cpu

Top Intel exec: Apple 'helps shape our road map'

Apple apparently plays a more significant role in Intel's long-term strategy than one might guess.

"We work very closely with them, and we're constantly looking down the road at what we can be doing relative to future products. I'd go as far as to say Apple helps shape our road map," Tom Kilroy, Intel's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said in a Reuters interview published yesterday.

Intel's love affair with Apple started in 2005 when the company announced it would ditch IBM's PowerPC processors in favor of Intel's x86 … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week there were questions on toggling Hyper-Threading in Intel CPUs on Macs, options for upgrading RAM on older Mac systems, and how to rename multiple items in a folder at once. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: RAM upgrade options for older Macs MacFixIt reader "Ronald" asks:

I have owned a MacPro for over four years (… Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer e-mailed questions from our readers. This week there were questions about burned discs no longer being recognized, upgrading from OS X 10.4 Tiger, using a third-party PDF printer in OS X, and CPU temperatures spiking in MacBook Pro systems. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we certainly welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Burned CDs not being recognized anymore MacFixIt reader "Russell" asks:

When I insert a CD, which … Read more

Managing PowerPC applications on Intel Macs

Starting in the early nineties, the PowerPC chip became the primary CPU architecture used in Macs for the next decade and a half. While it had potential, both it and the corporate politics behind it ultimately became a hinderance for Apple when competing with the vast and growing x86 and developing x64 architectures from Intel and AMD.

Apple made the transition to the x86 and x64 architectures very smooth with the use of Rosetta and Universal Binary applications, but this effort also resulted in a lot of remaining PowerPC code that is either still being used or is being packaged … Read more

Chip sales hit record $298 billion in 2010

In 2010, semiconductors brought in record revenue of $298.3 billion worldwide, a jump of 31.8 percent compared with the previous year, according to data out yesterday from the Semiconductor Industry Association.

In addition, chip sales in December hit $25.2 billion, a gain of 12.2 percent compared with 2009's final month. Fourth-quarter revenue grew the same percentage from the year-ago quarter to reach $75.5 billion.

"Semiconductor sales are a bright spot in our current economic picture, delivering a record high in the billions," SIA President Brian Toohey said in a statement. "The … Read more

Intel's 'Sandy Bridge' for laptops tested

Much has been made of the latest generation of Intel CPUs, previously dubbed "Sandy Bridge." Post-announcement, the chips are now known as the second generation of Intel's Core i-series processors, and use the same Core i3/i5/i7 names as the 2010 versions.

But under the hood, much has changed. As we reported from CES, "highlights of the second-generation Core processors, built around a new 32nm microarchitecture, include more energy-efficient performance and improved 3D and graphics performance. Intel claims that with this new generation of CPUs, content creation is up to 42 percent faster and gaming up to 50 percent faster than with previous generations."

The CNET Labs team has been benchmarking a test laptop provided by Intel. Known as a white-box system, this is a generic laptop loaded with the 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-2820QM, one of the higher-end new Intel CPUs. As a custom-built laptop with a quad-core CPU and solid-state hard drive, this system might be what one would call a ringer, and you won't find this specific build for sale anywhere. (For laptops more likely to end up on store shelves in the near future, check out our collection of the coolest laptops of CES 2011.)

Naturally, Intel has provided a list of suggested benchmark tests and workloads, all designed to show off the new Sandy Bridge components in the best light. Instead, we've run CNET's standard laptop benchmark tests, including our grueling battery drain test (the bane of PC makers around the world). Despite not using Intel's suggested applications and tests, the Sandy Bridge white-box laptop performed very well, even when up against the slate of recent high-end laptops we compared it with.

The charts below outline how the new Core i7-2820QM system did when up against current-gen Core i7 laptops, including HP's Envy 17 and Toshiba's Qosmio X505. In our single-app tests, the new quad-core Core i7 performed excellently, winning in some of the tests by a wide margin. … Read more

Computers and hardware preview

While CES isn't always a hotbed of computer news and product announcements, there's always enough new stuff to keep our attention, especially as the competition between traditional laptops and tablets heats up. These are some of the trends and stories we expect you'll be hearing much more about in January.

New laptop and desktop CPUs Unfortunately, some of the products we were most excited about from CES 2010 never actually saw the light of day, leading us to be a bit more skeptical about laptops that look too good to be true (we're looking at you, … Read more

Total system view

System Information Viewer (SIV) by developer Ray Hinchliffe is a free tool that centralizes all the information about your system that Windows scatters throughout a series of consoles, properties dialogs, and other tools. SIV does more, though, extracting even more useful information than Windows, such as detailed information about your CPU, including each core of multicore processors; networks and clients; hardware sensors; and software.

SIV downloads as a zipped file but needs no installation; the program opens with your system's basic information displayed as soon as you click the extracted executable. This makes the program totally portable, too, so … Read more

Firefox 'CPU resources' issue better but not gone

Firefox's use of CPU resources has improved but hasn't gone away completely.

The popular Web browser has had a longstanding CPU (central processing unit) utilization issue that--in some cases--overtaxed the CPU, causing noticeable heat issues in small laptops.

I wrote about this last November after I had been grappling with this issue for more than a year. First, on an Hewlett-Packard business ultraportable and then on the Apple MacBook Air. As I stated at the time, my theory is that many users don't notice Firefox CPU utilization on large, well-ventilated mainstream laptops. But it can be an issue on ultraportables, which are more sensitive to heat because of the obvious design constraints (typically under an inch thick).

On the HP ultraportable (model 2510p, running Windows Vista), CPU usage became a major concern. The cause was twofold. First, at least one HP 2510p SKU (using a 1.33GHz CPU--the configuration I owned) had a design problem. When the unit got hot, it would shut off without warning. That, combined with Firefox's CPU usage issues, as spelled out clearly by Mozilla in the link above, made for an unstable mix. Firefox, I determined after much trial and error, triggered most of the shutdowns on my HP laptop.

While this never happened running Firefox on the MacBook Air (which I use now), it did continue to cause overheating. I have both the original MacBook Air (which uses an older 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor) and a newer version (which has a newer 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor). Running Firefox on the older Air became unsustainable at times because of the heat issue. While moving to Safari didn't completely alleviate the heat problem, Safari did not generate the level of heat and fan activity that Firefox did.

Before I go any further describing the issue, let me say this: that was then. Mozilla has made strides--at least for the Web pages I access most often--in improving Firefox CPU utilization on the Mac.… Read more