Computer Technology News & Tips

For the third time in 2010, AMD is adding more speed to its processor lineup. But this time, both the Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs are being included. We spill the beans about the new dual-, triple-, quad-, and hexa-core chips in today’s article.

It’s no secret that we’re on the verge of seeing a whole new generation of processors from the AMD/Intel duopoly. Bobcat, Bulldozer, and Sandy Bridge are some of the processor architectures the chip giants will introduce between now and the second half of 2011. From what we’ve already seen and heard, these new designs are going to be real game-changers.

However, months are like years when it comes to technology, and product refreshes are always welcome when they bring more performance to the table. We’ve already seen mobile-based demos of AMD’s upcoming technology, but there has been little indication of how the company’s new desktop parts will perform. Until that happens, we’re left to play with existing Phenom II and Athlon II models. Similarly, though Intel talked a big game at IDF, its Gulftown-, Lynnfield-, and Clarkdale-based processors remain the only viable competition for anything AMD launches today. We’ll have to wait for late 2010 to get a more concrete indication of how Sandy Bridge fits into the market.

AMD has delivered speed bumps across the Athlon II line twice this year, and the company is doing it one more time with six new processors released today. But it’s not just the Athlon II lineup that AMD is updating this time. We’re getting the first new quad-core Phenom II in just over a year, and we even have our hands on a fresh Phenom II X6.

Before we get into the benchmarks of these speed-bumped chips, let’s dig a little deeper into their technical specifications.

Source: Tomshardware.com

With the International Solid-State Circuits Conference less than a week away, Intel has released additional details on its hexa-core desktop, next generation mobile and dual-core Westmere processors. Much of the dual-core data was revealed last month when the CPU manufacturer launched Clarkdale (our review is here if you want additional information on the CPU and its integrated graphics core). When Intel set its internal goals for what its calling Westmere 6C, the company aimed to boost both core and cache count by 50 percent without increasing the processor’s thermal envelope. Towards this end, the new Westmere chips will incorporate additional technologies to reduce the CPU’s power consumption at idle.

Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown) is a native six-core chip as shown above. Intel has crammed 1.17 billion transistors into a die that’s approximately 240mm sq. The new chip carries 12MB up L3 (up from Nehalem’s 8MB) and a TDP of 130W at 3.33GHz. In addition to the addition of hardware AES encryption instruction decode support, Intel has made a number of improvements to Gulftown’s power consumption. Up until now, Intel’s efforts to reduce CPU power consumption focused on what it calls the “Core”; the “Uncore” hardware couldn’t be powered down or controlled to the same degree. Starting with Westmere, both sections of the CPU can be fine-tuned to minimize power consumption without adversely affecting processor performance. As part of its bid to increase CPU complexity and performance without driving up system-level power consumption, Westmere will also support low-voltage DDR3, which uses an operating voltage of 1.35v (down from 1.5v standard). According to Intel, using the lower voltage memory reduces memory power consumption by about 20 percent overall.

Source: Hothardware.com