Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC; SEHK: 4335) is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Founded on July 18, 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation and based in Santa Clara, California, USA, Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network cards and ICs, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's successful "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.

Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until the early 1980s. While Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became their primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the PC industry. During this period Intel became the dominant supplier of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics in defense of its market position, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.[5][6] The 2007 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by Millward Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value falling 10 places – from number 15 to number 25.[7]

In addition to its work in semiconductors, Intel has begun research in electrical transmission and generation.[8][9]

Intel Core i7

Intel Core i7 is a family of three Intel desktop x86-64 processors, the first processors released using the Intel Nehalem microarchitecture and the successor to the Intel Core 2 family. All three models are quad-core processors.[1][2][3][4] The Core i7 identifier applies to the initial family of processors[5][6] codenamed Bloomfield.[7] Intel representatives state that the moniker Core i7 does not have any deeper meaning. The name continues the use of the successful Core brand.[8] Core i7 is manufactured in Costa Rica [9] and was officially launched on November 17, 2008.



Features
The Nehalema architecture has many new features, some of which are present in the Core i7. The ones that represent significant changes from the Core 2 include:

* The new LGA 1366 socket is incompatible with earlier processors.
* On-die memory controller: the memory is directly connected to the processor.
o Three channel memory: each channel can support one or two DDR3 DIMMs. Motherboards for Core i7 have four (3+1) or six DIMM slots instead of two or four, and DIMMs should be installed in sets of three, not two.
o Support for DDR3 only.
o No ECC support.
* The front side bus is replaced by QuickPath interface. Motherboards must use a chipset that supports QuickPath. As of 5 December 2008 (2008 -12-05)[update], Intel, EVGA, ASUS, MSI, Foxconn, Supermicro, and Gigabyte have all released X58 motherboards, all supporting the i7's LGA1366 Socket interface.
* Single-die device: all four cores, the memory controller, and all cache are on a single die.
* "Turbo Boost" technology allows all active cores to intelligently clock themselves up in steps of 133 MHz over the design clock rate as long as the CPU's predetermined thermal and electrical requirements are still met.[11] This mode isn't enabled when the CPU is manually over-clocked by the user.
* Re-implemented Hyper-threading. Each of the four cores can process two threads simultaneously, so the processor appears to the OS as eight CPUs. This feature was present in the older NetBurst architecture but was dropped in Core.
* On-die, shared, inclusive 8MB L3 cache.
* Only one QuickPath interface: not intended for multi-processor motherboards.
* 45nm process technology.
* 731M transistors.
* Sophisticated power management can place an unused core in a zero-power mode

Turion 64

Turion 64 is the brand name AMD applies to its 64-bit low-consumption (mobile) processors codenamed K8L.[1] The Turion 64 and Turion 64 X2 processors compete with Intel's mobile processors, initially the Pentium M and currently the Intel Core and Intel Core 2 processors.

Earlier Turion 64 processors are compatible with AMD's Socket 754. The newer "Richmond" models are designed for AMD's Socket S1. They are equipped with 512 or 1024 KiB of L2 cache, a 64-bit single channel on-die memory controller, and an 800 MHz HyperTransport bus. Battery saving features, like PowerNow!, are central to the marketing and usefulness of these CPUs.

Turion 64 X2

Turion 64 X2 is AMD's 64-bit dual-core mobile CPU, intended to compete with Intel's Core and Core 2 CPUs. The Turion 64 X2 was launched on May 17, 2006[1], after several delays. These processors use Socket S1, and feature DDR2 memory. They also include AMD Virtualization Technology and more power-saving features.

AMD first produced the Turion 64 X2 on IBM's 90 nm Silicon on insulator (SOI) process (cores with the Taylor codename). As of May 2007, they have switched to a 65 nm Silicon-Germanium stressed process[citation needed], which was recently achieved through the combined effort of IBM and AMD, with 40% improvement over comparable 65 nm processes[citation needed]. The earlier 90 nm devices were codenamed Taylor and Trinidad, while the newer 65 nm cores have codename Tyler.

AMD Fusion

AMD Fusion is the codename for a future next-generation microprocessor design and the product of the merger between AMD and ATI, combining general processor execution as well as 3D geometry processing and other functions of modern GPUs into a single package. AMD's merger with ATI closed on October 25, 2006. This technology is expected to debut in the second half of 2011 [1]; as a successor of the latest microarchitecture.

