With our review done I did the one thing I've been keeping myself from doing for the past week: I pulled the heatsink off my Kabini review notebook and grabbed a shot of the SoC. I guess this is technically the world's first consumer quad-core x86 SoC. Haswell will come in a single-chip solution as well but only as a dual-core part. Kabini needs no companion platform/IO controller chip, everything is integrated on this single piece of silicon. There are also two GCN compute units in there. I'm sure AMD will have more accurate numbers shortly, but using my completely unimpressive calipers I measured the die at 10.35mm x 10.35mm (107mm^2). I figure the actual number will be somewhere in the range of 104 - 112mm^2...
The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
Last week I mentioned that I had recently spent some time with AMD down in Austin, TX, benchmarking its upcoming Brazos platform. The Brazos platform is composed of an...
222 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/16/2010
VIA's Dual Core Nano & VN1000 Chipset Previewed
I haven’t had an official product briefing with VIA in years. The last time I met with a representative from the company was two years ago outside of IDF...
54 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/15/2010
Previewing AMD's Brazos, Part 1: More Details on Zacate/Ontario and Fusion
I hate to keep things from you all, but last week I was diligently working in a room at AMD’s new campus in Austin, Texas. You see, AMD wanted...
115 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2010
AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 Series & Llano “Fusion” APU: A Story in Pictures
We happen to have the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 in-house for testing at the moment. We wanted to play Show & Tell, but the nice...
54 by Ryan Smith on 10/19/2010
AMD's Fall Refresh: New Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs Balance Price and Performance
I don’t know the last time I was this excited about AMD’s roadmap. Zacate and Ontario are due out in a quarter, and both promise to bring competition to...
99 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/21/2010
Context-aware Computing, Intel Paints the Future of Devices
Traditionally a large focus of IDF is looking at future computing trends. For the longest time the name of the game was convergence. The shift to mobility highlighted many...
23 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/15/2010
AMD's Zacate APU Performance Update
It’s 12:43AM and I just got back into my hotel room. I spent the past few hours in AMD’s suite a block from IDF trying to get to the...
104 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/15/2010
Intel announces Tunnel Creek - Atom E600 System on Chip
At the end of this morning's keynote at IDF 2010 intel announced the Atom Processor E600 series. It's a Moorestown-like SoC designed for embedded applications. It's pretty obvious what the...
26 by Brian Klug on 9/14/2010
Intel Announces CE4200 SoC for Smart TVs
Intel just announced its CE4200 (Groveland) SoC, the successor to the CE4100 used in devices like the Boxee box. The CE4200 is based on Intel's 45nm Atom architecture and features...
4 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/14/2010
Intel's Sandy Bridge Architecture Exposed
A few weeks ago we previewed the performance of Intel’s next-generation microprocessor architecture, codenamed Sandy Bridge. We came away impressed with our early look at performance but honestly had...
62 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/14/2010
AMD Benchmarks Zacate APU
Update: We've spent more time with Zacate and have some more accurate performance comparisons here. It's tradition for AMD to have an off-site meeting place during IDF week and this...
66 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2010
Intel Demos Sandy Bridge, Shows off Video Transcode Engine
Today marks the first day of our IDF 2010 coverage and we just left Dadi Perlmutter's keynote. Keeping up with tradition, Dadi's keynote focused on two of Intel's upcoming...
18 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/13/2010
AMD Reveals Competitive Fusion APU TDPs: 9W for netbooks, 18W for notebooks
After the ATI acquisition AMD announced it would be creating a new category of microprocessors that featured integrated ATI GPUs. AMD called these hybrid CPU/GPUs Accelerated Processing Units (APUs...
30 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/7/2010Sandy Bridge Graphics Update
Last week we published our preview of Intel's 2011 Core microarchitecture update, codenamed Sandy Bridge. In the preview we presented a conservative estimate of what shipping Sandy Bridge performance...
43 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/1/2010
AnandTech 2010 Server Upgrade: The CPUs
Years ago I used to publish a series of articles called Behind AnandTech. We'd occasionally do a massive server upgrade and I'd publish detailed specs, shots and info about...
67 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/30/2010
Intel's Core 2011 Mobile Roadmap Revealed: Sandy Bridge Part II
Late last week we pulled back the covers on Intel's next-generation Core architecture update: Sandy Bridge. Due out in Q1 2011, we learned a lot about Sandy Bridge's performance...
55 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/30/2010
Farewell to ATI, AMD to Retire the ATI Brand Later this Year
Four years ago AMD did the unthinkable: it announced the 5.4 billion dollar acquisition of ATI in a combination of cash and stock. What followed was a handful of...
84 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/30/2010
The Sandy Bridge Preview
Every two years Intel is committed to introducing a new microprocessor architecture. It's a part of the whole tick-tock strategy that Intel hatched back in 2005 - 2006. Thus...
202 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/27/2010AMD Bobcat & Bulldozer Hot Chips Presentations Online
Yesterday we published our coverage of AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer architecture disclosures. If you haven't had a chance to read the piece or haven't been following AMD for the...
11 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/25/2010
AMD Discloses Bobcat & Bulldozer Architectures at Hot Chips 2010
We've been waiting years for AMD to deliver another knockout microprocessor architecture rather than continue to play the value game. While we've been waiting for its next generation Bobcat...
81 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/24/2010