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Just days ago, Nvidia showed the world how valuable the AI market is to silicon and solution providers by announcing a new set of hardware and services during its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. While that news was focused

Just days ago, Nvidia showed the world how valuable the AI market is to silicon and solution providers by announcing a new set of hardware and services during its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. While that news was focused on data center AI compute in the form of multi-million dollar servers powered by some of the largest processors and chips ever produced, the world of client AI, where AI runs on individual laptops and PCs, presents an equally appealing, and profitable, arena for technology giants to take advantage of.

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Intel SSD 660p: Cost Benefit Analysis of QLC Flash

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Intel SSD 660p: Cost Benefit Analysis of QLC Flash

Solid State Drives offer responsiveness and throughput unmatched by rotating media, but the persistent challenge has remained bringing the costs down far enough to spur greater adoption. SSDs came into the mainstream over a decade ago, and since then we have witnessed gradual increases in density in the form of process shrinks, a shift to multi-layer 3D cell structures, and by increasing the number of bits stored per flash memory cell. With those advances come greater capacity products at reduced cost. While this progression is typically slow going, every once in a while a company comes along and shakes things up with a step change in either performance, capacity, or cost. The Intel® SSD 660p aims to take a shot at the latter while maintaining class-leading performance.

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Intel confirms first graphics chips will land in 2020

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Intel confirms first graphics chips will land in 2020

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed during an analyst event last week that it will have its first discrete graphics chips available in 2020. This will mark the beginning of the chip giant’s journey towards a portfolio of high-performance graphics products for various markets including gaming, data center, and AI.

Some previous rumors posited that a launch at CES 2019 this coming January might be where Intel makes its graphics reveal, but that timeline was never adopted by Intel. It would have been drastically overaggressive and in no way reasonable with the development process of a new silicon design.

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Intel fights back against AMD, Qualcomm

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Over the last year and half, Intel has been under siege from various competitors in the consumer PC product segments. Once dominant and seemingly untouchable, Intel must now deal with an AMD that started its resurgence in the processor market in early 2017 and has been gaining market share and significant momentum amongst buyers, media, and analysts that follow these fields.

Qualcomm is also guilty of taking a poke at Intel with its low power Snapdragon processors working their way into new Windows 10 notebooks that focus on portability, integrated cellular connectivity, and extreme battery life.

During the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan this week, Intel is trying to prove to its partners and the public that it is back on message, reengaged with an aggressive agenda for the consumer desktop and mobile markets once again. Though consumer PCs may not be a growth market in most developed countries, there is acceleration in undeveloped locales.

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Intel hardware updates address security this year with new chips

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Intel hardware updates address security this year with new chips

In continuing follow up from the spectacle that surrounded the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities released in January, Intel announced that it has provided patches and updates that address 100% of the products it has launched in the last 5 years. The company also revealed its plan for updated chip designs that will address both the security and performance concerns surrounding the vulnerabilities.

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Low Queue Depth Performance and Implications on Testing Methodology

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Low Queue Depth Performance and Implications on Testing Methodology

The Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P shows itself to be a competitive product, offering impressive low-latency performance which gives it the edge in some of the more storage centric client workloads. Care must be taken to select the correct test system configuration and software in order to measure these potential gains in responsiveness observed at the lower queue depths in real-world usage. 

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Powers Most Responsive Desktop Platform

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Powers Most Responsive Desktop Platform

There are many ways to measure the performance of a PC and many ways to measure the performance of any single sub-system of that computer. Storage performance is no different, and with the movement towards evaluating the performance of computing hardware based on end-user experiences, the expectations of how storage should behave has evolved. As processor performance, graphics capability, and workloads evolve for the consumer, the demand for higher performing storage solutions has increased. 

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Offers New Levels of Performance for Mobile Platforms

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Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P Offers New Levels of Performance for Mobile Platforms

Intel continues to expand its product line of Optane™ storage drives, targeting consumers and OEMs in the mobile space with the new Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P. As the relative performance of notebooks and mobile platforms increases when compared to desktops, there has been a resurgence of interest and focus on the secondary components and systems in these machines. As modern processors increase core and thread count, along with frequency, cache, and more, the impact of other hardware level features becomes more critical to the overall experience for consumers. While the value of faster processing is critical, the impact of storage performance also plays an important role.

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Security vulnerability creates Spectre over Intel, AMD, Apple, and others

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Security vulnerability creates Spectre over Intel, AMD, Apple, and others

2018 started off with a bang for chip vendors like Intel and AMD, as a new and potentially industry-shifting security vulnerability at the silicon level was announced. Along with it came concerns about consumer privacy, financial security, and even potential performance impacts on computers and servers that were patched to alleviate the vulnerability.

