Displaying items by tag: Intel

As Intel moves more and more core components to their CPU we are seeing an interesting shift in motherboard design. The manufacturers are all realizing that the performance difference between them are narrowing. The days of seeing a massive difference in benchmark scores are almost gone. However, instead of just pushing out a bunch of cookie cutter boards some motherboard makers are looking for new ways to differentiate their boards. Asus is one of these makers and we will be taking a look at a board that has more than a few departures from the normal motherboard design philosophy. This is the Asus Z97-A. So without too much more delay, let’s dive in and see what Asus has given us.

The small form factor crowd has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. Every day on Facebook or some other spot on the internet you will see some pretty impressive builds with tiny motherboards stuffed in them. However, one of the things that has always seemed to be missing I full chipset support. Most of the time you can find mini-ITX boards running business or consumer chipsets. Fortunately, this trend has been changing and we are seeing more powerful boards hitting the market. We have one of these newer boards in the lab in the form of the Asus Z97I Plus. This Z97 chipset based board is intended to put all the power and features of larger boards into a tiny package. Let’s see how well Asus does at reaching this goal.

Intel has been working on making the “PC” a standalone unit for a very long time. The started the process by developing he standard to put the audio card on the motherboard and have been pushing to include more and more info either the CPU itself or mount it on the motherboard. This has not been a surprising move simply because the world keeps looking to smaller and smaller devices to perform its computing. However, Intel wants to take things one step further by getting rid of all of the cables that are needed to run a PC.

At AMD’s press conference during Computex 2014 they showed off their new Kaveri mobile CPUs and made some pretty bold claims. The first of which was that these new APUs were ready and able to be compared directly to Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs and in many cases beat them in terms of performance. The Kaveri line up is not exactly new as the desktop flavors were launched last year, however AMD is saying that the new mobile versions are something very special.

In other news about Intel we are now hearing that Devil’s Canyon, Intel’s Haswell refresh, will come clocked at 4GHz stock with turbo speeds of up to 4.4GHz. This stock speed is unheard of from Intel who has stayed away from pushing the stock speeds of their enthusiast CPUs. This step up is certainly going to be welcomed by the enthusiast and overclocking community who have been salivating over the new Z97 chipset and the feature packed motherboards that have been trickling out.

Today Intel showed off the world first 14nm CPU in the form of the Core M processor. This new chip is geared to be squeezed into ultrabooks, tablets and convertables. The CPU was shown in Asus’ new Transformer T300 Chi. According to Intel this new CPU range will be the most energy efficient they have ever built. We do not have any additional information on the Core M at this time, but we do know it is the first of the Broadwell CPUs and it is also more than likely one of their BGA style CPUs which is hard mounted to the motherboard.

Intel wants to accelerate the development of new autonomous vehicles , and the company also announced the first products which will help them achieve that goal. New line of In-Vehicle Solutions products was launched, and Intel announced additional investments and research aimed at fostering the development of the car towards better informing , assisting and taking control of the vehicle.

Intel announced that they have taken over a start-up company Basis Science from San Francisco. It is a company that specializes in the development and production of biometric sensors, and theri most device is Basis band, smart fitness bracelet that tracks a user's health - heart rate, calorie consumption, and stuff like that.

Intel is expanding its range of SoC solutions that are first used in the preparation of various supporting gadgets like smart watches, bracelets, etc. The newest members of the Quark family are Quark X1010 and Quark X1020D SoCs.

This series of SSDs represents Intel's answer to Samsung and OCZ (Toshiba) and their EVO 840 and Vector model. Intel claims that both drives come with significantly improved speed controller (up to 50%) and NAND bus which achieves 20% higher speed.