Chip tech 2017: A look back at the launches from AMD, Intel and Nvidia

Lee Bell
@llebeel
02 January 2018

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WHAT A YEAR 2017 was, eh? Thanks to the ongoings of the last few months, most of us have developed a complex that involves waking up and checking our gardens are still intact before breathing a sigh of relief that Trump hasn't caused a nuclear war yet.

And the chip industry was just as eventful, it seems. The three processor titans AMD, Intel and Nvidia, have been busy launching a host of innovations through 2017. In case you missed them, here are our highlights of the announcements from last year.

January 2017
Intel kicked off the year launching its 7th-generation Core and Xeon processors at CES in Vegas claiming the chips would offer performance improvements of up to 25 per cent "compared to a three-year-old computer".

The 7th-generation Intel Core processor family was touted for its 14nm process chip manufacturing technology and range in terms of power consumption from 4.5-watts for the Core vPro processors, to 65w and 95w in the S-series Core processors for proper, big-box desktop PCs.

Spring
We didn't see any big chip announcements from the three tech giants then until March when Nvidia announced its latest flagship GPU for gamers, the beastly GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

The new launch saw Nvidia overtake its own AI GPU, the Titan X, in terms of speed, with the new GPU offering 35 percent more performance that the previous GTX 1080 and 78 per cent more grunt than the GTX 1070.

Packing 11GB of GDDR5X memory and running at 11Gbps, it was aimed at serious gamers who want their machine to be translating their commands with the lowest latency possible into the highest possible graphic definition.

During the same month, Nvidia also unveiled the Jetson TX2 mini supercomputer at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, a credit card-sized PC that follows on from last year's TK1, which Nvidia at the time touted as the "world's first mobile supercomputer."

AMD used the month of April to launch its mid-range Ryzen 5 microprocessors, just weeks after the company launched its high-end Ryzen 7 microprocessors to generally positive reviews.

And Ryzen 5 looked to rival Intel's mainstream Intel Core i5 microprocessors and some of the low-end Intel Core i7 parts, weighing in at between £170 to £250 in the UK. The Ryzen 5 formed the mainstream part of the market, and early reviews and benchmarks of pre-release parts at the time suggested it would be highly competitive.