of the network and its massive data centers. Starbucks, uses an Azure IoT add-on to run preventive maintenance on its coffee machines. Intel’s interim CEO Bob Swan would like investors to believe his company is ready to participate in these new markets. The Oct. 24 conference call was filled with buzz about IoT and building next-generation silicon for analytics and AI. Given Intel’s higher earnings guidance — of $4.60 per share, higher than $4.39 estimates — investors naturally got excited. Perhaps overexcited. After all, despite all the talk about the future, Intel is still mired in the past. The company raised guidance because Swan says Intel’s PC client-supply business is expected to improve by double digits in the second half of the year. At $9.7 billion in sales during the most recent quarter, that business represents over half the company’s revenues. The next-largest business is the Data Center Group, with $6.4 billion in quarterly sales. The IoT segment represents only $1.2 billion. Even worse, the company has a long history of poor execution. The outcome has been huge write-downs and lost markets. For example, in 1999, Intel managers acquired Level One Communications and DSP Communications for $2.3 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively. The goal was to get ready for mobile. Four years later, the company exited mobile and sold most of its smartphone chip business assets to Marvell Technology Group for $600 million. A second foray occurred in 2010 when Intel purchased wireless intellectual property from Infineon Technologies for $1.4 billion. Intel’s mobile chip division then proceeded to lose $3.1 billion in 2013, and $4.3 billion a year later. And those billions of dollars in losses weren’t exactly offset by big sales. By 2016, weak sales of its Atom processors forced the company to exit mobile processors and focus on 5G modems. After failing to make a profit, Intel sold that business to Apple this past July for $1 billion. Recode reported May 2016 that analysts believe Intel lost $10 billion trying to win mobile. Sadly, its business model means this experience is probably going to play out again in value-added chips for AI, data analytics and IoT. Four large companies dominate semiconductor manufacturing: Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor, GlobalFoundries and Intel. The first three companies are pure-play foundries that manufacture silicon for other companies based on bespoke specifications. Intel mostly makes and sells processors under its own brand. That model is under attack … Just as Intel lost mobile to Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung, new players are lining up to design and commission AI chips for data centers and IoT. The Financial Times reported in February that Amazon.com, Facebook and Alphabet are building custom AI chips for data centers. And Microsoft began hiring AI chip designers in June 2018, according to a CNBC story. Keep in mind, data center processors are Intel’s second-largest business, and Swan says IoT represents its future. But there is a positive in all this. Intel managers are furiously buying back stock. The October earnings statement noted an increase of $20 billion for share repurchases during the next 15 months. And a page at the company’s investor relations site indicates the repurchase of 208 million shares in the open market through the first three quarters of 2019. Since 2005, this program has spent a staggering $82.8 billion buying back stock. This kind of insider buying generally points to their faith in the brand, the business and the potential not just for the company, but for the shares. While it’s good to see managers investing so heavily, that doesn’t mean you should follow their lead. At least, not in the foreseeable future. Intel shares trade at 12.3x forward earnings and 3.5x sales. While this is not expensive, Intel is no low-risk investment in the semiconductor space. Read More This Is Why The Big Intel Rally May Be A Mirage - Forbes : https://ift.tt/35Bwas1We don’t expect massive price drops on a lot of Intel processors during this Black Friday deals and holiday season. Why? Because the company has already dropped prices recently on its mainstream and high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs, while the company continues to struggle with manufacturing shortages and high demand. But there’s still a good chance you’ll see some price dips on mainstream 9th Gen Core processors like the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K, Core i5-9600KF, and others. That said, where you might find more and better deals from Intel this Black Friday and holiday seasons is in storage. Intel’s 660p M.2 NVMe SSD has been one of the lowest priced solid-state drives since soon after its launch, with frequent sale prices pushing it below 10 cents per gigabyte. It’s often priced below nearly all SATA-based drives, despite being significantly faster thanks to its PCIe interface. It is a QLC drive, which means its endurance isn’t as high as many other drives. But the drive has plenty of rated write cycles for most users not to have to worry about it. We’d of course love to see deals on Intel’s Optane SSD 905P. But that drive’s speed is in a class all its own (at least on the consumer side), so there’s little reason for that drive’s prices to drop. It’s expensive because nothing else can get close to it, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Below, we’ve put together a list of some of the Intel CPUs and SSDs that we expect might go on sale this season, along with live pricing and a price below which we consider that particular chip a deal. If you see any of these CPUs or drives below our suggested deal threshold, you can snatch it up with confidence that you’re getting a deal for your hard-earned build money. CPUsIntel Core i9-9900K Thanks to competition from AMD and the slightly faster Core i9-9900KS, this eight-core chip is currently selling for around $472, lower than it’s ever been. If you can find it for less than $470, it’s well worth considering. Intel Core i7-9700K This excellent gaming CPU used to haver around $400, but it’s currently selling for $340. If you see it for much below that, it’s a good time to buy. Intel Core i5-9600KF This six-core speedster used to sell for $240 or more. Recently, we’ve seen it dip to as low as $190. Anything less than that is a good deal. Intel 660p SSDIntel 660p SSD 2TB In this highest-capacity model, pricing usually hovers just below or above the $200 mark. That price is pretty good, but we’ve seen model drop as low as $190, and occasionally even lower for brief periods. If you can find it below $190, it’s worth snatching up. Intel 660p SSD 1TB The 1TB mid-capacity model has dropped as low as $85 on Newegg. If you can find it at that price or below, it’s a good deal. Intel 660p SSD 512GB The half-terabyte model usually sits around the $60 mark, with