Intel just revealed their 8th-Gen Intel Core processors, and with them, a bundle of information that's not important to most consumers. Much like the rest of the tech universe, PC users can be broken up into two categories: those that can tell the difference between processors, and those that don't care. The vast majority of the world is made up of the latter group.
Intel just pulled the curtain from their 8th Gen Intel Core processor lineup, including Y, U, H, and S-Series processors. Four different processor products are being detailed, all from the U-Series (detailed below). This includes the i7-8650U, i7-8550U, i5-8350U, and i5-8250U, each aimed at the laptop category with 4 cores and 8 threads, ready to roll with 2-channel DDR4-2400 LPDDR3- 2133 memory and 620 UHD graphics.
AMD's ultra-high-end Ryzen CPU platform THREADRIPPER is here, and early reviews suggest it's a monster. AMD's latest release adds to their full CPU refresh with Zen architecture for all markets: mainstream, budget, and enthusiast. With AMD Ryzen Threadripper, the company offers up to 16 cores, 32 threads, and 64 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 connectivity. And the hardware itself is as big as your hand.
The Intel Core X-Series processors were been revealed by Intel this morning in one big bunch. Included is the entire unlocked Intel Core X-Series i-family. This includes i5, i7, and i9, the most impressive of which is the Extreme Edition Intel Core i9-7980XE. These processors were announced first this week at Computex 2017 as "the most powerful, scalable and accessible high-end desktop platform offered by Intel."
AMD has made its comeback in the CPU market with the launch of its Zen-based Ryzen processors to take on Intel’s Core line with more affordable digits. But the consumer PC war isn’t won with CPUs alone. Graphics cards play an equal role, sometimes even greater for both gamers as well as multimedia workers. That is why AMD is now launching a new “Vega” GPU architecture, this time to strike at NVIDA’s long-held monopoly in the discrete graphics card market.
It looks like Samsung is about to be inside your favorite smartphone once again. While the company's chip-making devision lost their contract deal with Apple several years ago, they plan on picking up the pace once again the very near future. They began their series of big moves toward the future they envision earlier this year by splitting off their chip-making business arm within their semiconductor division as "Samsung Foundry" - and it would appear that their next goal is the iPhone.
When we're talking about mobile processors, a lot of attention is paid to the high-end, like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835. The mid-range is just as important to many phone manufacturers, however, and Qualcomm wants its processors to feature in those devices as well. With that in mind, Qualcomm has launched its new Snapdragon 450 at Mobile World Congress Shanghai.
AMD has introduced its new AMD Epic 7000 series of datacenter processors, saying they come with up to 32 high-performance Zen cores alongside a bunch of other notable features and bragging points, not the least of which is setting multiple new performance records. The new lineup features AMD Epyc processors ranging from the 8-core / 16-thread 7251 to the 32-core / 64-thread 7601.
Intel knows you're obsessed with speed, so please feel free to add the Intel Core i9 and the Core X-series processors to your List of Gadgetry to Covet. Unveiled at Computex 2017 this week, the new chips are part of what Intel says is recognition that no, not all PC users are created equal. Indeed, when it comes to gamers, content creators, and people dealing in compute-intense segments like virtual reality, the needs are higher than the current Core i3, i5, and i7 range can deliver.
The next big bit of Samsung technology is going to be very, very tiny. So tiny, in fact, that the company suggests they'll be leading the way to the product before anyone else - and that's a big deal. "The ubiquitous nature of smart, connected machines and everyday consumer devices signals the beginning of the next industrial revolution," said Executive Vice President of the Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, Jong Shik Yoon. This week Samsung announced that they'd push the semiconductor industry forward with a variety of new sizes in process technology on a new roadmap for the company.
Google is seeking a new way to make neural networking work efficiently - starting with the TPU. The TPU is a Tensor Processing Unit - to be compared to Intel's CPU or NVIDIA's GPU, made for processing data. Google's news here is their first-ever study published on how well their TPU works - compared, appropriately enough, to Intel's CPU and NVIDIA's GPU whilst neural networking.
This week the folks at Qualcomm have announced their decision to change the way they present their hardware. Instead of calling the technology they create a "Qualcomm Snapdragon processor", they'll be calling it a "Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platform." This should serve to better differentiate the full scope of what Qualcomm does - that's essentially deliver a platform, yes, from which a smartphone (or other smart devices) can process, connect, and deliver data to the end user.