CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

There's been another development in the ongoing controversy over whether Intel will have Meteor Lake desktop CPUs coming out.

Meteor Lake desktop rumors have been something of a rollercoaster to say the least (Image Credit: Intel)

In recent times, the rumor mill has indicated a pretty firm 'no' on this issue, and that Meteor Lake will be for laptops only, with Raptor Lake Refresh covering the bases for the desktop side of Intel's next-gen processors.

However, Phoronix.com (via Tom's Hardware) has spotted that Intel's engineers are still putting Meteor Lake-S (desktop) code in the Linux kernel.

Further doubt has been cast over whether Intel will manage to head up its future Arrow Lake CPUs with a 40-core flagship.

Raichu let us know the latest gossip on that 40-core behemoth (Image Credit: Raichu / Hardware Times)

You may recall that the 40-core chip - theoretically combining 8 performance cores with 32 efficiency cores - was previously rumored, then thought to be canceled, and then the grapevine indicated it might be back in the cards.

However, the latest from a regular hardware leaker on Twitter, Raichu, acknowledges that Intel does indeed have plans for this 40-core beast of a 15th-gen processor, but that it's struggling with realizing them.

Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, which will presumably be labeled as its 14th-gen processors, could turn up in October, according to the latest buzz from the rumor mill.

Intel's Raptor Lake processors will soon see new turbocharged models (Image Credit: Intel)

This comes from ECSM, a Chinese hardware leaker on Bilibili (so add plenty of seasoning with this one), who reckons that pepped-up Raptor Lake models will arrive in October, starting with 'K' models (unlocked chips).

The vanilla non-K CPUs from the 14th-gen will turn up in the following month, November, or maybe December, ECSM asserts. The leaker also informs us that there'll be a new 8+12 SKU (with 8 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores) to slot between the 8+16 flagship and 8+8 processors.

No more i3, i5, and i7, as Intel is shifting to a simpler naming convention for its CPUs, starting with upcoming 'Meteor Lake' processors. Intel's naming conventions for desktop and laptop processors have been the same for over a decade, so undoubtedly, there'll be some adjustment.

Intel Core 3, 5, and 7 will be the new naming for Meteor Lake processors.

So then, what can we expect? Intel notes that without the "i," products will follow simple Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7 branding. The new naming scheme doesn't stop there, as Intel will introduce a new processor tier - Intel Core Ultra - for the most advanced client processors. So basically, you're looking at Intel Core for mainstream CPUs and Intel Core Ultra for enthusiast high-performance models.

This means you can expect product names like Intel Core 7 14700 and possibly Intel Core Ultra 9 14900. There are examples and not indicative of any upcoming products.

Yep, that's not a typo. AMD is prepping to launch a new AM4 CPU, with new leaks (via chi11eddog) suggesting that a Ryzen 5 5600X3D is on the way. With the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series well and truly here, this would be a new and affordable upgrade for existing AM4 owners that should be able to deliver impressive gaming performance.

According to the leaked specs, the new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D features 6 Cores, 12 Threads, and a Base and Boost Clock speed combo of 3.3 and 4.4 GHz. Of course, the magic comes from AMD's 3D V-Cache stacking, which has proved excellent for boosting CPU-heavy gaming performance.

So even though the baseline specs are fairly modest, the 96MB of L3 cache memory should be able to provide a notable performance bump over the baseline AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. This would also make it a companion CPU to the still popular AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which has recently seen its pricing drop to around USD 300.

With the G.SKILL OC World Cup 2023 Grand Finals taking place at Computex 2023, we saw impressive overclocking skills in person, pushing CPUs and DDR5 memory to speeds requiring a steady dose of liquid nitrogen.

But there was a little more overclocking action at the show care of Level1Techs' Wendel, Bryan from Tech Yes City, and a team of expert overclockers from ASRock.

The mission? To push the 16 performance cores in Intel's new Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs to new heights, 7.2GHz to be exact. Paired with the ASRock W790 motherboard, the workstation CPU was able to hit a stable speed of 6.1GHz, where it managed to deliver an impressive Cinebench R23 score of around 46,000. This easily trumps the Intel Core i9 13900K score of around 38,000.

Intel could have Beast Lake desktop processors in the pipeline that are hugely clocked up and designed for excellent single-core performance to challenge AMD's 3D V-Cache (X3D) chips in the gaming arena.

Yes, Beast Lake is a rather silly name, but it may well change - if indeed these CPUs ever arrive (Image Credit: Intel)

Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) makes this claim in a new video (that also discusses Arrow Lake in-depth, which we cover here), and upfront we should note that this rumor needs to be regarded with a lot more skepticism than usual (wheelbarrows full of the stuff, frankly).

MLID tells us that the purported Beast Lake silicon is in early development - it might arrive in 2026, at the earliest - and the leaker isn't even sure if it's a new architecture or just some kind of "side project" we're told.

Intel's Arrow Lake processors are still on track and expected to make a massive impact in terms of performance uplift, headed up by a 40-core flagship, going by some fresh speculation.

Yes, Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), the well-known YouTube leaker who always has plenty to say about Intel and AMD (and NVIDIA), has released another video in which Arrow Lake is one of the topics discussed.

The latest from MLID's sources indicates that Arrow Lake is still on target for an expected launch in Q4 2024 (on both laptop and desktop), and that a previously rumored 40-core CPU is back in the cards.

It's no surprise that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's opening keynote at Computex 2023 dived head-first into the company's impressive advances in AI hardware. And with news that its new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip has entered full production, it points to some incredible performance gains on the horizon. It manages to build on the already impressive H100.

The ew GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip has entered full production.

The GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip sees NVIDIA combine an Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU and Hopper GPU architectures using NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology - which is capable of an impressive 900GB/s (up to) of total bandwidth. It's something of an AI beast, designed specifically for the most demanding generative AI and HPC applications.

With availability expected later this year, it doesn't stop there, with NVIDIA also prepping a new AI supercomputer called the NVIDIA DGX GH200. It includes 256 Grace Hopper Superchips, a whopping 144 TB of shared (i.e., unified) GPU memory, and 1 EFLOPS of processing power. On the memory front alone, that's 500x more memory than the previous generation NVIDIA DGX A100 introduced in 2020.

Computex 2023 is about to kick off, and we were lucky enough to explore the showroom floor a day early, which allowed us to catch a sneak peek at the dismantled ASUS ROG Ally.

For those who aren't familiar with the ROG Ally, ASUS has entered the handheld gaming market with a powerful device running Windows 11 and boasting what ASUS claims to be the "fastest" AMD APU.

Reports indicate that this "fastest" AMD APU is built on a custom 4nm process with Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architecture. Specifically, ASUS will ship the Ally with the Z1 Extreme, similar to the Ryzen 7 7840U but with certain modifications and specific features.