frequent dips to around $55. $50 would be an all-time low, and a great price for a speedy budget boot drive. Read More Best Intel Deals: Get the Lowest Prices on Core CPUs and Speedy SSDs - Tom's Hardware : https://ift.tt/2QLZW9eWe don’t expect massive price drops on a lot of Intel processors during this Black Friday deals and holiday season. Why? Because the company has already dropped prices recently on its mainstream and high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs, while the company continues to struggle with manufacturing shortages and high demand. But there’s still a good chance you’ll see some price dips on mainstream 9th Gen Core processors like the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K, Core i5-9600KF, and others. That said, where you might find more and better deals from Intel this Black Friday and holiday seasons is in storage. Intel’s 660p M.2 NVMe SSD has been one of the lowest priced solid-state drives since soon after its launch, with frequent sale prices pushing it below 10 cents per gigabyte. It’s often priced below nearly all SATA-based drives, despite being significantly faster thanks to its PCIe interface. It is a QLC drive, which means its endurance isn’t as high as many other drives. But the drive has plenty of rated write cycles for most users not to have to worry about it. We’d of course love to see deals on Intel’s Optane SSD 905P. But that drive’s speed is in a class all its own (at least on the consumer side), so there’s little reason for that drive’s prices to drop. It’s expensive because nothing else can get close to it, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Below, we’ve put together a list of some of the Intel CPUs and SSDs that we expect might go on sale this season, along with live pricing and a price below which we consider that particular chip a deal. If you see any of these CPUs or drives below our suggested deal threshold, you can snatch it up with confidence that you’re getting a deal for your hard-earned build money. CPUsIntel Core i9-9900K Thanks to competition from AMD and the slightly faster Core i9-9900KS, this eight-core chip is currently selling for around $472, lower than it’s ever been. If you can find it for less than $470, it’s well worth considering. Intel Core i7-9700K This excellent gaming CPU used to haver around $400, but it’s currently selling for $340. If you see it for much below that, it’s a good time to buy. Intel Core i5-9600KF This six-core speedster used to sell for $240 or more. Recently, we’ve seen it dip to as low as $190. Anything less than that is a good deal. Intel 660p SSDIntel 660p SSD 2TB In this highest-capacity model, pricing usually hovers just below or above the $200 mark. That price is pretty good, but we’ve seen model drop as low as $190, and occasionally even lower for brief periods. If you can find it below $190, it’s worth snatching up. Intel 660p SSD 1TB The 1TB mid-capacity model has dropped as low as $85 on Newegg. If you can find it at that price or below, it’s a good deal. Intel 660p SSD 512GB The half-terabyte model usually sits around the $60 mark, with frequent dips to around $55. $50 would be an all-time low, and a great price for a speedy budget boot drive. Read More Best Intel Deals: Get the Lowest Prices on Core CPUs and Speedy SSDs - Tom's Hardware : https://ift.tt/2QLZW9eThis has been a long time coming, as we're finally getting around to testing Intel’s Ice Lake architecture. This is Intel’s first real attempt at a 10nm CPU, and in this review we’ll be comparing it against their 14nm offerings to see how it stacks up in terms of performance. Last year we did see the 10nm 'Cannon Lake' but it was a single processor, the Core i3-8121U, a measly dual-core clocked at up to 3.2 GHz with no integrated graphics. It was used in a single Lenovo laptop plus a small handful of NUCs. Because of its low-end specs, it never saw much traction. Thus in our book Ice Lake is Intel’s first true entry to the CPU market with the 10nm process. There are many more SKUs available and we’re already seeing decent uptake in the market across ultraportable laptops. Instead of one CPU, there are 11 in Intel’s Ice Lake line-up, across 9W, 15W and 28W power categories. These are all designed for low-power ultraportables and other mobile devices, at least for now. Intel’s naming scheme is confusing as usual. Before Intel used U suffixes to denote 15W products, and Y to denote 9W. Now this is relegated to a single number: the 1065G7 for example is a 15W CPU, while the 1060G7 is 9W. All 15W products get a 5 in the fourth digit, and 9W parts get a 0. I personally preferred the use of U or Y, that was clearer for buyers rather than hiding this crucial performance indicator among a bunch of other letters and numbers. What has become clearer this generation though, is the integrated graphics capabilities. The G suffix tells us exactly what sort of CPU configuration we’re getting: G7 denotes Iris Plus with the full 64 execution units unlocked, G4 is Iris Plus cut down to 48 EUs, and then G1 gives us UHD graphics with 32 EUs. All use Intel’s new Gen 11 GPU, which is one of the bigger changes to Ice Lake compared to previous 14nm generations. And it’s a much needed change. Since Skylake was introduced, 15W CPUs have largely been stuck with GPUs that pack only 24 execution units with an architecture from 2015, and that continues to be the case with 2019’s 14nm refresh codenamed Comet Lake. Some 28W parts would push this up to 48 execution units, but that was generally the maximum you could find. Now, the base G1 tier includes 32 EUs, so we’re already seeing a 33% increase to core count (if you want to call execution units “cores”). And the top end also gets a bump, but crucially you can still find 64 EU G7 graphics within a 15W power envelope, so Intel is bringing a significant jump to graphics capabilities within the existing TDP, allowing it to better compete with the beefy graphics AMD provides in Ryzen Mobile. On top of this, Gen11 graphics provide a number of architectural changes, including support for variable rate shading, adaptive sync, display stream compression, and a faster media encoder. This really is the key benefit to getting Ice Lake over previous generations. There are also significant changes on the CPU front, thanks to an all-new CPU core in Sunny Cove. Intel is promising an 18% IPC increase over Skylake, support for AVX-512, new dynamic tuning capabilities, and a much better memory controller that supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4X-3733 speeds. While IPC has seen a large increase (according to Intel), this has been offset by lower clock speeds across the Ice Lake line. Take the flagship 15W part that we’re looking at today: the Core i7-1065G7. It gets the full 64 execution unit experience, giving us all the benefits of Gen11 graphics. But it only packs four Sunny Cove CPU cores