Introduction
The PC industry is tightly coupled to and utterly reliant upon the world of semiconductors. As Moore’s Law grants ever more transistors, hardware progresses, becoming more advanced and more integrated. This has accustomed the whole world to an astonishing pace of innovation. The PC ecosystem always seems to be in a state of transition, moving from the old to the new and more efficient. 2011 is a year on the threshold and in the midst of many major changes—more so than in years past.
This quarterly report is a survey of recent and upcoming introductions and the resulting PC hardware landscape. Given the quantity and scope of innovations, we focus on the new hardware that will have the greatest impact. That generally means exploring new microprocessor (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU) designs, which embody new technologies and will spawn off whole families of products. This broader approach is more useful when looking at the PC ecosystem as a whole, as opposed to focusing on the subtle differences between each individual product variation with a family. We will also discuss the overall PC landscape in light of these new CPUs and GPUs and the long-term trends that they suggest.
Unfortunately, the tech world (and in particular PC hardware) is typically littered with an assortment of code names, product names and brands that are difficult to remember, let alone put in the proper context. While this profusion of terminology is sometimes useful for those inside the industry, it largely serves to obscure the view for the rest of the world. To aid in the discussion, we have prepared a chart which explains the relevant codenames.
New CPUs and integrated graphics
The first quarter of 2011 is certainly a historic one for the PC industry, as it is the start of the transition towards integrating graphics into the microprocessor and a continuation of the trend toward lower power. Both Intel and AMD launched microprocessors with robust integrated graphics—in some cases exceeding the performance of low-end discrete components. The last time a tectonic shift like this occurred was in 1989, when the 486 integrated an x87 floating point coprocessor. Now that the GPU has been integrated into the CPU, there is yet another dimension to modern CPUs—the integrated graphics. With these new additions to the market, the breadth and number of CPU offerings has grown substantially.
At the low-power end of the spectrum, Intel will release a new generation of Atom processors in the first quarter. The new CPU is codenamed Lincroft, which runs in the neighborhood of 1.5GHz and uses a low-power variant of Intel’s 45nm manufacturing technology. The current Atom products also use a 45nm manufacturing process, but the high performance version—which has commensurately higher power consumption. While Lincroft has the same architecture as the previous generation and thus similar performance, the power should be substantially better. Systems using Lincroft will be aimed at the smartphone and tablet markets, and Intel claims 50X lower idle power reduction versus existing products. One key improvement is full 1080p multi-media decoding, which is largely due to Intel’s use of dedicated hardware in the chipset. The tablet versions will be released first, as the product design process is much quicker.
AMD kicked off 2011 with the release of its first product that integrates a low-power dual-core processor and graphics into the same silicon. For AMD, this was certainly momentous, as it was the first fruits to grow from the acquisition of ATI. These products sport a carefully optimized dual-core CPU, paired with a good performance GPU in a single chip that is manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process. The Bobcat CPUs at the heart of this product family were carefully designed to achieve low power but maintain good performance. In contrast to Intel’s low power offerings, the Bobcat cores use out-of-order execution and are intended to provide performance that is close to AMD’s previous low-power products. It certainly outstrips Lincroft in performance, while unsurprisingly falling short of low-end notebook processors.
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