Displaying items by tag: APU

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.

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.

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.

AMD goes back to its past as it looks to the future… sounds like a good headline right? But it is not merely a headline, but a reality in that AMD has done what we predicted they would do back in November 2011 when we talked about the direction that AMD was moving in. AMD is putting together an R&D consortium like they had when they were developing the Opteron and a few other products. At the time the think tank involved companies like Motorola, Texas Instrument, IBM, and even Samsung. Now the players are different, but the goal is the same.

AMD has finally signed the predicted license deal with ARM to incorporate some of ARM’s technology into AMD’s APUs. This was a move that we saw coming back in Q3 of 2011. Around the time when Rory Reed took over the helm at AMD we anticipated the shift to mobile computing. It was Reed’s big push at Lenovo while he was there and we did not expect anything less from him at AMD.

At Computex in Taipei AMD is showing off a prototype Windows 8 tablet. This is something that we predicted they would do right after they announced their shift to low power CPUs (well really APUs). It was a move that we predicted was not only logical, but one that was necessary for AMD with the shift to tablets and ultrabooks that many companies are making in anticipation of Windows 8 and its very touch oriented design.

We have talked quite a bit about AMD’s move to the APU (something that they talked about long before the ATi buyout) and what it has, so far, meant to AMD. Right now AMD’s Llano and Trinity APUs have brought something of a resurgence of AMD in the market at least at the lower priced level. AMD CEO Rory Reed has even go so far as to state that AMD is pushing for more GPU processing to handle more graphically geared content and to work with future cloud services. The problem is that so far, while AMD’s APUs are working great for gaming they have still not been able to keep up with Intel for computing power even at the same price points.

Although we reported on this last year it seems that AMD is intent on reminding all of us about their new strategy. In comments to BloombergBusinessweek CEO Rory Read has made the comment that AMD will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the CPU market. This time Read qualifies his comment with a statement that is sure to be put in the same category of Bill Gates’ famous (although misattributed) “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

AMD made Trinity official today with a real live launch of the newest APU in their Fusion family of chips. Although an AMD exec leaked that the new mobile processors were already in the channel back in early April today is the “official” launch day. AMD is wasting no time in letting people know they are going to be working to out price Intel with Trinity products as well.

It looks like AMD is putting some of the money they have been working to reclaim to good use (although we are not sure if this is the best time to do it). To help raise sales numbers of their APUs they have signed a deal with GameFly which gives a 30-day free membership and 20% of purchases. The move is a pretty smart one as we imagine the costs involved for AMD are small while the benefit could be pretty big especially in the mobile gaming arena.