Intel launched its high-performance Arrow Lake-H and HX series mobile processors, officially known as the Core Ultra 200H and 200HX, at CES 2025 and showed off an array of partner systems based on the chips as well. For those unfamiliar, Arrow Lake-H is very different than the lower-power Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 200S series for notebooks that launched a few months back. Arrow Lake-H is a higher-power mobile platform, that uses the same “Lion Cove” P-cores and “Skymont” E-cores as Arrow Lake-based desktop processors, but tuned for lower-power mobile applications. Arrow Lake-H also features an NPU and a relatively powerful integrated Xe-LPG+ GPU, but the NPU isn’t quite as powerful as what’s utilized in Lunar Lake. In fact Arrow Lake-H’s NPU is akin to the one Intel employed on the previous-gen Meteor Lake and desktop Arrow Lake processors. Don’t let that make you think Arrow Lake-H isn’t well suited for AI workloads, though.
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leaders in the EDA space like Cadence have continuously bolstered their toolsets to better assist customers of all sizes in the design, simulation and testing of their wares. But a few weeks ago, Cadence took things a significant step further, and actually architected, designed, and taped out what the company calls the industry’s first Arm-based system chiplet, in an effort to help customers design and implement their own chiplets.
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Just as it leads in data center AI accelerators, NVIDIA’s lead in the PC graphics space has been dominant for years and generations of products. When the company announced its forthcoming GeForce RTX 50 series of graphic cards based on its Blackwell GPU architecture back at CES in Las Vegas this year, there was almost no question as to whether NVIDIA would have the most powerful product on the market, competitively, when cards ship to gamers later this month. However, details and the nuanced picture of performance with the new GeForce RTX 5090, which is first out of the gate, had to wait until today’s embargo lift.
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It’s not uncommon to see major chip players introduce new and novel approaches to traditional computing paradigms at CES in Las Vegas in January. And if ever there was a limelight moment in that regard, AMD found it with the introduction of its new chip and platform architecture formerly known by the code name Strix Halo, and unveiled officially last week as Ryzen AI Max Series. This chip cojoins existing AMD CPU and GPU architectures, along with a high speed memory interface, in an unprecedented way, compared to traditional X86 laptop or desktop chip designs. And it’s safe to say this new Application Processing Unit, as AMD likes to call them, stole the show for many…
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At what was likely the most widely attended keynote in CES history, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage at the jam-packed Michelob Ultra arena, with a dizzying array of announcements of new technologies, from consumer devices like the new GeForce RTX 50 Series of gaming graphics cards, to a new secure autonomous vehicle platform called Thor that’s based on the company’s latest Blackwell GPU technology, and more – a lot more. However, a new Nvidia generative AI technology dubbed Cosmos, that some folks might have glossed over due to its complexity was, in my opinion, another star of the show. I’d even dare say, if Cosmos plays out as the company is intending, it could be a launch-pad for rocketing Nvidia’s robotics and autonomous vehicle businesses…
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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has caused quite the shake-up in the laptop market, with very competitive performance, fantastic battery life and a dedicated 45 TOPS neural engine for currently evolving AI workloads. I’ve written about Snapdragon X-based laptops and the platform in the past, but in this report, I’m going to delve into my experience living on Lenovo’s new Snapdragon X Elite-powered Yoga Slim 7x laptop, using the machine as my daily driver and travel workhorse.
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RISC-V chip design and IP powerhouse, SiFive, just announced availability of its new HiFive Premier P550 development board, and it's sure to make waves at the RISC-V Summit this week in Santa Clara. The new board is being billed as the highest-performing RISC-V development vehicle to date. If you're looking to push the boundaries of what's possible with RISC-V, this could be the test and development platform you’ve been waiting for.
