The PC Report

Today AMD has taken one big step in announcing that samples of their Fusion APU (Advanced Processing Unit), codenamed “Llano”, should be available in the first half of this year with volume production in 2011. The 32nm chip will pack both a quad-core processor as well as  a DirectX 11 supporting graphics processor on the one die. The chip is said to run at 3GHz+ and will support DDR3.

This “Llano” chip will go head on with Intel’s single die CPU+GPU solution, Sandy Bridge, which is also set for a 2011 production release. However, AMD will have the heads up on the Intel chip with their DX11-supporting GPU (which is based on the Evergreen DX11 lineup); Intel’s chip only supports DX10. AMD is also boasting that the chip will be less power consuming thanks to  power gating – a technique used on Intel’s Nehalem chips to help lower a core’s power and power up another core (hence Turbo Boost).

Also, for those of you wondering, Intel’s Arrandale and Clarkdale chips are not the same as these single-die CPU+GPU solutions – the Arrandale/Clarkdale chips have two dies (one for the CPU and one for the GPU). Anyway, no doubt we’ll see more of these chips later this year.

Only a few weeks after Intel announced their Pine Trail platform we are seeing the new 32nm Intel Arrandale and Clarkdale processors for the latest generation of computers. Like the new Pine Trail Atom processors, the new chips contain both a processing die and an integrated graphics die. As you can see in the picture above, the 32nm processing die is slightly smaller than the 45nm GPU die.

First off we have the Arrandale platform, which are the mobile iterations of the 32nm Nehalem process. Launched today were a total of 11 Arrandale-based processors: five Intel Core i7s ranging from 1.06GHz to 2.66GHz, four Intel Core i5s ranging from 1.06GHz to 2.53GHz and two Intel Core i3s at 2.13 and 2.26GHz. All the processors carry 2 physical cores and 4 threads via Intel’s HyperThreading technology, support DDR3 RAM at speeds of either 800 or 1066 MHz and (except for the Core i3s) can make use of Turbo Boost, which pushes a single core beyond the rated speed to achieve the best performance. The full chart of new CPUs is below.

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It was just a few days ago that we posted some news on the upcoming Asus Eee PC 1oo5P/PE and now Intel has officially announced the new Pine Trail Atoms we’ve been waiting on. In the line-up we’re seeing an N450 designed for netbook use as well as a single-core D410 and dual-core D510 made for nettops (that we’ve seen before) and a NM10 Express chipset. All the processors have a clockspeed of 1.66Ghz are said to use 20% less power than the current-gen Atoms.

As said in various reports, the new Pineview processors don’t give much of a performance improvement over the N270 and N280 even though they contain the memory controller and graphics chipset on the die as well as the processing cores. At least the inclusion of the graphics on the chipset makes the Eee PC 1005PE last for 10 hours on the one charge. We should be seeing more of these chips at CES 2010.

We’ve seen a few things concerning the upcoming Intel Core i3 and mobile Core i5 processors, and today Intel said they would officially launch them on January 7 next year. In a demonstration today, they showed off the dual-core Arrandale and Clarkdale 32nm chips, both which pack new integrated graphics on the CPU itself, named “Intel HD Graphics.” Both the i3s and i5s also feature HyperThreading, and the mobile i5 also has TurboBoost (a feature also found on the desktop i5 and i7 variants).

On the display models presented at the event, the mobile Core i5 chips were doing a great job of playing Call of Duty 4 on their integrated graphics, and the Core i3s were handling World of Warcraft and Blu-ray movies fine. Of course, these aren’t a solid indication of how powerful they are, but with the imminent launch we should be getting benchmarks pretty soon.

Not so long ago we saw a preview of the new hexacore Gulftown processor, which we figured would be released into a new line-up of processors branded as Intel’s Core i9 series, but alas, we were wrong. According to the latest leaked slide from Intel, the 6-core beast will be joining the Core i7 range as the Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition (codenamed Gulftown).

The leaked slide also shows us some more information about the processor: it will be made using the 32nm Westmere process, have 12MB of Intel Smart Cache (L3 Cache) and a TDP of 130W. Of course, as it’s joining the other i7-9xx CPUs it will fit into the LGA 1366 socket and will be compatible with the Intel X58 chipset through a BIOS update. The processing speed is said to be around 3.33GHz on all 6 cores and 12 threads, similar to the preview we saw before.

