AMD won't say if re-marked chips hit Germany, China
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) declined to comment Tuesday on a Taiwanese media report that more than 1 million re-marked AMD processors may have been shipped to Germany and China.
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AMD and Infineon are to spend â¬170m ($200m) between them to build a nanotech research facility. According to a Bloomberg report, the R&amp;D centre will be located in Dresden, Germany, probably not far from
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China rejected allegations from Germany that it was behind Internet espionage attacks on German companies and its government, saying on Tuesday it opposed such accusations.
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InfoWorld - Amid further delays of AMD's quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.
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I guess this news will have to hold us over until the individual companies make their announcements. AMD today announced PCI Express support from leading chipset manufacturers, offering performance-hungry
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Intel argues that some of chip rival's complaints fall outside U.S. borders.
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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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BEIJING, June 25 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- CCID Consulting Co., Ltd, via its Industry Research Center, recently released its views on the ongoing battle between AMD and Intel.
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(InfoWorld) - As Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) race toward smaller, faster chips, the fierce competition is taking its toll as both companies struggle to maintain profit margins by using more efficient manufacturing. At the tiny scale of 45-nanometer transistors and wires, a single speck of dust on a 300-millimeter silicon wafer can destroy an entire processor. Lower manufacturing yields cut into a company's profit margin, reducing the number of functional chips they can sell from each wafer. "As an industry, we're running out of gas at 45-nanometer geometry," said Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development for AMD. "We've been unable to scale the size as much as we used to because of leakage. We're still putting transistors closer together, but not shrinking the gates. So geometry shrinks can hurt you now, which they haven't in the past." One problem is that 65-nm and 45-nm chip components have shrunk so far that they are now smaller than the wavelength of the light used to carve those features onto silicon chips. To fight that trend,Â AMD and IBM Corp. said they will use three new technologies to boost manufacturing efficiency. By the second half of 2008, AMD expects to be producing 45-nm chips using immersion lithography, ultra-low-k interconnect dielectrics, and enhanced transistor strain. The companies made the announcement at the International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco. By inserting liquid instead of air between the projection lens and the wafer, AMD and IBM can reduce the wavelength of the light, giving them a 40 percent gain in resolution compared to dry lithography and allowing them to sell a higher percentage of the hundreds of chips on every wafer, Kepler said. Likewise, IBM plans to produce 65-nm server chips by the second half of 2007, then shrink both server and gaming chips to 45-nm at some point in the future, said Gary Patton, vice president of technology development for IBM's semiconductor research and development center. AMD and IBM have cooperated on chip development since 2003, and last year extended their contract through 2011 to reach the 32-nm and 22-nm chip generations. In response, Intel says that it beat AMD to the market with 65-nm chip sales by more than a year, andÂ has already begun producing samples of its 45-nm "Penryn" quad-core chipÂ for notebooks, desktops and servers. Intel plans to ship those chips in the second half of 2007. Even if AMD improves its manufacturing, Intel is poised to continue its lead in shrinking chip geometries because it has shorter gate lengths and SRAM (static RAM) cell sizes, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. "People have different meanings when they talk about the 65-nm process. There's not an industry standard," he said. AMD's Opteron chip was a commercial success because its excellent design compensated for poor dimensions at the 90-nm scale, he said. Chips with a greater cache of local memory stored in SRAM cells can avoid the time-intensive process of retrieving data from external sources. At the same conference in San Francisco this week, Intel announced plans to use "floating-body cells" to further increase the amount of on-chip memory, according to published reports. Despite the manufacturing challenges, chip companies continue to build smaller features because of the tremendous performance benefits. By shrinking from 90 nm to 65 nm, Intel chips have double the transistor density while reducing leakage five-fold (at constant performance) and requiring 30 percent less switching power. Â
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Becomes the first company to plead guilty to conspiring with manufacturers to fix the prices of DRAM chips in a 2-year probe. WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO: Germany&#39;s Infineon Technologies AG has agreed to plead
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In an announcement before semiconductor engineers in San Francisco this morning, AMD and IBM put forth proof of what could be their breakthrough process - their response to Intel in the race to reduction.  It could pull AMD back even with Intel by 2008, if Intel doesn't respond in the intervening months.
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Not out until Q1 '08, mobo-maker moles allege AMD has rebutted allegations that the launch date of its long-awaited Phenom processor has been delayed to Q1 2008 after the chip company fell behind on its original Q4 2007 release schedule.â¦
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N,   the world's number two maker of microchips for personal   computers, will supply China's second-largest PC maker with   chips, scoring its latest victory in a market share battle with   bigger rival Intel INTC.O.
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Advanced Micro Devices is building a new plant in Germany but still needs outside assistance to meet expected demand.
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Analysts said a full-fledged recovery for the Chinese computer maker isn't yet in sight.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel should have to share documents that could show it used monopolistic practices to force overseas PC vendors and retailers to shun Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) chips, the special master to a U.S. federal court recommended Friday. Intel is expected to contest the recommendation by Special Master Vincent Poppiti, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, before the matter comes before a judge on Jan. 12 for a final ruling. This is the latest round in aÂ long-running legal battleÂ that is scheduled to be decided in a case court beginning in April 2009. AMD has charged that Intel used its overwhelming 80 percent share of the worldwide microprocessor market to violate antitrust laws through coercive acts such as threatening to withhold incentive payments to PC vendors if they specified AMD chips in their products. In September, Intel got a boost when District Court Judge Joseph FarnanÂ ruled that Intel would not have to share those records, since U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over such actions alleged to have occurred in other countries. In return, AMD argued that foreign actions could also impact sales to U.S. customers, despite the fact that its chips are manufactured in Dresden, Germany, and sold to overseas customers. Poppiti's recommendation agrees with AMD's motion, reasoning that the market for x86 microprocessors is global, so Intel's behavior worldwide could serve as evidence in a U.S. antitrust case. Poppiti was appointed to make recommendations to the court related to the discovery phase of the case in which the sides share documents that can be used as evidence. "We are encouraged that the special master recognizes the importance of obtaining all evidence of Intel's wrongdoing, regardless of where it occurs, to demonstrate the impact it has had on AMD's domestic and export business," AMD spokesman Michael Silverman said in an e-mail. Intel lawyers are still reviewing Poppiti's recommendation, and have not yet decided whether they will file additional arguments by Dec. 27, Intel spokesman Chuck Molloy said in an e-mail. Â
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Dual-core chips that AMD and Intel plan to bring to market next year won't be sharing their memories.