In the past few years, the Windows-on-Arm (WoA) market has gotten some momentum has with companies trying to develop their WoA PCs, primarily laptops. One example of that is Microsoft. The company has launched a Surface notebook powered by a custom chip from Snapdragon, called Surface Pro X. This device is being powered by the Snapdragon SQ2 processor. However, what seemed to be missing for a while was the lack of support from the Arm itself for this type of market. That is what the company decided to change and make a brand new processor IP dedicated to "on-the-go" devices as they call it, translating into laptops.

The Cortex-A78C is a new design direction which Arm thinks is a good way for laptops, to get some more serious work done. Unlike the regular Cortex-A78 which is a heterogeneous design of big and little cores (Arm's famous big.LITTLE architecture), the new Cortex-A78C revision aims to change that. The "C" version of the processor is actually a homogeneous structure made up of all the big cores. Where you would typically use four big and four little cores for a design, Arm has decided to go all big with this design. For multithreaded purposes, this is the right decision to boost performance. The level three (L3) cache has seen a boost as well, translating to 8 MB of L3$ found on the die. We are eagerly awaiting to see the first designs based on this configuration and see how it performs.

Since AMD announced its next-generation Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors based on Zen 3 core, everyone has been wondering how the new processors perform. For a detailed review and performance numbers, you should wait for official reviews. However, today we have the scores of Ryzen 5 5600X CPU. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker @TUM_APISAK, the Ryzen 5 5600X performance numbers in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark suite have been leaked. When digging under the hood, the new Ryzen CPU contains six of Zen 3 cores with 12 threads, paired with as much as 32 MB of level three (L3) cache. These cores are running at 3.7 GHz base frequency, while the boost speeds are reaching 4.6 GHz.

In the test results, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU has scored Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media scores of 255.22 GOPS and 904.38 Mpix/s. These scores are not much on their own until we compare them to some of the Intel offerings. When compared to the Intel Core i5-10600K CPU, which is likely its targeted competing category, it scores 224.07 GOPS and 662.33 Mpix/s for Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media tests respectively. This puts the AMD CPU ahead 13.9% and 36.5% in these tests, indicating the possibility of Zen 3. Another important note here is the thermal headroom both of these CPUs run. While the Intel model is constrained withing 125 W TDP, the AMD model runs at just 65 W TDP. This could be an indication of the efficiency that these new processors harness.

Intel 10 nm products have seen massive delays over the years, and Intel has built many IPs on the new node, however, not many of them have seen the light of the day due to problems the company has experienced with the manufacturing of the new node. That has caused delays in product shipments in the past, meaning that the time for 10 nm is just ahead. According to the latest DigiTimes Taiwan report, we have information that Intel is going to delay its Ice Lake-SP server processors manufactured on a 10 nm node. And it is going to be a whole quarter late according to the report. Instead of launching in Q4 this year, we can expect to see new processors in Q1 of 2021. It is yet unknown whatever the launch will happen at the beginning of Q1 or its end, however, we will report on it as we hear more information.

Update: DigiTimes has also released another report regarding server shipments. It is reported that server vendors are decelerating the shipments as they are making fewer orders in Q4 to wait for the new Intel CPUs. Judging by this move, the demand for these new processors is going to be rather high and the supply chain is preparing slowly for it.

SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced that Dr. Yunsup Lee, CTO of SiFive, and Dr. Krste Asanovic, Chief Architect of SiFive, will present at the technology industry's premier processor conference, the Linley Fall Virtual Processor Conference. The conference will be held on October 20th - 22nd and 27th - 29th, 2020 and will feature high-quality technical content from leading semiconductor companies worldwide.

"Industry demand for AI performance has skyrocketed over the last few years driven by rapid adoption from the data center to the edge. This year's Linley Fall Processor Conference will feature our biggest program yet and will introduce a host of new technology disclosures and product announcements of innovative processor architectures and IP technologies," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst and conference chairperson. "In spite of the challenges posed by the pandemic, development of these technologies continues to accelerate and we're excited to be sharing these presentations with a global audience via our live-streamed format."

