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CHIP DESIGNER AMD said it will announce a sub 9W G series system on chip (SoC) in the coming weeks to show how low it can take the Jaguar architecture. AMD's latest G series chips are the firm's first true SoC parts, integrating its latest Jaguar CPU architecture with a GPU based on its Sea Islands architecture and including an I/O controller on the same die, all for a 9W thermal design power (TDP) rating. Now the firm has told The INQUIRER that it will announce a sub-9W TDP G series SoC in the coming weeks.AMD's five Jaguar based G...

Table of contents 1. The Story Of Fusion Begins 2. Looking For The Other Half 3. Merger And Mayhem 4. Scaling The Brick Wall 5. Up From The Ashes 6. Fusion Ignites 7. Heterogeneous Roots 8. OpenCL And HSA 9. Focus On The Programmer 10. HSA's Big Picture 11. More About The Big Picture 12. HSA Tomorrow You've already read about APUs, and maybe you're even using them now. But the road to creating APUs was paved with a number of struggles and unsung breakthroughs. This is the story of how hybrid chips came to be at AMD and where...

IDC readjusted its PC sales forecast after seeing weak shipments in February. Weaker than expected February PC shipments prompted International Data Corporation to reassess the market and adjust its expectation for the first quarter. Whereas IDC previously expected PC shipments to decline by 7.7 percent in Q1, the market research firm now says the drop could hit double digits, followed by a mid-single-digit decline in the second quarter before a recovery is in sight.

AMD is ready for it There have been more than enough leaks dealing with Richland, AMD's successor to the Trinity powered Virgo platform, and we even had a chance to see some leaks regarding its succesor, codenamed Kaveri. As you may already know, Richland is planned to last through 2013 and it is clear that this is very important chip for AMD. Based on the Piledriver architecture and built using 32nm technology, Richland will feature an integrated GPU that will be upgraded to Radeon HD 8000 series, a generation ahead of Trinity. As you know, there has been a lot of...

Sony PlayStation 4 Technologies to Be Available for PCs*********************************************But not the customized chip as I read it****************************************** Advanced Micro Devices reaffirmed plans to sell accelerated processing units with Jaguar x86 cores and Radeon HD “GCN” graphics technology on open market. While those APUs will not be as powerful as the one that AMD developed for Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 game console, technology- and architecture-wise they will be similar to the semi-custom APU inside the PS4.“Everything that Sony has shared in that single chip is AMD [intellectual property], but we have not built an APU quite like that for anyone...

AMD Hopes to Demonstrate Next-Generation Ultra Low-Power APUs at CES Chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices said that the first prototypes of products based on code-named Temash ultra low-power accelerated processing units will be demonstrated around the consumer electronics show next year. Most likely, the demonstrations will be private and made only for partners as the chip will probably be officially launched later in the year.

AMD today launched Opteron 6300 series CPUs for quad-processor servers. Built on Abu Dhabi core and "Piledriver" microarchitecture, that incorporates a number of tweaks for improved performance, new processors offer higher level of performance than the previous generation of server products, that was branded as Opteron 6200. AMD claims that new parts offer up to 24% better performance in SPECjbb2005 server benchmark than their predecessors. AMD microprocessors from Opteron 6300 series pack up to 16 cores depending on the SKU, as well as 16 MB L3 cache in a single package. Opteron 6308 is a quad-core processor. The number of...

AMD’s Management Considers Sale of Company, Patent Portfolio Advanced Micro Devices has hired JP Morgan Chase to investigate future strategic options for the company, which has been losing money, market share and talents for many years in a row. AMD officially denied that the plan is to sell the company or to merge with a bigger partner.The options that AMD asked JP Morgan Chase to explore include sale of the whole company as well as a sale of its portfolio of patents, reports Reuters news-agency citing three sources with knowledge of the matter. It is claimed that the primary...

Tablet and keyboard dock with Windows 8 sunny side up, coming right through.So what just happened is that AMD posted a YouTube video and leaving a dead link which should be accessible from October 9th onwards, creating suspense about an upcoming product launch (or an announcement of an upcoming product launch maybe?) on October 9th.

The best APU every year... AMD sent us two APUs to review. First up we have the A10-5800K, which is the highest performing part in the A-series lineup. Then we have the 5600K, which loses 200Mhz of CPU clock speed, 40Mhz of GPU clock speed, and has only 2/3rd’s of the GPU cores that the 5800K offers. Now if those sound like some pretty drastic cuts, that’s because they are. But the thing to keep in mind here is that the 5800K has a base clock speed of 3.8Ghz, a base GPU clock speed of 800Mhz, and 384 GPU cores....

