Displaying items by tag: CPU

AMD has recently released its new line of “Piledriver” CPU's, and they perform pretty darn well. No longer in its infancy stage, AMD's multi-threaded core approach has improved significantly from the “Bulldozer” line of chips. The FX-8350 is the best of these CPU's currently on the market, and retails for approximately $220.

Even though Advanced Micro Devices announced last year that they will cut 10% of their workers by the end of 2012's first quarter, things are even worse now. After they announced that expected sales will decrease approximately 10% from the last quarter, they are expected to announce in increase to the number of workers cut to go up to 30% because of weak sales. Rumors are that AMD plans  to announce the workforce cuts between 20% and 30% next week, and it will focus on jobs involving sales and engineering.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

It is no secret that Intel pretty much owns the desktop market. This is not only in terms of performance per watt but in most cases performance Vs. Cost. Their chief rival AMD has had setback after setback which has hobbled their ability to compete. In fact is has gotten so bad that AMD has officially stated that they will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the desktop market (they will continue to make desktop CPUs but are moving more toward mobile CPUs). This is a shame and normally could mean that new products from Intel will slow down along with innovation (nothing makes you invent like real competition). However this has not stopped Intel from pushing out a new line up of Desktop CPUs that fall under the title of Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is the Tick part of Intel’s Tick-Tock strategy where Sandy Bridge was the introduction of the microarchitecture and Ivy Bridge is the official die shrink from 32nm to 22nm. So let’s see what Ivy Bridge brings to the table in the form of the 3^rd Generation Core i7 3770k.

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.

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.