with a base clock of 1.3 GHz, a single-core turbo of 3.9 GHz and an all-core speed of 3.5 GHz. This is well below what you get with Intel’s other current-generation CPU, Comet Lake. The top-end Comet Lake chip built on 14nm offers a worse integrated graphics, but bumps up the CPU to 6 cores, clocked at 1.1 GHz base, 4.7 GHz single-core turbo, and 4.1 GHz all core. Alternatively you can get a Core i7 quad-core with a 1.8 GHz base and 4.3 GHz all-core turbo. While these 15W parts generally don’t run at the advertised clock speeds in sustained workloads, even comparing just these rated frequencies shows a massive discrepancy. Base clocks comparing quad core to quad core are nearly 40% higher for Comet Lake, although this narrows to 23% comparing all-core turbos. But with Ice Lake only receiving an 18% average gain to IPC, you can already see that it is probably going to struggle to outperform what Intel already has on 14nm in CPU workloads. And again, this whole situation with Intel having both 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Comet Lake on the market at the same time as part of their 10th generation only serves to confuse customers. With Comet Lake boasting a beefier CPU and Ice Lake taking the GPU crown, regular everyday Joes will have to do even more research than ever before to ensure what they are getting is the right product for their use case. And with product names like Core i7-10710U and Core i7-1065G7, which chip is better and in what areas is so murky I can’t see how anyone other than a hardcore enthusiast will truly know what they are getting. I feel like regular consumers know the old “higher number is better” trick, but with these names, that sort of deduction is impossible. So that’s the baseline knowledge you need about Ice Lake to kick off this performance review... Today we're focusing on the top-end Core i7-1065G7, a quad-core CPU with G7 graphics. This review will be discussing everything you need to know about productivity and compute performance, we’ll be comparing Ice Lake to previous 14nm parts, but gaming is something we’ll be tackling in a separate article. The laptop we have for testing with Ice Lake inside is the new Razer Blade Stealth, a laptop design that we really like with its super sleek metal design and high-end components. It also tends to provide a really great test platform – the CPU inside this beast can be configured at both its standard 15W TDP, or at a higher 25W TDP, giving us useful data for both. It also packs dual-channel memory at the maximum LPDDR4X-3733 speeds, so we’re getting the full memory bandwidth improvements of Ice Lake in this test system, too, which is ideal. The laptop also includes a discrete GPU, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q. For most tests, this GPU has been disabled so we can focus on the compute performance of the new integrated Gen11 graphics, but in some cases it’s also enabled. We have test data from an MSI Prestige 14 which packs the 6-core i7-10710U and GTX 1650 Max-Q, so we can also get a decent look at whether Ice Lake or Comet Lake is better when a more powerful discrete GPU is thrown into the picture. BenchmarksWe’re going to kick things off here as usual with a look at Cinebench R20, which gives us that all important look at multi and single threaded performance. The results for Ice Lake and 10nm are quite disappointing but not entirely unexpected given the lower clock speeds this CPU is able to run at. The Core i7-1065G7 sits among the Core i5-10210U and Core i7-8565U towards the bottom of the charts. These are all quad-core CPUs operating at 15W, there clearly isn’t much to be gained here moving from 14nm to 10nm in this power envelope. The new Core i7-10710U with six cores demolishes the Core i7-1065G7 in multi-threaded performance here: the 10710U is a good 32 percent faster. However, the 1065G7 does very well with single-threaded performance, outperforming most other CPUs in this table, which bodes well for Ice Lake in other single-threaded benchmarks. When bumping the 1065G7 up to 25W, only then is it able to outperform the 10710U in its 15W configuration, but when both chips are operating at the same TDP, the six-core option is still far superior. Looking at clock speeds, there aren’t too many surprises given our rated clock speed discussion earlier. Like all 15W CPUs, under a sustained Cinebench run, clock speeds are well below the maximum all-core turbo frequency so power consumption doesn’t exceed 15W. The 14nm Core i5-10210U sits between 2.2 and 2.3 GHz all-core in this run, while the 10nm Core i7-1065G7 drops down to 1.8 to 1.9 GHz. All three of these CPUs score roughly the same in this benchmark, but the 14nm chips need to be clocked around 22 percent higher. This ends up being quite similar to the difference in rated boost clocks we saw earlier, which was 23 percent, and also similar to Intel’s IPC improvement claims for Ice Lake, at an 18 percent average. The downside is that while Ice Lake is able to do more per clock and perform as well as 14nm parts, there is no material improvement to efficiency. This is pretty concerning for a new process, although it also speaks volumes about what Intel has been able to do with 14nm and its continual refinements. After all, this is 10nm up against 14nm++++, and those pluses do make a small difference with these mobile parts. For those thinking about a desktop Ice Lake processor, if we got perfect scaling with Cinebench R20 results, Intel would be able to make a 4.0 GHz 10nm CPU run like a 4.8 GHz 14nm CPU. But there are many question marks here: can Intel get Ice Lake running at 4.0 GHz all-core, especially over what would need to be 8 cores? Given boost clocks for mobile parts, that seems like it might be tricky. Would it even be as efficient at these frequencies? Would it improve performance? We’ll have to wait for desktop 10nm parts to get answers to those questions but you can see why Intel is sticking with 14nm on the desktop for now. Let’s look at some more benchmarks. Cinebench R15 has the 1065G7 slightly ahead of the Core i5 and Core i7 14nm models we’ve just been talking about, but there’s no significant gains to be made compared to the 10710U with its six cores: the 1065G7 is still 24 percent slower. Single thread performance is very good as we saw previously. Handbrake is where the boys get separated from the men, as this multiple hour long benchmark really stresses the long term steady state performance of these chips. Again, when constrained to 15W, there’s really no advantage to CPU performance here over previous generation parts. We’re about 23 percent slower than the 10710U, while the higher clocked Core i7-8565U actually outperforms the 1065G7 by a few minutes. Very similar story with x264 encoding, although this time the 1065G7 is marginally slower than 14nm equivalents such as the Core i5-10210U. In anything multi-threaded like this there