There is expected to be more than 79 zettabytes of IoT data in 2025, but the real value of this data is found in the insights it generates. The closer to the data source we can produce these insights the better, because of the improved security, latency and energy efficiency enabled. Computational storage is emerging as a critical piece of the data storage puzzle because it puts processing power directly on the storage device, giving companies secure, quick and easy access to vital information.

Our expertise and legacy in storage puts Arm in a strong position to address the changing needs of this market - with around 85% of hard disk drive controllers and solid-state drive controllers based on Arm, we are already a trusted partner for billions of storage devices. Today, we're announcing Arm Cortex-R82, our first 64-bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor designed to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation enterprise and computational storage solutions.

IBM today revealed the next generation of its IBM POWER central processing unit (CPU) family: IBM POWER10. Designed to offer a platform to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing, the IBM POWER10 processor uses a design focused on energy efficiency and performance in a 7 nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM's roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021. Some of the new processor innovations include:

In a sign of AMD's answer to Intel Hybrid tech being quite far away from implementation in a product, the company filed patents to a rival/similar technology only as recently as June 30, 2020, with the patent application being dug up by Underfox. The patent calls for a multi-core processor topology with two kinds of CPU cores - a "high-feature" core (big core), and a "low-feature" one (small core).

Here's where AMD's design is different: it calls for closely integrated groups of the two kinds of cores (one big core, and one small core), called "Processor Clusters." The dedicated L1 caches of the big and small cores in each group shadow data, while an L2 cache is shared between the two cores. Several such big+small Processor Clusters sit across a die, sharing the chip's last-level cache (L3 cache). This is unlike Intel's Hybrid design, where the big and small cores are spread apart on the die, with little cache coherency (Lakefield die-shot by le Comptoir du Hardware below). The patent also details the workflow of how the processor reconciles the ISA differences between the two core types.

Intel became the official PC hardware partner for the PC version of Marvel's Avengers last year and it seems like Intel is looking to take advantage of that with new limited edition "KA" Avengers series processors. Trusted leaked @momomo_us recently discovered listings for several of these Intel "KA" series processors on a Vietnamese retailer. It appears Intel is preparing to release 4 processors across their i5, i7, and i9 lineups these being the i5-10600KA, i7-10700KA, i9-10850KA and i9-10900KA. These processors should be identical to their K series counterparts apart from the commemorative packaging and the possible inclusion of Marvel's Avengers game codes. These processors will likely see a global release in the coming weeks/months in preparation for the launch of Marvel's Avengers on September 4th.

ASUS today launched VivoBook Flip 14 (TM420), a boldly styled convertible touchscreen laptop with a 360° hinge that allows it to be used in laptop, stand, tent and tablet modes - or anything in between. It also supports the ASUS Pen active stylus for natural writing and response feel, along with accurate input.

Everything's a breeze with VivoBook Flip 14, thanks to its powerful AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Mobile Processor with 8 GB memory and up to 512 GB PCIe SSD. It's also full of personality, sporting a sleek Bespoke Black finish and a color-blocked Enter key with yellow edges and text. The compact VivoBook Flip 14 is the perfect on-the-go laptop for productivity or entertainment anywhere.

AMD has quietly added two new mobile processors to its lineup, the AMD 3015e and AMD 3020e are 6 W dual-core Zen chips with Vega 3 graphics. The AMD 3015e features dual 14 nm Zen cores with multi-threading running at a base frequency of 1200 MHz with a turbo frequency of 2300 MHz. The onboard Vega 3 GPU runs at 600 MHz and the chip can support 1600 MHz DDR4 memory. The AMD 3020e keeps the same dual 14 nm Zen cores but loses multi-threading, the base clock remains the same at 1200 MHz but the turbo frequency gets a bump to 2600 MHz. The Vega 3 GPU also gets a boost to 1000 MHz along with the addition of 2400 MHz DDR4 memory support.

