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AMD Adds On For GPU
AMD is offering a new games bundle with HD 7000 series cards and oddly enough, the games on offer are pretty good.
Anyone who goes for an HD 7900 series card is looking at Farcry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. Buyers of two HD 7800 cards or a dual-headed HD7770 GHz edition can expect Farcry and Hitman, while those less fortunate, who end up with a single HD 7800 or HD 7770 series card will get just Farcry.
Still, this is pretty good value for money and the choice of titles is just as good. Bundled games tend to be somewhat older, less popular titles, so AMD’s new Never Settle bundle seems like a welcome breath of fresh air.
Will ST Micro Break-up?
ST Microelectronics reportedly is considering breaking itself up in order to offload its system-on-chip (SoC) business.
ST Microelectronics has been losing sales as its traditional customers such as Nokia and Research in Motion struggle in the smartphone market, which has tended to favour chip vendors such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia in recent years. Now Bloomberg is reporting that ST Microelectronics is considering breaking up to allow it to offload its SoC business and concentrate on the profitable analog business.
According to Bloomberg’s report the firm is mulling the division of the company into two distinct parts, the analog business and the digital business that designs chips for use in set-top boxes, televisions and smartphone handsets. ST Microelectronics’ analog business includes chips that end up in cars and white goods, areas where there is expected to be significant growth in the coming years.
ST Microelectronics moved quickly to try to put a lid on the report by denying “the existence of initiatives which can compromise the unity of the company”. Nevertheless, the firm’s stock price rose sharply on the rumour, suggesting that the market would welcome such a move and perhaps giving the firm’s board the incentive it needs to put through such a plan.
AMD Makes Cuts
AMD has cut its third quarter revenue and gross margin forecasts citing weak demand.
AMD’s lacklustre Bulldozer processor line has left the firm desperately trying to compete with Intel in the desktop market while its more impressive accelerated processor unit (APU) range has been rebuffed by Intel’s multi-million dollar ultrabook marketing push. Now AMD has revised down its estimate of third quarter revenues, which it says will be around 10 percent lower than the previous quarter.
Even more worrying for AMD is its lower forecast for gross margin, the difference between selling an item and the cost to make it, down from 44 percent to 31 percent. Effectively AMD said its cost of doing business has risen considerably higher, although it laid most of the blame on an $100m inventory writedown.
AMD couldn’t avoid admitting the blindingly obvious and said that its writedown of inventory was due to “lower anticipated future demand for certain products”. The firm has suffered through a disappointing 2012, and earlier this year it announced a $580m loss back in April.
AMD And Oracle Join Forces
AMD is taking part in the OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle.
The project aims to bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for servers and clouds. It will look at how the Java virtual machine, language and APIs, can be spruced up to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD APUs.
Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD said that the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community, he said.
AMD And BlueStacks Join Forces
AMD has joined forces with BlueStacks in an effort to bring Android apps to Windows tablets. BlueStacks is the outfit behind Android App Player, a Windows app that enables users to run Android apps on tablets.
Since AMD is not in the ARM game, it could obviously benefit from bringing some popular Android apps to Windows, allowing users to play a few levels of Bad Piggies on Hondo tablets.
However, apps have to be vetted before users can take end up on the AMD AppZone, but it is also possible to install other applications.
The BlueStacks Android Player will also run on Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs, and it even supports Windows XP.
In the long run, the possibility of running Android apps could be very interesting for consumers thinking about getting a Windows 8 tablet, as it will combine Microsoft’s unmatched enterprise solutions with fun and popular Android apps. Provided the whole thing works as advertised, of course.
AMD Confirms Trinity’s New Specs
AMD has confirmed the specifications of its Trinity accelerated processor units (APUs), with the majority being quad-core units with 4MB cache.
AMD launched its mobile Trinity APUs earlier this year in a bid to cash in on “back to school” sales and now it has detailed the specification of Trinity processors that will slot into desktop systems. The firm confirmed that Trinity has moved from Socket FM1 to Socket FM2 and save for two A4 and A6 SKUs the chips will all be quad-core parts with base frequencies over 3GHz.
AMD stuck with its A4, A6, A8 and A10 branding with the dual-core A4-5300, base clocked at 3.4GHz with turbo mode pushing that up to 3.6GHz and 128 graphics cores clocked at 723MHz at the foot of AMD’s APU line-up. Next up the firm has the unlocked dual-core A6-5400K, which not only bumps the CPU clock speed by 200MHz to 3.6GHz and 3.8GHz for base and turbo modes, respectively, but increases the number of graphics cores to 192 and their frequency to 760GHz.
