In late August, the 24th edition of the Hot Chips event will take place in Cupertino, America. Registration has started, and the organisation has published the event's programme. It reveals that AMD will be discussing its next generation of efficient x86 chips. Intel, in its turn, will provide more details on Knight's Corner, the multi-core x86 processor for high-performance computing which is to consist of at least 50 cores.
'Jaguar' is the codename for AMD's new efficient architecture that is to replace the current Bobcat chips. At the time of writing, only little information is available on these chips. A year-old road map shows that the Jaguar will be used for the CPU-part of the mobile 'Kabini' and 'Samara' APUs, which are part of AMD's Fusion strategy. Several Jaguar chips will be spread across the manufacturer's platforms, ranging from ultra low power up to mainstream. The architecture will be compatible with both DDR3 and its efficient counterpart, DDR3L memory.
As mentioned, Intel will hold a presentation on its Knight's Corner, which was recently officially introduced as the Xeon Phi co-processor. What once began as the Larrabee GPU has evolved to a PCI-Express expansion card with over 50 x86 cores, to be used for parallel processing. The unit also features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory and is produced using the same 22 nm Tri-gate transistor process Intel uses for its Ivy Bridge processors.
Apart from these large players for the consumer market, corporations such as IBM, Oracle and Applied Micro will also showcase their products. IBM will introduce two new chips, called Power7+, the likely successor to their current Power7 models. Oracle will talk about its 16-core Sparc T5, which is based on 28 nm transistors. Lastly, Applied Micro will reveal more details of its design of a 64-bit ARM system-on-a-chip server processor, called X-Gene.