Lenovo has recently unveiled two new laptops utilizing the AMD 3015e, the Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen and 300e 2nd Gen. The Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen features 4 GB DDR4 memory, 64 GB eMMC, Wi-Fi 6, 11.6" 720p screen, and runs Windows 10. The Lenovo 300e 2nd Gen has a similar build with the addition of a 360° hinge, pen support, and optional 128 GB SSD. The new AMD 3015e processor found in the laptops should perform ~20% faster than the Intel Celeron N4120. The Lenovo 100e 2nd Gen and 300e 2nd Gen will be available in September for 219 USD and 299 USD respectively.

Tachyum Inc. announced that its Prodigy Universal Processor has successfully completed software emulation testing across x86, ARM and RISC-V binary environments. This important milestone demonstrates that Prodigy will enable customers to run their legacy applications transparently at launch with better performance than any contemporary or future ARM or RISC-V processors. Coupled with hyperscale data center workhorse programs such as Hadoop, Apache and more, which Tachyum is recompiling to Prodigy native code, this capability will ensure that Prodigy customers can run a broad spectrum of applications, right out of the box. Tachyum customers consistently indicate that they would run 100% native applications within 9-18 months of transitioning to the Tachyum platform to exceed performance of the fastest Xeon processor. The emulation is to smoothly transition to native software for Tachyum Prodigy.

A Linux kernel patch contributed and signed off by Intel confirms that its upcoming Core "Alder Lake" processor will feature a hybrid core topology, much like Core Hybrid "Lakefield." The patch references "Lakefield" and "Alder Lake" under "Hybrid Core/Atom Processors." The patch possibly gives the Linux kernel awareness of the hybrid core topology, so it can schedule its work between the two types of cores on the silicon accordingly, and avoid rotating between the two core groups. Under the Android project, Linux has been aware of a similar tech from Arm since 2013.

Analogous with Arm big.LITTLE, the Intel Hybrid Core technology involves two kinds of CPU cores on a processor die, the first kind being "high performance," and the second being "low power." On "Lakefield," Intel deployed one "Sunny Cove" high performance core, and four "Tremont" low power cores. The low power cores keep the machine ticking through the vast majority of time when processing workloads requiring the high performance cores aren't present. With "Alder Lake," Intel is expected to scale up this concept, with the silicon rumored to feature eight "Golden Cove" high performance cores, and eight "Gracemont" low power ones. The chip is also expected to feature a Gen12 Xe iGPU.

ECS today rolled out the SF110 Q470 line of mini-PC barebones designed for 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S" desktop processors. The SF110 Q470 comes in two variants based maximum processor TDP supported - a 35-Watt model, and a 65-Watt model. The former includes a 90 W power brick, while the latter comes with a 120 W power brick and a meatier CPU cooling solution inside. Both barebones are based in the Intel Q470 chipset.

Inside, you'll get two DDR4 SODIMM slots supporting up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2933 memory, an M.2-2280 slot with both PCI-Express 3.0 x4 and SATA 6 Gbps wiring, and a 2.5-inch drive bay with a SATA 6 Gbps backplane. USB connectivity includes two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 2 ports on the front panel, one 10 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 2 type-C port, and four 5 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 1 type-A ports on the rear panel. Networking includes a 1 GbE connection driven by an Intel i219-V controller, and 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.2 WLAN card (you can opt for a newer AX201 card with 802.11ax + Bluetooth 5). Both the 35 W and 65 W variants physically measure 205 mm x 176 mm x 33 mm (HxDxW). Display outputs include an HDMI 2.0, two DisplayPorts, and a D-Sub. A COM port covers legacy connectivity. The company didn't reveal pricing.

