• CPU

    OpenCL SDK 2013 Beta: Intel got their act together 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 23-10-12 21:24     Number of Views: 244346 
    1. Categories:
    2. Benchmark
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    Intel has a less than stellar record when it comes to driver support for anything that is not an inf-update for their mainboard chipsets. After being established by industry leaders like Apple, Nvidia and AMD, Intel could not longer ignore the industry standard OpenCL - the open compute language. More or less reluctantly, they put out driver support for their CPUs, mostly functional, but quite underwhelming when it came to performance.

    One popular example for how enthusiastic Intel was about performance optimized OpenCL drivers could readily be seen by running Luxmark for example. This raytracing benchmark utilizes OpenCL-enabled processors, no matter what kind of beast they are. When you're using a recent Radeon graphics card in your system, chances are that you already have an OpenCL-1.2-enabled driver for your central processor installed - the one that comes with AMDs Catalyst driver package.
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    Intel unveils more details about Cedar Trail processors Atom D2x00 & N2x00 [Update: Datasheets complete] 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 03-10-11 09:10     Number of Views: 86323 
    1. Categories:
    2. Article,
    3. Architecture
    Intel Atom D2700 - Cedar Trail with less-than-anticipated capabilities

    With the official launch of Cedar Trail's desktop variants D2700 and D2500 just a few days ago, more and more details about the (ultra) mobile processor based on Intels Atom mircoarchitecture are starting to appear.

    While you can read about the chip's 1.86 to 2.13 GHz frequency, their 42 - 52 Dollar price, their 32nm manufacturing, their NM10 chipset and similar basics elsewhere, I am going to concentrate on some peculiar facts that either just surfaced or were confirmed through Intels data sheet for Intel's D2000 and N2000 series of Atom processors: The missing DirectX 10.1 support, (almost) no power management for the IGP or the limited video decoding support.
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    Do not let Power Management mess up your performance analysis! 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 06-09-11 18:41  Number of Views: 104313 
    1. Categories:
    2. Article,
    3. Architecture
    Modern Processors' Power Management

    Modern processors, be they of CPU, GPU, APU or SoC flavour, employ very sophisticated power management techniques in order to better leverage the full potential of their respective functional units in combination with the applied thermal solution. What sounds quite basic is indeed a multi-dimensional topic and can easily mess with any performance analysis that is not taking into account the specifics in each processor. In this article I am giving an outline what contributes to the power management in modern processors.

    A while ago - in IT-time quite an eternity - processors had a certain clock speed which they maintained during all operations. They had a fixed TDP that defined the necessary cooling solutions' capabilities to the fraction of a watt. Of course, power was quite low compared to more recent devices in the desktop space. Mobile devices, being much more dependant on a low power consumption, employed simple techniques like a reduced state for clock speed and core voltage as early as the turn of the millenium. With more recent devices, power has become a much more important issue in more than one respect - even in the desktop space. ...
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