No longer just a play thing for uni students, network devices and televisions. At least we hope so!We've been wondering why AMD haven't dipped their toes in the thriving mobile market. The potential to start from scratch on an emerging platform may be exactly what AMD needs to get out of their current slump in the CPU market, and leverage the strong GPU talent that they inherited when they bought ATI in 2006. A recent report by BSN has reignited hope that AMD may be seriously considering producing mobile processors through a potential acquisition of MIPS Technologies. MIPS Technologies licence...

Get your seams behind you AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster has been pushing what he calls the coming “Surround Computing Era”, and unveiled new processor architecture details, enabling technologies and design methodologies that will help drive it. Surround computing is apparently an “extension of pervasive and ambient computing trends” no less. It is when computing technologies are “a completely natural and seamless part of daily life”. Papermaster is proof of it, we can't see any seams on him at all, but that might be the idea. Talking at the Hot Chips conference, Papermaster said that surround computing imagines a world without keyboards...

AMD has updated its price pages pulling down the price on the full range of Llano APUs, Phenom II K10 parts and Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs. Although some price cuts are minor some parts got a price cut of up to 20 percent. The most significant price cut includes the now quite old Phenom II X4 955BE and 965BE CPUs that have dropped by 22.9 and 20.9 percent respectively. Price wise, the Phenom II 955 BE dropped from US $105 down to US $81 while the Pheom II X4 965BE dropped from US $115 down to US $91.The price cuts include...

AMD have integrated a real-time operating system (RTOS) into their G-Series of processors. What does this entail, you ask? Well, AMD is now loading Green Hill's Integrity OS into the platform. The embedded system is capable of a bunch of tasks where space and power are at a premium. This would include devices such as TV set-top boxes, other electronic home devices, industrial control systems, networking, the military, and medicine. You know, just a few of the largest markets in the world.

AMD told extremetech.com that its Bulldozer core does not feature 2 billion transistors as previously reported, but rather 1.2 billion. The die size remained unchanged, at 315 square millimeters, so it turns out AMD is only counting transistors actually used by the chip. It seems the other 800 million are looking for work on craigslist and dreaming of moving out of their mom's basement. AMD attributed the whole issue to a simple error, but the move raised more questions than it answered. On one hand, it means AMD’s new architecture doesn’t really need 2 billion transistors to attain decent performance,...

Here's one non-UDS announcement hitting the web right now that's also very significant for open-source and Linux: Advanced Micro Devices has announced today they will support Coreboot on all future processors. Coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is an open-source Linux-based BIOS implementation. AMD has long been a supporter of the Coreboot project with releasing code for Coreboot and supporting documentation in their products: both chipsets and servers.

At least a part of it In order to make Intel's IDF 2011 parade a bit more sour, AMD announced that its yet to be released FX-8150 CPU was already overclocked to 8.429GHz, which earned the company the Guinness World Record for the highest achieved frequency. AMD's own Sami Maekinen as well as Brian Mclachlan, Pete Hardman and Aaron Schradin had some fun with AMD's eight-core FX-8150 CPU. Just for reference, previous best AMD record was set at 7378.25MHz with the Phenom II 955 Black Edition. Of course, if you take a look at the CPU-Z screenshots, you will...

Should bring forward Intel's Sandy Bridge Xeon launch CHIP DESIGNER AMD has announced that it has begun shipping its Bulldozer architecture chips to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The firm started making its first Bulldozer chips codenamed 'Interlagos' last month and is now shipping to OEM customers. Many of the first batches of the Interlagos chip, which AMD said is the world's first 16 core x86 processor, will be used in supercomputers. Rick Bergman, SVP and general manager of AMD Products Group said, "This is a monumental moment for the industry as this first 'Bulldozer' core represents the beginning of unprecedented...

High levels of vitamin D in the bloodstream appear to be associated with a decreased risk of developing early age-related macular degeneration among women younger than 75 years, according to a report in the April issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a chronic, late-onset disease that results in degeneration of the macula, is the leading cause of adult irreversible vision loss in developed countries," the authors write as background information in the article. "Age-related macular degeneration affects approximately 9 percent (8.5 million) of Americans aged 40 years and older." Amy E. Millen,...

Advanced Micro Devices seems to be planning extremely rapid transition of its desktop microprocessors to 32nm silicon-on-insulator fabrication process, a person with knowledge of the matter said. By the second quarter of 2012 virtually all AMD processors will be made using 32nm SOI technology and be based on new designs.At present the absolute majority of desktop microprocessors shipped by Advanced Micro Devices are AMD Athlon II and AMD Phenom II chips in AM3 form-factor. But already in a little bit more than a year from now all the desktop chips that AMD will sell will be made using 32nm SOI...

