Thread: Anandtech News

Taking place today is AMD’s 2015 Financial Analyst Day (FAD). For AMD FADs are a combination of roadmap updates and number breakdowns for financial analysts and investors, showcasing where the company intends to go and why investors should continue to back the company.
The last time AMD held a FAD was in 2012. In the intervening years the company has undergone a number of changes for both the good and the bad, including the major console wins, continued struggles with PC market share, and of course a change in leadership from Rory Read to Dr. Lisa Su. Today’s FAD in turn is a chance for Dr. Su to show in greater detail her plans for the company, and where those plans will take AMD in the next couple of years.

AMD’s kicking off today’s FAD with a quick overview of what they see as the company’s major growth opportunities: gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter.

AMD of course is no stranger to gaming – they already attribute ~$3 billion in revenue to it – but AMD believes further growth is possible. They have a strong graphics IP portfolio, powerful silicon, and they are already in everything from casinos to high-end PCs, and everything in between. AMD is banking particularly hard on virtual reality through technologies such as LiquidVR, a somewhat risky affair (ask TV manufacturers about 3D TVs), but one that can potentially pay off well due to the high system requirements of VR.

AMD believes their second growth opportunity is immersive platforms, which is sort of a catch-all for everything from IoT to VR; essentially anything with a more “personal” connection to the user than traditional PCs and mobile devices. This broad category means leveraging virtually the entire company, CPU and GPU side, x86 and ARM.

Last but not least, AMD considers datacenters to be their final opportunity for growth. After a solid run with the Opteron series and AMD’s jump on 64-bit computing, the company has become increasingly locked out of the server and datacenter market – revenues from it are under $300M these days – and they’re looking to get back in. A lot of this will be driven by technology, with AMD relying on their future Zen (x86) and K12 (ARM) CPUs to help improve their competitive positioning, along with some good old fashioned pragmatism in as much as AMD intends to take advantage of the shift to server-side/cloud computing.
Overall, none of the growth opportunities here are surprising given what AMD has been saying in the past. Whereas FAD 2012 marked AMD’s intention to shift from being almost entirely PC focused towards being ambidextrous and leveraging semi-custom silicon, FAD 2015 presents AMD as continuing to chase many of those same opportunities which they have already been chasing for the last year or more. Ultimately the key to AMD’s growth plans will rely on correctly predicting opportunities to grow – particularly rapidly expanding markets as opposed to stealing revenue from existing players – and then executing on that in a timely manner with solid hardware.

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Having just left the stage at AMD’s financial analyst day is CEO Dr. Lisa Su, who was on stage to present an update on AMD’s computing and graphic business. As AMD has already previously discussed their technology roadmaps over the next two years earlier in this presentation, we’ll jump right into the new material.

Not mentioned in AMD’s GPU roadmap but now being mentioned by Dr. Su is confirmation that AMD will be launching new desktop GPUs this quarter. AMD is not saying much about these new products quite yet, though based on their description it does sound like we’re looking at high-performance products (and for anyone asking, the picture of the card is a placeholder; AMD doesn’t want to show any pictures of the real product quite yet). These new products will support DirectX 12, though I will caution against confusing that with Feature Level 12_x support until we know more.

Meanwhile the big news here is that these forthcoming GPUs will be the first AMD GPUs to support High Bandwidth Memory. AMD’s GPU roadmap coyly labels this as a 2016 technology, but in fact it is coming to GPUs in 2015. The advantage of going with HBM at this time is that it will allow AMD to greatly increase their memory bandwidth capabilities while bringing down power consumption. Coupled with the fact that any new GPU from AMD should also include AMD’s latest color compression technology, and the implication is that the effective increase in memory bandwidth should be quite large. For AMD, they see this as being one of the keys of delivering better 4K performance along with better VR performance.
In the process AMD has also confirmed that these HBM-equipped GPUs will allow them to experiment with new form factors. By placing the memory on the same package as the GPU, AMD will be able to save space and produce smaller cards, which will allow them to produce designs other than the traditional large 10”+ cards that are typical of high-end video cards. AMD competitor NVIDIA has been working on HBM as well and has already shown off a test vehicle for one such card design, so we have reason to expect that AMD will be capable of something similar.

