https://www.barrons.com/articles/intels-optane-chips-getting-closer-to-changi...

More BS Intel PR being reported yet again, Optane isn't going anywhere except in Intel's wet dreams .....




OK, this is compare and contrast time.   Intel Optane vs Samsung, Micron and all the rest.

In 2015, Intel made a big noise about Optane (saying the whole world would be running on Optane "phase change" memory inside of six months) and Intel has actually sold some Optane stuff in the last 2 years, but it has only successfully been used as a cache memory of sorts in a few very large rack space applications because Intel found they had early "read/write dependability" slowdown issues and a rather severe cost constraint acting against them.

Then Micron jumped ship on the original Optane idea and left the partnership completely this past spring.

Micron simply moved over to the Samsung side of things and threw their support behind the newer SD Association standards (currently at level 7) for both the SD/UC and SD/Express standards.    Micron has mentioned some vague plans to do something with Optane II down the road (Optane II which is still completely undefined at this point in time).  

Intel will have no rights to produce Optane III (as it will be designed by Micron at that future point in time).   Optane III will require a new brand name then, too, as Intel does share rights to the word "Optane" and Intel has so abused and tarnished the image of the "Optane" brand name that it is unrecoverable at this point.   Optane version 2 is muddled, and Micron won't finish working on it until Intel pays for all the Optane they had contracted for last year.

So, this can mean a "complete fuzzy something" may come leaping up at the world down the road because "Optane" as a term and as a standard is really truly completely undefined and totally unexplained at this point in time.

Literally anything could be "Optane" to Intel's eyes .......  so please, buyer beware on Intel Optane stuff going out into the future.   You really DON'T know what you are getting.

Impartial 3rd party tests of existing Optane set ups so far show that it does not yield the real performance levels that Intel advertised  to sell it to you in the first place.


===================================================


So, Intel is the only one producing any of the original Optane at 14nm only at this point in time.    Micron, Samsung and the rest are running the new SD Association SD/UC standard at 12nm and at 10nm .....  and have plans to run the SD/Express level at 7nm next year (Samsung is currently starting early memory production at 7nm as we speak so you can easily see where this is headed inside the next 2-3 years).

Same general use limitations apply to both Optane and to SD/UC and SD/Express at this point in time --- it really isn't fast enough to run as main systems memory just yet.   But it is faster than the older SSD drive tech and certainly faster than any sort of platter hard drives.

Cost is still a real issue when you start talking anything about "Terabyte sized" anything in micro SD card sizes.   Micro SD cards really are quite expensive once you go past 128 gigabytes heading up towards 258 gigabyte and 516 gigabyte sizes which are all that is available right now to be bought in SD/UC levels 1,2 & 3 on a Micro SD format.

These SD/UC levels 1, 2 & 3 cards are somewhat confusing right now, but they are REAL PRODUCTS and because of the current wide acceptance, lower cost and good availability these standards will be the eventual winners over the original Optane from Intel.

And yes, you could put your whole hard drive on a multi terabyte micro SD sized card swinging the SD Express double row of contacts "standard socket" starting early of next year.

You would need a device swinging the new SD/Express double row socket and some fairly deep pockets, but yes, you could go do it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/new-sd-card-uc-express-specs-tout-128tb-max-up-to-a...

Point to consider, is that when 7nm production actually begins to shift down to 5nm (in 2-3 years from now this may actually happen) we will likely be at the SD Association's level 8 standards, and will still only be using less than half of the total capabilities that the new level 8 standard provides.

However, right now the Micro SD/UC grade cards at 10nm (grades 1-3) are readily available and for $18 shipped I found I could buy a 64 gigabyte card that supposedly is just as fast as my new phone can supposedly actually use.  

Android 8.1 is the first OS level that will supposedly really allow the card to "conjoin" with the 32 gigs of systems memory that comes on the Moto G6  in what is again promised as "a user seamless manner" under the control of an updated Memory Manager (newly re-implemented in Android 8.1).       We shall see, my new 64 gig Micro SD/UC-1 card gets here this afternoon.

NO, IT IS NOT REAL YET

               Nope, it is the same old SD stuff, music, pictures and maps and only a very few apps can move over to the SD card at this time even if the SD card is custom formatted and encrypted as "internal" and the Memory Manager is active.   Memory Manager simply automatically takes the least used items off your systems memory as it starts to get full and puts those items over on to the SD card.

