SoCs

As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance. As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite...

Samsung Announces Exynos 1080 - 5nm Premium-Range SoC with A78 Cores

Today Samsung LSI announced the new Exynos 1080 SoC, a successor to last year’s Exynos 980. This year’s 1080 is seemingly positioned a little above the 980 in terms...

55 by Andrei Frumusanu on 11/12/2020

Apple Announces Event for November 10th: Arm-Based Macs Expected

We don’t normally publish news posts about Apple sending out RSVPs for product launch events, but this one should be especially interesting. This morning Apple has sent notice that they’re...

67 by Ryan Smith on 11/2/2020

Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU

It’s almost been a year since Imagination had announced its brand-new A-series GPU IP, a release which at the time the company called its most important in 15 years...

74 by Andrei Frumusanu on 10/13/2020

NUVIA Completes Series B Funding Round: $240M

One of the more interesting startups of late is NUVIA, with promises of a new Arm-based processor for the datacenter to rival the x86 dominance of AMD and Intel...

21 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/24/2020

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 750G: Cortex-A77 & mmWave in the Premium Range

Today Qualcomm is announcing a new entry into their premium tier Snapdragon 700-series with the brand-new Snapdragon 750G platform and SoC. The new SoC, as its name implies, lies...

13 by Andrei Frumusanu on 9/22/2020

Apple Announces 5nm A14 SoC - Meagre Upgrades, Or Just Less Power Hungry?

Amongst the new iPad and Watch devices released today, Apple made news in releasing the new A14 SoC chip. Apple’s newest generation silicon design is noteworthy in that is...

127 by Andrei Frumusanu on 9/15/2020

It’s Official: NVIDIA To Acquire Arm For $40 Billion

Following a number of rumors and leaks, NVIDIA this evening announced that it is buying Arm Limited for $40 billion. The cash and stock deal will see NVIDIA buy...

140 by Ryan Smith on 9/13/2020

Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake: Up to 4.8 GHz at 50 W, 2x GPU with Xe, New Branding

In August, Intel ran one of its rare Architecture Days where the company went into some detail about its upcoming Tiger Lake processor. This included target markets, core counts...

349 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/2/2020

Intel Launches Tiger Lake: A Live Blog (Noon ET, 9am PT)

Intel is about to launch Tiger Lake. Follow along with our Live Blog!

54 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/2/2020

3DFabric: The Home for TSMC’s 2.5D and 3D Stacking Roadmap

Interposers. EMIB. Foveros. Die-to-die stacking. ODI. AIB.TSVs. All these words and acronyms have one overriding feature – they are all involved in how two bits of silicon physically connect...

9 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 9/2/2020

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 732G: 730G Gets a Speed Bump

Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its Snapdragon 730G platform, introducing the higher-binned Snapdragon 732G. The new chip gives the platform a slight boost in terms of clock...

16 by Andrei Frumusanu on 8/31/2020

TSMC Launches New N12e Process: FinFET at 0.4V for IoT

One of the main drivers for the semiconductor industry is the growth in always-connected devices that require silicon inside, either for compute, communication, or control. The ‘Internet of Things&rsquo...

27 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/27/2020

TSMC and Graphcore Prepare for AI Acceleration on 3nm

One of the side announcements made during TSMC’s Technology Symposium was that it already has customers on hand with product development progressing for its future 3nm process node technology...

2 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/27/2020

Where are my GAA-FETs? TSMC to Stay with FinFET for 3nm

As we passed that 22nm to 16nm barrier, almost all the major semiconductor fabrication companies on the leading edge transitioned from planar transistors to FinFET transistors. The benefits of...

37 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/26/2020

‘Better Yield on 5nm than 7nm’: TSMC Update on Defect Rates for N5

One of the key metrics on how well a semiconductor process is developing is looking at its quantitative chip yield – or rather, its defect density. A manufacturing process...

107 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/25/2020

342 Transistors for Every Person In the World: Cerebras 2nd Gen Wafer Scale Engine Teased

One of the highlights of Hot Chips from 2019 was the startup Cerebras showcasing its product – a large ‘wafer-scale’ AI chip that was literally the size of a...

32 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/18/2020

Intel’s 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake SoC Detailed: SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP

At the start of the year, Intel ‘foolishly’ handed me a wafer of its next generation Tiger Lake processors, as the moment it came into my hands I attempted...

71 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/13/2020

NUVIA Phoenix Targets +40-50% ST Performance Over Zen 2 for Only 33% the Power

In November 2019, the company NUVIA broke out of stealth mode. Founded by former senior Apple and Google processor architects, John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams III, the...

50 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/11/2020

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold

Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen tremendous success with over 140 different...

88 by Andrei Frumusanu on 7/8/2020

HPC Systems Special Offer: Two A64FX Nodes in a 2U for $40k

It was recently announced that the Fugaku supercomputer, located at Riken in Japan, has scored the #1 position on the TOP500 supercomputer list, as well as #1 positions in...

38 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 6/26/2020

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