Huawei has been readying the entire new breed of desktop PCs with a custom motherboard, custom processor, and even a custom operating system. Being that Huawei plans to supply Chinese government institutions with these PCs, it is logical to break away from US-made technology due to security reasons. And now, thanks to the YouTube channel called "二斤自制" we have the first look at the new PC system. Powered by Huawei D920S10 desktop motherboard equipped with Kunpeng 920 7 nm Arm v8 processor with 8 cores, the PC was running the 64-bit UOS operating system, which is a Chinese modification of Linux. In the test, the PC was assembled by a third-party provider and it featured 16 GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 memory and 256 GB SSD.

The YouTube channel put it to test and in the Blender BMW render test, it has finished in 11 minutes and 47 seconds, which is quite slow. The system reportedly managed to stream 4K content well but has struggled with local playback thanks to poor encoding. Being that it runs a custom OS with a custom processor, app selection is quite narrow. The app store for the PC is accessible only if you pay an extra 800 Yuan (~$115), while the mentioned system will set you back 7,500 Yuan (~$1,060). At the heart of this system is eight-core, eight threaded Kunpeng 920 2249K processor. It features a clock speed of 2.6 GHz, has 128K of L1 cache (64K instruction cache and 64K data cache), 512K of L2, and 32 MB of L3 cache.

Ampere today announced further roadmap details of its Ampere Altra server processor family. In March the company announced Ampere Altra, the world's first cloud native processor, featuring 80 cores. Today, Ampere unveiled preliminary details of the expansion of the cloud-native processor family by adding Ampere Altra Max, which has 128 cores, providing customers with another cloud-optimized processor to maximize overall performance and cores-per-rack density.

Ampere Altra Max is ideal for applications that take advantage of scale-out and elastic cloud architectures. Compatible with the 80-core Ampere Altra and also supporting 2-socket platforms, Ampere Altra Max offers the industry's highest socket-level performance and I/O scalability. It will be sampling in the fourth quarter and additional details will be provided later this year.

Today, Intel launched Intel Core processors with Intel Hybrid Technology, code-named "Lakefield." Leveraging Intel's Foveros 3D packaging technology and featuring a hybrid CPU architecture for power and performance scalability, Lakefield processors are the smallest to deliver Intel Core performance and full Windows compatibility across productivity and content creation experiences for ultra-light and innovative form factors.

"Intel Core processors with Intel Hybrid Technology are the touchstone of Intel's vision for advancing the PC industry by taking an experience-based approach to designing silicon with a unique combination of architectures and IPs. Combined with Intel's deepened co-engineering with our partners, these processors unlock the potential for innovative device categories of the future," said Chris Walker, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Mobile Client Platforms.

Apple is planning to launch its own high-performance processors designed for Macs at the 2020 WWDC, held in the week of 22 June, 2020. This would be the the first step among many toward the replacement of Intel processors and the x86 machine architecture from the Apple Mac ecosystem, in the same fashion as the company replaced PowerPC with x86 last decade. Apple has codenamed the process of graduating to the new machine architecture "Kalamata," and besides detailing the new processor and its architecture, the company could announce a large-scale developer support initiative to help Mac software vendors to transition to the new architecture in time for the first Macs with the new processors to roll out in 2021.

A Bloomberg report on the new processors states that the chips will be based on the "same technology" as the company's A-series SoCs for iOS devices, meaning that Apple will leverage the Arm machine architecture, and has probably developed a high performance CPU core that can match Intel's x64 cores in IPC and efficiency. Macs based on the new processors, will however run MacOS and not iOS, which means much of the clean-break transition woes between PPC and x86 Macs are bound to return, but probably better managed by software vendors. It also remains to be seen how Apple handles graphics. The company could scale up the Metal-optimized iGPU found in its A-series SoCs on its new Mac processor, while also giving them the platform I/O capability to support discrete graphics from companies such as AMD.