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On October 10th, Intel took the wraps off its new Core Ultra 200S series of desktop processors, formerly know by the code name Arrow Lake. As a follow-on to the company’s recent Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V Series for laptops, Arrow Lake marks a transition that follows suit with Intel’s tiled architecture approach for its processors, which was first introduced with the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 100 series for laptops back in late 2023 in the consumer space. Intel’s tiled chiplet design, with external chip fabrication at TSMC that’s coupled with Intel’s cutting-edge Foveros chip stacking and packaging tech, has served the company well thus far. Further expanding this design approach to its desktop chip portfolio is likely just what the doctor ordered…
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The Synsopsys 40G UCIe IP affords up to 12.9Tbps per mm of data to efficiently travel between heterogeneous and/or homogeneous chiplet dies, with minimal silicon footprint. Higher bandwidth between chiplets is critical for enabling next-generation processor designs, and advanced AI and automotive ADAS systems, which must move massive amounts of data. Of note is that, despite its higher performance, Synopsys’ IP remains compliant with the UCIe 2.0 specification.
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In a conversation with AMD’s Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer and executive vice president for technology and engineering, I got a bird’s eye view regarding AMD’s philosophy and long-term sustainability and efficiency efforts. I also had a chance to connect with AMD’s Sam Naffziger, senior vice president, corporate fellow, for a deep-dive technical discussion detailing AMD’s past achievements and what it’s actively doing to maximize AI and HPC compute capabilities, though silicon and system-level optimizations and software co-optimization up and down the stack. Our discussions were eye opening.
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Last week, at one of the oldest consumer electronics industry shows, analysts and press were given hands-on access to Lunar Lake Core Ultra laptops from various OEM partners, along with a deep-dive view of Core Ultra 200V Series processor performance, delivered in a series of presentations and Q&A sessions. The promise of what Lunar Lake will deliver was very strong, so much so that competitors like Qualcomm immediately began picking apart some of the compares. This was to be expected of course, but let’s break down what you can expect from Lunar Lake and read between the lines a bit along the way as well.
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AI chip firm Tenstorrent, led by renowned microprocessor engineer Jim Keller, just announced new devkits and AI workstations powered by the company’s leading-edge Wormhole accelerators. Tenstorrent has previously offered devkits (development kits) based on its Grayskull AI processor (and will continue doing so while inventory is available), but Wormhole features a newer, more-powerful architecture, and this marks the first time the company has offered complete workstations built around its chips.
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Digital twins are fundamental in many industries for delivering products, in the most efficient and timely manner. Of course, designing and building aerospace and defense systems will have requirements that don’t directly align to some other industries, but the benefits of physically accurate simulation and digital twin technologies still apply.
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Dell has never strayed from Intel Core processors to power its XPS 13 models, so this is a first to be sure, and a bold bet for the Round Rock, Texas company. I’d offer that bet was sound, from what I’ve seen thus far, and I’m impressed with this laptop as a potential daily driver.
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AMD just announced the acquisition of Silo AI, the largest private AI lab in Europe. The companies have signed a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Silo AI in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $665 million.
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In the resounding buzz that AI stirred at Computex 2024 in Taiwan, literally all of the major semiconductor players had something to say, though not all had new technologies that will shape this burgeoning new landscape. AMD, on the other hand, stepped out with a full arsenal of new chip technologies targeted at AI-fueled computing from the client edge to gaming desktops and workstation, and the AI-infused data center.
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Lunar Lake represents a major architectural shift for Intel, manufactured on TSMC’s N3 and N6 chip fab process nodes, in an effort to leap ahead of new entrant competition from both Qualcomm and AMD. And to say both members of the media and analyst communities were waiting with baited breath for this level of detail on Intel’s new ultra-efficient processor architecture, for the age of the AI PC, would be a major understatement.
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Microsoft better defined the hardware requirements and expected experiences from the modern AI-powered PC, and it goes far beyond just a Neural Processing Unit-equipped machine capable of at least 40 TOPS.
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Snapdragon X Plus is based on the same Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU architectures as the company’s Snapdragon X Elite platform, though this chip sports a 10-core CPU complex versus 12 cores in the higher-end product, and a max multi-core frequency of 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost speeds like some of the X Elite products.
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An area of circuit design that perhaps hasn’t seen enough integration over the years, are clock timing solutions. However, that is going to change with the introduction of SiTime’s Chorus family of clock generators that are targeted at the quickly evolving AI data center and data center networking.
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