It’s this time of the year when we look back at what happened, and what may be next. 2020 did not pan out as planned in more ways than one, but there were still some interesting developments. Based on 2019 announcements, 2020 was promising to be an exciting year for Amlogic and Rockchip with the expected launch of RK3588 and S908X high-end processors for 8K capable devices, but we’ll have to wait for 2021 for this to happen. Instead, the most interesting processor of the year from the Allwinner, Amlogic, and Rockchip offerings was probably Amlogic S905X4 processing adding AV1 hardware decoding. As pointed out in our “RISC-V 2020 highlights” post, it was a fairly eventful year for RISC-V architecture, although there’s still a long road ahead, especially for application processors. We had seen some general-purpose and Bluetooth RISC-V MCUs in 2019, but 2020 saw the launch of the first […]
Intel NUC M15 Laptop Kit serves as an Evo-qualified Tiger Lake laptop reference design
Intel NUC mini PCs or mini Desktops have been around for over 8 years, but now Intel has just announced an NUC laptop kit. Wait… What? Yep, NUC just stands for “Next Unit of Computing”, so it can be any kind of computer, and the company’s latest NUC is Intel NUC M15 laptop kit (codenamed “Bishop County”) powered by an Intel 11th generation Tiger Lake processor. The NUC M15 laptop kit complies with Project Athena that aims for thin laptops with fast response times and long battery life and targets the whitebook market, so Intel customers can use it as a reference design meeting Intel Evo platform brand requirements. Intel NUC M15 laptop kit (LAPBC710 and LAPBC510) specifications: SoC LAPBC710 – Intel Core i7-1165G7 quad-core/octa-thread Tiger Lake processor @ up to 2.8 GHz (base) / 4.7 GHz (Turbo single-core) / 4.1 GHz (Turbo all-core) with 12M Cache, 96 EU Intel […]
Intel unveils eASIC N5X Structured ASIC, and the Open FPGA Stack
Intel’s virtual FPGA Technology Day 2020 is taking place today, and the company made two announcements before the event. First, the company introduced the new Intel eASIC N5X structured eASIC family with an Intel FPGA compatible hard processor system to design to quickly create applications across 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud, and edge workloads. In addition, Intel also announced the Intel Open FPGA Stack (aka Intel OFS), a scalable, open-source (intel calls it “source-accessible”) hardware and software infrastructure available through git repositories design to ease the work of hardware, software, and application developers. Intel eASIC N5X eASIC N5X is the first structure ASIC from the company to integrate an Intel FPGA compatible Quad-core Armv8 hard processor system. The new chips will help customers bring custom solutions faster to market compared to traditional ASICs thanks to the FPGA fabric, and at a cheaper cost and with up to 50% lower core power […]
Intel Celeron 6305 and Pentium Gold 7505 Tiger Lake Processors Launched
Intel launched various Core i3/i5/i7 Tiger Lake processors in early September, shortly followed by more Core i3/i5/i7 UP3 Tiger Lake Embedded SoCs, so I was a little confused when Congatec launched a Tiger Lake COM Express module with of choice of processors including the usual Core processor plus an unnamed Celeron Tiger Lake processor because none were listed in Intel Ark. But a few weeks have passed, and there are now three new Celeron and Pentium Tiger Lake processors in the list namely: Pentium Gold 7505, Celeron 6305, and Celeron 6305E with the later optimized for embedded & IoT applications with a wider temperature range from 0 to 100°C. All three processors come with a 15W TDP and are manufactured using Intel’s 10nm process. As we can see from the table below both Celeron 6305 and Celeron 6305E have the exact same key features. The main difference between the Celeron […]
Intel Unveils Atom x6000E Series, Celeron and Pentium Elkhart Lake IoT Edge Processors
We’ve been expecting Intel Elkhart Lake processors for more than a year, and the company has now officially announced the “IoT-enhanced processors” with a new Atom x6000E Series, as well as some Celeron and Pentium N/J parts. Last year, we thought Elkhart Lake would succeed Gemini lake, but the new 11th generation 10nm processors may not be found in many consumer devices, as they target IoT edge applications with additional artificial intelligence (AI), security, functional safety, and real-time capabilities. The company has announced a total of 12 Elkhart Lake processors with all but one featuring 10th Generation Intel UHD Graphics and divided into eight Atom x6000E series processors. and four Celeron/Pentium parts Intel further explains Elkhart Lake IoT edge processors deliver up to two times better 3D graphics compared to Pentium J4205 Apollo Lake processor, come with Intel Programmable Services Engine real-time offload engine with support for out-of-band and in-band […]
Intel NUC 9 Extreme “Ghost Canyon” Kit – NUC9i9QNX Review
I’ve previously written about Intel’s (relatively) new NUC 9 range of mini PCs and now I am following up with my experiences of having bought one. Whilst I’ll cover some performance metrics from both Windows and Ubuntu I’ll also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using either OS together with a comparison of gaming, thermals, and power usage as well as a brief look at overclocking potential and implications together with highlighting the issues encountered. NUC9i9QNX Hardware Overview The model I purchased and will be reviewing here is the NUC9i9QNX from Intel’s Ghost Canyon lineup and is formally known as the Intel NUC 9 Extreme Kit – NUC9i9QNX. It contains a “Compute Element” with an i9-9980HK which is an eight-core 16-thread 2.40 GHz processor boosting to 5.00 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics 630. The full specifications of the NUC9i9QNX include: The NUC9i9QNX is sold as a kit which essentially means […]
Intel Jasper Lake Celeron & Pentium Processors Lineup Leaked
Intel has already announced Intel Tiger Lake processors designed for long battery-life, ultra-thin laptops, but which will also be found in industrial applications. I was also told Intel Elkhart Lake processors would be announced on September 24th. Elkhart Lake processors are based on the new Atom Tremont architecture, and so far, I thought they would be the successors to the affordable Gemini Lake processors. But FanlessTech just leaked the Jasper Lake lineup, also based on Tremont and whose SKUs closely match what we would expect from Gemini Lake successors. At this point, there are three desktop SKUs with 10W TDP, and three mobile SKUs with 6W TDP. All processors come with 4MB L2 cache and unspecified Intel UHD graphics. They’ll be manufactured with Intel 10nm process. What’s a bit unusual in the table above is that Intel normally uses “J” letter for 10W desktop processors, and “N” for mobile processors, […]
Intel Launches 11th Gen Intel Core “Tiger Lake” Processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics
Intel has officially launched Tiger Lake processors for thin-and-light Laptops. The new 11th generation processors come with either Intel Iris Xe graphics or the older Intel UHD graphics, and nine processors are currently available divided into two families: UP3 with 12W to 28W configurable TDP, and UP4 with 7W to 15W configurable TDP. Manufactured with a 10nm process, the new processors are said to deliver up to 2.7x faster content creation (Photo Editing), more than 20% faster office productivity in Office 365, and more than 2x faster gaming plus streaming when comparing an Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor to AMD Ryzen 7 4800U. The new Intel Iris Xe graphics comes with up to 96 EUs and up to 16MB of L3 cache, and Intel claims it outperforms 90% of the discrete graphics usually paired with U-series processors. Tiger Lake processors also integrate a new DP4a instruction set for neural network inferencing […]