MicroTechXP

How best to sum up this new lineup? I guess it’s a case where that old phrase “something for everyone” actually fits the bill pretty well. We have processors aimed at both the high-end enthusiast who wants to squeeze as much power out of their components as well as processors aimed at the budget-conscious. We also see a revolutionary new energy efficient processor aimed at home theater enthusiasts who want quad-core power without having to put up with large PC cases in their living rooms or the noise generated by extravagant fans.
So, finally, some cool stuff to drool over from AMD. Let’s take a closer look starting with the tech specs. [zDnet]

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During yesterday’s 45nm processor event, AMD representatives made a few statements not related to the showcase. Namely, they revealed their plans for the next few months when AMD is going to be announcing a few new platforms and processors. In the end of March – beginning of April AMD is going to introduce its Perseus platform offering great stability, manageability, security and low power consumption for commercial environments. Perseus platform is regarded as a primary competitor to Intel’s vPro platform. It will include quad-, triple-, and dual-core processors based on AMD’s K10 and K8 architectures, integrated chipsets from the 780 series announced yesterday and optional graphics cards from R6XX family working in Hybrid Graphics mode. It is important to specifically stress Hardcastle technology dealing with security and management that should strengthen Perseus positions in the commercial market even more.
After that in the first half of April AMD is going to introduce a few quad-core Phenom processor models based on B3 core stepping and free from the notorious TLB bug. We should see Phenom 9650 and Phenom 9550 working at 2.3 and 2.2GHz frequencies respectively. At the same time the first triple-core Phenom 8600 and Phenom 8400 processor should also come out. They will at first be based on B2 core stepping and work at 2.3 and 2.1GHz frequencies respectively. All these four new processors will feature 95W TDP.
View: XbitLabs

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Adv anced Micro Devices in order to “re-architect it”. The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMD’s x86 license is a non-transferable one.
“We believe AMD [could] face mounting pressure from shareholders, to restructure the company with a focus on a change in leadership,” said the analyst. Indeed, shareholders of AMD are hardly pleased with the company’s performance in the recent quarters as well as issues with the launch of quad-core microprocessors and the release of DirectX 10 graphics processing units. Nevertheless, late last year AMD managed to secure $622 million from Mubadala Development Company, which means that there are those who believe in AMD. [Xbit-Labs]

AMD reached its lowest share price for more than four years last week and, as a result, its market value dropped to around US$5 billion – that’s $400 million less than it paid for ATI in July 2006.
Intel, AMD’s major competitor in the CPU business, has been on a roll for the past 18 months and is now worth around US$162 billion, which makes the chip giant more than 32 times the size of AMD in monetary terms.
Even worse for AMD is that its partner-cum-archrival, Nvidia, has a market cap of around $19 billion, which makes it almost four times as valuable as the struggling platform company.
It’s fair to say things haven’t been going well for AMD since the middle of last year, as its two major rivals launched products that remain largely uncontested even today. Neither the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 nor the GeForce 8800 GTX have been truly surpassed in terms of performance yet and it’s not going to happen until next year. [Bit-tech.net]

After being late to market with high-performance graphics offerings for a number of times, ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, is reportedly considering high-end graphics solutions that utilize more than two or, perhaps, even more physical dice. The method has been successfully utilized by Intel Corp., but will it be feasible for graphics processors too?
ATI Radeon HD 2900 (R600) graphics chip, which contains about 700 million of transistors had power consumption of 160W, or even more, but still did not manage to demonstrate performance on par with Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, a solution that also demands high amount of power and is rather expensive to manufacture. But ATI Radeon HD 3800 (RV670) graphics processing unit (GPU), which is made using 55nm process technology, has the same amount of horsepower as R600, but is cheaper to build and consumes less amount of energy.
View: The full story @ Xbit-labs

In a recent interview with Gulf News, AMD’s CEO Hector Ruiz took the gloves off and went straight for Intel’s throat. Angry about Intel following AMD’s lead in areas like X86-64 (64-bit) technology yet dominating the market, Ruiz let loose to the media.

“If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations h ave occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel.

Oh, but there’s more!

