Displaying items by tag: AMD

AMD has lowered the prices for a total of eighteen processors from older generations, mainly for FM1 and AM3 sockets. Within the A Series APU chips for FM1 socket prices were changed for six processors, ranging from a minimum of 3.7% for A6-3670K (from $80 to $77) to 21.7% ($46 to $36) for A4-3300.

The recently introduced AMD FX processors codenamed Vishera could remain on the market throughout the next year. Unofficial sources have said in part of the presentation that showed AMD's processor roadmap for the coming year, apparently FX chips for desktop computers will stagnate on Vishera solutions with the Piledriver core.

Yesterday AMD made an announcement that has been in the works for some time and one that we predicted would happen. Late last year as AMD began to change their direction we noticed that AMD was solidifying their partnerships with Texas Instrument, Samsung and a few others who they have always maintained close ties with. AMD had also publicly stated that they were no longer going to compete with Intel head to head in the high-end market but that they were going to work on more power efficient solutions while improving their current offerings for the data center (trying to get more CPU cycles with less power). At the time we felt that AMD was preparing to build their own SoC (System on Chip) offerings we also felt that it was likely that AMD would build both x86 and ARM versions. The last piece of the puzzle was AMD licensing ARM technology (originally AMD claimed this was for use inside their CPUs to handle security).

Cray's new supercomputer has been brought to life in America at the ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) which operates under the U.S. Department of Energy. Titan is capable of delivering more than 20 petaflops of computational power and therefore represents the world's most powerful supercomputer. It's the equivalent of the computing power from 500,000 laptops. The system is also known as the Cray XK7 and is used as an open science project.

The tablet wars are going to get very interesting now that Microsoft has pushed out Windows 8 and their “design point” device the Surface RT. Already this morning there are multiple articles about this new OS and hardware from both sides of the argument.  It is interesting to see the comments that range across Facebook and other social networking sites about the new OS, and more importantly about Microsoft’s Surface RT. This last product has created its own subset of fans and haters outside the general argument about Windows 8. So the big question is, where does Windows 8 and Surface RT stand in the market on the day of the launch, and where do they really fit in?

AMD has recently released its new line of “Piledriver” CPU's, and they perform pretty darn well. No longer in its infancy stage, AMD's multi-threaded core approach has improved significantly from the “Bulldozer” line of chips. The FX-8350 is the best of these CPU's currently on the market, and retails for approximately $220.

It seems like every other amateur computer builder has joined the fan club of either Intel or AMD for their processor needs. It is no secret that Intel builds over-all more capable processors; if you are willing to cough up the extra cash for diminishing returns in the area of performance. AMD has typically been seen as the more cost effective solution for gaming (though, this is highly debatable currently), and sells over all less expensive processors.

Even though Advanced Micro Devices announced last year that they will cut 10% of their workers by the end of 2012's first quarter, things are even worse now. After they announced that expected sales will decrease approximately 10% from the last quarter, they are expected to announce in increase to the number of workers cut to go up to 30% because of weak sales. Rumors are that AMD plans  to announce the workforce cuts between 20% and 30% next week, and it will focus on jobs involving sales and engineering.

Irony is one of those things that you really have to savor. We are sure that both Intel and AMD are savoring the irony of AMD launching a new line of servers running Intel Xeon E3-1260L CPUs. The new server will be sold by AMD’s wholly owned subsidiary Seamicro, but we all know that AMD is the name behind it all. AMD bought Seamicro last year primarily for their interconnect technology, but we are also sure their rising server business was a bonus.

At VMWorld 2012 AMD has summed up what we told you last week when we stated that they were going to split their time and focus on server CPUs for the cloud and APUs for thin clients. In an interesting statement AMD has come out and admitted that they have largely ignored the server and workstation segment for the last four years. This neglect has allowed Intel to push well beyond what AMD can currently offer even when you start factoring in price. In the data center it is all about scalability. Even in spending less you want to make sure you are getting the most out of the systems you build.