Reports from CNBC started circulating that AMD and Tesla are working together to build a custom processor for Tesla’s autonomous Autopilot in its cars. This would reduce the reliance on NVIDIA GPU technology and would give Tesla more verticality in its product stack. CNBC claims that Tesla is far enough along on this implementation that it has samples back from AMD for evaluation.
Read MoreApple announced the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X yesterday and the majority of the discussion will center around the high prices of the flagship models, the design and integration of the edge to edge screen, and remaining concerns about availability of the $999 version. But this generation of iPhone also brings with it a significant shift in the silicon design that powers Apple’s smartphones. With both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, the company is using in-house designed processors nearly exclusively.
Read MoreSales of AMD’s new Ryzen processor for consumer PCs may be gaining more ground than many investors and market analysts have been predicting. One of the bigger hardware resellers in Europe, Germany’s MindFactory, an online and physical retailer, makes sales data public and it has been compiled to show the changes in unit sales and revenue comparing AMD to Intel. Starting with March of this year, the launch of the first AMD Ryzen processors, the shift at this retailer has been astonishing.
Read MoreBack in late June, AMD announced a commercial version of the Ryzen product family. The Ryzen Pro series of processors levies the success of the Zen architecture and the Ryzen consumer products in hopes to make in-roads on the enormous market opportunity that commercial and managed enterprise desktop sales offer. The top three PC OEMs are on-board with AMD for the first time, bringing an air of credibility that previous commercial products lacked.
Read MoreFor the first time in nearly a decade, the sales of PC graphics add-in cards rose in the second quarter. Add-in cards are the discrete, high performance graphics solutions for PCs that are typically used by gamers, workstations, rendering farms, and enterprise segments that need high performance graphics capability. Based on data from Jon Peddie Research, add-in card sales rose by 30.9% sequentially and more 34.9% year over year.
Read MoreIntel is taking an aggressive stance with this release, doubling the processor core count from two to four, essentially doubling the amount of computing that each processor will be able to perform in the power restraints of the laptop segment. Because a notebook has to operate with limited power consumption and heat creation to stay inside a standard form factor, balancing performance and power draw is of critical importance. Intel is placing a bet with the 8th Generation Core products that the added processing capability will be used more effectively by software going forward, and that it can offer that capability without sacrificing the vital performance of higher clock rates needed by today’s applications and operating systems.
Read MoreToday however, the Apple that sells phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, software, and services often times takes a back seat to competitors when it comes to hardware integration. When a company has the market share and audience of this scope it can be difficult to make sweeping changes in as it risks alienating a subset of consumers. The side effect is a product line that is further behind competing solutions than ever before.
Read MoreNew technology and integration programs at Qualcomm are working to improve the performance, capability, and availability of true depth sensing technology for Android-based smartphones and VR headsets this year.
Read MoreThe weekend before one of the largest graphics and development conferences starts, AMD CEO Lisa Su stood on stage at LA Live to announce the official release of two new product families that reinsert AMD into the world of high-end consumer, prosumer, and content creation markets. Both the Ryzen Threadripper processor and the Radeon RX Vega graphics chip offer significant performance increases over the previous AMD product portfolio for markets that are high margin and high ASP. With these new offerings shipping in August, AMD is poised to have a significant increase in product movement late this summer and into the fall.
Read MoreDuring the ChinaJoy 2017 event in Shanghai, VR pioneer HTC announced its standalone VR headset aimed at the China market. This marks the first major player in the virtual reality space to officially reveal a standalone product intended for the broad consumer market that requires a more affordable, portable VR solution.
Read Morehough reviews aren’t launching for another couple of weeks, on July 13th AMD showed all of its cards for the summer’s hottest CPU launch, Ryzen Threadripper. With the hyper-aggressive naming scheme to go along with it, Threadripper will be a high-core-count processor and platform, based on the EPYC socket and design, targeting the high-end desktop market (HEDT) that Intel has had to itself for nearly that same 10-year window.