Intel is preparing to launch its next-generation Tiger Lake lineup of processors for the middle of 2020. The processors are based on the new "Willow Cove" CPU core, which supposedly brings even more IPC gains compared to previous "Golden Cove" CPU cores found in Ice Lake processors. The Tiger Lake lineup will use Intel's advanced 10 nm+ manufacturing process. This alone should bring some gains in frequency compared to the 10 nm Ice Lake processor generation, which was spotting a maximum of 4.1 GHz boost frequency on 28 W TDP model named Core i7-1068NG7. This processor is labeled as the highest-performing Ice Lake parts available today and the best 10 nm products available so far from Intel.

Thanks to the popular hardware leaker Rogame, we have evidence that the gains from 10 nm+ manufacturing process are real and that Tiger Lake will show us an amazing boost frequency of 5 GHz. In the benchmark, an unknown OEM laptop was spotted running the benchmark with a Tiger Lake CPU. This CPU is a 4 core, 8 threaded model with a base frequency of 2.3 GHz and a surprising boost frequency of 5 GHz. This information should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt until we get more information about the Tiger Lake lineup and their specifications.

TSMC is working hard to bring a new 5 nm (N5 and N5+) despite all the hiccups the company may have had due to the COVID-19 pandemic happening. However, it seems like nothing can stop TSMC, and plenty of companies have already reserved some capacity for their chips. With mass production supposed to start in Q3 of this year, 5 nm node should become one of the major nodes over time for TSMC, with predictions that it will account for 10% of all capacity for 2020. Thanks to the report of ChinaTimes, we have a list of new clients for the TSMC 5 nm node, with some very interesting names like Intel appearing on the list.

Apple and Huawei/HiSilicon will be the biggest customers for the node this year with A14 and Kirin 1000 chips being made for N5 node, with Apple ordering the A15 chips and Huawei readying the Kirin 1100 5G chip for the next generation N5+. From there, AMD will join the 5 nm party for Zen 4 processors and RDNA 3 graphics cards. NVIDIA has also reserved some capacity for its Hopper architecture, which is expected to be a consumer-oriented option, unlike Ampere. And perhaps the most interesting entry to the list is Intel Xe graphics cards. The list shows that Intel might use the N5 process form TSMC so it can ensure the best possible performance for its future cards, in case it has some issues manufacturing its own nodes, just like it did with 10 nm.

Silicon Valley startup Tachyum, founded in 2016, is ready with its crowning product, the Tachyum Prodigy. The startup recently received an investment from the Slovak government in hopes of job-creation in the country. The Prodigy is what its makers call "a universal processor," which "outperforms the fastest Xeon at 10X lower power." The company won't mention what machine architecture it uses (whether it's Arm or MIPS, or its own architecture). Its data-sheet is otherwise full of specs that scream at you.

To begin with, its top trim, the Prodigy T16128, packs 128 cores on a single package, complete with 64-bit address space, 512-bit vector extensions, matrix multiplication fixed-function hardware that accelerate AI/ML, and 4 IPC at up to 4.00 GHz core clock. Tachyum began the processor's software-side support, with an FPGA emulator in December 2019 (so you can emulate the processor on an FPGA and begin developing for it), C/C++ and Fortran compilers; debuggers and profilers, tensorflow compilers, and a Linux distribution that's optimized it. The I/O capabilities of this chip are something else.

Today, AMD announced that 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors are powering the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute E3 platform, bringing a new level of high-performance computing to Oracle Cloud. Using the AMD EPYC 7742 processor, the Oracle Cloud "E3 standard" and the bare metal compute instances are available today and leverage key features of the Gen AMD EPYC processors including class-leading memory bandwidth and the highest core count for an x86 data center processor. These features enable the Oracle Cloud E3 platform to be well suited for both general purpose and high bandwidth workloads such as big data analytics, memory intense workloads and Oracle business applications.

SiPearl, the company that is designing the high-performance, low-power microprocessor for the European exascale supercomputer, has signed a major technological licensing agreement with Arm, the global semiconductor IP provider. The agreement will enable SiPearl to benefit from the high-performance, secure, and scalable next-generation Arm Neoverse platform, codenamed ''Zeusʺ, as well as leverage the robust software and hardware Arm ecosystem.

