Month: November 2020

The programmability of a processor is a scale is all about flexibility and performance – something highly programmable and customizable is adaptable to all sort of situations, but often isn’t as fast. However, something that has a very specified compute pathway can go very fast, but can’t do much beyond that pathway. On the flexible side, we have FPGAs, that can be configured to do almost anything. On the fixed side, we have ASICs, such as fixed function hardware for AI. Somewhere in the middle is what’s called a ‘Structured ASIC’, which tries to combine as many benefits from the two.

An FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array, is a piece of silicon built that can be configured after manufacturing. By implementing a series of programmable logic blocks, memory cells, and layers of connectivity, a programmer with enough knowledge can configure the FPGA to run the equivalent of unique circuit designs for specific functions. For example, any series of AI calculations can be done on a CPU core slowly, and a subset of them can be very fast on a GPU, but if that calculation methodology has to change, the FPGA can be adjusted to be GPU-like of efficiency while being as configurable as the CPU.

An ASIC, by contrast, is a very fixed unit of hardware. By knowing what sort of calculations are expected, an ASIC can implement those calculations very fast and very efficiently, but it can only do that sort of calculation. For example, a graphics card can be thought of as an ASIC, as it does graphics very well, however the special 4K decode engine inside the GPU is better suited to the term of an ASIC, because all it does is decode 4K images/video and it knows how to do it much faster and much more efficiently than a CPU or an FPGA could.

Obviously if there are security concerns, an FPGA has the ability to perhaps be configured to avoid that issue. An ASIC by contrast has no solution. FPGAs can be deployed with updates to be sent later, whereas ASICs cannot be updated. FPGAs are initially very cheap, and ASICs require a lot of up-front non-reusable engineering (NRE) costs, however when built at scale, can offer something cheaper at orders of magnitude lower power and higher performance. These are some of the trade-offs.

A structured ASIC (or for Intel, an eASIC), is something between the two. The underlying design of an eASIC product is similar to an FPGA, but by doing some small upfront NRE/circuit design, an eASIC company changes some of its silicon manufacturing masks for FPGAs for the design in question. This means that the eASIC is no longer as configurable as an FPGA as it now has some rigid pathways in its silicon, but it takes gains some of the performance and power efficiency by having rigid pathways. It also hasn’t required the large amount of design costs that a full ASIC requires, and thus saves a lot of cost, and the product ends up somewhere between an FPGA and an ASIC.

For any company interested in something like a structured ASIC, it means developing a relationship with a vendor offering a portfolio of structured ASIC base designs, and then implementing some level of circuit customization on top at the point of manufacture.

Intel recently purchased a company called eASIC in mid-2018 to do just this, and the first line of products are called the N5X eASICs (Diamond Mesa, for anyone following code names), which add-in hardened embedded CPU cores to allow for control and security. A number of technologies have been pulled in from the Intel Agilex FPGA family to improve the previous eASIC offering, as well as a software platform.

The N5X series base design is built on a 16nm process (TSMC, by virtue of the acquisition), uses up to 80 million eASIC gates (8.8 million FPGA-like look up tables/logic elements), 225 megabits of dual port memory, supports 32G transceiver tiles, and features a quad-core A53 hard processor system. The N5X product line is in the form of N5Xabc, where abc is the number of FPGA-equivalent cells divided by 100,000 – thus the top model is the N5X088, with 8.8 million.

With customers implementing their own DSPs and pipelines into the N5X, Intel is promising faster time-to-market than traditional ASICs, up to 50% lower power than FPGAs with smaller form factor packaging, overall lower unit cost than FPGAs, and enhanced security.

Intel decided to make this announcement at its FPGA Technology Day, which coincided directly with the annual Supercomputing conference. It seemed odd that Intel would cause the two to clash. The N5X family of products however won’t be in production until Q2 2021.

Despite obvious handicaps, Apple’s M1-based MacBooks delivered a laudable performance in a head-to-head against the latest performance workhorses from AMD.

The tests were performed by custom high-end desktop assemblers Puget Systems who wanted to test the performance penalties of Apple’s decision to move away from Intel processors to ARM-based ones.

Puget pitted two of their AMD PCs equipped with Ryzen 5800X and Ryzen 5950X against the MacBook Air and Pro, and were themselves impressed by the Apple M1’s performance given the obvious impediments of the new architecture that prevent it from unleashing their true potential.

Apples to oranges

Puget only builds PCs and doesn’t have any in the same price range as the new MacBooks. They explain that the machines they’ve used in the test “scored roughly the same as the new MacBooks” in previous benchmarks, despite costing about twice the M1-based laptops.

Unsurprisingly, in virtually all the benchmarks, the new MacBooks were only about half as fast as the better stocked desktops. However as Puget notes, “for a mobile platform that is roughly half the cost, the new MacBooks hold up pretty well.”

What makes the results even more interesting is the fact that the tests were conducted using Adobe software that was running through a translation layer on the Macs. That’s because Adobe hasn’t yet ported their Creative Cloud suite to the ARM architecture. 