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Meltdown and Spectre Security Vulnerability Impacts Intel most, but AMD, Arm as well

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Meltdown and Spectre Security Vulnerability Impacts Intel most, but AMD, Arm as well

Just before the closing bell on Wednesday, Intel released a statement responding to the security issues brought up in this story. While acknowledging that these new security concerns do exist, the company went out of its way to insinuate that AMD, Arm Holdings, and others were at risk. Intel also states that performance impact on patched machines “should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”

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Intel® Optane™ Memory and Intel® SSD 545s combine to offer NVMe-class storage performance

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Intel® Optane™ Memory and Intel® SSD 545s combine to offer NVMe-class storage performance

Though originally targeted for hard drives, combining the caching performance of Intel® Optane™ Memory with an SSD is a solution that can offer improved performance in numerous consumer workloads without a significant increase in price. By utilizing 16GB and 32GB Optane™ modules with various capacities of Intel® 545s solid state drives, the competitive landscape of the consumer storage market takes on an interesting twist.
 

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Samsung Z-NAND Products Take Aim at 3D XPoint

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Samsung Z-NAND Products Take Aim at 3D XPoint

Intel and Micron are starting to enjoy the technology disruption caused by their 3D XPoint memory, which offers significantly faster access times while also maintaining the non-volatility of slower storage mediums. During Flash Memory Summit, Samsung made it clear that it wanted a piece of the action with Z-NAND.

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Intel makes moves into 5G, potential partnership with Apple

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Intel makes moves into 5G, potential partnership with Apple

Intel this week made announcements surrounding its efforts and products in the mobile connectivity device segment. The Intel XMM 8000-series of 5G capable modems will bring the next-generation of wireless connectivity to PCs, smartphones, and infrastructure devices with a target consumer product launch in mid-2019. Intel also updated plans for a new 4G LTE modem that will offer speeds as high as 1.6 Gigabits-per-second, a substantial upgrade from current connectivity options on smartphones (peaking at 1.0 Gigabits-per-second), again with a 2019 target release.

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Intel uses AMD graphics hardware in new notebook processor

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Intel uses AMD graphics hardware in new notebook processor

Today Intel announced a new product family for its 8th Generation Core family that combines a 35-watt processor and AMD Radeon graphics chip on a single package in order to create a new class of gaming notebook solution. It hasn’t been assigned a brand yet, that will likely occur with a formal announcement at CES this January. This announcement has significant impact because it solidifies a partnership between competitors AMD and Intel for a product in a space both compete in.

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Intel Optane Storage Performance and Implications on Testing Methodology

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Intel Optane Storage Performance and Implications on Testing Methodology

The new Intel Optane SSD 900p offers workstation and enthusiast consumers a new level of performance for storage. But offering incredibly fast response times and low latency puts a unique emphasis on storage testing methodology, system configuration, and software design. Our Optane white paper focuses on the impact and issues of legacy testing as well as the value of measuring low queue depth performance.

Download the Intel® Optane™ Storage Performance and Implications on Testing Methodology white paper here!

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Upcoming AMD Raven Ridge Ryzen APU Puts Pressure on Intel and NVIDIA for Notebooks

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Upcoming AMD Raven Ridge Ryzen APU Puts Pressure on Intel and NVIDIA for Notebooks

As the winter buying seasons ramps up, AMD is readying a major notebook processor release that will be competitive to for the first time Intel in nearly a decade. With recent leaks of upcoming configurations coming from major system builders like HP, and performance data that indicates a strong uplift compared to previous AMD offerings, the mobile AMD chip will force both Intel and NVIDIA to make adjustments to product lines and positioning.

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Intel Nervana AI Chip Takes on NVIDIA for Machine Learning

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Intel Nervana AI Chip Takes on NVIDIA for Machine Learning

In an attempt to regain relevance in the quickly growing artificial intelligence and machine learning markets, Intel has just announced a new product family called Nervana, centered on a completely unique architectural design. The Nervana Neural Network Processor, or NNP for short, is targeting data center and enterprise customers that want to accelerate AI training times while offering superior efficiency and lower power consumption.

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AMD and Intel Race Towards High Core Count CPU Future

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AMD and Intel Race Towards High Core Count CPU Future

As we prepare for a surprisingly robust summer season of new hardware technologies to be released to the consumer, both Intel and AMD have moved in a direction that both seems inevitable and wildly premature. The announcement and pending introduction of high core count processors, those with many cores that share each company’s most modern architecture and design, brings with it an interesting combination of opportunity and discussion. First and foremost, is there a legitimate need for this type of computing horsepower, in this form factor, and secondly, is this something that consumers will want to purchase?

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