AMD unveils portable video player chip
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Integrated video engine to offer DVD quality on a handheld
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New component could allow players small enough to fit in notebook PCs.
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AMD has launched the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor, a low-power version of its 32/64-bit chip aimed at the thin-and-light notebook market.
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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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I was pretty amazed to see 3D graphics coming to mobile phones, and now it looks like TV is coming to them too! Texas Instruments has started work on a chip that
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Hard-drive based multimedia player will be available later this year.
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices&#160;(AMD) is&#160;getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip.
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The PlayStation Portable is going to have one complex processor running the show for games and multimedia.
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Shared research produces fast, tiny memory ideal for consumer devices.
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Samsung unveils chip that can be used to create 64GB flash memory cards.
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Cool but pricey Portable Media Center devices now available.
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Toshiba revealed a new high-performance chip aimed at multimedia applications such as video processing in consumer devices.
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Apple&#39;s splashy digital music player has emboldened Microsoft and other technology titans to move quickly to the next frontier in portable entertainment: the video iPod, so to speak.
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Advanced Micro Devices has unveiled a stripped-down, low-cost computing device as part of a plan to move into developing markets. The chip maker aims to provide 50 per cent of the world with internet and computing
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Advanced Micro Devices on Monday introduced a high-end graphics card whose core will also be part of its next-generation Fusion processors.The ATI Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card combines two chips from its predecessor, ATI Radeon 3870, on one board, doubling its performance, said Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD. The ATI Radeon 3870 had one chip on the card.The chips, manufactured using the 55-nanometer process, are more power efficient and deliver better performance than the previous graphics processors, Moorhead said.AMD will incorporate a graphics-processing core based on the X2 in its&#160;upcoming Fusion processor. Fusion will integrate a graphics processor and CPU on one chip, said John Taylor, an AMD spokesman.There are no overt tie-ins between Fusion and the X2, but the graphics-processing cores are expected to be similar, Taylor said.While X2 is designed for maximum graphics performance, the graphics-processing core will be adapted for notebook platforms and implemented in Fusion, Taylor said.AMD last week said the Fusion family&#39;s first processor, code-named Swift, will be based on the Phenom core and optimized for power management with the latest graphics and processing technology on a single chip. Notebooks with the Fusion processor are expected to be out in the second half of 2009.Targeted at PC users who want high-end graphics, the X2 graphics board supports Microsoft&#39;s DirectX 10.1 gaming platform, Taylor said.The graphics board plugs into a PCI Express slot and supports up to 1GB of memory. It includes DVI and DisplayLink ports to support external multimedia devices.The card will support CrossfireX technology by the end of this quarter, which will allow up to four graphics cards to work together to scale multimedia performance, AMD said in a news release.Priced at $449, the card is available worldwide.With high-end features and midrange pricing, AMD&#39;s Moorhead hopes the new graphics card will boost the company&#39;s product offerings and heat up competition with rival Nvidia.Pricing makes the X2 impressive, but even more significant is the card&#39;s improved performance while using just one slot, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. Users seeking a graphics performance boost usually end up buying two cards, which uses up two card slots.It&#39;s hard to predict whether the card will help AMD steal graphics market share from Nvidia, he said. &quot;It has the potential to do that if AMD is able to manufacture [X2] in volume,&quot; Peddie said.Nvidia held a 37.8 percent global market share in the third quarter of 2007, while AMD was in third place with 18.8 percent, according to numbers from Jon Peddie Research. Intel was in second place with 33.5 percent market share.
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Nvidia today announced the availability of PureVideo. The technology is designed to accelerate MPEG 2 and high-definition content on computer systems equipped
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Details of the chip designed to power Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be released on Monday.