Displaying items by tag: APU

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.

Over the course of the last year or so we have watched as a once solid company has started to crumble into a shadow of its former self. Yes we are talking about AMD and although the trip down the path to where they are now started years ago we have to wonder if there was ever a chance to change things and get the company back on track.

CES 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada – Just when you thought our CES coverage was over we bring you our coverage of AMD and a few of the products that they wanted to show off during CES. AMD’s booth this year was somewhat out of the way. Although many companies choose to be on the main floor of the show AMD was up in what almost seemed like a back corner in the meeting room area. This did not mean that they did not bring out some cool stuff. It just seemed like they really were not looking to deal with the madness of the show floor.

Ok... remember how we told you that we had a suspicion that AMD might be working on an x86 based SoC.  We have already seen several signs pointing to a major push on something new and we know that AMD is VERY excited about their Brazos and Llano products. If you add this on top of AMD CEO Rory Read’s fondness for small, low-powered mobile devices you can begin to see a picture emerging. The picture is still fuzzy, but we are finding more signs that could back up our case for AMD’s x86 SoC.

You knew this would happen (as it does almost every time a new CPU is ready to hit the market). In the hype leading up to the release we always start to see “leaked” slides that contain pricing, technical details and even launch dates. It is the same story over and over again and it is one that is, in some cases, perpetrated by the manufactures themselves or a partner bent on getting some good pre-launch press.

AMD’s Llano is not a new product; it is one that has been out on the market for long enough that all of the major hype and press has already been written. We recently wrapped up our long term testing of an AMD A6-3650 combined with a Gigabyte A75 motherboard. We were rather impressed with the performance that we saw, even if the numbers did not match up to the overall feel. Now we are taking a look at the same CPU, but taking a step down the ladder to the A55 chipset. This time the victim is the A55M-DS2 motherboard.  You are losing a few items with this shift like USB 3.0, SATA 3.0  and a PCIe slot, but we wonder if that will really impact performance. So let’s take a look at the design and the features that you can expect to get when you pick up one of these.

With all of the excitement surround a CPU launch from both AMD and then Intel some of the smaller products have been overlooked. These are parts like the A75 chipset and the Llano CPU. We have had one of these up on the test bench for a while now. Mostly to run the performance tests and see where this hardware falls in terms of real performance, but also to try it out and see just what it is like to use.  After all this is a platform that AMD was putting a good deal of stock in for future sales and market share. We wanted to see what it would be like to actually use one. We have already taken a look at the design philosophy and features So without any further preamble we bring you the second half of our Gigabyte A75-UD4H motherboard review.

Over the last few months I have watched a few analysis articles hit the internet with comments about the “stale” PC market and how the desktop PC is dying. These predictors of doom and gloom have always been around and in many cases I have a feeling they are saying these things because they want you to believe them. The funny thing is that the reality of the PC market is quite different from these fairy tales. If you need proof of that you need look no further than the earnings results from the two main CPU manufacturers. Intel posted a record quarter and even AMD is profitable and managed an increase in revenue over last quarter.

AMD has finally started to turn things around on their own. For a little while they were running off of the settlement that they received from Intel and we watched with interest as they dipped back down from profit to loss. However they had a rebound in Q2 and managed a $61 million in net income in Q2. For Q3 AMD has seen a very nice improvement. Their total revenue was $1.69 Billion with a 7% new income increase of just over 7% bringing the Q3 income up to 97 Million. This is a HUGE improvement over Q3 2010 where they posted a $118 Million Dollar loss. Of course this was taken care of in Q4 by the Intel settlement which let AMD post their first positive quarter in something like 5 years.

AMD’s ATi division also saw improvement where they posted a net income of $12 Million. In Q2 this division was down and posted a $7 Million loss. Right now AMD is pointing toward the Llano APUs as the reason for this increase in cash. Another factor in this (according to the AMD press release) is an increase in adoption of the AMD platform in notebooks. They specifically mention Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP and others saying that they have globally increased their offerings with AMD APUs.
Things do look up for AMD, but there is an interesting statement in their PR which leads me to think that all is not beer and pizza. Looking at their forecast AMD is predicting only a 3% growth with a 1-2% margin of error. This means that despite the launch of a new Opteron, the new FX Series CPUs and additional OpenCL adoption they are only expecting a 1% revenue increase in Q4. This is not what I would call confidence in newly launched products. We will see if AMD is able to pull off a better increase or if the launch of Intel’s next CPU will put a damper on their Q3 increases and end 2011 for AMD on a down quarter.

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There were some interesting announcements for AMD at the Globalfoundries event today; although it was not AMD that made these, but Greg Bartlett, Senior VP of Technology and Integration Engineering at GF.  Gregg was showing off a few slides of upcoming technology that GF will be involved in and let some things out. We are certain these were previously approved by AMD that would like as much press as possible about their new APUs (which appear to be very good).

The things that were let to slip were the fact that AMD’s next generation Trinity will be 32nm instead of 22nm or even 28nm. The new Trinity will be based on a derivative of the Bulldozer core architecture and, according to AMD, will be roughly 50% faster than the current Llano APUs. The new APUs will feature AMD’s next generation 28nm HD7000 series graphics (which was another confirmation although not a formal announcement). The trinity parts are slated to be pushed towards the mobile market (where AMD seriously needs a better offering) and should begin shipping in early 2012.

It will be interesting to see AMD and Intel compete for this new market space. We have already watched some entertaining Facebook posts from both sides about this very issue.

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