My past experiences with Android phones being able to actually "seamlessly and completely use" the SD card memory WERE NOT REAL on all my past phones and I had hoped that this lack had finally changed for the better.   Nope, exactly the same restrictions are on the SD card use as before.  Pictures, music, graphics and a few permittable apps are the only things moved over at this time .....  HOWEVER, there is a detailed set of folders created on the drive by the Memory Manager that could be filled up with properly sorted and filed items but that will only happen as your normal memory begins to clog up with stuff.

The new "super card" installed as conjoined internal memory cannot be speed tested by any of the the old standard android SD card speed tests as they report it correctly as custom encrypted memory and they never were built to handle that sort of action.

   ........ oh well, I can't even test it to see if it is working right.

https://liliputing.com/2018/07/intels-9th-gen-core-chips-are-on-the-way-if-th...



Intel’s chip-naming convention has gotten kind of weird recently. So I’m not entirely sure what to make of the fact that the company included a bunch of previously unannounced processors in an official document recently.

Logically, the new Core i3 and Core i5 9000 Series chips will be branded as part of the company’s 9th-gen Intel Core processor family. But they’re also listed as “Coffee Lake S” chips, suggesting they’ll use the same architecture as some of Intel’s 8th-gen processors (or at least something similar to it.


Intel

The new CPUs showed up in an updated Intel Microcode Update Guidance document, as noted by VideoCardz and TechSpot. Here’s a list of the new 9000 series processors:

Core i3-9000
Core i3-9100
Core i5-9400
Core i5-9400T
Core i509500
Core i5-9600
Core i5-9600K

There aren’t many details available about these new chips, but the Core i3 versions all seem to be quad-core chips, while the Core i5 processors are hexa-core models. It’s unclear if or when we can expect 9000 Series Core i7 chips.

But if these are really Coffee Lake-S chips, I’m not sure what, if any, advantages the 9th-gen versions will have over their 8th-gen counterparts.

Intel’s 8th-gen processor lineup is already kind of a mess when it comes to naming. Here are some of the mobile chip families that are all branded as 8th-gen Core processors:

15 watt Kaby Lake Refresh processors
28 watt Coffee Lake-U processors with Iris Plus graphics
45-watt Coffee Lake-H processors
10nm Cannon Lake-U series processors

And that’s not even counting the company’s 8th-gen desktop chips. All of which is to say, that simply knowing the chip generation doesn’t tell you much about an Intel processor’s architecture or performance anymore. So while it’s kind of interesting to see that 9th-gen chips are on the way, I honestly have no idea what that even means at this point.


What does it mean?    Intel has issued new "safer" microcode to slow down the processing on all  their old chipsets that are still in wafer production.   The stuff they sell from this point forward will SLOW DOWN 2-5% while it does "ongoing mitigation" for the 6-8 versions of Meltdown and Specre that exist as of now.

Making a "new 9th generation" out of these "new" slowed down then paper overclocked old processors is a rare form of pure Intel marketing BS nonsense

--- certainly it isn't worth popping the cork on the champagne for Intel to celebrate anything (in my eyes, anyway).    

Calling it a "new 9th generation product" simply says how far down inside the toilet whirlpool Intel is currently rotating.

So Intel has actually quit doing some of their stupid predictive processing things that had opened up that huge raft of security issues.  To make it back up speed-wise Intel now has put a paper spec "overclock" in place that suspiciously just covers the slow down due to not using predictive processing any more --- goody goody on them.  

Small lies seem to be working better for you, huh?   

 

It is all lies on paper, Intel hasn't changed ANYTHING since last year, really, except for stopping using the predictive stuff (a 5% slowdown that actually can go up to 20% for some certain select workloads) and on the top end chipsets they actually added a couple of more cores, going way past what existing cooling systems can actually handle, which means the whole shebang chokes down due to "self-preservation thermal throttling".

Heck, you will get the new slowed down processing stuff FOR FREE eventually without having to buy a new PC if you just wait for the Mickeysoft nightly update that has it in it .......    

Who would want to forgo that disastrous pleasure that that particular "break the world update" will bring ????

