AMD tuning out distractions to bring ATI on board
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.
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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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ATI Technologies Inc. announced an integrated chipset family for the AMD Athlon 64 and Sempron procesor families on Monday, helping AMD push its 64-bit technology down into the value space.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  , expected to acquire graphics chip maker ATI  Technologies Inc.   for about $5.5 billion,  said on Sunday it would make a "significant corporate  announcement" on Monday.
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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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There&#39;s been a fair amount of debate recently about whether AMD or Intel is winning the ever-present chip arms race. Based on the experience of this year&#39;s Intel Developer Forum (IDF), I&#39;m not sure that Intel can still claim to be in the lead.
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Analysts are suggesting that AMD may be forced to delay its Barcelona multi-core chip, a move that could set the company back both financially and strategically.
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AMD is expected to unveil its most powerful desktop processors to date today, a few days after rival Intel disclosed changes to its desktop processor road map.
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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Graphics card giants ATI and Nvidia are working on new chips to improve the quality of mobile displays.
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Wall Street eyes deal as AMD-ATI merger nears completion If your arch-rival buys one of two highly competitive graphics chip companies, what else can you do but acquire the other GPU maker? That's exactly what it was yesterday claimed Intel would do: snap up Nvidia after AMD's move to acquire ATI.â¦
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Tired of being pushed around AMD today attempted to rescue some initiative in its battle with Intel with pot shots aimed its rival's server, desktop, and even developing world strategies.â¦
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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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Chipmaker to focus on technology and features instead of megahertz.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will continue to supply ATI graphics chips for PCs based on Intel Corp. microprocessors despite the fierce competition between the two companies, AMD's chief technology officer said in an interview. The Intel question loomed large after AMD bought ATI last year. Many believed that AMD would stop supporting Intel microprocessors with the ATI chips, and that Intel would encourage its customers to use its own graphics chips or those from other companies besides AMD. AMD CTO Phil Hester said at Computex last week that AMD will continue to supply ATI graphics products that work with Intel processors. It makes business sense for AMD to do so and there's still a healthy market for ATI products paired with Intel processors, he said. AMD also believes that the introduction of its Fusion chips in 2009, which will put graphics functions and the microprocessor on a single chip, will not spell the end for discrete graphics components, Hester said. That's good news for gamers and other people who want top-end multimedia performance for work or home applications. Graphics cards with discrete GPUs (graphics processing units) have always delivered far better performance than chips with graphics built in, such as PC chipsets. Fusion processors will improve as AMD discovers new ways to boost the performance of graphics processors and microprocessors, Hester said. One area of improvement for GPUs will be in power consumption. GPUs still use more power than microprocessors, so there is an opportunity for AMD to use the lessons it has learned to reduce power consumption in microprocessors and apply them in GPUs. The importance of graphics in so many devices was a major reason AMD bought ATI Technologies Inc. "The future is consumer electronics and the PC," said Hester, indicating Fusion will be important for AMD in both segments. Handsets are already a major market for ATI graphics. Over 200 million ATI chipsets have already been shipped in handsets, he said. David Orton, the former CEO of ATI and current executive vice president of AMD's visual and media business, said ATI graphics products will continue to challenge Nvidia Corp., which was ATI's biggest rival, for the premium end of the market. Two important areas for the graphics industry today are further improving picture resolution, and 3D (three dimensional) viewing. In picture resolution, the industry is talking about moving to 4 million pixels per frame resolution, twice the number of pixels found in the best high definition television (HD TV) out today. Advances in 3D should lead to images jumping out of the screen within the next few years in games and in graphics intensive work such as mechanical design, Orton said. One problem the industry has been trying to solve for the high-definition video era is making sure that users can watch HD movies on laptops without running out of battery power. Orton said the graphics processor in ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards contains a unified video decoder to decode HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movie discs, instead of passing the decoding work to the microprocessor. The difference is that a laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 2000 should be able to show an entire HD movie on a single battery. At Computex, Acer Inc., the world's third largest PC maker, showed off an AMD-based laptop PC with ATI's HD 2000 technology inside.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Powerful processor will target high-end desktop PCs in an effort to stay ahead of AMD.
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One of these days AMD's going to take a bite out of Intel and not let go.