If anything these benchmarks confirm that the new Apple M1 machines are no slouch. As Puget notes, it’ll be really interesting to see how the new MacBooks perform once Adobe improves support for the M1.

There’s no getting away from the fact that the Alienware AW5520QF is a massive screen. It’s awesomely massive though, not annoyingly so. But at 55-inches you’re going to need a big ol’ desk just give this somewhere to sit, and you’ll want to be sat back from it as well. Because even with its native 4K resolution, you’re looking at a fairly low 80ppi (pixels per inch), where we usually avoid anything less than 100ppi for normal viewing distances, but you know, some things are worth making an exception for. This is one of those things.

Playing on a screen this big is going to give all your games the epic treatment. Seriously imagine Cyberpunk 2077 on this—you’ll have an experience few can enjoy. Or WoW: Shadowlands for that matter, that’s going to feel special. In fact, just about any game where you have been vistas to behold is going to be amazing. 

As already stated this is a 4K screen, and it supports 120Hz refresh rates too, making for a silky smooth gaming experience. On top of that, it supports AMD FreeSync and is Nvidia G-Sync compatible too, so smooth frames whatever hardware you’re packing. Dell quotes a 0.5ms grey-to-grey response time as well, which means that this panel is no slouch. 

The other big news on the specifications front is the fact this is an OLED screen. The colour reproduction from OLED is vivid and rich, but it’s the ability to totally turn off the pixels to produce incredible blacks that really stands out. Contrast is on a completely different level to the likes of IPS and VA technologies, which explains why Dell is quoting a Contrast Ratio of 130,000:1. If you like to play horror games, then this is the screen for you.

Along with a USB 3.0 hub, you’ll also find three HDMI ports to plug things into, you know in case you’ve got an Xbox Series S/X or a Playstation 5. There’s a DisplayPort too, which is the main connection you’ll want to use with your PC. You even get a remote with this bad boy, for those kick back and enjoy moments.

This screen would normally set you back a hefty £3,576, but thanks to the joy of Black Friday you can get over 50% off, which means you only pay £1,699. That’s a bargain and a half.

The longer it takes for DDR5 memory to grab a foothold in the market (none of AMD’s or Intel’s consumer platforms support the next-gen memory standard…yet), the higher overclockers will continue to push DDR4 RAM. Now the record to beat is a hair over 7GHz.

That is incredibly fast for DDR4 memory. It was just over a year ago when I naively wondered if overclockers would break the 6GHz barrier on DDR4, and sure enough, some did with a kit of G.Skill memory. Now 14 months later, bragging rights belong to Micron and its Crucial Ballistix Max memory.

Micron got a huge assist from an overclocker in China who goes by “baby-j,” who validated their achievement at CPU-Z and HWBOT. They set the record with a single Crucial Ballistix Max DDR4-4000 memory module, hitting 7,004.2MHz. That represents a 75 percent overclock over what is already a fast frequency.

The record overclock was also achieved using MSI’s MEG B550 Unify-X motherboard and a Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G processor. And as you might expect, the RAM and CPU were bathed in liquid nitrogen. So in other words, this is not something you are going to duplicate at home on a whim (or with air cooling), nor does it have any real-world application.

Nevertheless, in the realm of record overclocks, baby-j deserves a tip of the hat for going further than anyone else ever has with DDR4 memory. At least for now. We won’t see any consumer DDR5 platforms this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this record gets broken before 2021 rolls around.

That said, DDR5 is in mass production as memory makers prepare for future chipsets. The first kits will run at speeds from 4,800-5,600MHz. That’s not 7GHz, but they also will not require any exotic cooling, just good old fashioned heatspreaders and good airflow.

The desktop versions of NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 3000 graphics cards may still be almost impossible to come across, but the company has a lot more Ampere-based SKUs planned, including three mobile variants. According to a new report by Wccftech, ASUS and MSI will begin selling RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 laptops from as early as January 2021. There will be equivalents from HP, Dell and Lenovo, but laptops from these OEMs will not arrive until April 2021.

NVIDIA will continue to supply the ageing GTX 1650, GTX 1650 Ti and GTX 1660 Ti to manufacturers too, although these will be paired with new processors from AMD and Intel. The RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 will be offered with AMD APUs too, a change from the current setup. These APUs will be the Ryzen 5000H series, which AMD is yet to announce. There will also be Intel Tiger Lake-H laptops with the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, though.

Wccftech claims that the RTX 3070 will be available from US$1,299, with the RTX 3080 pitched at US$1,999. Additionally, an RTX 3060 will be arriving in 1H 2021, and from US$999. Apparently, these prices are NVIDIA’s recommendations, so actual prices will vary between OEMs.

NVIDIA still has the desktop version of the RTX 3060 Ti to launch too, which is reputedly due on December 2. Similarly, the RTX 3050, RTX 3050 Ti, RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 Ti are slated for release in January 2021. Hence, it will be a busy few months for NVIDIA if all the rumours hold water.