APC October 2021

“Technically Intel already has an 'Ark', being its database/wiki of chips. This is the sexy Arc.” It’s finally happened – the big unveil of Intel’s resurrection lineup of new products and technology we’ve been waiting for. And it’s absolutely thrilling! While much of the work will have been in the pipeline pre-Gelsinger, it's the big reveal Intel absolutely had to deliver on. On both the CPU and GPU front Intel’s surprised and pleased us. The Arc GPU announcement outlined few basic tech details, but this was all about a statement of intent. A declaration of commitment that Intel is entering one of tech’s hottest warzones. Until now we weren't sure if Intel really was all-in on discrete consumer graphics cards; now we know it is, and big time. We’ve come from the last…

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“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know…

Intel’s Architecture Day 2021 was full of deep-dive disclosures, with this year’s topics focusing on the architectural details of the company’s forthcoming Alder Lake CPUs that will span from the desktop PC down to ultra-mobile applications by combining two types of cores in a hybrid design, a first for an x86 desktop PC chip. However, unlike other Arm hybrid designs we’ve seen that are tuned for power efficiency, Intel has tuned its Alder Lake chips for the highest performance possible. Intel claims that Alder Lake’s high-performance cores come with an average 19 percent IPC improvement over the Rocket Lake chips, marking the fastest high-performance core the company has built, and that its new efficiency core offers up to five times the power efficiency of Skylake. Intel’s Alder Lake also supports features like…

Intel Alchemist, aka DG2, GPUs are set to become the first gaming graphics cards spun out of the Intel Xe-HPG yarn, something that is promised to be the basis for many more competitive GPUs from the chipmaking Goliath. Alchemist also happens to be the first offering from Intel’s high-performance graphics brand, Arc, which covers hardware, software and services. It’s all set to kick-off at the start of next year, when we’ll see Intel put its best foot forward in hopes to heave open the hydraulic grip of Nvidia and AMD over gaming GPUs. Xe-HPG is born out of both Intel’s Xe-LP and Xe-HPC architectures, but with some specialised twists. As Intel has since explained at its Architecture Day 2021, Xe-HPG is built for gaming first. The new Xe-core within Alchemist GPUs features…

Nothing is real and anything is possible – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s iconic kitchen, where he presented three pandemic-era keynote addresses in 2020 and 2021 – was almost entirely fake, including Huang himself (though his voice was real), during the company’s GTC 2021 keynote earlier this year and nobody even noticed. The virtual presentation was cooked up using something called Nvidia Omniverse, a multi-disciplinary collaboration tool for creating 3D virtual workspaces. For an annual keynote address known for impressive technical displays, this one certainly delivered. Most viewers had no idea they hadn’t seen the real Huang speaking from his real kitchen until a new documentary by Nvidia was released that detailed the efforts that went into making that presentation. A video of Nvidia’s DGX Station A100 workstation was also entirely generated using Omniverse. The…