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-zen-x86-processor-dryhana,37417.html

China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP



Chinese-designed "Dhyana" x86 processors based on AMD's Zen microarchitecture are beginning to surface from Chinese chip producer Hygon. The processors come as the fruit of AMD's x86 IP licensing agreements with its China-based partners and break the decades-long stranglehold on x86 held by the triumvirate of Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies. Details are also emerging that outline how AMD has managed to stay within the boundaries of the x86 licensing agreements but still allow Chinese-controlled interests to design and sell processors based on the Zen design.

AMD's official statements indicate the company does not sell its final chip designs to its China-based partners. Instead, AMD allows them to design their own processors tailored for the Chinese server market. But the China-produced Hygon "Dhyana" processors are so similar to AMD's EPYC processors that Linux kernel developers have listed vendor IDs and family series numbers as the only difference. In fact, Linux maintainers have simply ported over the EPYC support codes to the Dhyana processor and note that they have successfully run the same patches on AMD's EPYC processors, implying there is little to no differentiation between the chips.

The new chips are surfacing against the backdrop of the trade war between the US and China that could escalate quickly, likely reinforcing China's long-held opinion that a lack of native processor production could be a strategic liability. Today's wars are won with chips, and their strategic importance certainly isn't lost on those in the halls of power. In fact, the Obama administration blocked Intel from selling Xeon processors to China in 2015 over concerns the chips were fueling the country's nuclear programs, and subsequent actions by the US have largely prevented China from achieving the technical know-how and equipment to develop its own chips through acquisitions and mergers.

That makes it even more surprising that AMD has managed to establish a franchise that allows Chinese processor vendors to develop and sell x86 processors in spite of US regulations and the licensing restrictions with Intel, but now more information is coming to light about how AMD pulled off the feat.

Satisfying The x86 Cross-Licensing Agreement
AMD's announcement in 2016 that it had established a joint venture in China to develop processors was surprising, but it yielded a much needed $293 million cash infusion (in payments based on delivery dates) for the then-struggling company, which had operated at a loss for the prior six quarters. AMD is also set to reap royalties, based on unit sales, once the processors begin to ship in volume.

As part of the licensing agreement, AMD established a joint venture (JV) in China called the Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd. (THATIC) and agreed to license its x86 and SoC IP for chip development. THATIC consists of AMD and both public and private Chinese companies, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences that is heavily influenced by the Chinese government.

According to mydrivers.com, THATIC then established two companies through joint ventures: Haiguang Microelectronics Co. Ltd. (HMC) and Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co., Ltd (Hygon).

But here's where things get tricky. AMD holds a 51 percent stake in HMC, while Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 49%. Meanwhile, AMD owns 30% of Hygon and Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 70 percent.

HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a company owned primarily by AMD. But AMD provides the IP with the understanding that the company will use it to design its "own products specifically tailored to the needs of the Chinese server market." That requires quite a bit of maneuvering given the restrictions of AMD's x86 cross-licensing agreement with Intel.

To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC.

HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors.

And thus, AMD's transfer of the x86 IP stays within the legal boundaries. According to the agreement, the final products can only be sold within China's borders. That opens up a huge opportunity for AMD via royalties due to the exploding China data center market, but potentially serves a blow to Intel due to the Chinese governments' influence: China has invested heavily in native chip producers through its Made In China 2025 initiative and also offers incentives and other measures to prop up domestic chip production.

China Continues To Invest
It's unclear what the impact of AMD's licensing agreement will have on the long-term outlook for China's chip development ambitions. China is also heavily involved in other chip-producing ventures, such as Zhaoxin Semiconductor, which is working to produce x86 chips through a partnership with VIA. The combination of these efforts, among others, could ultimately provide the country with the independence it desires from US interventions, and possibly alter the long-term processor market in the process.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR INTEL?

Intel had hopes of throttling AMD back to "only taking 20% of their market share" away in the second half of 2018.

That goes out the window now as you have 3-4 Chinese government backed companies LICENSED to use AMD Zen and Via x86 tech in a mix or match fashion with MIPS and IBM and ARM technologies.   This is legal and above board.

Hygon must make the chips and sell the chips inside China.  This does not limit secondary or tertiary vendors (motherboard or systems builders) from reselling the final end product through a supply chain that ends possibly outside of China.