just aren’t many gains to be had from Intel’s 10nm process. It’s not all bad for Ice Lake though. Single-threaded performance is very strong, and here looking at a single instance of Premiere’s Warp Stabilizer effect we can see that the 1065G7 is at least 8 percent faster than last-gen 14nm CPUs, and 12 percent faster than Intel’s lower clocked 10710U. We saw hints of that in Cinebench but here we can see the material difference, with Ice Lake shaving a minute off this workload. What about another good result for Ice Lake? In Adobe Photoshop’s Iris Blur filter we see strong performance out of the Core i7-1065G7. This CPU is 8 percent faster than the 10710U and 17 percent faster than the 10510U, which is a really strong showing. While this isn’t a single-threaded test, it’s quite memory intensive given the size of the photo we’re working with, so I believe we’re seeing good gains from the massive improvement to memory bandwidth we get thanks to Ice Lake’s new memory controller. But when we move back to these long term multi-threaded tests, it’s not good news for Ice Lake. In this Blender benchmark run which is run on the CPU for all of these processors, the 1065G7 is slower than 14nm equivalents like the Core i7-8565U. It’s not massively slower, but ideally you’d like to see some sort of gain in the 15W power class. That is only provided by the six-core 10710U, which matches the performance of the 1065G7 at 25W. 7-zip continues the story we’ve been showing for a while now. Even though this is a short workload, it’s multi-threaded, and the 1065G7 ends up falling behind the Core i5-10210U. The margins aren’t huge, all within single digits for most of these 10nm vs 14nm quad core comparisons, but still not that impressive. Few more workloads to go, this time our brand new MATLAB benchmark which is a real world usage of differential equations and fast Fourier transforms, which are common tasks people perform in this engineering tool. This workload hits just a few threads and also can be quite memory and cache intensive, so with Ice Lake seeing gains in these areas, MATLAB performance is higher than other 10th-generation parts. 13 percent gains here over 10th-gen is very decent. What about Adobe PDF exporting, which is another single-threaded task? Ice Lake performs well here, like we’ve seen in other 1T workloads. 10 percent better performance than the Core i7-10710U is a good result and is in line with what we’ve shown so far. Ice Lake isn’t very fast in VeraCrypt decryption, matching the 8565U and surprisingly falling well behind the Core i5-10210U. Comet Lake possibly has enhancements to improve accelerated AES performance that other architectures don’t, testing further 10th-gen CPUs will give more insights to this benchmark. With all the CPU limited tests out of the way, let’s take a look at some compute workloads, because this is where Ice Lake will really shine thanks to its much faster Gen11 GPU. Our new Premiere benchmark is a prime example of this. We’re able to take advantage of Premiere’s hardware accelerated encoding, on top of GPU accelerated effects, to deliver significant gains. In its stock configuration with no dedicated GPU, the Core i7-1065G7 outperforms most other configurations, including the Core i5-10210U with an MX250 GPU. It also demolishes 14nm parts: 75% faster than the i7-10710U, and more than twice as fast as the i5-10210U, all thanks to huge GPU gains. What’s also impressive to see is that when the GPU is kept constant, in this case the GTX 1050 Max-Q, Ice Lake is still marginally faster in this workload compared to the six-core 10710U, I think a lot of that comes down to better accelerated encoding. But overall, if Premiere is your main workload, Ice Lake is the way to go with better Warp Stabilizer performance and better encoding performance. When using our older Premiere benchmark, which is more GPU intensive, gains aren’t as significant especially compared to some of the discrete GPU options. Pairing a 10210U with an MX250 for example, is much faster, although consumes a lot more power. And Ice Lake falls behind Comet Lake with 6 cores versus 4 cores when the GTX 1650 Max-Q is held constant. We also see huge performance gains in CompuBench Optical Flow, with a more than 2x advantage comparing Gen11 graphics to older 14nm options. When fully GPU limited like this, it’s no surprise to see the much higher execution unit count on Ice Lake take control and deliver a big performance improvement. Similar gains are available with Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen filter, which is also run on the GPU. 130% faster performance from Ice Lake compared to Comet Lake and other Skylake derivative CPUs is a huge gain, and it slightly nudges out the MX250 from Nvidia which is awesome from an integrated option. It also ends up handily beating AMD’s Ryzen Mobile offerings in this test, I suspect higher memory bandwidth to the GPU is playing a part there, given we just saw Ryzen performing well in Optical Flow. What We LearnedAll the data in, that's many hours of benchmarking you just witnessed right there. We haven’t seen too many surprises given all the information we had in the lead up to this release. We weren’t expecting much in the realm of CPU performance, but we did expect decent gains to GPU performance, and that’s largely what we observed. The Core i7-1065G7 delivers roughly equivalent multi-threaded CPU performance to the Core i5-10210U. So when comparing quad-cores on Intel’s 10nm and 14nm nodes, basically nothing has been gained here. Single thread performance is somewhat higher, around the 10 percent mark, but this is offset by the occasional slower multi-threaded result. In general, it’s fair to say performance is about even. And it’s similar comparing the Core i7-1065G7 to the Whiskey Lake Core i7-8565U. There are some larger than expected gains for workloads like MATLAB and Photoshop Iris Blur, but in longer tests like Handbrake, Ice Lake actually clocks in slower. On average, the i7-1065G7 is a few percent faster but it’s not a mindblowing difference and certainly in these CPU limited workloads, there’s not much of a reason to upgrade from any of the 8th-generation parts or newer. When you compare Ice Lake to the best Intel has to offer within 15W, the Core i7-10710U smokes the Core i7-1065G7 in multi-threaded workloads, so if you want to use your ultraportable for anything intensive like video encoding, a Comet Lake six-core CPU is a better option. At the same time, Ice Lake is generally faster in single-threaded tests, so it will depend what sort of things you do with your laptop as to what processor makes more sense. The margins don’t change too much when comparing 25W configurations, more power does equal more performance and in this case Ice Lake is about 20 to 25 percent faster in its 25W mode compared to 15W, but so is Comet Lake. If you were expecting to see notably