With apologies to AMD: NVIDIA’s Pascal Test Vehicle, An Example Of A Smaller, Non-Traditional Video Card Design

Finally, while talking about HBM on GPUs, AMD is also strongly hinting that they intend to bring HBM to other products as well. Given their product portfolio, we consider this to be a pretty transparent hint that the company wants to build HBM-equipped APUs. AMD’s APUs have traditionally struggled to reach peak performance due to their lack of memory bandwidth – 128-bit DDR3 only goes so far – so HBM would be a natural extension to APUs.

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Along with AMD’s roadmap announcements today at financial analyst day, AMD has also offered a brief update on the state of Carrizo, the company’s forthcoming next-generation mobile APU. Due for launch this year, AMD has just confirmed that Carrizo is ramping well and will be launching this quarter, though SKU details are not being provided at this time.
Meanwhile, AMD is also using the opportunity to announce their intended branding for Carrizo notebooks. These products will now be known as the 6^th generation A-series, and will be featuring revised AMD badges to indicate this. AMD will be retaining the current FX/A10/A8 branding, with the only real change being the inclusion of the “6^th generation” branding on the badges.
Badging aside, AMD still will have to face the fact that they’re launching a 28nm notebook APU versus Intel’s 14nm notebook CPUs, the company is once again banking on their strong GPU performance to help drive sales. Coupled with the combination of low power optimizations in Carrizo and full fixed-function hardware decoding of HEVC, and AMD will be relying on Carrizo to carry them through to 2016 and Zen.
Finally, though it will come a bit later in the year, AMD’s FAD update has also briefly mentioned their plans for their AMD Pro lineup and how Carrizo will impact it. In short, AMD will be leaning on a combination of Carrizo’s power gains, and their own security technology as found in the Pro APUs.

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As part of AMD’s business unit reorganization in 2014, many of AMD’s high-growth businesses were organized into a new group at the company, the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Business (EESC). Now through their first few quarters, Forrest Norrod, the Senior VR and General Manager of the EESC was on-hand at FAD to present AMD’s specific plans for that business for the next 2 years.
Forrest’s comments on the embedded and semi-custom businesses generally reflected AMD’s earlier comments on their three growth opportunities, but I wanted to call specific attention to AMD’s datacenter plans, which Forrest we into in more detail.

AMD’s datacenter plans for the next couple of years will see AMD taking a three-pronged approach to the market. On the CPU side, AMD will of course be leveraging their forthcoming x86 Zen and ARM K12 CPU designs in various fashions. Zen, as previously discussed, should offer a significant increase in IPC and improve AMD’s competitive positioning in the x86 space. And since AMD is launching their high-performance desktop Zen CPU as the first Zen product, the implication is that the server version of that product should not be too far behind.

Meanwhile over the next couple of years AMD will be leveraging the Opteron A1100 “Seattle”, followed by the K12 in 2017. AMD is positioning their ARM datacenter products as being primed for efficiency, whereas their x86 products are primed for high native I/O capacity and high overall performance. Opteron A1100 will ship later this year, though I’m still unsure just how much adoption it is going to see as opposed to the K12 in 2017.

Last but certainly not least however, I wanted to call attention to AMD’s GPU/APU plans in the datacenter space. AMD already has a presence with GPU accelerator cards in the form of the FirePro S-series, with these cards being the basis of their high performance computing (HPC) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives. AMD is expecting these markets to continue to grow as customers increasingly turn towards GPUs for better compute throughput, and VDI for remote client hosting and the server-side use cases it was designed for.

But the most interesting thing about this roadmap is AMD’s “high-performance server APU”. To date, the closest AMD has come to a server APU is are their FirePro APUs, which are versions of AMD’s standard desktop APUs with the ability to use their FirePro driver set and are intended for workstations. Consequently the creation of a high-performance server APU represents a new product within AMD’s portfolio, as they have never done something quite like this before.
AMD isn’t saying much about this APU, but it will be a multi-teraflops chip for both HPC and workstations, which implies something significantly more powerful than today’s Kaveri APUs, and much closer to the performance of some of AMD’s discrete GPUs. The end-game here of course is to leverage HSA and the close proximity of CPU and GPU in a way no other vendor currently can, to deliver high performance in workloads that benefit from close CPU/GPU interaction. The fact that AMD is targeting this at HPC makes me curious just what they’re planning for FP64 performance, but they could just as well be going after markets such as oil & gas and machine learning where FP32 and F16 are sufficient. Meanwhile there is also a very good reason to suspect that this may be the first place AMD implements HBM for an APU, as it would be in-line with their previous comments about doing HBM with more than just discrete GPUs, and this is a high-margin market that would be suitable for a higher-cost feature like HBM.