What to be watchful for is what is NOT above board --- China's very capable industrial espionage functions might be lifitng tech from everybody and then producing it as a "subsidiary development of combining Zen and IBM and Via technologies".   Micron as a memory maker has already been pillaged by China so their new memory stuff is coming soon from the Far East now too.  

Plus China is BLAZING FAST, they can steal something and have it in full production as their "home designed subsidiary development tech" before the original company can finish up their lengthy required in country testing and then arrange for a production slot at TSMC.    

As far as legalities go, obviously Chinese company XYZ had also developed the tech on a parallel pathway using old tech they had licensed from AMD, VIA, IBM, ARM, MIPS, (you get the idea, Chinese companies hold mfg and development rights to a whole lot of old American companies old tech nowadays).

In cases like AMD, some older tech was licensed outright -- the fact that some new features fresh from brand new industrial espionage from vendors B and C got mixed into the pie is "regrettable".    

When the total service life of a processor is only 2-3 years, it can easily take 4 times that long to reach some sort of minimal court settlement based off litigation in the Far East.   And that is if it doesn't wind up as any form of shared judgement due to fault existing on both sides.

CHINA IS NOW A MULTI-FOUNDRY PC LEVEL & SERVER LEVEL CHIP SUPPLIER starting today.

Look to see a whole lot of PC and laptop action coming out of China sometime out in the future ..... dirt cheap just like the little Android TV boxes are today.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-micron-3d-xpoint-imft,37461.html



Wow, it is an original Optane 3d XPoint board, suitable for hitting a PCIe card slot on a specialty rack space motherboard that was constructed specifically to use it as a buffer memory for a large platter hard drive.    Large Samsung SSD drives were less expensive and ran a good bit faster in real use as you could put your whole hard drive on the bootable Samsung SSD for the same money and the original Intel Optane drive was always restricted to buffer functions only.

Intel has been bundling these boards with the specialty rackspace motherboards that mount them as a "special deal" as sold by their favorite board vendors, essentially giving the Optane boards away for free lately since they have a warehouse full of them.    

Intel has a whole generation of rackspace motherboards with Intel CPUs and matching Optane boards jest a sitting in a warehouse that have been totally overcome by events, so ya wanna buy one of these anyway?   Cheap?   Intel will give you the Optane stuff for free ......




This is the DDR4 version of the same sort of memory, once again requiring a specialty board from an Intel favorite board vendor.   Very few sample sticks or boards were ever built as the cost was way too high and the Optane stick memory was too slow again --- Samsung standard memory sticks were a lot better deal price/performance wise.

Tom's Hardware covers the pending death of Optane memory in the blue quote below as the final stages of the Micron Intel divorce become known.    Be aware that Optane won't completely die and disappear until the warehouses get empty, sometimes in late 2019-2020.

What will happen is that the other forms of fast non-volitile memory (faster and cheaper) are what will end Optane in reality and will be what sweeps it off the table starting late next year.

Micron is done with Optane, sees no future for it as it isn't speed or cost effective compared to the new SD Association Level 7 and new proposed Level 8 SD and MicroSD standards that all the memory companies are supporting as of now (Micron included).

So, Intel is once again the only one sitting in the leaky 14nm Optane row boat at the moment, and Intel has simply lost track of their oars again and is just floating along until the warehouses finally all get emptied out.


XPoint Shakeup: Intel and Micron to Cease Joint Development of 3D XPoint Next Year
by Paul Alcorn July 16, 2018 at 4:15 PM

Intel and Micron have announced they have updated the terms of their 3D XPoint joint development partnership and will cease joint development after the second generation of 3D XPoint is completed in the first half of 2019.

The two companies also recently announced they would cease joint development of NAND through their Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) partnership after the third generation of flash technology, but the storied IMFT franchise will apparently soldier on through shared production facilities.

Intel and Micron will continue to develop new generations of 3D XPoint independently "in order to optimize the technology for their respective product and business needs."   This means Intel representatives confirmed to us that Intel will still produce 3D XPoint out of the jointly-operated IMFT fab in Lehi, Utah even after the companies develop their respective third-generation products, but Intel still has the option to produce the memory at other facilities if needed.

Intel and Micron announced 3D XPoint in July 2015. The companies designed the new memory to bridge the performance gap between NAND and DRAM, and because of 3D XPoint's persistence (it retains data after power is removed), it can serve in both memory and storage roles.