better efficiency at these higher power targets, so far that doesn’t seem to be the case on the mobile side. On the other hand, Ice Lake is clearly much faster when you need GPU acceleration. In pure GPU limited situations, Ice Lake’s unlocked Gen 11 GPU is more than twice as fast as the crappy integrated GPU we’ve had from Skylake derivatives. And that’s all within the same 15W power envelope. In a mixed workload like Premiere, that can lead to huge performance improvements. Overall, our early impressions on Intel’s Ice Lake processor are mixed. From testing the fastest 15W configuration available, there are some positive takeaways: faster single-thread performance, hugely improved GPU performance – but this is spoiled by issues in other areas. Getting no improvement to multi-threaded performance is concerning for Intel’s new 10nm node. Considering the CPUs we’ve tested have all been locked to 15W, getting no performance gains from 10nm versus 14nm means we’re also seeing no gains to efficiency. Ice Lake does appear to have much improved IPC, but this has been entirely offset by the CPU running at lower clock speeds. Lower clock speeds, higher IPC, same power, same performance. This handily allows Comet Lake to swoop in, offering a six-core CPU in the same power envelope, for significant gains to multi-threaded performance. Again, doesn’t apply to single-thread applications where Ice Lake holds a lead, but for anything that loads up the CPU, Comet Lake is the way to go. Granted, we haven’t done any battery life testing with this new platform as it’s nearly impossible to get a good apples-to-apples comparison, but same performance at same power level shouldn’t translate to major improvements. If anything, gains will come from other platform advantages like changes to the way power gating is handled, different boost technologies, more efficient memory and so on. Getting a much faster GPU with Ice Lake is nice, but it’s also not a revolutionary upgrade given AMD has been offering this sort of performance since late 2017 with Ryzen Mobile. This is more about Intel bringing their part up to a competitive graphics standpoint. In some instances Ice Lake’s 64 execution unit GPU still falls behind first-gen Ryzen Mobile, depending on the power limitations. Other times, it’s faster, depending on how much memory bandwidth is required given Ice Lake has a big advantage in that department. Intel also has to compete with discrete GPU offerings, including Nvidia’s popular MX150 and MX250, as well as newer, more powerful options like the GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q that was included with our Razer Blade Stealth test system. It depends heavily on the exact workload in question, but Ice Lake’s integrated GPU isn’t much faster than Comet Lake with an MX250, the exception to this rule being Premiere, where a combination of factors make Ice Lake a much better option. As it stands right now, the outright fastest hardware combination I’ve seen in ultraportable form factors appears to be Intel’s Core i7-10710U paired with a GTX 1650 Max-Q, which you can get in MSI’s Prestige 14. If Razer, for example, had swapped out the i7-1065G7 for a i7-10710U in this latest Blade Stealth, I suspect in most workloads it would be superior, aside from some single-threaded edge cases. While it’s neat that Ice Lake has a much improved integrated GPU, because it doesn’t bring forward CPU performance with it, we’re not seeing improvements over what was already possible with 14nm. OEMs have been increasingly opting for discrete GPUs in their ultraportables, and Ice Lake doesn’t do much to improve over these configurations. If you bought an 8th-gen laptop with an MX150, Ice Lake won't be much of an upgrade. Where you will see gains is in laptops that don’t use a discrete GPU. If an OEM decides that they just want to include one chip, then something like the Core i7-1065G7 is going to give a large compute performance gain over say, an 8th-gen Core i7-8565U by itself. Bottom line, it's a modest start for Intel’s 10nm series due to a lack of efficiency gains which probably has to do with Intel’s struggles at 10nm. It's possible that with a 10nm revision or just a full step forward to 7nm, this will improve significantly. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence AMD is working hard on a next-gen Ryzen Mobile part on TSMC’s 7nm. Shopping ShortcutsFurther ReadingRead More Intel Core i7-1065G7 Benchmarked: Ice Lake with Iris Plus Graphics - TechSpot : https://ift.tt/2XLNdF4Earlier this month, Intel provided updates on its AI portfolio that includes the company’s new Neural Network Processors (NNP) for Training and Inference. Intel also gave details about Keem Bay, its next-generation Movidius VPU (vision processing unit) for edge computing with massive increases in performance and efficiency. Intel announced the dedicated hardware at its AI Summit event on November 12th. These products are arguably the culmination of over three years of work since its acquisitions of Movidius and Nervana in the second half of 2016 and creating its AI Products Group, led by Nervana co-founder Naveen Rao. Rao pointed out that Intel is already a big player in AI, stating that its 2019 AI revenue will surpass $3.5 billion, up from over $1 billion in 2017 and larger than Nvidia’s data center business. (Most of that likely stems from Xeons doing inference in the data center.) Since AI will be infused in practically everything, as Intel says, Intel’s strategy is to put AI capabilities throughout its portfolio. Intel has shown this through its OpenVINO vision toolkit for IoT, Agilex FPGAs, Ice Lake on the PC, Cascade Lake’s DLBoost, and even further out, its future discrete graphics. Processors: DLBoostIntel demonstrated the bfloat16 support on next year’s 56-core Cooper Lake as part of its DLBoost umbrella of AI features in its processors. Bfloat16 is a numeric format that achieves similar accuracy as single precision floating-point (FP32) in AI training, but with the smaller memory footprint of a 16-bit format. Intel didn’t provide a performance improvement estimate, but it did claim that for inference, Cooper Lake is 30x faster than Skylake-SP in July 2017, which comes from both hardware and software improvements. On the PC side, Ice Lake incorporates the same DLBoost AVX-512_VNNI instructions that are also in Cascade Lake. Intel showed that a Core i3 Ice Lake processor achieves 4.3x higher inference throughput than a Ryzen 7 3700U. Although it should be noted that the former utilized both its CPU and integrated graphics, whereas the Ryzen processor used solely the CPU.
