AMD Reenters High End Markets with Threadripper and Vega, Taking Aim at Intel and NVIDIA

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AMD Reenters High End Markets with Threadripper and Vega, Taking Aim at Intel and NVIDIA

The 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.

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AMD Puts More Pressure on Intel with Threadripper

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AMD Puts More Pressure on Intel with Threadripper

hough 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.

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Samsung Memory Ramp Improves AMD GPU Outlook

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Samsung Memory Ramp Improves AMD GPU Outlook

Earlier 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.

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Qualcomm Partners with Bosch, OmniVision, and Ximmerse to Shore Up Mobile VR Sensors

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Qualcomm Partners with Bosch, OmniVision, and Ximmerse to Shore Up Mobile VR Sensors

Qualcomm 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.

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AMD and Intel Race Towards High Core Count CPU Future

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AMD and Intel Race Towards High Core Count CPU Future

As 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?

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The Windows Opportunity for Qualcomm

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The Windows Opportunity for Qualcomm

With 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.

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Chromebook Platform Choice Important for Android App Performance

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Chromebook Platform Choice Important for Android App Performance

Bringing 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.

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Snapdragon Platform Brand Changes Face of Qualcomm Flagship

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Snapdragon Platform Brand Changes Face of Qualcomm Flagship

Though 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.”

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Anecdotal: Early AMD Ryzen Pre-orders Show Exceptional Demand

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Anecdotal: Early AMD Ryzen Pre-orders Show Exceptional Demand

With 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.

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Still Playing Games: Mobile SoC Follow-ups Should be Standard

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Still Playing Games: Mobile SoC Follow-ups Should be Standard

The 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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The 5G Economy will add $12.3 trillion of revenue by 2035

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The 5G Economy will add $12.3 trillion of revenue by 2035

Earlier today a report commissioned by Qualcomm was released focusing on the impact of upcoming 5G standards and technology on the global economy. (https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/5g/economy) Qualcomm, along with nearly every major player in the technology and wireless industry, believes that 5G will bring about a new era of connected devices with a combined intelligence far greater than what we can demonstrate on today’s offerings. The 5G Economy was led by research firms IHS Markit and PSB, with outside verification by leading economist and professor Dr. David Teece, director of the Tusher Center at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley, and principal executive officer of the Berkeley Research Group. The results and tone of the report point towards a substantially more dramatic impact of the move to 5G than we have seen in any previous wireless technology migration.

Many consumers and businesses today not only utilize mobile 4G and 3G technology, but have come to depend on it to drive growth and sustain modern business models. 5G will move mobile wireless connectivity to a new level, hitting the landmark of being considered a General Purpose Technology, a designation given to technologies that change the world. Other GPTs include the printing press, electricity, automobiles, and the internet, putting this new predicted classification into proper context.

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Qualcomm and Microsoft bring full Windows 10 to Snapdragon devices

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Qualcomm and Microsoft bring full Windows 10 to Snapdragon devices

At the WinHEC developer conference in China today, Qualcomm and Microsoft have announced a partnership to enable a full Windows 10 computing environment on systems based on the next-generation of Snapdragon processors in the second half of 2017. The importance of this announcement can’t be overstated – it marks another attempt for Microsoft to enter the non-x86 market with mobile devices (think tablets and notebooks, less smartphones)

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Kaby Lake outperforms Skylake by surprising delta

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Kaby Lake outperforms Skylake by surprising delta

In August at the company’s annual developer forum, Intel officially took the lid off its 7th generation of Core processor series, codenamed Kaby Lake. The build up to this release has been an interesting one as we saw the retirement of the “tick tock” cadence of processor releases and instead are moving into a market where Intel can spend more development time on a single architecture design to refine and tweak it as the engineers see fit. With that knowledge in tow, I believed, as I think many still do today, that Kaby Lake would be something along the lines of a simple rebrand of current shipping product. After all, since we know of no major architectural changes from Skylake other than improvements in the video and media side of the GPU, what is left for us to look forward to?

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Qualcomm Shows Snapdragon 835, World's First 10nm FinFET processor built with Samsung

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Qualcomm Shows Snapdragon 835, World's First 10nm FinFET processor built with Samsung

Though we are still months away from shipping devices, Qualcomm has announced that it will be building its upcoming flagship Snapdragon 835 mobile SoC on Samsung’s 10nm 2nd generation FinFET process technology. Qualcomm tells us that integrating the 10nm node in 2017 will keep it “the technology leader in mobile platforms” and this makes the 835 the world's first 10nm production processor.

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Oculus Launches Asynchronous Spacewarp, 45 FPS VR

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Oculus Launches Asynchronous Spacewarp, 45 FPS VR

Oculus has announced that as of today, support for Asynchronous Spacewarp is available and active for all users that install the 1.10 runtime. Announced at the Oculus Connect 3 event in October, ASW promises to complement existing Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW) technology to improve the experience of VR for lower performance systems that might otherwise result in stutter

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