Ultimately for AMD their plans for the datacenter are ambitious, but if executed well seem to be achievable. After being pushed out of the x86 server market, AMD is making a concentrated effort to re-enter it via the Zen CPU, and AMD’s APUs offer an interesting, alternative take on getting there. That said, we should also expect to see AMD significantly leaning on open industry standards to get back into the datacenter space, and consequently making part of their argument the fact that they are not Intel, and consider themselves to be more open towards working with partners and customers.

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So far I’m the only one on the AnandTech staff that has had a go with three of the major VR players: Oculus’ Rift (Crescent Bay), HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR. Throughout every demo, the question has always been ‘when, when, when?’. It’s been almost three years since the initial Oculus Kickstarter, and we’ve seen the headset grow in terms of investigating the issues surrounding VR as well as the feel and the content. This morning Oculus announced that ‘Q1 2016’ is the date where consumers will be able to buy a retail version of the headset, or by the end of March.

Up until this point, users and developers could buy a development kit with non-final hardware to both test and experiment how to write code and interfaces that can use virtual reality. Oculus will start taking pre-orders for the full retail version later this year. One of the big issues, for me personally, is that VR needs to launch with ground-breaking AAA titles – at least one, if not two. There’s no indication as to what games might be launching in that time, but hopefully they have been working closely with particular game developers to ensure good performance on day one.
At CES this year, when I tested Oculus, hardware specifications were hard to come by. We knew the display was at 90 Hz, requiring a black frame every other frame in order to prevent ghosting. The key take-home message from Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus, at the time was that they wanted more. Higher resolution per eye and faster refresh rates were the two key factors, along with what system was powering the content as both of those requirements puts a strain on current graphics solutions. Oculus is set to release details between now and launch, with next week featuring more of the technical specifications.

Brett testing Rift at CES

Pricing is yet unannounced, but other publications have put it in the ‘up to $400’ range, which is similar to the development kits ($350). If I remember correctly, Oculus stated to us in January is that they intent to offer the best VR experience when they launch, and potentially offer partners the chance to create kits themselves but Oculus will always be at the forefront of the technology and software curve in that regard.
Oculus is targeting the Rift at ‘gaming, film, entertainment, communication, and much more’. All angles point to PC content first, although I’m sure that something done with a console can’t be far behind.
PS: In case you missed them, we’ve posted pieces dealing with our hands-on of the Crescent Bay version of the Rift as well as the Vive in recent months.



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Having just wrapped up a bit ago is AMD’s 2015 Financial Analyst Day (FAD). For AMD FADs are a combination of roadmap updates and number breakdowns for financial analysts and investors, showcasing where the company intends to go and why investors should continue to back the company.
We’ve been covering FAD 2015 throughout the afternoon, and we have seen AMD make a number of announcements and roadmap reveals throughout the event. The individual announcements are below, and meanwhile now that the event has wrapped up we want to provide a quick summary of what AMD is going to be up to over the next two years.
AMD Charts Future Growth Opportunities
AMD’s 2016-2017 x86 Roadmap: Zen Is In, Skybridge Is Out
AMD’s K12 ARM CPU Now In 2017
AMD’s 2016 GPU Roadmap: FinFET & High Bandwidth Memory
AMD To Launch New Desktop GPU This Quarter (Q2’15) With HBM
AMD Announces 6th Generation A-Series APU Branding - Carrizo Due This Quarter
AMD’s 2016-2017 Datacenter Roadmap: x86, ARM, and GPGPU
With AMD’s FAD 2012 being a major event for the company – one where then-CEO Rory Reed announced AMD’s intention to move away from being almost solely PC focused to a mix of PC, semi-custom, and ARM products – FAD 2015 by comparison is a far more tame event. Under the direction of Dr. Lisa Su, AMD is largely executing on the plan they set into motion some time ago. And where they have made changes, such as dropping SeaMicro, AMD has announced those changes in advance. So this year’s FAD does not see AMD announcing major changes to the company’s direction.

