Displaying items by tag: Graphics

After the success of their consumer level APUs it looks like AMD wants to try and bring some of that to the professional world. Yes, they are going to be making something like Trinity for the workstation market. AMD is going to attempt to drop a CPU (or four) inside their FirePro GPUs to see if it sticks.  The move is almost the opposite of what you see with the APUs. In the Llano and Trinity you have a small number of GPU cores that are added into the CPU die in order to provide graphical output. These cores are very efficient and were pulled from AMD’s successful Radeon line of GPUs. In the new FirePro Processors they will maintain the full GPU (just like in a discrete card), but add in CPU cores to create a more functional whole.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AMD has begun shipping their 28nm GPUs to OEMs in preparation for the official launch in January at the 2012 CES. This news is good for AMD as they have been promising to be first to market with 28nm for most of the year. It is also good to know that some of the issues with TSMC’s 28nm process that we have heard about are not going to slow things up.

It looks like AMD might be taking a leaf out of HP’s book. According to a report from ZDNet Asia AMD will begin to shift its focus away from the desktop to the server side where the margins are much higher per unit. This latest news plays into some additional rumblings that AMD is getting out of the x86 market (which is not true at all). We have already told you that AMD is planning to shift its consumer line up toward the mobile market where AMD feels they have an advantage over Intel and the Atom.

It seems like companies are determined to re-vsit old ideas these days. We see VMWare trying to recreate a wheel that was pioneered by Citrix. Apple is always redoing an old idea and presenting it like it is a new concept and now we see nVidia going down a road that has been traveled more than once before. The road in question is external video devices; not monitors or splitters or anything like that, but we are talking about external video cards. This is something that has been done before and did not go over all that well. I ccan remember when people were buying PCMCIA cards for use with video editing software. These would work for a while, but the cards would often die (and be replaced) or the inconvinience of using this would become so great we would end up building them a desktop system to replace the laptop they had just bought.

Still if the word from Fudzilla is to be believed this is something that nVidia will be producing and they are even excited about the prospect. We think that this will go the same way that AMD's external grpahics has gone. It is a VERY niche product and one that not only has a limited number of partners (Sony) but also has a very limited market vertical. The problem is that most of the markets where this would be desired already have mobile systems with impressive discrete graphics all on there own. If this is reall a direction that nVidia is going down, they will have a rought road ahead.

Source Fudzilla

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We have taken our walk around of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 and found we like the design and many of the features packed into the system. In the second half of our test we will be diving into what you can get out of it when you put in under the stress of rendering, gaming and general purpose computing. We do have concerns with this new product as it has really been built with a newer CPU in mind (one that is not ready as of this writing). Still one of the things that AMD has always worked on is backwards compatibility. With that in mind we are breaking out our Phenom II 1100T and getting ready for some testing.