Read MoreEarlier this week, Samsung announced that it would begin ramping up production of its 8GB HBM2 technology in order to address the rapidly expanding need for high-bandwidth memory in the market. HBM2 is used in high performance processors used for artificial intelligence, HPC (high performance compute), graphics, gaming, networking, and enterprise servers because of its low power, high throughput capability. HBM technology uses stacked memory dies that are vertically connected by TSVs (through silicon vias) to improve density and capacity, while also preventing overheating to guarantee higher reliability.
Read MoreQualcomm has put forward steady work on creating the vibrant hardware ecosystem for mobile VR to facilitate broad adoption of wireless, dedicated head mounted displays. Though the value of Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream View cannot but overstated in moving the perception of consumer VR forward, the need to utilize your smart phone in a slot-in style design has its limitations. It consumes battery that you may require for other purposes, it limits the kinds of sensors that the VR system can utilize, and creates a sub-optimal form factor in order to allow for simple user installation.
Read MoreAs we prepare for a surprisingly robust summer season of new hardware technologies to be released to the consumer, both Intel and AMD have moved in a direction that both seems inevitable and wildly premature. The announcement and pending introduction of high core count processors, those with many cores that share each company’s most modern architecture and design, brings with it an interesting combination of opportunity and discussion. First and foremost, is there a legitimate need for this type of computing horsepower, in this form factor, and secondly, is this something that consumers will want to purchase?
Read MoreThunderbolt is finally on the path to mass adoption thanks to Intel's move to integrate it in future processors and make licensing it easier.
Read MoreWith both Microsoft and Qualcomm publicly discussing the re-emergence of mobile processors from Qualcomm running the Windows consumer desktop operating system, it seems as good a time as any to dissect what this might mean for the industry and the major players involved. Windows 10 running on Qualcomm processor platforms in tablets and notebook form factors brings with it some incredible opportunities for all involved, including the consumers they are targeting, with a focus on areas the Windows+Intel relationship has neglected for some time. But with that comes substantial risk and many avenues of potential conflict when these systems begin to hit the market the end of this year.
Read MoreBringing Android apps and the Play Store to the Chromebook platform is not a trivial task. Android applications were built and compiled for a specific set of hardware and operating system variants. Chrome OS, despite being designed by the same company, is quite different. It was built initially as an online-only system and has slowly evolved into a hybrid, acknowledging and accepting the need for offline activities. In the Chromebook space today there are two distinct segments of hardware available: one is based on ARM-designed processors and the other uses Intel x86 processors.
Read MoreThough not as exciting as the launch of a new chip or the deployment of a new wireless technology, Qualcomm today takes a big step towards revamping its image and setting the direction for its flagship Snapdragon product line going forward.
The Snapdragon 835 SoC product will now be referred to as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform, removing the moniker of “processor” from the name. All Snapdragon 800-, 600- and 400- chips will follow the same pattern, dropping the term processor and instead adding “mobile platform.”
Read MoreWith dwindling market share in the consumer space and most recent reports showing well under 20% for AMD, the excitement and demand for Ryzen is a welcome change for its CPU division. AMD’s marketing team is well practiced in churning up fans and communities to enthusiasm levels well beyond most other silicon providers thanks in large part to the personnel in its GPU/Radeon division. It now appears that the passage of time, and the pent-up demand for any competition to Intel in the mainstream gaming and enthusiast markets, is going to provide a boost for AMD in 2017.
Read MoreThe topic of honesty in the world of mobile performance benchmarks can draw pursed lips and awkward glances when brought up in a meeting involving a silicon SoC provider. It’s not a secret that gaming the system has been a frequent area of concern since phone reviews became an intrinsic part of the purchasing process for many consumers, but it isn’t a popular subject. Some of the most-respected in media showed back in 2013 that nearly everyone involved in the process had some portion of blame, resulting in dishonest scores and performance metrics that led to ill-informed customers.
A similar, but more nuanced, discussion can be had about SoC and handset performance over time. Thiscan take two angles: first, performance of benchmarks in long-term usage scenarios (sustained performance); and second, performance of phones through software and firmware updates released weeks, months, and even years later.
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