In what is likely one of the biggest stories in tech for the week, Arm Holdings, a company that only recently returned to being a public company in September, saw a huge spike in its stock, nearly 60% at one point, after its quarterly earnings report. As recently as Halloween Arm was under $50, yet broke $120 on Thursday.
Read MoreThe heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.
Read MoreAMD first unveiled its new Hawk Point processors at its AI event in December, now branded as the Ryzen 8040 series of APUs. Ahead of CES this week in Vegas, the company briefed me on some new performance metrics of interest that it plans to show off in its exhibit area, across a range of AI tests, content creation, and gaming.
Read MoreOne of the most important technology companies in the world is often times one of the least discussed and debated. Arm Holdings (or just Arm) is a UK-based company founded in 1990 that has been the silent leader in the expansion of computing outside the world of servers and PCs. If you have a smartphone, a connected appliance, a smart TV, or digital home assistant, you are working with a piece of technology with Arm at its core.
Read MoreThis launch is made even more interesting due to the pending onslaught of competition coming the PC space from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Only days prior to the Apple announcement, Qualcomm had shown the Snapdragon X Elite SoC that will come in 2024, making some significant claims of performance relative to the best from its rivals. Heading out to my local retailer on Tuesday I picked up a pair of the new MacBook Pro laptops to do some testing and get a feel for how well these new devices compare to other systems powered by Intel and AMD, as well as my own M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro.
Read MoreAt the heart of all the new MacBook Pro laptops is a series of M3 processors, for the first time announced and available in the same window. It has been less than a year since Apple launched the M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, and only four months since we saw the M2 Max released. This is a very fast cadence for a whole new family of processors and probably indicates that sales of that generation weren’t living up to expectations.
Read MoreLast week during its annual Snapdragon Summit held in Maui, Qualcomm dropped a bomb on the computing world with the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite processor, a new SoC targeted at the notebook PC going squarely after the likes of Intel, Apple, and AMD. You’ll no doubt find a lot of articles posting this morning that summarize a collection of about six different benchmarks that the press was able to witness being run (no true hands on), but I wanted to focus on one particular set of results of interest to me.
Read MoreEarlier this week I published a piece here on MarketWatch describing the coming interest and marketing dynamics in the chips landscape centered around the idea of client AI, or AI processing that runs locally on a device like a laptop or a smartphone, rather than in the cloud. Now this week, during the company’s annual technology summit, Qualcomm has taken the wraps off an interesting combination of products paired with some eye-opening claims. These new products have the capability to shift the balance of power in the PC space.
Read MoreDespite historically impressive stock performance this summer, AMD is faced with a pair of news items that might get some investor attention. One of the partners that AMD was working with on its transition to 7nm technology has announced today that it would no longer be pursuing so-called “leading edge” silicon manufacturing. As a result, AMD must now depend on a single production source, the same used by NVIDIA, Apple, and Qualcomm.
Read MoreIn the build up to earnings season this month, AMD is eager to get out from under some of the problematic and lingering concerns that have followed it. Deftly navigating around a potentially serious security concern and trying to find ways to offset the risk involved in too much of its graphics business being associated with the volatile cryptocurrency markets, AMD continues to put itself in a position for growth.
Read MoreIn a report this week, Bloomberg has revealed plans for Apple to engineer processors for its notebook and PC designs, mirroring in many ways its development and integration with silicon chip design for its mobile products including iPhone and iPad. According to the report, Apple would begin the rollout of these new processors in Macs in 2020.
Read MoreQualcomm is finally talking about design wins surrounding its server chip platform called Centriq, unveiled this past November. Early excitement and technical interest in the company’s first attempt to bring a processor to the server space have been high, though without firm commitments from major system vendors or cloud service providers like Amazon and Microsoft, the markets have been hesitant to buy-in to this and similar Arm-based designs.
Read MoreVerbosely called the 8th Generation Core Processor with Radeon Vega M Graphics, the new G-series of parts targets a middle ground of the notebook space that wants graphics performance for gaming but without the bulk and size usually associated with traditional gaming systems.
Read MoreJust before the closing bell on Wednesday, Intel released a statement responding to the security issues brought up in this story. While acknowledging that these new security concerns do exist, the company went out of its way to insinuate that AMD, Arm Holdings, and others were at risk. Intel also states that performance impact on patched machines “should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”
Read MoreToday Intel announced a new product family for its 8th Generation Core family that combines a 35-watt processor and AMD Radeon graphics chip on a single package in order to create a new class of gaming notebook solution. It hasn’t been assigned a brand yet, that will likely occur with a formal announcement at CES this January. This announcement has significant impact because it solidifies a partnership between competitors AMD and Intel for a product in a space both compete in.
Read MoreThe new display processor is highly associated with the latest Mali GPU cores, but with enough work a 3rd party licensee could adapt it to another GPU architecture. This is obviously not the most efficient way of using this technology as it is regarded as a turnkey solution for the Mali GPU products. ARM has developed the software stack for both Andriod and Linux, and if needed it can develop Windows based drivers to fully leverage the features of this latest product. It is easily attached to 3rd party panel interfaces.
Read MoreWith the launch of Ryzen Mobile, a processor meant to compete with Intel’s 7th and 8th generation Core processors in ultrathin and 2-in-1 notebooks, AMD is completing what can only be called a revolutionary year for the company. “It truly is the culmination of a spectacular year of product launches,” claims Lisa Su, AMD CEO. Every quarter of 2017 has brought with it multiple significant product launches that have shifted and molded the company’s portfolio of products and IP into something very different than the AMD of recent history.
Read MoreAs the winter buying seasons ramps up, AMD is readying a major notebook processor release that will be competitive to for the first time Intel in nearly a decade. With recent leaks of upcoming configurations coming from major system builders like HP, and performance data that indicates a strong uplift compared to previous AMD offerings, the mobile AMD chip will force both Intel and NVIDIA to make adjustments to product lines and positioning.
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.
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