Displaying items by tag: AMD

Over the course of the last year or so we have watched as a once solid company has started to crumble into a shadow of its former self. Yes we are talking about AMD and although the trip down the path to where they are now started years ago we have to wonder if there was ever a chance to change things and get the company back on track.

For those of you that are old enough to remember the birth of the AMD Athlon CPU then you might also remember that AMD picked up quite a bit of the technology from a company called DEC. DEC had a CPU that at the time was simply amazing. To make matters worse it was a 667MHz CPU that was able to run rings around both Intel’s and AMD’s 1GHZ CPUs. There were multiple reasons for this but the most under rated one was the efficient caching structure. The DEC Alpha processor was light years ahead of most CPUs on the market at the time, but due to it being a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) CPU it was not as flexible as even the slower X86 CPUs.

AMD has lost another high-level employee today. This time in the form of Eric Demers CTO of the AMD graphics division; although I have never met Eric I have heard of him from others and it seems there are mixed feelings about the impact this will have on AMD. Some are saying that there will be no immediate impact. This is probably true as AMD’s GPU business is mapped out until at least the end of 2012.

Although the big news in the graphics market is AMD’s 7xxx series GPUs and the lack of Kepler from nVidia there are still things going on with some of AMD’s older Radeon products. One of these arrived in our lab a few days ago and is a very interesting product indeed. This is Asus’ HD 6770 DirectCU Silent. It is pretty much exactly what it says; you get an AMD Radeon 6770 GPU (with 1gb of GDDR5) cooled by a direct contact cooler with no moving parts. This is a great product for people looking to build a silent gaming rig or perhaps a quite HTPC. Of course there are probably going to be tradeoffs with any product like this and it is now our job to find out what they are. So, without too much of a delay let’s take a look at Asus’ EAH6770 DC SL/2D1/1GD5; otherwise known as the HD 6770 DirectCU Silent.

One of the all-time largest patent trolls RAMBUS (yes even bigger than apple) has finally settled a long running battle with nVidia and signed a licensing agreement with the GPU and SoC manufacturer. RAMBUS is famous for its underhanded dealings in the mid-90s when the company filed patents on technology that was being openly discussed at JDEC conferences.  RAMBUS then turned around and sued other members of the organization for violating their patent rights. The resulting legal battle made the Samsung Vs. Apple dispute look like a fight over the TV remote.

So the big news today is the release of AMD’s 7950 GPU. We are seeing a ton of reviews hit the internet covering everything from stock reference designs to stock cards with advanced cooling on them. The word so far is that the 7950 is a great card and can take on nVidia’s GTX 580 in most games. However, while everyone was busy reading up on AMD’s latest product to hit the gaming market someone at MSI let all of the details for AMD’s future GPU releases out to the press.

So there is now a rumor out that nVidia is going release Kepler for the mobile market before launching for the desktop. This sounds great and on the surface seems simple, but is that all there is to this? Is the decision to launch in the mobile space really all about getting into ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge? As we always do we read over the rumors and tried to make some sense of them, what we came up with is very interesting.

CES 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada – Just when you thought our CES coverage was over we bring you our coverage of AMD and a few of the products that they wanted to show off during CES. AMD’s booth this year was somewhat out of the way. Although many companies choose to be on the main floor of the show AMD was up in what almost seemed like a back corner in the meeting room area. This did not mean that they did not bring out some cool stuff. It just seemed like they really were not looking to deal with the madness of the show floor.

They say the consumer has a very short memory and that may be true in many cases, but when news that AMD is being sued by Quanta (the largest contract notebook maker in the world) we saw many, many posts and comments bringing up nVidia’s fiasco with the 8600M GPU. Although the two issues might appear to be similar, they are very far apart in terms of not only the problem, but who was/is ulimately responsible for the problem.

Not that long ago we showed you some more information about AMD’s new Tahiti GPU. At the time there were rumors that AMD would have the official launch on or around December 22nd (which is in 3 days). We contacted a few of our sources and they were still saying that the launch was going to be in January (either the 9th or the 12th). We started to dig around, but were not able to get any more information on this so we decided to leave it off as an unconfirmed rumor.