Displaying items by tag: AMD

You know, there is a certain irony when a company brags about a product that contains their competitor’s hardware. Unfortunately for AMD that is exactly the position they are in right now. AMD recently bought the company Seamicro (for a hand sum) for the purposes of gaming their interconnect technology. Intel picked up Cray’s interconnect unit shortly after, but there is talk that their deal pre-existed the AMD one. However, regardless of who bought what first AMD bought the whole company while Intel only picked up a certain division.

When Lynnfield launched with its built in PCIe controller the motherboard makers of the world collectively groaned. They began to wonder how in the world they were going to run everything they want to put onto their motherboards with the limited number of PCIe lanes that were provided. The answer to this solution was simple, use a bridge chip… the problem was that there were not many that were up to the job. One of these companies that quickly became synonymous with high-performance motherboards was PLX. We first saw these on Asus motherboards (the P55 motherboards) and the system simply worked. Since then many more motherboard makers have adopted them and come to reply on PLX to keep things moving.

At the end of AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit they tried to pull an Apple style trick (saving that “one more thing”). Mark Papermaster came out with a rather large graphics card and announced to the crowd that he was introducing the FirePro W9000. The card has 6GB of GDDR5 a rumored 2,048 cores that are capable of pushing 4TFlops of single precision calculations and 1TFlop of Double Precision calculations.

AMD goes back to its past as it looks to the future… sounds like a good headline right? But it is not merely a headline, but a reality in that AMD has done what we predicted they would do back in November 2011 when we talked about the direction that AMD was moving in. AMD is putting together an R&D consortium like they had when they were developing the Opteron and a few other products. At the time the think tank involved companies like Motorola, Texas Instrument, IBM, and even Samsung. Now the players are different, but the goal is the same.

AMD has finally signed the predicted license deal with ARM to incorporate some of ARM’s technology into AMD’s APUs. This was a move that we saw coming back in Q3 of 2011. Around the time when Rory Reed took over the helm at AMD we anticipated the shift to mobile computing. It was Reed’s big push at Lenovo while he was there and we did not expect anything less from him at AMD.

Ok, you know things are going bad for a product push when you hear that even the US Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) has decided to weigh in on security issues surrounding the use of your product. In an unusual move US CERT has released a paper outlining very specific security issues with AMD Video Drivers. This issue would affect their desktop, professional mobile and even APU based drivers.

At Computex in Taipei AMD is showing off a prototype Windows 8 tablet. This is something that we predicted they would do right after they announced their shift to low power CPUs (well really APUs). It was a move that we predicted was not only logical, but one that was necessary for AMD with the shift to tablets and ultrabooks that many companies are making in anticipation of Windows 8 and its very touch oriented design.

At CES 2010 we watched as the “PC” world began to gear up for its onslaught into the tablet market. Many at the time were still claiming that Apple was going to hold the market simply because they had a very big foot hold (and still do). However as we watched press briefings from Asus, Lenovo, nVidia, AMD, and Intel we saw something very interesting; the move to tablets that make sense for everyone. We are not talking about the choice of OS here either.

We have talked quite a bit about AMD’s move to the APU (something that they talked about long before the ATi buyout) and what it has, so far, meant to AMD. Right now AMD’s Llano and Trinity APUs have brought something of a resurgence of AMD in the market at least at the lower priced level. AMD CEO Rory Reed has even go so far as to state that AMD is pushing for more GPU processing to handle more graphically geared content and to work with future cloud services. The problem is that so far, while AMD’s APUs are working great for gaming they have still not been able to keep up with Intel for computing power even at the same price points.

It looks like we might have done our Windows 8 coverage the wrong way around as we are now seeing a host of articles that are showing off the new look of the desktop, the Metro UI News, Sports and Weather apps and more. This is very odd as we have been talking about much this since the Build Conference. Still it is very possible that some of these sites are now listing these items in a new PR push for Microsoft. After all the most recent one we saw on the new Desktop Look had a direct quote from them on Aero and the “vista” look.