Processor

Qualcomm may have become the household name in the mobile application processor (AP) market but it is hardly the only one. Even before Apple’s A chips or Samsung’s Exynos, there was MediaTek. Often the preferred processor of Chinese brands and less expensive smartphones, MediaTek has been making promises of high-end features at affordable prices, at least as far as its chips are concerned. Now the Taiwanese company is trying to nibble at Qualcomm’s bottom line with its new Helio A series designed to bring camera and AI features to the budget smartphone market.

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One of the more recent trends in Silicon Valley is for the biggest tech companies to bring chip development in-house, rather than rely on third-party suppliers like Qualcomm and Intel. Apple has been doing this years already, and Google is already looking to catch up, but it seems the latest to have interest in developing its own processors is Facebook. Earlier this year it was revealed that the company had plans to start designing custom chips for consumer hardware, and now they've made a fairly big hire.

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Qualcomm is gradually making its push into the PC processor market, namely with its latest Snapdragon 850, aimed at notebooks. That chip, however, is just a higher-clocked version of the Snapdragon 845, a processor originally designed for smartphones, which means the 850 still doesn't make the cut in keeping up with Intel's CPUs. The much rumored Snapdragon 1000, however, is expected to be a different story.

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Intel's limited-edition Core i7-8086K processor is up for sale, though supplies of the hotly-anticipated chip aren't expected to last long. The new processor was announced at Computex 2018, to mark the 40th anniversary of the original 8086 processor.

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It's a core numbers game again. This time, however, the competition has reached double digits. While desktop and laptop CPUs still dawdle on quad cores, AMD and rival Intel are heating it up in the server and enterprise market. Just after Intel boasted about its upcoming 28-core chip slated for late 2018, AMD dropped its own bombshell. It has 32 cores and it's not afraid to use it. In fact, it's also coming sooner, around the third quarter of the year.

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Qualcomm has revealed its latest chipset, the Snapdragon 850, aiming to bring all-day battery life and always-on connectivity to a new range of Windows 10 notebooks and 2-in-1s. Announced at Computex 2018, the new chipset follows the Snapdragon 845 and its predecessor the Snapdragon 835, themselves already finding their way into Windows 10 on ARM notebooks and convertibles.

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It's almost ironic if you think about it. Intel wanted to get into the mobile and wearable market dominated by ARM chip makers like Qualcomm that it rushed head on, only to unceremoniously retreat from those markets after repeated failure. Now it seems that Qualcomm is poised to do the same but coming from the other side. Just days after a rumors surfaced about a Snapdragon 850 or 950 designed for Windows 10 on ARM devices, word arrives of a Snapdragon 1000 for the same. And, to add to the irony, it might be stepping up to Intel's disadvantages as well.

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Mobile chip-maker Arm has unveiled a new set of high-end processor tech, targeting laptops, premium smartphones, and AR/VR devices as it cranks up the pressure on Intel and AMD. Although Arm chips may have traditionally been associated with smartphones, the company is pitching its new line-up at larger hardware as notebook buyers begin to demand always-on connectivity and all-day battery life.

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2018 immediately started off on the wrong foot for Intel and, consequently, the computing industry at large. Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities plagued modern processors, mostly from Intel but also from its rivals, even on some ARM chips. They can never be fully fixed without an entirely new CPU architecture, so all we're left with are mitigations to lessen the probability of an exploit. Even so, new variants still arise and a fourth one based on Spectre has just been found. Fortunately, at least for now, Intel says there's little reason to panic.

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Intel has finally begun shipping a 10nm processor, though this first Cannon Lake Core i3 is a tidbit ahead of what will be the main event next year. The chip-maker has been struggling to meet its own 10nm manufacturing promises, discovering that transitioning to the new architecture was trickier than it initially expected.

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Onboard graphics chips have earned a not so good reputation for being near useless beyond basic display capabilities. That reputation is partly thanks to Intel who, until recently, hasn't exactly given its built-in GPUs much love. AMD, in contrast, is playing up its Radeon property, acquired from old NVIDIA rival ATI, to boost both its images and its graphics chops. It is putting those chops to work on the second gen Ryzen PRO processors for notebooks and desktops. And this time, AMD made sure it has some OEMs to cheer it on.

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Intel's much-anticipated "Cannon Lake" processors have been delayed, with the chip-maker confirming that its next-generation CPUs now won't be hitting volume production this year. The new chips rely on Intel's equally-new 10 nanometer production process, which the company has been particularly upbeat about, but which itself has experienced some significant delays.

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