Displaying items by tag: AMD

Last year, AMD decided to reward future owners of the Radeon HD 7900 and 7800 series with free keys for Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and a discount for Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Satisfied with the results of those actions, this year they created a new one, with an even better range of popular gaming titles.

AMD has introduced another processor within the Vishera platform for AM3 + socket. It is a quad-core FX-4130 chip with a Piledriver architecture. This new CPU inherits the old model name FX-4100 and it is very similar in price and performance. It looks like AMD wants to give at least a small upgrade for users of this older socket.

The consumer electronic market is an interesting one. It is probably one of the only markets (with the exception of possibly the auto industry) to have the massive number of incorrect segmenting of products. One of the biggest areas of segmentation (incorrect segmentation) is in the “PC” market. Here the competition for products is insane. Back in the early days (the days when we had IBM Compatibles) things were relatively simple; at least they were on the surface. When you walked into a store and looked for a computer (if you were at all interested in having one back in the mid-90s) you saw IBM’s and their clones. One of the first computers I was exposed to was the Osborne One which actually predates the original IBM PC and the consolidation of the market in the early to mid-80s. In fact it was the introduction of the IBM PC combined with the Kaypro II portable that ended up killing Osborne and their chance in the market.

AMD had their big CES-2013 press conference yesterday and while the tone was the typical joyous “we are doing great” one that you hear in any press conference from a tech company these days there was something else behind the happy faces and smiles. As we watched and listened to the different speakers we heard this subtle tone and it was an apology. AMD’s message for 2013 is that they will not only promise better performance and competing products, but they will execute and deliver on those products.

AMD, in the last quarter of this year significantly reduced wafer orders from GlobalFoundries. According to the original agreement, AMD was supposed to but $500 Million worth of wafers from GlobalFoundries, but that figure is now down to about $ 115 million. AMD CEO Rory Read tried to cool the situation by saying “Today's announcement demonstrates that the long-term strategic partnership between AMD and GlobalFoundries continues to benefit both companies,” but it's obvious that this was something that AMD certainly did not want.

Apple's desktop computer for professionals, the Mac Pro, could soon get a hardware upgrade. The upgrading in question here refers to the graphics subsystem, which is one of the weakest components of the current range of Mac Pro. This is in addition to the slower USB 2.0 and the absence of Thunderbolt.

Yesterday there was a flurry of news posts with dire warnings that Intel would soon be removing the ability to upgrade your CPU. The news talked about the future of Intel CPUs and their associated sockets after Haswell.  When we first saw some of these posts they read like the latest Facebook update rumors, but as with many rumors there is a nugget of truth somewhere in them (at least most of the time). We did reach out to Intel, but as expected they were not able to comment on unannounced products and had nothing more to say. So exactly what is going on with Intel and the future of the DIY market, let’s take a look and see if we can make some sense of the rumor that is going around.

In order to satisfy the appetites of its numerous U.S. semiconductor clients, Taiwanese TSMC appears to be preparing to build a huge factory in the U.S. Earlier this month, word spread that an unnamed company hired Deloitte for business and financial advice to explore locations for the construction of huge buildings in the districts of Rensselaer, Saratoga and Utica, New York. The server location must have access to water, power and gas resources which can serve the building of 3.2 million square feet (300,000 square meters) which will employ around 1,000 workers (40% with an engineering degree). The building would be up to 55 meters high, and would cost several billion dollars.

The Titan, a supercomputer that was created by adding nVidia's Tesla GPUs to existing AMD Opterons in the Jaguar supercomputer, has become officially the fastest supercomputer in the world. The Titan system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. came out on top as expected, with amazing performance of 17.52 petaflops. U.S Secretary of Energy Steven Chu  indicated that “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing“, and without a doubt Titan will bring that.

Suppose I have a picture that I have been given. This picture is not something that the owner wants shown to the world so they have given me a list of people that can see it. When someone wants to see it I ask them who they are and if their name is on the list I show it to them. However, this plan is not working out that well so the owner decides to add some requirements. Now when someone wants to see the picture they have to show ID. Still people are getting around that with fake IDs, so now the owner gives out a special code word that is unique to each person while still maintaining the requirement for ID. To make things even more secure I have a picture of each person and a copy of their ID. What I have described here is a very simple explanation of the way that some of the different levels of encryption work; from the very basic to much more complex routines. In this article we will be talking about encryption as it relates to wireless access points and we can tell you up front you will be surprised at how insecure some of them are.