Micron announced its 3D XPoint-based QuantX products in 2016, and we even tracked down the finer details of the design, but the SSDs did not make it to market. As a result, Intel is the only company selling 3D XPoint-based products and Micron has relied on Intel to purchase its excess 3D XPoint production inventory.

However, during a recent earnings call, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra revealed that 3D XPoint sales to Intel were flagging, thus incurring under-utilization charges that impacted Micron's bottom line. Micron even indicated that it was possible that the company wouldn't sell any 3D XPoint to Intel in the future. As such, Mehrotra announced that Micron would re-negotiate the terms of future 3D XPoint development with Intel. That means the split in product development is likely the outcome of the renegotiation.

Sales of 3D XPoint have obviously been under expectations. Intel has brought the new memory to market in various SSD form factors, but pricing has been a concern as prices for traditional flash-based SSDs have continued to plummet. Intel has even taken to offering "Core+" processors that come bundled with 3D XPoint drives in an apparent effort to spur sales.

Analysts have long predicted that the debut of Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs, which bring the speedy memory to the DIMM form factor to enable explosive memory capacity increases, would mark the true turning point for 3D XPoint adoption. Unfortunately, Intel's 3D XPoint DIMMs have been plagued by delays, which ultimately has led to lower-than-expected sales.

Intel is currently ramping production of its long-overdue DIMMs and claims that several hyperscalers and cloud service providers are committed to deploying its products. Micron says that it will bring its first 3D XPoint-based products to market by the end of 2019, with meaningful revenue occurring in 2020.

Both Intel and Micron have sunk a tremendous amount of R&D into the skunkworks-class project over the course of a decade, so it is unlikely that either will cease development and production. Intel and Micron have repeatedly stated that 3D XPoint is an inherently scalable design: the companies can either add more layers, shrink lithography, or store more bits per cell to boost capacity and performance. That leaves plenty of room for improvements in the future. Given the announced timeline for the second-gen products in early 2019, we could see faster, cheaper, and more capacious 3D XPoint products soon.

This last paragraph ignores the fact that other forms of persistent memory from folks like Samsung are EATING OPTANE'S LUNCH RIGHT NOW for both performance and price with the standard SSD and the standard DIMM style memory being run at 10nm and 12nm at Samsung and at TSMC.  

When 7nm persistent SSD and DIMM memory products from Samsung and others gets into the bulk distribution channels Intel hopes it will have given most of the existing stocks of 14nm Optane sold or given away by then as their aging Optane products will have become relatively undesirable even as buffer memory at that point in time.

Micron wants to get away from Intel and is taking all the needed steps to firm up the divorce settlement.



Do not buy an Optane board -- it is EXPENSIVE poorer performance memory for your computing dollar.

This comes under the heading of "Intel sez" followed up by Apple actually building some of them and finding out the hard way.



https://youtu.be/Dx8J125s4cg     

Yep, it is an Apple guy video producer complaining in a video (very well done video, BTW)  --- click on it to watch it as it is the whole refrigerator freezer show and tell.

"Intel sez" .....     Here is your spec sheet, you can trust it.   Don't worry about having to do any of that pre-release testing stuff, it just makes your hair get gray early ......


"Intel sez" .....     Which is even more dubious than "Rossi sez" as Rossi can occasionally surprise you by surpassing his own brags on some select occasional items.   And it turns out Rossi told you the real literal truth, in as much as anyone understood it at the time.

https://liliputing.com/2018/07/lilbits-320-apples-new-macbook-pro-is-fast-exc...



https://youtu.be/Dx8J125s4cg    it is a video, click on it to watch it







Lilbits 320: Apple’s new MacBook Pro is fast… except when it’s not
07/18/2018 at 5:41 PM by Brad Linder

Apple launched its most powerful MacBook Pro laptops to date last week, including 15 inch models with support for up an Intel Core i9 processor and AMD Radeon Pro discrete graphics.

Unsurprisingly, a top-of-the-line model scores really, really well in benchmarks, and Laptop Magazine reports it has one of the fastest SSDs shipping in any laptop.

But YouTube Dave Lee discovered that when you push the laptop up towards its normal working loads… it slows down considerably. It looks like the MacBook Pro chassis might not be able to keep the motherboard cool enough for the Core i9 processor to run at listed normal rated speed for any extended period of real use.

