AMD Tuning Out Distractions to Bring ATI on Board
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Worldwide lawsuits against Intel and four straight quarterly losses have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies.
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How about an embedded processor that&#39;s designed to deliver a quantum leap in performance and system bandwidth while keeping power in check?
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A lower-than-expected revenue warning from graphics card producer ATI is raising concerns about whether the company will be able to help merger partner AMD attain its goals of producing a competitive integrated graphics platform.
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The competition in the PC Graphic Cards market just got hotter. ATI has good news for the computer gamers. They have released five new cards aimed at advanced gamers.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is moving fast to complete a planned acquisition of ATI Technologies Inc., offering US$1.7 million in salary and bonuses to hire the graphics card vendor's chief executive officer, David Orton. Retaining Orton could help AMD to reach its stated goal of building a single platform to boost its performance in media and data processing and to build a stronger presence in the consumer digital media market, AMD said whenÂ it announced the $5.4 billion offer in July. AMD hopes to build electronics that combine its microprocessors with ATI's GPUs (graphics processing units), and thus maintain its momentum in nibbling away at the market share of rival, Intel Corp. So the company offered Orton a job as senior vice president of the planned 14,900-person company, according to papers filed Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. AMD also reported this week that government officials on Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission had approved the deal. AMD expects to clear all other hurdles by the end of October, including the approval of ATI shareholders and Canadian securities regulators. But even asÂ AMD nears its goal, rumors surfaced Wednesday that Intel wants to acquire ATI's rival, Nvidia Corp., the only remaining vendor of the graphics cards used in PCs, gaming consoles, set-top boxes and handheld devices. An industry analyst was quoted by the EE Times saying the rumor is swirling, but he believes it is unlikely. Indeed, such a move would be surprising, given Intel's ongoing corporate reorganization. The company is struggling to meet profit targets and has recently cut costs by laying off 10,500 workers and selling several divisions. Also, Nvidia is growing more expensive by the day, as stock traders see a bright future for the sole remaining independent graphics vendor, boosting company stock from $18 to $30 since AMD announced the deal to buy ATI, as of midday Thursday. Intel does not comment on rumors, a spokeswoman said. A Nvidia spokesman declined to comment, calling the rumors mere market speculation. Â
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This morning, AMD announced its desktop-level integrated chipset combining its designs for systems and peripheral bus controllers with ATI's graphics logic, all in one package. AMD already has the lead in components for value-priced systems, and ATI's logic may help it maintain that lead. But as Intel has proven over the years, that effort might not always bear fruit.
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Gamers should welcome the latest news from ATIâfive new graphic processors from one of leading GPU manufacturers. The new entrants in the war for gamers&#39; hearts and systems are the ATI Radeon
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(InfoWorld) - AMD on Monday is giving the public an advanced look at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy. AMD, playing catch-up to rival Intel, whoseÂ quad-core XeonÂ product launched in 2006, will discuss features of its quad-core product, code-named Barcelona, at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco, a forum for engineers in solid state circuitry and system-on-a-chip processor design. AMD says it will present details at the conference of how Barcelona, due to be released in mid-2007, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over its own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003. Barcelona will feature "Enhanced PowerNow" technology, which will dynamically adjust core frequencies as workloads change in order to power down cores when not needed to save energy, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron. Under the PowerNow technology already deployed in the dual-core Opteron, the OS delivers the needed power to the busiest core, but if the other core is not as busy, it will still receive the voltage demanded of the busiest core, Kerby said. But with Enhanced PowerNow, while the busiest core will receive the power it needs, the OS will reduce the frequency and voltage of the remaining cores because they aren't as busy. "We still see power savings with our current PowerNow technology, but it's going to get better with Barcelona because we're going to be able to dynamically and independently adjust the core frequencies of each individual core," he said. Also in Barcelona, the OS will directly communicate with the CPU instead of first going through the CPU driver, a more efficient approach, he said. "With Barcelona, there is no CPU driver middleman. The OS can tell the processor directly, 'Hey this is how much work I'm doing,' and the Barcelona core will determine when the best time is to make that change. It's not doing it blindly," he said. Barcelona also separates the power management of the cores from that of the memory controller, which is embedded in AMD-designed processors. That way, frequency and voltage can be reduced to the cores when they are not busy and increased to the memory controller when it is busy, and vice versa. AMD claims an 80 percent reduction in memory controller power usage with this design change. Barcelona will also feature enhanced clock-gating, which means core logic circuits can be turned on or off to save power. Like settings on a coffee grinder, the chip can do "coarse" or "fine" clock gating, shutting down increasingly finer sections of core logic as needed. AMD claims that Barcelona can deliver a 40 percent improvement in performance over "the competition." While not mentioning Intel's Xeon specifically, AMD has long pointed out that its quad-core chip will be four cores designed on the same piece of silicon, while Intel's design is two dual-core processors packaged together.