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Movidius: Keem Bay VPUAs part of its push into machine vision and edge intelligence, such as smart cameras, robots, drones and VR/AR, Intel acquired Movidius in 2016. Movidius calls its low-power chips "vision processing units" (VPUs). They feature image signal processing (ISP) capabilities, hardware accelerators, MIPS processors and programmable (VLIW) 128-bit vector processors which it calls SHAVE cores. Movidius’ products have found their way into several notable products such as Google’s Clips camera, DJI’s Phantom 4 drone and the DJI powered toy grade Ryze Tello. Movidius has also produced it in the Neural Compute Stick form factor. The latest NCS2 is based on the Myriad X. As a refresher, the 2018 Myriad X also featured a dedicated 1 TOPS (tera operations per second) neural compute engine that made it 8x faster at inference than the Myriad 2, and features a total of 4 TOPS over all compute units. The Myriad X has 16 SHAVE cores, up from 12 on the Myriad 2. Its die size is 71mm2. Intel has now detailed what it calls the Gen 3 Intel Movidius VPU codenamed Keem Bay. According to Intel, it boasts more than 10x the inference performance compared to the Myriad X while consuming the same amount of power. Intel says this is due to “adding groundbreaking and unique architectural features that provide a leap ahead in both efficiency and raw throughput”. It also has a new on-die memory architecture. Indicative of those features, Intel claims that Intel claims it achieves four times more inferences/second per TOPS than Nvidia’s 16nm, 30 TOPS Xavier, and overall is on par (within 10% throughput) in performance at one-fifth the power consumption. Compared to the Huawei HiSilicon Ascend 310 (16 TOPS at 8W), Intel claims 1.25x higher performance with ~3x higher energy efficiency. Its lead against Nvidia’s TX2 is even higher. Intel said Keem Bay consumes a third less power than TX2’s 10W and a fifth of Xavier’s 30W, which would put Keem Bay at around 6.5W. Intel also claims big gains in inferences per mm2. While Intel didn’t disclose its manufacturing process, its efficiency and die size suggests it is likely TSMC 7nm. At 71mm2, the chip’s die size is practically unchanged from the Myriad X’ 72mm2, and compares to Xavier’s 350mm2. Keem Bay will be supported by Intel’s OpenVINO vision AI toolkit (which Intel calls the fastest growing tool in Intel history) and its new Edge AI DevCloud that allows customers to test their OpenVINO models for a variety of hardware configurations. Intel also announced an Edge AI nanodegree on Udacity. Keem Bay will be available in M.2 and PCIe form factors in the first half of 2020. In the PCIe card form factor, multiple chips might be put on one board similar to the Myriad X. Nervana Neural Network ProcessorsIntel has NNPs for both deep neural network training and inference. Intel says deep learning models are growing in complexity far beyond Moore’s Law, at a pace of doubling every 3.5 months or roughly an order of magnitude per year. AlexNet in 2012 had 26 million parameters, ML-NLP today has 100 billion parameters. This makes dedicated hardware a necessity. Intel’s NNP-I for inference is based on two Ice Lake Sunny Cove cores and twelve ICE accelerator cores. Intel claims it will deliver leadership performance per watt and compute density. In its M.2 form factor, it is capable of 50 TOPS at 12W equating to 4.8TOPS/W as it had already announced. Intel disclosed that the PCIe card form factor draws 75W and produces up to 170 TOPS (at INT8 precision). Intel also showed its NNP-I in the ruler form factor that it originally invented for SSDs, fitting 32 cards in a single rack unit chassis (1U) and compared this to 20 Nvidia T4s in 4U. Intel claims it achieves 3.7x the compute density in ResNet-50. Assuming perfect performance scaling of both chips, this implies that one 12W NNP-I delivers 60% of the performance of the 130 TOPS (INT8), 70W T4. It is also cloud-native with Kubernetes support and comes with a full reference solution stack. Production will start this year. Moving to the NNP-T for training, Intel reiterated its high, near-linear scaling efficiency, at 95% for 32 cards compared Nvidia’s 73%. It features a glueless fabric that requires no additional switching or NIC costs, and it can scale to hundreds or thousands of cards. To that end, Intel showed a pod reference design, the Nervana NNP Pod with 480 chips in 10 racks. It also showed a rack designed with Baidu with 32 NNP-Ts.
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Final ThoughtsThe deep learning hype has settled down a bit, like 5G and autonomous driving, but it is still a nascent and rapidly-growing market, estimated at $10 billion revenue this year. It is forecasted to grow to $40 billion in 2022 (including the edge) with the majority on the inference side. Movidius has established itself at the edge, and Keem Bay is looking to be a significant improvement compared to the Myriad X, beating the likes of Huawei and Nvidia to market with a (presumably) 7nm edge solution. With the addition of the NNP-I and NNP-T cards for the data center, Intel is entering a new market and completing its portfolio of AI solutions alongside its AI-infused Xeon and Core processors, Gen graphics, Movidius VPUs, FPGAs and Mobileye EyeQ SoCs. Intel is several years behind Nvidia in the training market, though, and it has yet to show MLPerf results of its NNP-T. But by providing well-scaling, glueless solution, it is likely to at least gain some traction. Earlier this year, though, Huawei beat even Nvidia to market to 7nm with the 256 TFLOPS (FP16), 310W Ascend 910. On the inference side where competitors are trying to take share from Xeons, Nvidia has a slight time to market lead with the T4 and Qualcomm has announced the 7nm Cloud AI 100 for 2020. Intel’s pre-emptive response is the NNP-I focused on energy efficiency. Its also differentiates itself with the inclusion of two Sunny Cove CPU cores, with the rationale that inference workloads can be more complex than purely based on throughput. Read More Intel Shares Details on Movidius Keem Bay, Other A.I. Hardware - Tom's Hardware : https://ift.tt/2XIcTCwIt’s all about speed this week; Amazon is announcing new stuff before its December Re: Invent conference. DDN has spruced up its arrays and Intel is launching a data moving semiconductor block to offload server CPUs. There is more, including a tape industry tidbit and 128-layer NAND. Read on. AWS Data ExchangeThis service brings data from validated sources to Amazon customers. They can find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in AWS in a secure way. Qualified data providers include Reuters, Change Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet and Foursquare. AWS Data Exchange removes the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, billing, and entitling. AWS Data Exchange becomes their data delivery system to enterprises, scientific researchers, and academic institutions. Currently they may receive the data on shipped physical devices (tape, disks) or use old style FTP transfer methods from several hosts, or use specific APIs. Amazon says it can sweep