Displaying items by tag: AMD

Earlier today we talked about how AMD’s Rory Read is looking to cloud based services to help overcome the lack of processing power available to AMD’s APUs (and other CPUs moving forward) in that article we talked (very briefly) about some of the concerns that are keeping people out of cloud based services. Although one that is commonly talked about is privacy the other (and perhaps even more important) is security.

Although we reported on this last year it seems that AMD is intent on reminding all of us about their new strategy. In comments to BloombergBusinessweek CEO Rory Read has made the comment that AMD will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the CPU market. This time Read qualifies his comment with a statement that is sure to be put in the same category of Bill Gates’ famous (although misattributed) “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

AMD made Trinity official today with a real live launch of the newest APU in their Fusion family of chips. Although an AMD exec leaked that the new mobile processors were already in the channel back in early April today is the “official” launch day. AMD is wasting no time in letting people know they are going to be working to out price Intel with Trinity products as well.

You would think today was a slow news day as we see people reporting on something we talked about almost a month ago (well really more than that). It seems that people are waking up from the haze of all of the news about Windows on ARM (Windows RT) and starting to realize that x86/64 tablets are going to be much, much more attractive to both consumers, businesses and both manufacturers and developers.

It looks like AMD is putting some of the money they have been working to reclaim to good use (although we are not sure if this is the best time to do it). To help raise sales numbers of their APUs they have signed a deal with GameFly which gives a 30-day free membership and 20% of purchases. The move is a pretty smart one as we imagine the costs involved for AMD are small while the benefit could be pretty big especially in the mobile gaming arena.

AMD is hard at work to try and cut back on operating costs. This is a smart move on their part as they will have to figure out a way to bounce back from the recent loss they posted. To save money they are working to cut down on their data centers. Currently AMD operates 12 geographically distributed data centers. These have costs associated with them that go beyond simply keeping the lights on.

There will be some rejoicing as AMD managed to grab a tiny amount of the x86 market share from Intel last quarter. According to Mercury research AMD’s combined x86 market share rose from 18.2 percent to 19.1. This .9 percent rise was attributed to AMD’s strong offering in the mobile market although some reports seemed to suggest otherwise.

Valve is one of those companies that just seems to work. They have a leadership and management style that supports creativity and free thinking. In fact during a recent interview Gabe Newell stated that they let people work on the things they feel are important and that is how new projects are created (it was funny to hear him say he often rolls his desk into the elevator to work with others).

AMD may have hit something of a snag in their HPC department. It seems that Intel has bought out Cray’s interconnect business. Now if you are wondering how that affects AMD then it might interest you to know that Cray (a maker of super computers) has had a fondness for AMD since the introduction of the Opteron. Now with Intel grabbing up the Interconnect side of the house (and 74 Cray engineers) things could change quickly.

AMD has some sun in its future after a very disappointing quarterly announcement. It seems that Trinity and Brazos 2.0 are already in the channel which means we should see products with these two APUs in them very soon (as soon as May 15^th by some reports). AMD’s APUs have been a solid seller for AMD while many of their more regular desktop CPUs are left on the shelves. We covered some of the new features in Trinity while we were at CES this year and we can say that for a low power processor they have some pretty solid performance.