So what is AMD’s direction over the next two years? The short answer to that is that the company is focusing on what they believe to be higher margin, higher growth opportunity markets where they can take a chunk of those markets without necessarily having to wrest revenue and sales from existing competitors. Overall AMD sees their three big growth markets as gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter market.
At the same time what AMD is looking to avoid is low-margin markets where they can’t do something to set themselves apart. AMD has made it clear that they’re not going to invest in fields such as mobile (smartphones/tablets) or IoT client devices, as while that’s a high growth field, it’s already overweight with competitors who either have the cost control (MediaTek) or the war chest (Intel) to drive margins down to levels AMD cannot sustain. Similarly, AMD is working to reduce their presence in the low-end PC market, as that too suffers from low margins, and is coupled with a poor outlook that has seen AMD get burnt by a significant drop in demand (and consequently revenue) in that market.

The one exception to this of course is semi-custom silicon, which although is not high-margin, allows AMD to leverage their strengths. Nowhere else can you find a vendor with a top-tier GPU profile, custom x86 CPUs, custom ARM CPUs, and the willingness to help customers build customized chips around those building blocks. Semi-custom silicon also presents AMD with some relatively stable revenue, as contracts for semi-custom designs will typically involve supplying chips for a number of years.

To achieve their goals, AMD has set out a roadmap through 2016 and 2017 to develop the technologies necessary to compete in their respective markets, and to deliver the performance necessary for both semi-custom silicon and finished AMD products.

The big item on AMD’s agenda is of course Zen, the company’s forthcoming x86 CPU design. Scheduled to launch in 2016, starting with the high-performance desktop, Zen is a return to fundamentals of sorts for AMD. We do not have performance estimates for Zen, but from an architectural standpoint AMD is making it clear that they are shooting for much higher IPC with Zen than Carrizo/Excavator, touting a 40% increase in IPC.
Zen will ultimately be driving AMD’s entire range of x86 products, top to bottom, datacenter to laptop. AMD’s Dozer and Cat families are at an end, and in the end there will be only Zen. Zen in turn will be part of a long-term process for AMD; the company already has newer iterations of Zen in the works (Zen+) which further improve on the architecture farther out. Coupled with significant gains AMD is expecting to enjoy from FinFET processes, and the company is putting on their optimistic face for their chances in the x86 market.

In fact AMD is backing Zen to the point where other projects have been pushed to the wayside or canceled altogether. AMD’s project Skybridge – a plan for 20nm ambidextrous x86 and ARM CPUs – has essentially been canceled as a result of the combination of lack of customer need for ambidextrous CPUs and the generally poor performance of the 20nm process. Meanwhile Zen’s ARM sibling – K12 – has been pushed back from 2016 to 2017 to allow AMD to complete Zen first, and then roll what they’ve learned from Zen into K12.
For AMD this marks a return to form, and a very aggressive move on the x86 market. After having seen their datacenter market share fall to just 1.5%, for example – with the company admitting they did not invest in high-performance CPUs and it cost them most of their market share – AMD is optimistic that they can recover their datacenter market share through the combination of Zen, K12, and their GPGPU capabilities. This in turn means hitting the datacenter in both the CPU and HPC markets, and even going one step beyond with a forthcoming, very high performance HPC APU that combines all of AMD’s strengths.

Meanwhile on the GPU front, AMD is not providing quite as much visibility on their GPU roadmap, but they are sharing their plans out to 2016. Launching this quarter will be a new AMD desktop product featuring High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the first such product in the GPU space. HBM promises to significantly increase AMD’s available memory bandwidth and allow their partners to work on more innovative card designs due to the smaller amount of space an HBM solution requires.

2016 in turn will see AMD continue their focus on HBM with the release of products using HBM Gen2, all the while releasing their first GPUs manufactured on a FinFET process. AMD isn’t naming which process they’re using, though either way it would be a significant step up in manufacturing from the current 28nm process their GPUs use. Overall AMD is touting a 2x increase in perf-per-watt for their 2016 GPUs, with most of that gain coming from the shift to FinFET.

Longer term, while AMD is not committing towards any specific products, AMD is strongly hinting at HBM coming to APUs as well. AMD’s APUs have traditionally struggled under the limited amount of bandwidth 128-bit DDR3 provides, so an HBM-enabled APU would help to further improve AMD’s GPU performance on their APUs.
Wrapping things up, the key to AMD’s plans for the next two years will hinge on both properly anticipating the market and in executing on technology. AMD will need to correctly predict opportunities to grow – particularly rapidly expanding markets as opposed to stealing revenue from existing players – and then execute on that in a timely manner with solid hardware across both the CPU and GPU space. AMD believes they have the pieces they need in development, and with 2015 almost half-over the company is finally reaching the point where their earlier transition is complete, so it will be interesting to see how AMD’s next two years unfold. The company is not yet in dire straits, but after losing market share and seeing gross margins suffer, now is the time where AMD needs to reverse their fortunes and reach profitability if they’re to ensure their own future.