Big GHz fight in 2011 Qualcomm has decided to show its dual Scorpion based MSM8x60 mobile CPU and it also told the world that this CPU can hit 1.2GHz, per core that is. The chip has an Adreno 220 GPU that we know little about and of course its a 45nm chip since 28nm should be only ready in the latter part of 2011. The chip should be able to do high definition stereoscopic 3D video, and multi-party video conferencing as well as some nice gaming. It is intended for tablets and phones and you can bet that you will...

Heating up clock wars Whether you like it or not, the ARM revolution is happening today and these small chips are starting to matter to the world just as much as Intel and AMD chips do. They will get to many tablets and mobile phones in 2011 and onward and most of the 2011 models are dual-core. We just mentioned the 1.5GHz OMAP 4440 chip yesterday and we got confirmation from a source close to Texas Instruments that this fancy fast chip can ship in the second half of 2011. Texas (non-chainsaw) chaps do believe that that have a good...

Commentary: Board just as culpable for chip maker’s current fateSAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s board of directors may have booted CEO Dirk Meyer over a lack of strategic vision for the mobile market, but the chip maker’s problems are not going to be solved by a little house cleaning in the top suite. In fact, the board is just as responsible for signing off on decisions that distracted the company and perhaps factored into why AMD missed out on major growth areas. Earlier this week, AMD stunned both Wall Street and Silicon Valley with the news that...

EDITORIAL Don't get too enamoured with your fancy, long term plans... Process technology is the best friend, and worst enemy of the graphics world.  Throughout the years we have seen improvements in process tech create new opportunities within the 3D graphics industry, and at the same time we have seen it be the downfall of certain products and cycles.  Today we see that in full effect, and for a variety of causes. Looking back through the years we have seen some great advances, and some huge stumbles.  Consider NVIDIA and their flawed GeForce FX design on a “not quite ready...

The Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel... Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1--the latter used on Apple's Mac operating systems... Certain graphics chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia already support DirectX 11... Smith also reiterated that Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon--the follow-on to Sandy Bridge--by the end of 2011... also repeated that Intel has invested "six to eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production." ...A...

Apple will use Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs in its future laptops, no surprises there, but what's interesting about these forthcoming machines is that some of them might rely solely on Intel's chip for both general and graphical processing tasks. That's the word from the usual "sources familiar with Apple's plans," who expect "MacBook models with screen sizes of 13 inches and below" to eschew the inclusion of a discrete GPU and ride their luck on the improved graphical performance of Intel's upcoming do-it-all chip. There are currently no sub-13.3-inch MacBooks, so the suggestion of one is surely intriguing, but the...

A chip company's plan to open a manufacturing plant in Abu Dhabi has experts worried about the supply of essential computer processors. Should a war or even a serious political disagreement arise, they say, a foreign power could stop or corrupt the flow of computer chips from its plants to the U.S. Intel Corp. announced on Tuesday plans to spend up to $8 billion on state-of-the-art plants in Oregon and Arizona, meaning most of its central processing units (CPUs) -- the brains behind every computer -- would continue to be manufactured in the U.S. The company's CEO, Paul Otellini, said...

Chipmaker delivers a 100 MHz bump to almost all of its lineup, its third refresh of the year for some models Today Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., the world's second largest microprocessor maker, unveiled six new CPUs to hold off Intel while it prepares its next-generation architecture. First, let's get a quick primer on AMD's CPU brand strategy, which can be a bit confusing.  AMD makes two major lines of CPUs -- a high end line dubbed Phenom II, and a budget lined dubbed Athlon II.  Athlon IIs lack L3 cache and typically feature slightly lower clock speeds.  Also, only Phenom...

In NVIDIA's eye the parallelism of the GPU is the only future for computingNVIDIA has struggled this time around in the GPU war.  Its first DirectX 11 products were delivered a full seven months after AMD's.  While its new units are at last trickling onto the market and are very powerful, they're also hot, loud, and power hogs.  However, NVIDIA is staking much on the prediction that the computer industry will be ditching traditional architectures and moving towards parallel designs; a movement which it sees its CUDA GPU computing as an ideal solution for. Intel and NVIDIA have long traded jabs, and Intel's recent failed...

