Displaying items by tag: AMD

As companies race towards smaller and faster processors they continually run into a problem. This problem is one of current leakage. As the process used to make the individual transistors shrinks current leakage grows. There have been many concepts presented to combat this leakage some of which have been successful such as AMD’s SOI (Silicon on Insulator), Intel’s High-K Metal Gate and Tri-Gate Transistors. These work fairly well down to 28nm, but start to become less efficient at 22nm and below. Most agree that to move forward with smaller transistors a new material is needed.

Back in October of last year we talked a little bit about AMD’s plans and where Rory Reed saw AMD heading. We knew from his past work with Lenovo that he was fascinated with the mobile world and that he felt it was the future of computing. Since that time we have heard him talk more and more about how the current laptops and desktops have more than enough power to do what they need to do. His reasoning is that the computer world is going to shift to the cloud and back into the traditional client/server infrastructure or more accurately the mainframe/terminal infrastructure. Looking at the current state of the cloud the Mainframe/Terminal model is the way that many companies want to go anyway. They want to do all of your calculations, rendering, compiling and then send you the output.  All your “PC” needs to be able to do is display that output. This is the future that Rory Reed envisions for AMD.

Although the news has been more about the massive global war between Apple and anyone that makes an Android phone there is more going on in the world of tech than just those few items. Today we have heard that AMD will be launching a new CPU and it has already popped up for pre-order on at least one site. The news is noteworthy in that the CPU was originally expected to hit earlier this year with a number of other SKUs. We are not sure if today’s announcement is an indication that we will be seeing the other six missing products in the coming months, but for AMD fans this is potentially very good news.

Since the first day AMD presented the AMD Radeon 7850 2GB graphic card, code name “Pitcairn”, they surprised the industry with its performance, abilities, technology and efficiency that put them in front of the rivals. The 7850 series has around 40% better performance when compared to its predecessor (the 6850) when running at higher resolutions. The HD 7850 is based on 28nm GCN Pitcairn GPU with 1024 stream processord and 256bit memory interface.

One of the thing things that we find interesting in many leaks and even official documents about upcoming products is the use of percentages and multipliers without much real data. We saw this with Microsoft and their performance claims for Windows 8’s new desktop and 3D graphics performance. They used a ton of percentages and yet forgot to list the hardware they were comparing or any of the raw numbers. Not too long after that we saw ARM claim a base 50% performance increase with their next generation Mali GPUs over their current generation Mali GPUs. Again we do not have any real numbers or the basis for these claims. Unfortunately for ARM even a 50% performance increase will not make their next gen faster than some of their competition.

Rumors are fun things, but in the end a good deal of them can be counted out with little more than common sense (and a little research). An interesting rumor that popped up in the past weeks is one that is trying to claim that AMD is a prime target for acquisition. Right now the potential buyers are listed as Samsung and Qualcomm, but does any of that make sense? Is AMD really a prime target for acquisition and are they ready to be bought out by someone else? Let’s take a look at these rumors and see if they hold any water.a

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.

AMD is one of those companies that really need to take a long hard look at its past to get a good handle on where it is going. My first experiences with AMD go pretty far back to when they were making 2x86 CPUs on license from Intel. At the time AMD was also a pretty big player in the DSP market and could be found in many of the early two-way radios and later in Cell phones (it was cool to show that to people that were skeptical of buying AMD for the first time. Still AMD was always considered the low cost alternative to Intel, but one that came with a performance hit (it was not completely true, but that was what the market thought).

AMD has just announced that their Q2 earnings may be as much as 11% lower than expected (over Q1 2012). Originally AMD predicted a gain of 3% sequentially for this quarter, but it looks like a few things did not turn out the way they planned. AMD is mostly blaming the issue on slow channel sales in China and Europe, but also stated that they encountered a weak market which impacted their OEM sales. Both causes are over generalizations of an issue that we saw coming back in 2011; AMD has to get their products into the hands of the consumer.

Google (and ARM as a whole) is finding out the hard way that building an OS is not that easy and without proper and full support you are going to have problems across your entire platform. Today and Google I/O 12 Google announced and showed off Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Now this sounds great but there are still a ton of devices that are waiting for ICS (Android 4.0) that was announced last year.