Gallery: AMD FAD 2015: Mark Papermaster - Technology Roadmaps


Gallery: AMD FAD 2015: Lisa Su - Computing & Graphics Business

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Along with a bevy of roadmap announcements at financial analyst day, AMD has also slipped in a full-on mobile GPU announcement today at the event.
Being announced today is the Radeon M300 series. With so much other news coming out of FAD we’re still tracking down more information on the product line, but of the information released by AMD so far, we do know that these parts are being advertised as refined parts with better efficiency and power management. AMD’s FAD presentation has not made any mention of what specific GPUs are being used here or of specific SKUs (we may yet see a press release), so it’s not clear whether there are new GPUs involved or if these are simply rebadges of existing GPUs and products.
AMD does note that M300 systems should already be available from several of AMD’s usual partners, including Alienware, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Meanwhile given the timing of the announcement and the fact that AMD is specifically advertising these GPUs as supporting Dual Graphics mode with AMD’s A-series APUs, I suspect some of these GPUs may be intended to work alongside AMD’s Carrizo APU, which is due this year.
Update: AMD has since released the details of the M300 SKUs on their website, and though they’re not incredibly detailed, they give us an idea of just what AMD is up to.
[TABLE="align: center"]
[TR="class: tgrey"]
[TD="colspan: 6, align: center"]AMD M300 Series GPU Specification Comparison[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: tlblue"]
[TD="width: 130"] [/TD]
[TD="width: 147, align: center"]R9 M375[/TD]
[TD="width: 147, align: center"]R7 M360[/TD]
[TD="width: 146, align: center"]R5 M330[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Was[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R9 M270/M260[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R7 M270/M260[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R5 M255[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Stream Processors[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]640[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]384[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]320[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Texture Units[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]40[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]24[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]20[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]ROPs[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]16[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]4?[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]4?[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Boost Clock[/TD]
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Along with today’s announcement of the OEM mobile Radeon M300 series, AMD has also announced the OEM desktop Radeon 300 Series. This was a rather low-key launch with only a very brief press release on the matter along with AMD updating the OEM Radeon website, and as one might expect this is for good reason.
We’ve been through this event once before – most recently with the OEM HD 8000 series – so our regular readers will know the drill. Whether or not GPU manufacturers have new GPUs, OEMs will want new parts to sell, which leads to GPU manufacturers engaging in rebranding and subtle spec changes to create new parts to sell under a new series name. In AMD’s case this is complicated by the fact that they have been updating their GPUs in a piecemeal fashion – Hawaii, Bonaire, and Tonga have all landed at very different times – and AMD is not done yet as they’re going to be launching a new high-end GPU this quarter. So AMD needs a product lineup to include both the new part and their retained parts under a single brand, which leads to another incentive for rebadging.
In any case, as these are OEM parts I advise not reading into the names and specifications too much. AMD’s OEM and Retail parts can be very different at times – and at other times there aren’t any retail parts at all (HD 8000) – so these OEM parts aren’t necessarily indicative of what we’re going to see in retail in the coming months. Though based on AMD’s actions with the Radeon 200 series, we may yet see a similar rebadge happen for the retail 300 series.
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[TD="colspan: 6, align: center"]AMD OEM Desktop Radeon R9 300 Series GPU Specification Comparison[/TD]
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[TD="width: 140"] [/TD]
[TD="width: 143, align: center"]AMD Radeon HD R9 380 OEM[/TD]
[TD="width: 143, align: center"]AMD Radeon R9 370 OEM[/TD]
[TD="width: 144, align: center"]AMD Radeon R9 360 OEM[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Was[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R9 285[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R7 265[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Variant of R9 260 (OEM)[/TD]
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[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Stream Processors[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]1792[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]1024[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]768[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Texture Units[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]112[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]64[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]48[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]ROPs[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]32[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]32[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]16[/TD]
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[TD="class: tlgrey"]Boost Clock[/TD]
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Readers following our wireless networking coverage must be quite familiar with the developments in 802.11ac land. As a recap:

