Benchmarking the Radeon Pro W5700
Performance: relative to its predecessor and the most comparable Nvidia offering
Intel’s new 14-nm Xeon W 2200 processors
Intel once envisioned a 2018 where 10-nm processors were shipping out of its fabs, followed by a subsequent introduction of a major new core microarchitecture. However, the company’s well-chronicled delays with 10-nm meant another “optimization” generation extending Skylake one more time on 14++ was in order to fill the gap. For the Core brand processors serving high-performance PC and Entry … Read more
Doubling down on ray tracing at GTC 2019
And the fact they are so symbiotic could have a lasting and dramatic impact on 3D visual processing. Right at the outset of this year’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went out of his way to give graphics a hefty dose of respect, acknowledging that 3D visual processing remains the company’s bread and butter business. Now from … Read more
Nvidia’s most accessible Turing-class Quadro: the RTX 4000
Benchmarking and assessing a Turing-class GPU a much different process
Keeping up a Moore’s Law pace … with or without Moore’s Law
As a sign of its renewed focus on constructing and articulating a coherent strategy for the future, Intel recently held an industry analyst summit, the first in four years. The confluence of the slowing of Moore’s Law transistor scaling, a rapidly transitioning computing paradigm from distributed, local clients to data-rich clouds, and energized competition from competing providers of high-performance silicon … Read more
The workstation market in Q3’18: Economic conditions and demand drive the market to record levels
Vendors are justifiably more confident to hang their hats on the workstation market than most other PC-related markets. And for good reason, the workstation does not suffer (at least not to a substantial degree) from the forces that have been dragging on the mainstream PC market as of late, namely lagging replacement cycles due to reaching “good enough” computing levels, … Read more
AMD’s Next Horizon dawns with 7nm Epyc Rome Zen 2 processor
If Las Vegas placed odds on what news AMD would break in San Francisco at its Next Horizon, the heavy favorites would have been clear: the official announcements of both Zen 2 processor technology and the first 7 nm device based on Zen 2, an abundantly-core’d Epyc CPU for server and workstation applications. Both have been on corporate roadmaps and … Read more
The Tale of Turing
Nvidia’s long expected successor to Pascal in gaming and professional graphics markets is here. At Siggraph in August, Nvidia pulled the covers off of Turing, which one could argue is both a successor to not one but both of its preceding generations, Pascal and Volta. In the process, Nvidia confirmed several of the more expected advancements in its next flagship … Read more
Lenovo upgrades its 17-in ThinkPad mobile workstation with Coffee Lake
It has turned into the summer of mobile workstation refreshes — and new products — for Lenovo. In June, the company launched an upgrade of its core 15-in model, the ThinkPad P52, and the introduction of a 52s. And most recently at August Siggraph, the company released a 17-inch refresh, the ThinkPad P72, along with a new (the fourth) addition … Read more
AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper: highest core count in single socket workstation
Threadripper has played a significant role in helping AMD redefine itself in the CPU market. The original Threadripper spawned from the first round of Zen generation parts in 2017, pushed the core count up to 16―more cores than the gaming or professional computing segments had seen to date. Threadripper pushed the core count up so dramatically, it forced Intel to … Read more
Intel launches Coffee Lake Xeon E (rebrand) for Entry 1S workstations
It’s been roughly two decades since workstation OEMs were building new models on their own schedules. Back in the 90’s, vertically integrated industry pioneers like SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, and DEC produced everything, from the chassis and operating systems to the CPU and GPU chips inside. They introduced new workstations whenever they were able to deliver all the key components … Read more
Incumbent Intel’s answer to challenger AMD’s dual Epyc workstation platform
Intel virtually owns the market for workstation CPUs. However, with its Zen generation processors, AMD can mount its most significant threat in years. Here, we look at the very top end of the market, assessing both massively-core’d dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable and AMD Epyc platforms.