While AMD’s A4 and A6 Trinity processors are dual-core, the four other chips in the range are all quad-core parts, with the A8-5500 and A8-5600K sporting base clock speeds of 3.2GHz and 3.6GHz, respectively, with turbo mode boosting those to 3.7GHz and 3.9GHz, respectively. The firm has kept the number of graphics cores on both chips the same at 356 and clocked them at 760MHz, however the higher frequency on the A8-5600K means that the firm bumped up the TDP to 100W, though given it is unlocked, the factory TDP is largely academic.
AMD’s A10 chips follow in the same vein as the A8 parts, with the 65W A10-5700 part clocked at 3.4GHz, boosted to 4GHz while the 100W A10-5800K part has its clocks set at 3.8GHz and boosted to 4.2GHz. AMD has given both processors 384 graphics cores clocked at 800MHz.
Samsung Goes HSA
It seems that the IFA 2012 show in Berlin was a good show for AMD as well, or to be precise, it was good for the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation founded by AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination and Mediatek. Samsung has joined up alongside six new members.
The HSA Foundation was created back in June at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit as a foundation that will deliver new user experiences through advances in computing architectures in order to improve power efficiency, performance, programmability, portability across computing devices and general support of software across a broad spectrum of devices in order to remove the need for code rewriting for various different platforms.
Senior Manager of Technology Marketing at AMD, Sasa Marinkovic, noted on the AMD blog that there is no doubt that the HSA Foundation is off to a good start and in addition to Samsung, they are more than happy to welcome six additional companies including Apical, Arteris, MulticoreWare, Sonics, Symbio and Vivante.
AMD Details Vishera
AMD will launch three eight-core processors led by the AMD FX 8350 but it also plans to launch two six-core processors for people who like to spend a bit less.
The AMD FX6350 is a 125W six-core with a 3.9GHz base clock and 4.2 maximum turbo core clock. It comes with 14MB of cache, supports DDR 3 1866 and comes in AM3+. Naturally this is a 32nm SOI product just as its predecessor as AMD is not ready for 22nm fun yet.
The runner up is a 3.5GHz clocked six core that turbos to 4.1GHz, all that while staying in 95W TDP envelope. The name is FX 6300 and these two boys should launch together. The rest of the specification is the same as with faster brother. These two processors will replace the Zambezi based FX 6120 and FX 6100. These parts as well as FX 6200 that is also a part of Zambezi legacy are all selling between $190 and $250 which is definitely not a lot of money for quite powerful processors.
AMD Cuts Radeon Prices
After the recent price cut back in July, that included a $50 price cut for HD 7970, HD 7950 and HD 7870 graphics cards, AMD has apparently decided to cut some of these prices even further taking the HD 7950 3GB graphics card down to $320, or just in line with Nvidia’s recently release GTX 660 Ti graphics card.
AMD has already dropped the HD 7970 from $479 to $429, HD 7950 from $399 to US $349 and the HD 7870 down from $349 to $299. The new price cut skips the HD 7970 graphics card but includes the HD 7950, HD 7870 as well as the 1 and 2GB versions of the HD 7850.
The most important is probably the price cut for the 3GB HD 7950 which battles it out with Nvidia’s recently released GTX 660 Ti. The HD 7950 3GB is, according to the report, will receive a $30 price cut placing it at $320. The HD 7870 2GB graphics card got another $50 price cut pushing it down to $250 which probably makes it one of the most interesting mid-range graphics cards on the market.
AMD also decided to drop price on 1 and 2GB version of the HD 7850 graphics card taking them down by $40 to $190 and $210, respectively.
Will Qualcomm Buy AMD?
This wild rumor is not completely without merit, as Qualcomm did acquire a piece of AMD, or AMD’s handheld graphics business to be precise, and it would not be too surprising to see Qualcomm after the whole company sometime in the future.
Samsung on the other hand is not an entirely impossible choice, but at this point it won’t be acquiring AMD either.
It looks like market players want to see the acceptance of Windows RT that will finally prove how important ARM processors really are and knowing AMD, the worst is behind them, as 2012 was the year of many chances, cancelation and anything but good execution for them.
Meanwhile Qualcomm is doing great in the ARM market, although its Snapdragon S4 line suffers from insufficient 28nm production, but due to its on-chip LTE implementation the chips are sought after, especially in the United States market.