all this away and replace it with faster, smoother data delivery through its cloud. Data providers can, Amazon says, reduce or do away with sales and marketing effort, as well as technology to store, deliver, bill for, and entitle data for their customers. Investigate AWS Data Exchange here. DDN beefs up storage arraysDDN touted new generation SFA arrays with greater performance At SC19 in Denver this week. The high performance computing storage lineup includes SFA18KX and SFA7990X hybrid systems and SFA400NVX and SFA200NX all-flash arrays. DDN doesn’t say what the performance features will be. We understand that NVMe SSDs are coming to the hybrid systems, which currently support SAS disks and SSDs only. They may also get multi-actuator disk drive support, with two read/write heads per disk platter instead of one. This will increase their bandwidth. We wonder if PCIe Gen 4, with twice PCIe Gen 3 speed, will be adopted as well. That would boost bandwidth nicely. DDN is preping new data management features for its EXA5 Lustre array. It is also getting an S3 object storage interface that can be accessed in parallel with its existing NFS/SMB file interfaces. That means these DDN file storage arrays will be able to act as object storage arrays to a S3 API-using application. The company’s WOS object storage system supports S3, Swift, NFS, SMB, Spectrum Scale and Lustre. Data Streaming AcceleratorIntel has launched a Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) to speed data movement (copy and transformation) in coming Intel CPUs and applying to/from volatile memory, Optane memory-mapped I/O, and through a Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) device to/from remote volatile and persistent memory on another node in a cluster. This replaces Intel’s 2006 era QuickData Technology and offloads data moving functions from a server’s main CPU. ![]() The DSA has a PCIe-compatible OS programming interface and is controlled with a device driver. Think of it as a semiconductor block added to a System-on-Chip (SoC). It supports shared virtual memory operation and Intel Scalable I/O Virtualization. Download the architecture specification here. Short itemsAerospike, a real-time NoSQL data platform supplier has announced a $32m Series D fundraising round. Data analytics company Databricks and automated data governance supplier Immuta have integrated their products to provide analytics on sensitive data in the cloud. They say this is policy-driven and automated, with data made secure, anonymised and compliant for cloud analytics and machine learning. Databricks also announced API integration with AWS Data Exchange, a new service for Amazon Web Services customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has deployed a high performance computing architecture to support computationally intensive analysis including machine learning and AI‐based workloads using Excelero’s NVMesh elastic NVMe block storage product. GigaOm has published Data Storage Architectures for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. HPE announced the HPE Container Platform, claimed to be the industry’s first enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform for cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. It uses BlueData and MapR technology. HPE has added Cray products to its own set, such as positioning Cray supercomputers above the Apollo line. Cray’s Slingshot interconnect is on the combined product list, as is ClusterStor E1000 storage array for HPC workloads, differentiating it from HPE’s existing Nimble, 3PAR and OEMed Hitachi VSP 5000 arrays. Email and data security vendor Mimecast has acquired DMARC Analyzer, a SaaS-based supplier offering domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance setup, management and analysis. The UK’s Object Matrix, with object storage, and Germany’s Arvato Systems, with media asset management, have teamed up to enable media companies to instantly access, manage, browse, and edit clips from their digital archives. SK hynix is sampling 128-layer 3D NAND – the first public appearance of a 3D NAND chip with more than 100 layers. This is the company’s sixth 3D NAND generation and the sample chips have a 1Tbit capacity. They are built into 1TB UFS and 2TB M.2 sample drives with TLC (3bits/cell) flash. There is also a 16TB EDSFF E1.L ruler format drive sample. ![]() (Clockwise from top left) 16TB E1.L eSSD, 2TB cSSD, 1TB UFS 3.1 The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council has deployed a Spectra TFinity ExaScale Tape Library in its Scientific Data Centre facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Initial capacity for the scalable system is 65PB. It has 48 drive bays and a mixture of 17 open-standard LTO-8 tape drives and 16 IBM TS1160 tape drives. The UK’s StorMagic announced it has validated its virtual SAN SAN product with HPE DL325 and DL360 ProLiant Gen10 rack servers running both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. The company has joined HPE’s partner program. ![]() The Tape Storage Council has released its State of the Tape Industry report, which highlights the current trends, use cases, and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry. We found it bitty and uncompelling. Get it here.
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Intel Tiger Lake-Y 10nm CPU Makes Early Benchmark Debut With Gen12 Xe Graphics - Hot Hardware11/22/2019 ![]() In this case, benchmark entries in both Geekbench 5 and SiSoftware were uncovered by TUM_APISAK. The Geekbench entry shows a 4-core/8-thread processor operating with a base clock of 1.19GHz. Given the "Y" designation, the low clock speed shouldn't be too surprising, as these are ultra-low power mobile processors. Intel's Y-Series typically have a TDP in the 9W range, even lower than the 15-25W U-Series. We're also expecting 12MB of L3 cache (up from 8MB), as we previously reported, and 1.25MB of L2 cache per core. ![]() A SiSoftware entry also was revealed which specifically calls out the Gen12 IGP onboard with 96 execution units (total of 768 shaders). This is a relatively healthy increase over the Gen11 IGP found in Ice Lake (64 CUs). The IGP is also listed with a clock frequency of 1GHz, and support is confirmed for LPDDR4x memory. While LPDDR4x is used in this particular Tiger Lake-Y processor, the platform also supports LPDDR5 memory (rated for up to 6,400Mbps). LPDDR5 could end up being a big boon for mobile applications, as it is up to 45 percent more power efficiency than LPDDR4x Tiger Lake-Y supports PCIe 4.0 (a first for Intel), Advanced Vector Instructions 512 (AVX-512), and the Gen12 graphics use Intel's all-new Xe graphics architecture. Also on tap are new Willow Cove CPU cores, which are an upgrade over Sunny Cove in Intel's first 10nm processor: Ice Lake. In other Intel news, the company apologized earlier this week for lingering production shortages