Intel

Intel Q4 2019 results

  Intel beat Wall Street’s expectations again with its fourth-quarter financial performance sending the company’s stock up to an all-time high Friday after the chipmaker reported late-Thursday afternoon terrific results for the last quarter in 2019. Twenty billion dollars. Think about that for a moment. If every human, man, woman, child or politician, oh wait, I did say, human, if … Read more

Ambarella expands its platform to meet Intel’s challenge

CES, the land of dreams, hopes, and big promises. Ambarella was founded in 2004 on the basis of a massive semi-smart image sensor with video-compression. Four years later, the company introduced its flagship product, the H2 with an image processing pipeline that included a 10-bit HDR video processing and imaging that could handle challenging low-light conditions.  In 2011, the company … Read more

Intel announces discrete GPU DG1 at CES

Intel seldom disappoints at CES, and this year they clearly had more to tell than the time allotted to do it. From autonomous cars, supercomputers to micro IoT thingies. Vice President Gregory Bryant showed the tiny but powerful 10 nm, Tiger Lake processor based on the Willow Cove architecture and said it is in full production. Gregory Bryant holding a … Read more

Intel’s embedded multi-die interconnect bridge

Most chips in today's smartphones, computers, and servers are comprised of multiple smaller chips invisibly sealed inside one rectangular package. How those multiple chips—often including CPU, graphics, memory, IO, and more—communicate has been a challenge for circuit, chip, and packaging designers? Intel thinks they’ve got the answer with their EMIB (embedded multi-die interconnect bridge) which is a complex multi-layered sliver … Read more

A rose by any other name is still a PC

  It seems some PC suppliers are (just now?) discovering that people buy PCs and use them for different applications in addition to what the PC supplier promotes them for or how they are branded. Imagine! Some PC suppliers are betting the CAD market may become a new growth driver for the PC market. As a result, several tier-one suppliers have prepared … Read more

Famous Graphics chips: Intel 740

Intel has tried several times to get into the stand-alone graphics chip market. Its first attempt in 1982 was the cross-licensing of the NEC 7220,  which became the Intel 82720. Then in 1983, Intel made the iSBX 275 Multibus-based add-in graphics board (AIB) with the chip.  Its second attempt was in 1988 when it released the 82786, which it billed as … Read more

Intel GPU turned on, 7nm on track

Everybody dance now: the Intel machine seems back on track Intel released their third-quarter results (see TechWatch, Intel Q3 2019 results) and reported record results. In the analyst call, Intel’s CEO Bob Swan said the company is on target to return to a schedule of major manufacturing upgrades every 2 to 2.5 years. In addition, Swan said, “We are on … Read more

And then there were three—nanometers from TSMC

While Intel struggles to get the yield on 10 nm up to acceptable levels, TSMC, which is already shipping 7-nm parts to AMD, Qualcomm, and others, has built a 5-nm fab and is now getting a site ready for a 3-nm fab. Europeans consider hair with a diameter of 0.04 to 0.06 mm as thin, hair with a diameter between 0.06 and 0.08 mm … Read more

Intel’s new 14-nm Xeon W 2200 processors

  Intel once envisioned a 2018 where 10-nm processors were shipping out of its fabs, followed by a subsequent introduction of a major new core microarchitecture. However, the company’s well-chronicled delays with 10-nm meant another “optimization” generation extending Skylake one more time on 14++ was in order to fill the gap. For the Core brand processors serving high-performance PC and Entry … Read more