Since battery technology isn’t really enabling us to pack more than a few watt-hours into our portable devices, companies like Intel, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments are working hard at making their chips and processors more efficient. Apple is acknowledged to be the leader here — their vertically-integrated device creation process (and the mysterious A5) gives them the control they need to maximize battery and get that critical 10-hour claim. TI is hoping that an upcoming family of its OMAP chips will take some of the pressure off manufacturers and enable current batteries to last from dawn till dusk. → Read More
Intel has made an interesting advance in microprocessor technology after years of research, and it seems that 2011′s processors will be the first to feature 3D transistors and tri-gate technology. By optimizing the shape of the transistor at a nanometer level, Intel has made it possible to both reduce the size of individual transistors and improve their efficiency.
Now, it’s important to differentiate this 3D method from others under investigation, like IBM’s. This isn’t a multi-layer solution, merely a more complicated shape for the single layer of transistors we know and love. I say merely, but of course sculpting things at a near-atomic level is no joke. So what exactly is the advance here, and what will it enable? → Read More
Cloverview is going to be the name of Intel’s next-generation Atom processors for tablets according to a hint dropped during a speech today at the Intel Developer Forum. → Read More
As you probably know, computer processors are made up of a bunch of teeny tiny transistors on top of brittle silicon. While this works well for devices that can deal with solid frames, new technologies that need to be more flexible will require a new type of processor. One that can bend. → Read More
This week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, European researchers showed off the world’s first flexible microprocessor made with organic semiconductors. Right now, processing power is similar to what was found in the 1970′s, but the advantage is that the processor is flexible. What’s so good about the research is that it can lead to fully bendable displays and sensors; something we could begin to see in clothing, gadgets and biomedical applications. → Read More
The “tock” portion of Intel’s latest tick-tock cycle has officially hit, and the shrink of last year’s Core processors brings a number of improvements to the line. Intel’s finally taking some steps towards reducing systems’ reliance on discrete GPUs, and they’ve also seriously improved hardware transcoding. Essentially, though, this isn’t a feature or performance release, it’s bringing the top-end speed of the last generation to chips that plain cost less money and produce less heat. Looks like it’s time to upgrade to me. → Read More
For years, makers of computer processors have worked to shrink the size of their components. The smaller your circuits and gates, after all, the more you can fit on a wafer, and the more work a processor can do per unit of area. Intel has traditionally done a die shrink every other year, and reorganized their chips on the “off” years. Interestingly, I wrote two years ago about how engineers considered the switch from 22nm to 16nm to be “insurmountable.” Guess they surmounted it! → Read More
The pair of 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores will come for mobile devices in 2011 with 1080p playback and recording, dual triple screen support and five times the 3D graphics performance than the current processors, you know the ones that are now used in the Galaxy S and Tab. I understand that it is important to use a dual screen phone for 1080p playback while you are driving an additional external screen. But what about battery life? → Read More
This is pretty funny. You’ve probably seen some of the propaganda over the last year or so about how GPUs are orders of magnitude faster than CPUs at certain tasks, due to their parallel processing engine. Intel got tired of hearing about it, I guess, and decided to debunk the myth. They set out to disprove the notion that a GPU can be 100 times faster than a CPU. They kind of did it, but I think this is what is termed a Pyrrhic victory. → Read More
I really don’t understand what the big deal is about the A4. ARM designed the chip, Apple customized it, and Samsung built it. How is that any different from any other phone or device manufacturer?
The A4 variant (an unfortunate name considering the A* naming convention in ARM chips) is just an A8-based chip with a setup specific to the iPhone or iPad’s PCB layout and processing needs. Apple doesn’t have fairy dust to sprinkle on it to make it anything more than that.
