Displaying items by tag: Processors

AMD has been something of an unusual company ever since they first decided to dive into the x86 market with their purchase of NexGen. The would-be CPU maker had an interesting knack of building CPUs that performed well, but were always just a pace behind their rivals. That was the case until AMD pulled off a minor miracle in the form of the Athlon and Athlon64 CPUs. AMD seemed to have stolen the crown from Intel and looked likely to keep it for a long time.

After the 8-core processor codenamed MT6595, MediaTek company also announced the MT6732, its first 64-bit SoC. The chip has four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz and the Mali T760 GPU with support for OpenGL 3.0 and OpenCL 1.2.

According to the site VR-Zone, the most powerful version of the new generation of Intel processors, code-named Broadwell, will have 18 cores. Apparently, Intel has no plans to accelerate the core, but will simply put more of them in a single processor.

In a paper titled “Graphene-Based Non-Boolean Logic Circuits” a group of researchers from University of California Riverside explain how certain limitations with graphene could be overcome in the near future. Graphene, for those of you that might not be familiar, is one potential replacement material for processors. This is not just CPUs, but could include a large array of electronic components. However, there has been a problem with graphene that no one has been able to completely overcome. Due to some of the physical and electrical properties of graphene (one atom thick, high electron mobility) graphene has been seen as a solid replacement for the material used to build integrated circuits. However, those same properties make it very inefficient for building traditional transistors.

Morris Chang, founder and director of TSMC published some of the company's plans for the near and distant future. The company has moved the start of production of 16 nanometer chips in SONFET technology to the end of this year, which is slightly earlier than planned.

The Irish agency for construction planning An Bord Pleanala approved Intel’s plans to build a new factory for the production of processors. It is a facility in which they should produce processors built on the 14 nanometer process, and should be located in the Intel campus in Leixlip County Kildare.

Intel plans to use 14-nanometer technology in conjunction with the next generation of processors codenamed Broadwell, heirs of the 22-nanometer Haswell which is expected next year. Intel's chief for technology development, Justin Rattner, said that the development of new production technology is progressing according to the plan and that Intel is expected to use this within one to two years. He emphasized that Intel's aggressive development of new production technologies will allow an extension of Moore’s law for the next 10 years. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors and the density of transistors on chips doubles every two years.