So while some tasks are super-fast, others (like heavy-duty video rendering jobs) can take longer on the new 15" MacBook Pro than on older (fewer cores) models from year before last.    

Whoops?

On the bright side, the laptop is super fast if you stick it in a freezer while rendering videos.

So that’s always an option.


==================================================


So, if you thought that one was a good one, here is a brand new breaking news one that might even wind up being an even better "chicken choker" than a 15" MacBook Pro .....

https://liliputing.com/2018/07/hp-updates-its-z-line-of-entry-level-workstati...

HP updates its Z line of entry-level workstations with Xeon E options (and more)
07/18/2018 at 9:00 AM by Brad Linder

HP is updating its line of entry-level workstation computes with four new models, including the HP Z2 Tower, HP Z2 Small Form Factor, and HP Z2 Mini, along with the EliteDesk 800 Workstation Edition.

The smallest of the bunch is the HP Z2 Mini G4, which is an update to the Z2 Mini Workstation that launched a few years ago.

The new model is the same 8.5″ x 8.5″ x 2.3″ size as its predecessor, but under the hood it packs a lot more power, with up to NVIDIA Quadro P1000 graphics, up to an Intel Xeon E-2176G processor, and up to 32GB of DDR4-2400 memory.



This is actually a little hover craft with four corner lifting air jets .......



The little computer has room for a 2.5 inch drive and an M.2 NVME 2280 SSD and features a USB 3.1 Gen-2 Type-C port, four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and a headset jack and two SODIMM slots.

The HP Z2 Mini G4 supports 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 and in comes with a bunch of processor and graphics options including Intel Pentium Gold through Xeon E chips and a choice of AMD or NVIDIA graphics.

Prices start at $799, and HP is positioning the Z2 Mini workstation as not only small enough to put on your desk without taking up a lot of space, but also as a system that can be mounted to the back of a monitor or set up in a rack.

           

I mean if you are gonna REALLY REALLY choke a baby chicken,  putting an overclocked rackspace derivative Xenon E2176G chipset, 32 gigs of systems RAM and a NVIDIA Quadro P1000 graphics card all inside a Chromebox sized case with very little air flow and absolutely no effective heat sink fins built into the PLASTIC case top .......          

Love that toolbox sized "laptop floor charger" ya got over there, guys  ..... but what's with the two clear plastic water lines running beside that really thick power cord going up to the little box on the desktop ???   And why is that big boxy power supply so durn noisy ????


Really ????    HP guys, do you really even read your own press releases ????

Or did Intel build and release this particular press release for you guys as a "time saving favor" to you ????

Apple is jealous that HP has done gone and one-upped them again on the overheated front .....

...... this time fer choking very small baby sized chickens even worse than Chick-fil-A ever did

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fenghuang-ryzen-vega-soc,37551.html

The mysterious AMD Fenghuang is a complete system on chip (SoC) powerhouse made up of a quad-core Ryzen processor paired with 24 Vega Compute Units and 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a single chip.

Kaby Lake-G ushered in a new class of processors for Intel, with all the progress items coming from AMD.   Now that AMD's short marriage with Intel has ended, the red chipmaker is free to branch out and do its own thing.   Jack Huynh, AMD's corporate vice president of its semi-custom business unit, announced today via the company's blog that it has created a new SoC for Chinese electronics manufacturer Zhongshan Subor.

The semi-custom SoC, codenamed Fenghuang, will power Zhongshan Subor's upcoming gaming console and PC. The Fenghuang chip harnesses the power of AMD's Zen processor and Vega graphics processing unit architectures. The SoC features a Ryzen processor with four cores and eight threads running at 3GHz and 24 Vega Compute Units operating at 1.3GHz. An Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) might be the first thing that comes to mind; however, the Fenghuang SoC is quite the opposite. APUs don't come with their own graphics memory, and the Fenghuang chip has 8GB of high-performance GDDR5 memory at its disposal. Jack Huynh also confirmed that the SoC will support the chipmaker's existing and next-generation technologies, such as AMD FreeSync, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition software and Rapid Packed Math.