Building your own computer can be very time consuming and rewarding at the same time. While piecing the new hardware together is usually a relatively easy task, picking out the right components in the first place is what can make it more troublesome (that's where our PC buying guide comes in handy - but please, read on). The first component that must be decided upon before any build takes place is the processor, as this will dictate which motherboard can be used and often the memory type. As one of the more expensive components you must choose wisely, so think...

FTC says Silicon Valley giant also trying to dominate graphics chip arena SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Intel Corp. has made peace with arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but the Federal Trade Commission's suit against the chip behemoth points to the rise of its new nemesis on the legal front -- Nvidia Corp.The FTC complaint focuses on Intel's alleged anticompetive behavior against AMD in the market for central processing units, or CPUs, that run personal computers. But it also zeroed in on the market for graphics processing units, or GPUs as graphics processors are known, an arena where Nvidia and Intel...

Lawsuits wrapped up with cash, promises of good behavior If you were looking forward to a long and protracted antitrust battle between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, you're out of luck. The two companies have buried the hatchet and settled all outstanding intellectual property and antitrust lawsuits. Under the settlement between the rival chip companies, Intel and AMD have signed a five-year cross licensing agreement and are letting go of any claims they made against each other with regard to breaches of previous cross-licensing arrangements. Oh, and AMD gets $1.25bn and Intel agrees to "abide by a set of business...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The executive arm of the European Union unveiled details Monday of its antitrust case against Intel Corp., including internal emails that the commission said showed the chip giant coercing or cutting deals with manufacturers to shut out rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. But Intel Corp. immediately fired back, saying the E.U. Commission "relied heavily on speculation found in emails from lower-level employees that did not participate in the negotiation of the relevant agreements," according to spokesman Chuck Mulloy. The release of the nonconfidential version of its Intel decision comes about a week after details of the...

Now that virtualization has become a key driver of x64 server sales, the ability to live-migrate workloads from machines using older chip generation to newer and future ones is important to data centers - which is why AMD's latest nerd porn demonstrates its Opteron architecture performing inter-generational migrations. The company's future twelve-shooter Magny-Cours Opteron processor, due in 2010's Opteron 6000 series servers using the G34 socket and related chipset, is featured in the latest AMD video. Magny-Cours, by the way, is not really a twelve-shooter as much as it's two six-shooters sharing the same holster. The demo stars Ron Meyers,...

Earlier this year, the European Commission nailed Intel with a record setting $1.45 billion fine for what it construed as anticompetitive practices, and on Monday the EC published a non-confidential version of its Intel Decision laying out all the details that led to the hefty fine. The EC seems to have taken particular exception to conditional rebates offered by Intel, listing no less than five scenarios, including rebates to Dell from December 2002 to December 2005 in exchange for purchasing exclusively Intel CPUs. But according to the paper, Intel also dangled the conditional carrot in front of Acer, HP, NEC,...

Designed as the optimal balance of CPU performance and graphics excellence, this AMD platform is designed to take advantage of new Windows 7 enhancement. As part of the new desktop platform designed for mainstream consumers, AMD today announced the first ever quad-core processor for less than $100 Suggested System Builder Price (SSBP). By balancing the power of new AMD Athlon™ II X4 quad-core processors and the AMD 785G chipset featuring ATI Radeon™ HD 4200 graphics, AMD delivers smooth HD visuals and the foundation for a great Windows 7 experience. When matched against similarly priced competitive processors, the AMD Athlon II...

What looks like CPU-Z data on one of AMD’s Magny-Cours 12-core server processors has popped up on the internet today.

BOSTON (June 18, 2009) - Omega-3 fatty acids found in fatty fish such as tuna and salmon may protect against progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), but the benefits appear to depend on the stage of disease and whether certain supplements are taken, report researchers at the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research (LNVR), Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University. The researchers calculated intakes of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) from dietary questionnaires administered to 2,924 men and women, aged 55 to 80 years, participating in an eight-year supplement trial, the...

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is one of the leading causes of blindness in adults, a growing problem as the population ages. Now a team of researchers at the University of Kentucky has raised hope for early detection and preventive treatment. Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati and colleague have discovered a biological marker for AMD, a receptor known as CCR3. They say it shows strong potential as a means for doctors to lesson the impact of the much-feared condition. The findings were reported in an article published online Sunday by the journal Nature. "This is a major paradigm shift in macular degeneration research,"...

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Global Foundries has sent a formal commitment letter to New York state for the construction of the Fab 2 project at the Luther Forest Technology Campus in upstate New York. The letter initiates the construction phase of the Fab 2 project and triggers the process of issuing state bonds for reimbursements payments and incentives to the company for the development of the estimated $4.2 billion wafer fab. The purchase of 223 acres of land from the campus is set for Wednesday (June 10). Global Foundries also has completed a development agreement with two New York townships which...

