Intel's Cannonlake to offer CPU's with more Cores

Intel's Roadmap to 'Cannonlake'

 Although Intel are no stranger to offering high-performance CPU's with a high core count such as the Intel Core i7-5960X processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, these processors are top of the line and carry a heavy price tag. For years Intel have only offered it's mainstream processors with 2 and 4 core count and a maximum of 8 threads on models with Hyperthreading.

This is all about to change according to a LinkedIn profile spotted by Motley Fool, of an Intel engineer which the profile describes he or she is working on the upcoming 'Cannonlake' SoC that "integrates 4/6/8 cores and Converged Coherent Fabric (CCF) which acts like a NorthBridge".

The reason of Intel's move to offer more cores could be a response to AMD's upcoming 'Zen' microarchitecture which will offer high core count CPU's. As Intel will move to a smaller 10nm manufacturing process in 'Cannonlake' it's plausible that Intel will increase the amount of CPU cores due to the smaller die.

Intel Releases its Ultra Fast PCI-Express Solid State Drives - The Intel SSD DC P3608

The Intel DC P3608 Solid State Drive

 Intel have released a whole new range of high capacity ultra fast PCI-Express solid state drives. The SSD DC P3608 is Intel's new 'Data Center' range which are primarily designed for enterprise level. The new drives come with a capacity of up to 4 TB with Read & Write speeds of up to 5GB/s & 3GB/s. What makes the DC P3608 drives achieve such high speeds is because the drive features 8 x PCI-Express lanes as opposed to 4 x lanes in previous models.

There are 3 capacities with the Intel SSD DC P3608 being 1.6TB, 3.2TB, and 4TB. The 1.6TB has a read speed of 5GB/s and write speed of 2GB/s, the 3.2TB has a read speed of 4.5GB/s and write speed of 2.6GB/s, and the 4TB has a read speed of 5GB/s and write speed of 3GB/s.

Some of the DC P3608's features include:

Enhanced Power Loss Management - Protection from unplanned power loss called PLI (Power Loss Imminent).
20mm HET MLC NAND (High-Endurance Technology) - The drive has extremely high durability with the 4TB drive being able to write up to 21.9PB over the life of the drive before wearing out.
End-to-End Data Protection - End-to-end data protection and ECC (Error Correction Code) Dual NVMe Controller - More effecient than SATA or SAS, the dual controller architecture allows the SSD to simultaneously transfer data with this improved efficiency.

Pricing for the DC P3608 starts from $3509 for the 1.6TB model and $8759 for the 4TB model.

Intel announces it's Skylake embedded processor lineup

Intel's Skylake Architecture using 14nm technology

Earlier in September Intel has announced its new Skylake desktop processors. Starting with the enthusiast level 'K' Series Core i5 6600k & i7 6700k processors followed by it's powerful 'S' Series  and more recently it's mobile Skylake-H and Skylake-U processors.

Now Intel announces it's consumer level Skylake-T and embedded Skylake-TE processor series to it's lineup. These processors will all be on the new LGA1151 socket. The 'T' series lineup will start off with the entry level Pentium G4400T, and on to the Core i3-6100T, i5-6500T and i7-6700T. The embedded 'TE' series share the same processors as the Skylake T but with slightly different CPU clock speeds. Here is the a table of the lineup below.

Model	Cores / Threads	Frequency / Turbo	L3 cache	Graphics	GPU Frequency	TDP
Pentium G4400T	2 / 2	2.9 GHz	3 MB	HD 510	350 / 950 MHz	35W
Pentium G4400TE	2 / 2	2.4 GHz	3 MB	HD 510	350 / 950 MHz	35W
Core i3-6100T	2 / 4	3.2 GHz	3 MB	HD 530	350 / 950 MHz	35W
Core i3-6100TE	2 / 4	2.7 GHz	4 MB	HD 530	350 / 1000 MHz	35W
Core i5-6500T	4 / 4	2.5 / 3.1 GHz	6 MB	HD 530	350 / 1100 MHz	35W
Core i5-6500TE	4 / 4	2.3 / 3.3 GHz	6 MB	HD 530	350 / 1000 MHz	35W
Core i7-6700T	4 / 8	2.8 / 3.6 GHz	8 MB	HD 530	350 / 1100 MHz	35W
Core i7-6700TE	4 / 8	2.4 / 3.4 GHz	8 MB	HD 530	350 / 1000 MHz	35W

The new embedded desktop series replace the current 'Haswell' Pentium G3320TE, Core i3-4340TE, i5-4570TE and i7-4770TE and have a slight performance increase with about 100MHz increase in clock speed, a lower TDP thanks to Skylake's 14nm manufacturing process and support for DDR4 memory.