Taking advantage of the Arm "Zeus" platform, including Arm's POP IP, on advanced FinFET technologyenables SiPearl to accelerate its design and ensure outstanding reliability for a very high-end offering,in terms of both computing power and energy efficiency, and be ready to launch its first generation of microprocessors in 2022.

MATLAB received an update that no longer cripples users of AMD processors. Back in November 2019, there was quite some controversy when it emerged that MATLAB, a popular computing platform popular with engineering firms, universities, and research institutes, wasn't working optimally with AMD processors. Specifically, the suite's Intel MKL (math kernel library) component was designed such that if it didn't recognize the "GenuineIntel" CPUID string, it would disable fast AVX2 code-paths and fall back to SSE. This would inflict anywhere between 20-300 percent performance penalties on "AuthenticAMD" processors.

Reddit user Nedflanders1976 developed a tweak back in November, which spoofs MKL into thinking AMD processors are "GenuineIntel," enabling it to leverage modern instruction sets such as SSE4, AVX, and AVX2. AMD processors have been supporting SSE4 and AVX since its 2011 FX-series, and AVX2 since 2017 Ryzen. With the latest R2020a version, MATLAB automatically enables AVX2 execution on AMD processors that support the instruction set. A quick set of tests by ExtremeTech confirms that the update does indeed leverage the faster code-path by default, with Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X gaining over 200% performance and beating the Core i9-10980XE (something that needed the Nedflanders1976 tweak earlier).

Ampere Computing, a startup focusing on making HPC and processors from cloud applications based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture, today announced the release of a first 80 core "cloud-native" processor based on the Arm ISA. The new Ampere Altra CPU is the company's first 80 core CPU meant for hyper scalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Being built on TSMC's 7 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, the Altra is a CPU that is utilizing a monolithic die to achieve maximum performance. Using Arm's v8.2+ instruction set, the CPU is using the Neoverse N1 platform as its core, to be ready for any data center workload needed. It also borrows a few security features from v8.3 and v8.5, namely the hardware mitigations of speculative attacks.

When it comes to the core itself, the CPU is running at 3.0 GHz frequency and has some very interesting specifications. The design of the core is such that it is 4-wide superscalar Out of Order Execution (OoOE), which Ampere refers to as "aggressive" meaning that there is a lot of data throughput going on. The cache levels are structured in a way that there is 64 KB of L1D and L1I cache per core, along with 1 MB of L2 cache per core as well. For system-level cache, there is 32 MB of L3 available to the SoC. All of the caches have Error-correcting code (ECC) built-in, giving the CPU a much-needed feature. There are two 128-bit wide Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) units, which are there to do parallel processing if needed. There is no mention if they implement Arm's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) or not.

Ahead of their rumored April 2020 availability product codes of Intel's upcoming 10th generation Core "Comet Lake-S" desktop processors leaked to the web, courtesy momomo_us. The lineup includes 22 individual SKUs, although it's unknown if all of these will be available in April. There are four 10-core/20-thread SKUs: the i9-10900K, the i9-10900KF, the i9-10900, and the i9-10900F. The "K" extension denotes unlocked multiplier, while the "F" extension indicates lack of integrated graphics. "KF" indicates a SKU that's both unlocked and lacking an iGPU. Similarly, there are four 8-core/16-thread Core i7 SKUs, the i7-10700K, the i7-10700KF, the i7-10700, and the i7-10700F.

The 6-core/12-thread Core i5 family has several SKUs besides the range-topping i5-10600K and its siblings, i5-10600KF and i5-10600. These include the i5-10500, i5-10400, and i5-10400F. The quad-core Core i3 lineup includes the i3-10320, i3-10300, and i3-10100. The former two have 8 MB L3 cache, while the i3-10100 has 6 MB. Among the entry-level Pentium SKUs are the G6600, G6500, G6400, G5920, and G5900.