Regarding future AMD microarchitectures beyond the introduction of the latest microarchitecture at mid-2007 and a refresh of the microarchitecture in late 2007 and early 2008; AMD executive VP Henri Richard's June 2006 interview with DigiTimes hints at the future processor development beyond that of the well documented one:

“Q: What is your broad perspective on the development of AMD processor technology over the next three to four years?

A: Well, as Dirk Meyer commented at our analysts meeting, we're not standing still. We've talked about the refresh of the current K8 architecture that will come in '07, with significant improvements in many different areas of the processor, including integer performance, floating point performance, memory bandwidth, interconnections and so on. You know that platform still has a lot of legs under it, but of course we're not standing still, and there's a next-generation core that's being worked on. I can't give you more details right now, but I think that what's important is that we're establishing clearly that this is a two-horse race. And as you would expect in a race, sometimes, when one horse is a little bit in front of the other, it reverses the situation. But what's important is that it is a race.”

GeForce

GeForce is a brand of PC graphics processor units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia. The first GeForce products were designed and marketed for the high-margin computer gamer market, but later the product's releases expanded the product line to cover all tiers of the graphics market, from low-end to high-end. As of 2008[update], there have been ten iterations of the design. Nvidia only designs the chips; manufacturing is outsourced. While several companies (notably, Intel) design low-end GPUs, only Nvidia's GeForce and ATI's Radeon series compete for the high-end GPU market.

Name origin
The "GeForce" name originated from a contest held by Nvidia in early 1999. Called "Name That Chip", the contest called out to the public to name the successor to the RIVA TNT2 line of graphics boards. There were over 12,000 entries received and 7 winners received a RIVA TNT2 Ultra graphics board as a reward.[1][2]

Opteron

The Opteron is AMD's x86 server processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core (K8) and was intended to compete in the server market, particularly in the same segment as the Intel Xeon processor. Processors based on the AMD K10 microarchitecture (codenamed Barcelona) were announced on September 10, 2007 featuring a new quad-core configuration.

Technical description Two key capabilities

Opteron combines two important capabilities in a single processor die:

1. native execution of legacy x86 32-bit applications without speed penalties
2. native execution of x86-64 64-bit applications

The first capability is notable because at the time of Opteron's introduction, the only other 64-bit processor architecture marketed with 32-bit x86 compatibility (Intel's Itanium) ran x86 legacy-applications only with significant speed degradation. The second capability, by itself, is less noteworthy, as all major RISC makers (Sun SPARC, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, IBM POWER, SGI MIPS, etc.) have had 64-bit implementations for many years. In combining these two capabilities, however, the Opteron earned recognition for its ability to run the vast installed base of x86 applications economically, while simultaneously offering an upgrade-path to 64-bit computing.

The Opteron processor possesses an integrated DDR SDRAM / DDR2 SDRAM (Socket AM2/F) memory controller. This both reduces the latency penalty for accessing the main RAM and eliminates the need for a separate northbridge chip.

Multi-processor features

In multi-processor systems (more than one Opteron on a single motherboard), the CPUs communicate using the Direct Connect Architecture over high-speed HyperTransport links. Each CPU can access the main memory of another processor, transparent to the programmer. The Opteron approach to multi-processing is not the same as standard symmetric multiprocessing as instead of having one bank of memory for all CPUs, each CPU has its own memory. Thus the Opteron is a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture. The Opteron CPU directly supports up to an 8-way configuration, which can be found in mid-level servers. Enterprise-level servers use additional (and expensive) routing chips to support more than 8 CPUs per box.

In a variety of computing benchmarks, the Opteron architecture has demonstrated better multi-processor scaling than the Intel Xeon[1]. This is primarily because adding an additional Opteron processor increases bandwidth, while that is not always the case for Xeon systems, and the fact that the Opterons use a switched fabric, rather than a shared bus. In particular, the Opteron's integrated memory controller allows the CPU to access local RAM very quickly. In contrast, multiprocessor Xeon system CPUs share only two common buses for both processor-processor and processor-memory communication. As the number of CPUs increases in a typical Xeon system, contention for the shared bus causes computing efficiency to drop. Intel is migrating to a memory architecture similar to the Opteron's for the Core i7 family of processors.