• The first 3-stream 802.11ac routers (based on the Broadcom BCM4706 chipset) started shipping in May 2012, with Buffalo Technologies and Netgear leading the way. There were marketed as AC1750 units (3x3 5 GHz providing up to 1300 Mbps and 3x3 2.4 GHz providing up to 450 Mbps). The street pricing of the AC1750 routers started to go down once Qualcomm started shipping their first-generation 802.11ac router platforms in products such as the TP-LINK Archer C7 in April 2013.
• In Q4 2013, a wave of AC1900 units started to hit the market. Netgear's Nighthawk R7000, a popular member in this series, still continues to sell well in the market. These units still used a 3x3 5 GHz radio for up to 1300 Mbps, but the 2.4 GHz had some proprietary Broadcom extensions (TurboQAM) to support up to 600 Mbps in an end-to-end Broadcom environment.
• In 2014, Quantenna began to bring their technology lead in the Wi-Fi space to the market with their Wave 2 4x4 802.11ac chipset. Despite being announced at CES 2014, the Asus RT-AC87U began to ship in July with the QSR1000 radio coupled with a Broadcom SoC. Netgear started to ship the same radio coupled with a Qualcomm IPQ8064 SoC in the Nighthawk X4 in September 2014. The QSR1000's Wave 2 feature set includes support for MU-MIMO, but neither of these routers shipped with MU-MIMO enabled in the firmware (citing lack of client support at that point of time). Given the 4x4 configuration, these routers were tagged as AC2350 / AC2400 units (600 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band and 1733 Mbps in the 5 GHz band)
• In the midst of these Wave 2 product launches, Qualcomm announced plans for their Wave 2 802.11ac platforms (both routers and clients) in April 2014. Broadcom, being late to the Wave 2 party, decided to bring out the XStream platform with dual 5 GHz radios (six-stream configuration) also in April. They were able to get it quickly into the market too, with the Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000 becoming available in June 2014.
• At CES 2015, we saw the first set of routers based on Qualcomm's QCA9880 4x4 Wave 2 802.11ac router platform getting announced. Vendors such as TP-LINK and TRENDnet were expecting their AC2600 class routers to ship towards the middle of the year.

Coming back to today's announcement regarding the EA8500, Linksys is becoming the first vendor to start shipping a QCA9880-based router. The important aspect here is that the router will ship with MU-MIMO enabled. Client devices with MU-MIMO enabled are also coming into the market just now (more on that in our detailed review). Hopefully, this announcement will spur both Netgear and Asus to enable MU-MIMO in the firmware for their Quantenna-based routers.
The salient features of the EA8500 router are listed below:

• 4x4 802.11ac with MU-MIMO and beamforming support
• QCA9880 radio + 1.4 GHz dual-core IPQ8064 SoC
• Simultaneous dual-band operation (5 GHz 802.11ac - 1733 Mbps, 5 GHz 802.11n - 600 Mbps, 2.4 GHz 802.11n - 800 Mbps)
• 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0 / eSATA
• 4x 1Gbps LAN, 1x 1Gbps WAN
• Adjustable antennas for optimal performance

One important point to note is that MU-MIMO capabilities will translate into real benefit only when there are multiple MU-MIMO-capable client devices talking to the router simultaneously. This will probably be a common scenario in enterprise Wi-Fi deployments soon. Howeverm in a typical household, we would imagine that a situation involving multiple MU-MIMO clients is probably at least a good year away. Qualcomm is targeting an end-to-end play here, as the announcement made last year included a number of products in the client space with MU-MIMO capabilities.
Linksys is accepting pre-orders at $280 for the EA8500 today with shipments slated for May 10, 2015. Wide retail and e-tail availability is also expected starting next week. There is no doubt that MU-MIMO will be the most efficient way to boost Wi-Fi performance in the near future, and it is good that Linksys and Qualcomm are teaming together to accelerate its market adoption.

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Today I'm looking at a Chromebook from Dell. It's the Dell Chromebook 11 Touch. More accurately, it may be called the New Dell Chromebook 11 Touch or the Dell Chromebook 11 (2015) as Dell had offered a previous generation of Chromebooks which were also called the Dell Chromebook 11. This new Chromebook from Dell appears to target a different section of the market than its predecessor, as it sports a new rugged design to protect it from accidents and environmental hazards that it may endure. To find out how it holds up when compared to the competition, read on for the full review.

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