Zhongshan Subor demonstrated its gaming PC at its booth at ChinaJoy, one of the largest gaming and digital entertainment expos in Asia, held in Shanghai. The Chinese manufacturer stated that it plans to release the gaming PC in late August. The SUBOR gaming console, with the same specifications as the company's gaming PC and a customized operating system will be available by the end of this year.

AMD and Intel are at the approximately 50-50% mark on new unit PC sales in the USA at this particular point in time.

AMD did something sorta new this week, something for desktop and console units that was requested by a China console firm.  They put together a single chip SoC format that had ALL the requested functions on the chip itself, including a largish chunk of fast access on-die operating systems memory, 32 gigs worth of it sitting up on an on-chip PoP package.  

This makes up a complete SoC package for the console units that can also be used in a laptop or a desktop .....

This is ground breaking stuff for desktop uses, utilizing pure cell phone type low cost ideas in PC space by clear intent.  

The AMD SoC at 12nm currently only requires a large flat style copper heat sink so it can fit and work in thin laptop formats as well.    Once it shrinks to 7nm it will work even better at a lower required heat dissipation level.

Expect low end laptop uses and small desktop uses to proliferate like crazy out of China (which is starting now even as we speak).    China based Zhongshan Subor has licensed the build rights for this Fenghuang style processor.   We do not know if Zhongshan Subor has any design rights arranged with AMD at this point in time .....

Intel has only had one reply to all their many challengers at this point in time and that is MORE and MORE and MORE bigger hotter running cores ---- this thought is failing big-time on the overkill & over expensive side of the equation.  

Thermal throttling is the bugger bear that is biting Apple and Intel in the arse at this time -- getting rid of the heat is the challenge that Apple has failed to address.

Intel understands they are going to lose all lower end market share due to intense new competition from ARM and AMD ..... but Intel is bound and determined to hang on to the upper end (the very most profitable) segment of the PC processor market.   Intel losses in rack space are beginning to seriously mount up STARTING NOW as the Chinese Dhyana rack space CPUs are shipping inside China as we speak.  

China is the largest rack space growth market too, and Intel holds almost no new rack space installation sales inside China proper at this point in time.  

China as a government and as a people strongly prefer to buy a Chinese built chipset due to Trump's recent trade war attacks and his two year's worth of various Intel Xenon export restrictions.

So, Intel is shedding market share right now like the Wicked Witch of the West did once the mop water hit her in the face.



MELTING .......  melting ......  (groan) ......  melting        
My Intel Inside worldwide market share is melting .....




http://fortune.com/2018/06/18/amd-stock-price-intel/

Gus Richard, an analyst at Northland Capital Markets, on Monday downgraded his rating on Intel’s stock to “underperform” with a price target about 20% below Intel’s closing price on Friday. Increased competition from AMD, greater use of graphics chips in many data centers (for performing AI tasks), and a diminishing ability by Intel to unveil chip manufacturing advances ahead of rivals are all hurting, Richard noted.

AMD (AMD, -1.70%) has lately been updating its revived chip line with second generation improvements to the Ryzen chip for PCs and Epyc chip for servers.

“The performance gap between Intel and AMD has narrowed substantially,” according to Richard. “AMD is now well positioned to compete in desktop and notebook markets. While AMD’s parts may sell at a discount to Intel’s the discount is declining and the price points are increasing.”

Intel said it was ready for the competition. “While we are prepared for a more competitive environment as we move through 2018, we’ve already factored that into our financial forecast and we’re in a great position to compete,” Intel said in a statement. “We remain very confident in our products, our roadmap and our competitive position.” The company pointed to its Xeon processor Scalable family and upcoming new Intel Optane DC persistent memory and storage technology as examples.

This last paragraph once again shows Intel REALLY wants the business world to remain completely oblivious to the fact that Micron has dumped them as an Optane partner and the Core i9 and Xenon Scalable Chipsets (same stuff actually) are really running head on into some very hard thermal throttling issues.    

Those last two cores that Intel tacked on were two cores too many -- older lower core count processors from two years ago can do the same real workload items quicker unless the new Core i9 processor equipped laptop is literally put inside a freezer to keep the works cool enough for all the cores to function at Intel's intended specified rates.



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https://www.zdnet.com/article/computex-2018-amd-previews-32-core-2nd-gen-thre...

As Intel struggles to find cooling solutions for their newest Core i9 and other rack space chipsets that they now call "Gamer" chipsets, AMD has done what they said they would do at Computex inside the 3 months time span they said they would do it inside.