Intel continues… to abuse their monopoly and that’s why around the world governments and regulatory agencies continue to go after them.

Now we have to wait for Intel’s response. This should be a good fight. [gizmodo via gulfnews]

The turf-war between AMD and Intel is about to heat up. On Monday, a JPMorgan analyst upgraded Advanced Micro Devices to "neutral" from "hold" and predicted that the chipmaker should steal market share from its larger rival.

Shares of AMD edged up 0.2%, or 3 cents, to $12.72 during noon trading, while shares of Intel were down 0.4%, or 9 cents, to $24.84.

This month, AMD released Barcelona, the long awaited quad-core server processor. Unlike Intel’s quad-core chip, Barcelona features four cores on one piece of silicon. For comparison, Intel’s chip simply fuses two dual-core chips together. Although Intel will be the goliath of the chip market for a long time, AMD’s new chip closes "the performance gap between AMD and Intel in the server segment," said JPMorgan analyst Christopher Danely. The chip will allow AMD to "stem its losses in the server market and gain back share," Danely added.

View: Full Story@ Forbes

According to CNET’s News.com, processor-manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices will announce the imminent departure of Henri Richard, the company’s chief sales officer, later this afternoon. Richard’s loss is a very significant development in what has been a disastrous year for AMD. The company’s flagship product for 2007, a quad-core server chip known as Barcelona, will arrive six months later than expected after a number of technical glitches; in the interim, AMD has lost a substancial amount of money trying to compete against Intel’s quad-core chips by slashing the prices of its dual-core chips.
Taking up his position in 2002, Richard has been a very public figure at AMD, as opposed to CEO Hector Ruiz and COO Dirk Meyer. He presided over a question-and-answer session with reporters last month at AMD’s analyst meeting, and has been one of the leading executive voices behind AMD’s antitrust campaign against Intel. An AMD representative declined to comment on the report but if the date of Richard’s departure is accurate, the company will have to pull off its biggest product launch of the year with Barcelona without its head salesman. 
View: Full Story @ C|Net

Dell knows it won’t happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211N support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers. At Ubuntu Live 2007, Amit Bhutani had a session on Ubuntu Linux for Dell Consumer Systems, where he had shared a slide with Dell’s “area of investigation”,  which Amit had said is essentially their Linux road-map. Amit had also stated that the NVIDIA 2D and 3D video drivers were “challenges in platform enablement”. Dell wants to offer ATI Linux systems, but first the driver must be improved for the Linux platform (not necessarily open-source, but improved). Dell currently ships desktop Linux systems with Intel using their open-source drivers as well as NVIDIA graphics processors under Linux. Amit had went on to add that new Dell product offerings and availability in other countries will come later this summer.

News Source: phoronix.com

The old saying, essentially, is, “From here, things can only get better.” From where AMD was last April, that’s indeed what happened - and perhaps that’s no surprise. Yesterday, the company reported rising chip shipments that led to increased revenues and recovering profit margins, though still not yet near the point of being considered “healthy.”

A deal announced just two months ago between AMD and one-time Intel-exclusive producer Toshiba is being credited by analysts for an 82% increase in mobile processor shipments over AMD’s second fiscal quarter of last year, even though in the real world, AMD could not possibly have shipped that many Turions in a 45-day period.

More likely, the surge was brought on by long-time AMD partner Acer, whose resurgence to most likely the world’s #3 notebook computer manufacturer now has another AMD partner, HP, combating it in the courtroom. The Toshiba bounty will most likely be recorded during the third quarter, which will only bring more good news for AMD.

It could really use the good news, after a solid year of being hammered by Intel in all the departments where AMD had demanded that it play fair, including price and performance. While it managed to report a loss for the June quarter of $457 million on $1.37 billion of revenue, that loss was indeed narrower than for the first quarter - as predicted - and revenue was up 11.3% over the previous quarter.

Now, if you put two and two together (as many analysts neglect to do), you conclude that the 82% mobile CPU shipment increase - part of a 38% overall shipment increase over the prior quarter - wasn’t reflected in revenues that were only marginally higher, on gross margin up only 5% on the quarter to 33%.

Read: [Betanews]