Written by
bojsa
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 13:23
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Recently, we have devoted much attention to the APU, which is one of the largest inovations that AMD has introduced to the IT industry. Placing a serious graphics system inside a processor is the great success of this company wich dosn't hide their pride about this product, and with a good reason. True, the concept is not new, because Intel has earlier presented almost the same thing, except for the fact that the northbridge is not integrated in their process.
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Written by
Vladimir Dimitrijevic
Friday, 04 November 2011 19:23
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We’ve been presenting a lot of new AMD products lately. APUs are slowly descending into the mainstream, and the very philosophy of using the PC has changed together with user needs. Making a brute-force CPU isn’t all that hard to do, but the balance of price, performance and power/heat dissipation of such a CPU is no longer a viable solution. AMD’s K10 CPU architecture and its revisions have been around for a long time. On the other hand, Intel has had a more advanced, or to be precise, better optimised product. All these factors put AMD in front of an arduous task - changing their microarchitecture completely and designing the new one from scratch. Expectations were high! The Bulldozer architecture is finally before us, but before presenting it, let’s have a reminder about what constitutes a modern CPU and processors in general.
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Written by
Ivan Todorovic
Monday, 19 September 2011 17:41
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 We’ve written a lot about AMD’s first Llano CPU lately, but time was scarce on each occasion, and we’ve somehow failed to look at it from the practical side. In the meantime, another CPU from the series came out, as did a new motherboard signed by ASUS, so we thought we might as well profit from the occasion and really get to know the capabilities of the new chip. As we already know, Llano is a quad-core APU which comprises integrated graphics and the controllers from what used to be the northbridge. The specificity of the new APU is that the CPU cores and the integrated GPU share a lot of electronics, which means that this is not merely placing several chips into a single piece of hardware, but truly creating a symbiosis between various elements contained within; Llano is the first product to combine the CPU and the GPU in this way.
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Written by
Nebojsa Todorovic
Friday, 09 September 2011 14:27
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 Whenever you’re willing to buy a new PC or upgrade your graphics card, there will be a colleague, neighbour or friend who’ll tell you that the CPU is going to be a bottleneck if you take a really strong graphics card. Truth be told, these claims are not without basis in fact, but lately, we’ve been under the impression that the issue has been overblown by far. In other words, how many people do you know who’ve actually tested a certain graphics card model with several CPUs and can back up their claims in fact? Certainly, there is a difference between various CPU generations, but how does a Core i3 cope with applications other than the CPU-intensive ones compared to Core i5? Is the price difference of 50€ a clever investment if the only thing you care about as far as performance goes is the number of frames per second?
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Written by
Nebojsa Todorovic
Wednesday, 29 June 2011 23:43
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 After the successful launch of the new APU generation, AMD has finally presented the cream of the crop of their product gamma - the A-series (codenamed Llano). Models from the A-series can be expected in portable PCs, all-in-one PCs, desktop configurations and similar devices which require a high level of performance, but are consumption-sensitive. The A-series APU contains three components that we’ve only been able to see separately thus far: the northbridge chip, the quad-core CPU and discreet DirectX 11 graphics, and all that at less than half the consumption of these three components when separated. Of course, packing all this onto a single piece of silicon was no easy task, making A-series the one with the largest APU surface of all Fusion platform products (228 m²) and the maximum consumption of 35 to 45 W.
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Written by
Marko Nesovic
Monday, 03 January 2011 17:31
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  Unlike our watches that tick-tock thirty times a minute, Intel has tweaked their clock so that it tick-tocks twice a year, in order to, among other things, remind us that it's time for improving existing technology. This year's “tock” brings us a new microarchitecture, codenamed Sandy Bridge. We've already covered the theoretical aspects of Sandy Bridge in two separate articles recently; well, perhaps not theoretical, but certainly without a tangible model in front of us to provide us with first-hand results. The previous articles were based on the information released to the public by Intel, as well as some that found their way out in spite of Intel's will. The time has finally come for us to see whether the words of Intel's representatives about energy-efficient performance, major advancements in the graphics field, Turbo Boost technology optimisation etc. ring true and are truly based on actual results.
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Written by
Vladimir Dimitrijevic
Saturday, 01 January 2011 21:30
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  We've recently tried to explain and clarify most of the novelties brought to us by Sandy Bridge CPUs in an article, according to the information that we'd been able to acquire. Naturally, there were a few grains that have remained a mystery until the actual CPUs were physically available to us, so let's have a look at those.
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Written by
Marko Nesovic
Wednesday, 22 December 2010 01:47
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 Although Intel still hasn't officially presented their new microarchitecture, as part of the successful Tick-Tock strategy, for those who just can't wait for the beginning of next year, we've decided to peek through the thick curtains obscuring Sandy Bridge. A good deal of information concerning the aforementioned microarchitecture is already readily available online, so we thought it might be a good idea to clarify what you should expect of it.
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Written by
Ivan Todorovic
Sunday, 05 September 2010 13:00
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  Do you remember the times when CPUs were chosen based on whether you were assembling a gaming PC, in which case you'd opt for cheaper Celerons and Durons, or a heavy workload PC, in which case you'd buy the more expensive Pentiums and Athlons? It came to our mind on multiple occasions during this test. Those days of single-core CPUs, when Megahertz were the only relevant thing, and the difference between home and professional models consisted in the difference in the quantity of cache memory, only served to underline the problems that modern-day users are facing when assembling a new PC. Is a tri-core CPU enough for current games, or should one go for a quad-core? Will the L3 cache play any role in game performance, or is an ordinary Athlon II enough? A weaker Core i7 and a cheaper P55/H55 motherboard, or a stronger one and an expensive X58 mobo? Who gives more bang for buck, Intel or AMD? Questions are many, responses come down to less-than-clear PC forum experts, and the buyer often feels underachieving, as if it were only a question of a few additional euros to build a significantly better PC. It came to a point where we considered indispensable to try and find everything we possibly could in the CPU department from dealers and retailers, and make them cross swords in the most common PC tasks.
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Written by
Djordje Kovacevic
Sunday, 09 May 2010 20:07
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  In the beginning of 2010, Intel presented their first CPUs manufactured in 32 nm lithography, therefore beginning the Tick phase. This refers to Intel’s development model, called Tick-Tock, designating two phases in development. The Tick phase means presenting a new manufacturing process developed on current architecture, whereas the following Tock phase means that Intel presents a completely new architecture.
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