32 cores, 64 threads, it goes into existing dual socket standard AMD thread ripper motherboards with existing standard cooling options fully workable --- a rational established gamer technology that is naturally unlocked and completely over-clockable.

It is here.   It is real.   For any test you care to mention it completely trashes Intel's very best 24 core  "promised for production but only available as samples at this time" Core i9 / Epic / Xenon chipsets.

The 32 core AMD chipset is 53% faster than Intel's 24 core best and it does not have the severe throttling issues that haunt the power hungry hot running 24 core Intel unit.

AMD has added some sweet sweet frosting on the top of their cake, the CPU itself costs $400 less for each processor, that is $800 per pair less than existing Intel offerings that do not perform as well and make more heat and throttle a lot more .....  and Intel will require you to buy new sockets and new motherboards and some expensive fancy memory stuff that AMD does not require to get up towards that better speed levels.



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https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-got-a-new-plan-for-managing-windows-...

I have been saying for the last longest time Microsoft was going to a subscription basis for you to use their Windows 10 software.

This starts this month in the Business world first, as a new Microsoft run MONTHLY subscription system for your PC hardware complete with all consumer/business MS OS and software products.

MS is branching out, it seems ........  and they are really going to own your PC now legally  .....

Yep, Justin --- MS will in essence lease the hardware out along with the software, retaining ownership of both, retaining legal rights to go in and alter both at will at night as the nightly updates roll.   For whatever reason, be it good or bad in the eyes of the user.

The rub becomes cost, add those monthly charges up and you are really just buying your computer over and over and over again as the years roll by ......

Google has a much better deal for overall cost .....    Mickey needs to figure out how to get their total ownership cost DOWN a bunch ASAP as Google is actively moving in on business now, gaining business acceptance and increasing their market share significantly.

We are seeing Mickey's first reaction moves to the Chromebook Crostini System for Linux and what Crostini is doing to make both Linux apps and Windows apps able to be loaded on to a standard Chromebook in a painless fashion.



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I know I have been telling you guys for a while now that all Linux Apps are all coming to Chromebooks soon.   This has happened already for 18 Chromebooks now in the Developer mode, but rumors are now spreading that the last major bugs to Crostini have been worked out and on one of the very next general Chrome OS release numbers this feature will go live across the board as standard, just like the Android app support has done.  

This means Chrome 69 or Chrome 70 will have this Linux ability naturally, which is sensible since Google has already put in full isolation Sandboxing into Chrome 68 which opens the door wide for the Linux (and for those nasty funky Windows apps) to safely run inside their own little sheltered worlds inside your modern Chromebook.

This latest move by Google has tightened the screws on MS big time, and is thought to be prompting MS to only be willing to release their newest apps when combined with a totally locked down hardware and OS system set up.

Business will quickly disabuse MS that they are calling the shots in this area as Chrome/Linux/Wine is willing to load your old version Windows OS and App install disks and MS will quickly find that they no longer call a lot of the shots anywhere any longer .......

Versions of Chrome OS are available now that will run on re-purposed old MS machines, so hardware simply isn't the limiting factor that MS and Intel would wish for it to be.   This also says Wintel can't force you to go buy a new machine quite so easily any more, as Chrome OS is so light and fast it runs really really well on old generation Windows machines, just like Linux is willing to do.



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Now toss in the Linux idea of Snaps and Flatpacks and realize that devoted enthusiasts in the major distro worlds will be putting together flat packs and snaps to do ANY Windows program or game that your hardware can handle, no matter how stubborn that program might be to set up.  

You will be able to go get a snap or a flatpack from off the internet, make it legal by the existence of your software discs and just go DO IT.

Legalities can always get manipulated by MS and it is expected that all programmers who can do so will go to a freeware Windows world alternative such as REACTOS or LINUX/WINE for the Windows type operating portions that Chrome OS cannot supply.  

Certainly MS is capable of tweeking their OS literally overnight to stymie an offending Snap or Flatpack, but MS but cannot easily do so if it is really Reactos/Linux/Wine that is operating under the Snap/Flatpack's covers.

 So other than the cost what is a negative to leasing PC's and the software from a company that will do all the work of keeping it maintained for me?

 This sounds like a cell-phone plan to me.