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Over the past six months, the usual strict hierarchies of the chip world have seen some rearranging. Perennial underdog Advanced Micro Devices (AMD:NYSE - news - research) has made impressive strides with
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AMD intends to hold the performance crown for desktop processors with today&#39;s introduction of the Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4 GHz) and FX-55 (2.
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AMD's new form factor aims to make it easier for enthusiasts and system builders to create small-form-factor systems. Here's a look inside the reference design.
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The quad-core server chip won't appear until later this year, but AMD's trying to show potential customers the chips are up and running.
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As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won&#39;t be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?Many of AMD&#39;s current troubles are tied to Barcelona, the first version of its Quad-Core Opteron processor.&#160;Repeated delays of this chip weakened AMD&#39;s finances and undermined confidence in the company&#39;s ability to deliver new products as promised. Rebuilding that lost confidence among corporate users and the financial community won&#39;t be easy and the company can ill afford further missteps.Over the next six months, there are several milestones that AMD must hit in order to get back on track. The first, and arguably most important, involves volume shipments of Barcelona, scheduled to happen during the first quarter. AMD desperately needs this chip to shore up flagging revenue from its commercial business and to take back ground lost recently to Intel in the server market.With a bug that was recently discovered in Barcelona fixed, AMD expects the latest version of the chip to start coming out of its manufacturing plants in January. Barcelona shipments are expected to rise throughout the first quarter, reaching &quot;full volumes&quot; and widespread availability of servers based on the chip during the second quarter, according to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.Another early milestone to look out for involves Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip that&#39;s set for volume production during the second half of 2008. AMD will produce Shanghai with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process that is one generation ahead of the 65-nanometer process used to make Barcelona.The numbers used to describe chip manufacturing processes refer to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip. The smaller these features can be made, the better. Making these features smaller gives chip makers the ability to shrink the overall size of a chip, thereby reducing unit manufacturing costs, or to add new features. Chips made using a more advanced process may also consume less power and run faster than other versions. But semiconductor production is as much art as it is science, and moving to a more advanced process is fraught with risks.In the case of Shanghai, AMD will take advantage of the 45-nanometer process to triple the size of the Level 3 (L3) cache, from 2M bytes in Barcelona to 6M bytes. The L3 cache is a shared pool of memory that can be accessed by all four cores on the chip. Each core has 512K bytes of Level 2 (L2) cache. When data is moved out of the L2 cache, it moves into the L3 cache instead of main memory, meaning that the core can access this information more quickly than would otherwise be possible.Like AMD&#39;s existing server lineup, Barcelona and Shanghai also include an on-chip memory controller that further helps to increase performance.The memory structure used in the Quad-Core Opteron is different from Intel&#39;s server chips, which do not use an L3 cache and do not have an on-chip memory controller. Instead, Intel&#39;s quad-core Xeon 7300 server chips have 8M bytes of shared L2 cache. Since Intel processors actually pack two dual-core chips inside a single package, the L2 cache is divided into two parts, with 4M bytes on each silicon chip. Intel&#39;s processors do not use an on-chip memory controller.Boosting the Quad-Core Opteron&#39;s L3 cache with Shanghai should give AMD&#39;s quad-core chips the opportunity to stretch their legs, but the company has to make them first. The first working samples of Shanghai are due out of AMD&#39;s factory in Dresden, Germany, in January, according to recent remarks by Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group. If these samples arrive late or suffer from unexpected technical problems, this could delay volume production of Shanghai to late 2008 or even early 2009. Conversely, working samples that arrive on schedule and meet or exceed expectations would give AMD an added boost.Besides the server segment, there are a couple of key product milestones on AMD&#39;s roadmap for desktop and mobile processors that bear watching as well.For example, the company plans a first-quarter rollout of Perseus, a package of chips aimed at PCs for the corporate market and centered on a quad-core or triple-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset. A dual-core version will also be rolled out. During the second quarter, AMD plans to roll out Puma, a chip package designed for notebooks. Puma is based on a new processor, called Griffin, expected to offer better performance and power efficiency than AMD&#39;s existing line of mobile processors.AMD plans to offer additional details of its plans and upcoming products at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas during January, Hughes said.
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Processor could steal spotlight from AMD, Intel's forthcoming dual-core chips.
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November 08, 2004 - AnandTech have slapped up a great feature and review on ATI&#39;s new chipset for AMD processors, which seems to give Nvidia a run for their money.
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To judge by the shift in the headlines, the processor war is nearly over. Who&#39;s in? Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD). Out? Intel (Nasdaq: INTC).
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Intel gets latest Itanium into "white box" systems. AMD, meanwhile, isn't willing to concede any ground.