That said, however, there’s a lot more to a device than making the right hardware decisions. The Samsung Wave, it has been revealed, uses a very similar Samsung-made (obviously) 1GHz ARM A8 processor, putting it as near Apple’s A4 as can be. But do you think you’re going to have a similar user experience? No, silly! So much depends upon the UI designers and coders that the processor is really only a secondary consideration. → Read More
Remember back in the day when you could go into a store and compare two clock speeds and come out with the right machine for you? Everything else was immaterial. Hard drives could be upgraded, memory could be added, but clock speed was the number you lived or died by. 1.8GHz was better than 1.5GHz every day of the week, right? Those days are over. Moore’s Law, the idea that “the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every two years” is nearly over, which is why multiple cores are now appearing in consumer PCs. When you have multiple cores, clock speed doesn’t make any sense. A 2.5GHz quad-core machine, to the average Joe or Jane, seems to mean that the PC has four cores running at 2.5GHz each. That means it’s 10GHz, right? Right? → Read More
AMD reps have been seen zooming around the Apple campus, taking meetings and presumably hawking their wares. With the recent MacBook Pro update proudly proclaiming the power of the Core i5 and i7 processors inside, and the work with Intel and NVIDIA to produce seamless hybrid graphics acceleration, it seems a rather odd time to be window-shopping with other vendors. But Apple has always been coy about its hardware choices, since whatever is in Apple’s products shares Apple’s cachet to an extent, and they are well aware of the value that represents. So what’s going on here? Is Apple jumping ship, or just teasing in order to get a rise out of Intel and NVIDIA? Maybe a little of both. → Read More
Oops! Looks like someone accident let some information out early. AMDs “Thuban” processors will be out next month, and there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there until recently. Turns out that somebody talked. Well, at least someone’s BIOS talked. → Read More
Bet you weren’t expecting that headline tonight, were you? Well, it’s about as literal as I could get. Some enterprising boffins at the University of Rochester used a high-powered laser to etch microscopic patterns in silicon such that water overcomes its own hydrophilia and goes in whatever direction they please. This is very much still a laboratory discovery, but a few years down the road, you might see this kind of thing built into chips as a sort of hybrid active-passive cooling solution. → Read More
File this one under “future toys.” We hear about a lot of these super-low-level advances in processing and storage (whenever I see the word “holographic,” I reach for the salt), and while they’re usually at best years away from practice and manufacture, they’re good to keep informed on, if nothing else than as cocktail chatter. “Did you hear about those new nanotube speakers?” → Read More
There’s a story going around right now that the development costs for Apple’s A4 chip, which powers the iPad, might be as high as a billion dollars. Let’s not get carried away here. Apple licensed the CPU and GPU from ARM, and the A4 shares a lot of elements with the Tegra 2.
The billion dollar investment here is for designing a chip “from scratch.” Is that really what happened here? → Read More
One of the small surprises of the iPad announcement was that it was running on Apple’s own custom silicon. Well, that’s true to an extent, but it’s not like Apple actually invented the processor in-house. It’s just not OEM hardware. In fact, other guys are running with many of the same parts.
The A4 is a custom implementation of the ARM A9 processor, also found in Snapdragon (running the Nexus One) and Tegra (running the Zune HD). The difference is there is a GPU mated with the A9 in Apple’s design, probably to help offload the graphics work and keep the interface smooth. → Read More
VIA has introduced its updated line of Nano processors, built for netbooks and all-in-one computers. The 3000 series promises a 20% performance boost over existing Nano CPUs while managing to reduce overall power consumption by 20% as well. → Read More
While I was sliding down bannisters and having -160° alcohol poured on my hands, the AMD camera crew and the overclockers we were all there to see were putting together an honest-to-god documentation of the event.
I forgot to post it a few weeks ago when it came out, so it’s not exactly breaking news, but if you’re interested in how these guys did their incredible overclocks using exotic cooling materials, there’s a lot more info here than in our little film. → Read More
Last week AMD invited CrunchGear down to Austin to check out an overclocking event they were holding, at which many, many liters of liquid nitrogen and the much colder liquid helium would be consumed by thirsty processors.
They asked us, however, not to video the entire event, since they’d have their official video coming out shortly and some of the technology being used was still in development. No problem, we said, we’ll just dip our pulled-pork tacos in the spare liquid nitrogen. → Read More
