Intel: 10nm Tiger Lake CPUs Will Be in 50 New Laptops Coming This Fall

Intel took the wraps off its not-so-secret central processing units (CPUs) code-named Tiger Lake, built with a 10-nanometer manufacturing process. It may has well been called Tiger Leak. From a report: The 11th Generation Intel Core Processor models include the Intel Core i7-1185G7 chip, with a base 3GHz frequency that can be boosted to 4.8GHz. The Santa Clara, California-based company has…

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold

Today, Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. AnandTech reports: The new Snapdragon 865+ is a new binned variant of the [Snapdragon 865] with higher peak frequencies on the part of the “prime” CPU as well as the GPU, promising +10% performance on both aspects. Whilst in relative terms the new chipset’s…

Nvidia Engineer Releases Open-Sourced Vulkan Graphics Driver for the Raspberry Pi

Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch. Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The…

MIT’s Tiny Artificial Brain Chip Could Bring Supercomputer Smarts To Mobile Devices

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at MIT have published a new paper that describes a new type of artificial brain synapse that offers performance improvements versus other existing versions, and which can be combined in volumes of tens of thousands on a chip that’s smaller physically than a single piece of confetti. The results could help create…

Dell’s All-AMD Gaming Laptop Hailed as a ‘Budget Blockbuster’

AMD “has a potent combination of both CPU and GPU technologies,” writes Slashdot reader MojoKid, that “can play well in the laptop market especially, where a tight coupling of the two processing engines can mean both performance and cost efficiencies.” One of the first all-AMD laptops to hit the market powered by the company’s new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors is the…

After 37 Years Microsoft Open Sources GW-BASIC

“Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft’s 1983 BASIC interpreter,” reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC “can trace its roots back to Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s implementation of Microsoft’s first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer.” “Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code…

Microsoft Launches Windows Terminal 1.0, Unveils GPU Support and Linux GUI Apps in WSL

At Build 2020 today, Microsoft gave developers a slew of new tools to coax them into using Windows over macOS or Linux. From a report: Windows Terminal is now out of preview for enterprises, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 is getting support for GPUs, Linux GUI apps, and a simplified install experience. Microsoft even released a Windows Package Manager…

NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU For AI Unveiled, Largest 7nm Chip Ever Produced

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s new Ampere A100 GPU architecture for machine learning and HPC markets today. Jensen claims the 54B transistor A100 is the biggest, most powerful GPU NVIDIA has ever made, and it’s also the largest chip ever produced on 7nm semiconductor process. There are a total of 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, 432 Tensor cores,…

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 768G: Higher-Bin 765 Up To 2.8GHz

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: Today alongside with the launch of the Xiaomi Redmi K30 5G Racing Edition, Qualcomm is announcing the new Snapdragon 768G SoC which powers the device. The new SoC is a direct follow-up to the Snapdragon 765G announced last December, and the two chips are very likely the same silicon design, with the new…

AI Drives Innovators To Build Entirely New Semiconductors

“AI has ushered in a new golden age of semiconductor innovation,” reports Forbes:
For most of the history of computing, the prevailing chip architecture has been the CPU, or central processing unit… But while CPUs’ key advantage is versatility, today’s leading AI techniques demand a very specific — and intensive — set of computations. Deep learning entails the iterative execution of millions…