With this revelation, we are now left wondering what will be put into the (assumed) Core i9 line-up that we have seen on several occasions in various roadmaps. No doubt more details of this chip will follow soon, as the release date is planted as Q1 2010.

It appears as though HP has leaked a huge heap of info about some upcoming products they are releasing, including info about new Intel processors and ATI graphics cards, along with the new HP software suite. All of the leaked info looks current and details the new North American Spring 2010 line-up from HP, which by the looks of it is going to be a good line-up.

In the new HP Pavillion desktop computers it appears as though we will be seeing the latest from Intel’s Clarkdale range. The new Core i5-6xx processors will be included, featuring Intel’s Turbo Boost technology that can speed up certain cores depending on the workload at hand. Core i3-5xx processors are also going to be used, however these will feature a lowered L3 cache and no Turbo Boost technology. It is also speculated that the HP TouchSmart will be getting an upgrade to the Arrandale Core i5 and i7s.

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Intel is already showing off the next generation in multi-core processors while the flagship six-core Core i9 hasn’t reached the shelves yet. This new processor, the experimental 48-core Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), codenamed “Rock Creek”, packs an impressive 1.3 billion transistors onto a single 45nm die, sucks less power than the i9 at 125W and is designed for parallel computation; specifically gesture control.

The bonus to this new chip is that it can run standard x86 applications, an improvement over its 80-core predecessor which couldn’t. The processor has successfully been able to boot both Windows and Linux so far, however as each core is less powerful than a standard Atom processor, there isn’t much you can do as of now. No doubt we’ll here more about massive multi-core CPUs in the future.

In what appears like an update to this roadmap we saw back in July, we are getting more details of upcoming Intel processors. First off are the S, or low powered, versions of some processors, namely the i7-860 and i5-750, which bring the TDP down to 82W and also lower the clock speeds. These processors still carry the same amount of L3 cache and still TurboBoost up to the same clockspeeds as the non-”S” versions.

Then we get some details on the dual-core i5 CPUs that appear to be coming relatively soon. There is an i5-670, clocked at 3.46GHz, an i5-660/661 clocked at 3.33GHz and an i5-650 clocked at 3.2GHz. All these CPUs come with 4MB of L3 cache and have a TDP of 73W. Interestingly, these CPUs are marked with “2-core & GPU” colors and another chart shows them also to have some sort of GPU combined. We’ll have to wait for more details though.

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It’s still a while away until these chips are released, but in an early review the upcoming Intel Core i9 is shown to be truly top-of-the-line. The 6-core processor, codenamed “Gulftown”, is made via the 32nm process and is based off the Intel Westmere architecture (the 32nm Nehalem die shrink). The test unit shipped to PCLab was an unspecified Gulftown model with a clock speed of 3.07GHz and it uses the LGA 1366 socket.

While the Core i9 is similar in performance to other Nehalem CPUs when it is doing single- or dual-core operations such as gaming and Windows startup, however when you crank up the threaded applications such as x264 encoding and ray-tracing the Core i9 shines. It pulled ahead by 46% in the POV-Ray test and by approximately 50% in the MPEG-2 to x264 encoding. The CPU also pulled ahead in the 3DMark Vantage CPU score, but the main score varied only slightly compared to the Core i7

These processors are bound to be expensive when they ship in 2010, but it’s well worth it considering the performance benefits in some applications.

With Pineview still not out the door yet, it is surprising that we are seeing the next-in-line so soon. The next generation CPU in the Intel Atom line, “Cedarview” (going with trees again like Pineview), is expected to be made using the 32nm process and will be shipping out sometime in 2011 after the upcoming Pineview processors have done their time.

Cedarview processors are also rumoured to include a DDR3 controller that supports DDR3-1066 RAM to match the Bloomfield Core i7 processors. However, it appears to only be supporting the RAM in single-channel mode even though the motherboards will contain two RAM slots. An odd choice, but I suppose Intel must have some reasoning behind the decision. We hope we’ll get more info about the Cedar Trail platform in the future.