Vital nutrients found in fatty fish like salmon and tuna can stave off the progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which affects around 200,000 people in Britain and is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. More and more people are predicted to develop the condition, which initially involves an inability to make out fine details, as the population ages. Researchers say that the omega 3 fatty acids found in fish could offer protection against the disease. Their findings, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, show that progression to both the dry and wet forms of advanced disease...

A new feature in Istanbul is called HyperTransport Assist, a technology that increases memory and I/O performance by reducing the overhead of cache lockups. Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) on Monday launched its six-core server processor code-named Istanbul, saying computer makers this month would be selling high-powered products incorporating the chip. The release of AMD's latest Opteron chip followed less than a week after Intel (NSDQ: INTC) announced that it would begin production of an eight-core Nehalem-EX processor, officially called the Xeon 7400 line, this year. Systems are expected in 2010.

A few months ago I launched something we quickly titled "Bench". The idea behind AnandTech Bench is that it's a publicly accessible version of the database of benchmarks we've run internally.  You can currently compare 34 AMD CPUs and 36 Intel CPUs in the engine across 18 benchmarks.  I'm working on adding power data as well. You can access Bench at its own URL: http://www.anandtech.com/bench   Currently Bench only has CPU data in it but there are plans to expand it to storage and GPUs in the future, the former being far easier than the latter due to constantly changing drivers....

The world is returning to the 1970s on most economic policies, so why not antitrust too? Judging by events this week, antitrust enforcement in the U.S. and Europe is in for a major comeback, whether or not consumers benefit. Yesterday in Brussels, the European Commission imposed a record antitrust fine of $1.45 billion on Intel for the heinous crime of discounting computer chips in its fierce and long-running competition with AMD. Meanwhile on Monday, President Obama's new antitrust chief, Christine Varney, issued a radical revision of the Department of Justice's own antitrust enforcement standards. Ms. Varney's ambition seems to be...

In the highly demanding (and some say shrinking) world of PC gaming, only two graphics powers really count: reigning popular champ Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division. Now it looks like ATI’s Radeon may have got a bit of a lead on its arch-foe. ATI, once considered a perennial also-ran to Nvidia’s cutting-edge graphics chips, has become the first to crack what it called the 1 Gigahertz barrier on standard air-cooling. Pounding its chest, the company trumpeted on Wednesday the milestone and talked about “amazing gaming experiences” for the likes of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. and Electronic Arts’ Battleforge. It would...

The verdict is in and it's huge. As expected, the EU is fining Intel a record €1.06 billion or $1.45 billion (Billion!) dollars due to violations of antitrust rules in Europe. The record fine surpasses that of the €497 million fine originally levied against Microsoft. The EU ruled that Intel illegally used hidden rebates to squeeze rivals out of the marketplace for CPUs. In a statement issued by European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, the EC said,

BRITISH scientists have developed the world’s first stem cell therapy to cure the most common cause of blindness. Surgeons predict it will become a routine, one-hour procedure that will be generally available in six or seven years’ time. The treatment involves replacing a layer of degenerated cells with new ones created from embryonic stem cells. It was pioneered by scientists and surgeons from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and Moorfields eye hospital.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday congratulated the defense establishment on the morning's successful test of the Arrow missile. "I would like to congratulate the defense establishment on the successful test. While we are for peace, we will know how to defend ourselves," said Netanyahu. The Prime Minister was speaking at a pre-Passover chametz-selling ceremony also attended by Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. He also spoke with Defense Minister Ehud Barak about the results of the test.

This morning, AMD raised the bid in a high-stakes game of poker with Intel, and it's looking more and more like both sides are playing according to big plans.Yesterday in an interview with Betanews, Intel corporate spokesperson Chuck Mulloy requested that AMD lift its veil of secrecy regarding the redacted portion of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies. The unseen portion, we're told and Mulloy believes, includes the list of technologies that AMD is currently licensing to Intel -- Mulloy himself has not seen that list. It's the list of technologies whose licenses AMD is threatening to cancel if...

CeBIT 2009: An entirely new chip We learned some bits and pieces on ATI's upcoming RV790 chip and we can now happily confirm that his is yet another 55nm chip from ATI. The company didn’t want to postpone the introduction of the new card in performance segment and therefore did it in 55nm, while RV740 remains the first 40nm. RV740 just launched as a mobile chip, and we’ve seen it up and running, while the desktop part should arrive in the next month or two. The new chip is a new architecture, but with some basic concepts taken from the...