Intel Nervana AI Chip Takes on NVIDIA for Machine Learning

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Intel Nervana AI Chip Takes on NVIDIA for Machine Learning

In an attempt to regain relevance in the quickly growing artificial intelligence and machine learning markets, Intel has just announced a new product family called Nervana, centered on a completely unique architectural design. The Nervana Neural Network Processor, or NNP for short, is targeting data center and enterprise customers that want to accelerate AI training times while offering superior efficiency and lower power consumption.

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Western Digital Targets “Super 7” with new Hard Drive Technology

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Western Digital Targets “Super 7” with new Hard Drive Technology

Today at a reveal on its San Jose campus, storage company Western Digital revealed a new technology that enables growth and capacity increases in hard drive technology spanning into 2030 and beyond. This generational leap, called Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording, or MAMR, will provide enterprise and OEM customers with headroom for continued expansion of storage as the need for larger sources of data continues to grow while giving WDC a competitive advantage for multiple years.

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NVIDIA AI Hardware Launch Cements Autonomous Driving Leadership

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NVIDIA AI Hardware Launch Cements Autonomous Driving Leadership

Already a leader in mindshare around artificial intelligence and self-driving technology, NVIDIA announced at its GPU Technology Conference a new platform it promises will power fully autonomous vehicles. The Drive PX Pegasus is a high performance system that combines ARM-based processing cores with two yet-to-be-announced graphics chips offering as much as 10x better performance than the previous best offering from the company. Though sampling and shipping won’t start until the second half of 2018, NVIDIA has already announced a partnership with Deutsche Post DHL and ZF to bring delivery trucks with full autonomy to roads in 2019.

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Microsoft Moves Connectivity Future with 4G LTE-enabled Surface Pro

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Microsoft Moves Connectivity Future with 4G LTE-enabled Surface Pro

At the company’s Ignite conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft officially announced the upcoming Surface Pro flagship tablet PC with support for 4G LTE cellular connectivity, using the same networks that power today’s most popular smartphones. Shipping on December 1st, the Surface Pro LTE will bring always-on connectivity support to the Surface for the first time in several generations, with upgraded software support and improved connection speeds.

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AMD could be a perfect fit for custom Tesla autonomous driving processor

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AMD could be a perfect fit for custom Tesla autonomous driving processor

Reports from CNBC started circulating that AMD and Tesla are working together to build a custom processor for Tesla’s autonomous Autopilot in its cars. This would reduce the reliance on NVIDIA GPU technology and would give Tesla more verticality in its product stack. CNBC claims that Tesla is far enough along on this implementation that it has samples back from AMD for evaluation.

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Apple A11 Processor in iPhone 8 and X Shows Value of Custom Silicon

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Apple A11 Processor in iPhone 8 and X Shows Value of Custom Silicon

Apple announced the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X yesterday and the majority of the discussion will center around the high prices of the flagship models, the design and integration of the edge to edge screen, and remaining concerns about availability of the $999 version. But this generation of iPhone also brings with it a significant shift in the silicon design that powers Apple’s smartphones. With both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, the company is using in-house designed processors nearly exclusively.

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AMD is gaining ground on Intel faster than analysts had thought

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AMD is gaining ground on Intel faster than analysts had thought

Sales of AMD’s new Ryzen processor for consumer PCs may be gaining more ground than many investors and market analysts have been predicting. One of the bigger hardware resellers in Europe, Germany’s MindFactory, an online and physical retailer, makes sales data public and it has been compiled to show the changes in unit sales and revenue comparing AMD to Intel. Starting with March of this year, the launch of the first AMD Ryzen processors, the shift at this retailer has been astonishing.

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New AMD Ryzen Pro brings competition and performance to commercial PC markets due for a refresh

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New AMD Ryzen Pro brings competition and performance to commercial PC markets due for a refresh

Back in late June, AMD announced a commercial version of the Ryzen product family. The Ryzen Pro series of processors levies the success of the Zen architecture and the Ryzen consumer products in hopes to make in-roads on the enormous market opportunity that commercial and managed enterprise desktop sales offer. The top three PC OEMs are on-board with AMD for the first time, bringing an air of credibility that previous commercial products lacked.

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Nvidia and AMD are deluged with orders for PC graphics cards

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Nvidia and AMD are deluged with orders for PC graphics cards

For the first time in nearly a decade, the sales of PC graphics add-in cards rose in the second quarter. Add-in cards are the discrete, high performance graphics solutions for PCs that are typically used by gamers, workstations, rendering farms, and enterprise segments that need high performance graphics capability. Based on data from Jon Peddie Research, add-in card sales rose by 30.9% sequentially and more 34.9% year over year.

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

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Intel increases laptop performance to prepare for coming fight with AMD, Qualcomm

Intel is taking an aggressive stance with this release, doubling the processor core count from two to four, essentially doubling the amount of computing that each processor will be able to perform in the power restraints of the laptop segment. Because a notebook has to operate with limited power consumption and heat creation to stay inside a standard form factor, balancing performance and power draw is of critical importance. Intel is placing a bet with the 8th Generation Core products that the added processing capability will be used more effectively by software going forward, and that it can offer that capability without sacrificing the vital performance of higher clock rates needed by today’s applications and operating systems.

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Apple might be a money maker, but it’s behind the curve on almost all of its products

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Apple might be a money maker, but it’s behind the curve on almost all of its products

Today however, the Apple that sells phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, software, and services often times takes a back seat to competitors when it comes to hardware integration. When a company has the market share and audience of this scope it can be difficult to make sweeping changes in as it risks alienating a subset of consumers. The side effect is a product line that is further behind competing solutions than ever before.

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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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