Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabiliti...
In the upper echelons of commercial workhouses, having access to copious amounts of local NVMe storage is more of a requirement than ‘something nice to have’. We’ve seen solutions in this space include custom FPGAs to software breakout boxes, and more recently a number of the motherboard vendors have provided PCIe x16 Quad M.2 cards for the market. The only downside is that they rely on the processor bifurcation, i.e. the ability for the processor to drive multiple devices from a single PCIe x16 slot. HighPoint has got around that limitation. The current way of getting four NVMe M.2 drives in a single PCIe x16 slot sounds fairly easy. There are 16 lanes in the slot, and each drive can take up to four lanes, so what is all the fuss? The problem arises from the CPU side of the equation: that PCIe slot connects directly to one PCIe x16 root complex on the chip, and depending on the configuration it may only be expecting one device to be connected to it. The minut...
ASRock unveiled five new B365 motherboards at CES 2019 with a mixture of features similar to its Z390 offerings. The B365 Pro4 and B365M Pro are targeted towards professional users while B365 and B365M Phantom Gaming 4 mark a lower cost entry point onto the Intel 8th and 9th generation processors. The last of the five new models is the mini-ITX sized B365M-ITX/ac. ASRock B365 Pro4 ATX Motherboard In an effort to free up some capacity for the fabrication of their 14 nm silicon, Intel announced plans to add the B365 chipset to their line up last month which uses their 22 nm manufacturing process. ASRock has taken this new chipset and marketed their new range with added the moniker of 'Power, Redefined', but the five new models look targeted more to general consumers. Each of the five ASRock B365 models uses a single 8-pin 12 V ATX power connector to provide power to the CPU (which is ample given the B365 doesn't officially support overclocking)...
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