for its legacy 14nm processors. Read More Intel Tiger Lake-Y 10nm CPU Makes Early Benchmark Debut With Gen12 Xe Graphics - Hot Hardware : https://ift.tt/35CevAv![]() Intel warned personal-computer makers that its shortage of computer chips will continue for the foreseeable future despite record spending over the last year to ease its production problems. Intel, which holds about 80% of the market for PC chips, apologized to customers Wednesday for struggling to end the shortage, which has slowed growth in the PC market. Michelle Holthaus, Intel's general manager of sales, marketing and communications, said the shortage could result in shipment delays. She said stronger-than-anticipated demand for PCs continues to outpace the supply of Intel Core CPUs. The shortages are so severe that the world's largest supplier of computer chips has started to outsource more of its total production to other chip makers. "Sustained market growth in 2019 has outpaced our efforts," Holthaus said in a letter published Wednesday. "Supply remains extremely tight in our PC business where we are operating with limited inventory buffers. This makes us less able to absorb the impact of any production variability, which we have experienced in the quarter. This has resulted in the shipment delays you are experiencing." "Despite our best efforts, we have not yet resolved this challenge," she cautioned. The Santa Clara, California-based company has been fighting the shortfall since early 2018. Robert Swan, Intel's chief executive, confessed to facing worsening shortages of chips based on 14-nanometers last year, blaming unforeseen demand for PCs. For the last year, Intel has focused production on more profitable chips with high core counts used in data centers and high-end personal computers. Swan said last month that the shortage will last longer than anticipated. He said capacity challenges will continue in the fourth quarter of 2019 and potentially in 2020, despite increased investments in its production output. "As we see the fourth quarter, we're still going to constrain our customers' growth, which is absolutely where we do not want to be," Swan said on an earnings call last month. Intel has been pushing to ease the pressure on its manufacturing plants around the world. The Silicon Valley giant bumped capital spending last year by 30% to $15.2 billion to solve the production bottlenecks. The company last month raised its forecast for capital spending in 2019 from $15.5 billion to $16 billion as part of increased investment in its latest chip production process, called 10-nanometers. Intel bolstered its production of chips based on 14-nanometers by 25% over the last year, delivering a double-digit bump in its supply of core processors from the first half to the second half of 2019. The company plans to supplement its supply of chips based on 14-nanometers and 10-nanometers by another 25% in 2020. Intel expects "mid-to-high single-digit" growth in sales of personal computers in 2020. But the company has struggled to wind down the shortage, which has also dampened demand for memory chips and other components used in PCs. Intel said it has started to contract out more of its manufacturing to increase its inventory of Core CPUs. "We are increasing our use of foundries to enable Intel’s differentiated manufacturing to produce more Intel CPU products," Holthaus told customers. "We are focused on getting capacity in place so we can take the word shortage out of our quarterly discussions," George Davis, Intel's chief financial officer, said last month on a conference call with analysts. The shortage has diminished Intel's market share in low-cost personal computers, where AMD is gaining ground. The ongoing shortage opens the door to Intel losing more market share to AMD in 2020. "We're continuing to build capacity in 2020 because we think it gives us an opportunity to compete for those units next year," Davis said. The personal computer business slumped slightly to $9.7 billion over the last quarter as it struggled to stay ahead of ongoing growth in demand. More than 68 million personal computers shipped globally over the last quarter, increasing more than 1% from a year ago, according to Mikako Kitagawa, senior research analyst at Gartner. Davis said it is looking to resolve its supply problems before the end of 2020. Intel is also facing stiff competition. AMD is set to snatch market share by introducing its latest line of Ryzen CPUs based on the world's most advanced production process, called 7-nanometers, which offers faster performance and lower power consumption. Qualcomm, the world's largest vendor of smartphone chips, has also started selling chips that enable longer battery life for laptops, tablets and other PCs. Delays in the development of its 10-nanometer production process have loomed over Intel for years. Intel has surrendered the crown in advanced chip technology to TSMC, which serves customers ranging from Apple and Google to AMD and Nvidia. Intel said its latest 10-nanometer CPUs would start selling in PCs before the end of 2019. The company also plans to roll out chips based on 7-nanometers in 2021. "We're investing to recapture process leadership going forward," Intel's Swan said on the conference call with Wall Street analysts last month. "We are going to be very open minded about, 'How do we make sure we're building the best products?' and where we build them is something we will always evaluate." He confessed that "we're letting our customers down and they're expecting more from us." Read More Intel Contracts Out Production to Help Curb Chip Shortage - Electronic Design : https://ift.tt/35sSkfPApple and Intel file antitrust lawsuit - JURIST - News - Legal News & Commentary - JURIST11/22/2019 ![]() Apple and Intel jointly filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Fortress Investment Group Wednesday. The allegations filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California are that Fortress has stockpiled patents and sued on those patents demanding as much as $5.1 billion from Apple. The firms connected with Fortress have filed 25 lawsuits against Apple for monetary damages per Apple product sold. Fortress does not create any technology products. According to the complaint, Fortress collects patents for the sole purpose of suing technology companies and has done so in violation of antitrust laws because it is using the patents for anti-competitive purposes. The complaint claims that patent assertion entities, like Fortress, deter innovation through pursuing meritless litigation. According to the complaint, the costs of the litigation is ultimately passed on to consumers. Read More Apple and Intel file antitrust lawsuit - JURIST - News - Legal News & Commentary - JURIST : https://ift.tt/35pY61O |
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January 2020
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