Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
ARM Profits On The Rise
ARM has reported good second quarter financial results, with profit rising by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM has been riding high in the public consciousness thanks to firms such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia pushing its chip architecture into smartphones and tablets. The firm announced it managed to take in $209.78 millio in revenue during the second quarter, a 15 per cent increase from the same period last year, while net income rose even faster by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM said two billion chips using the firm’s various design models were shipped during the quarter, which represented a nine per cent increase from last year. The firm revealed that its core money making operation, processor royalties, rose by 14 per cent.
Warren East, CEO of ARM said, “ARM’s royalty revenues continued to outperform the overall semiconductor industry as our customers gained market share within existing markets and launched products which are taking ARM technology into new markets.
“This quarter we have seen multiple market leaders announce exciting new products including computers and servers from Dell and Microsoft, and embedded applications from Freescale and Toshiba. In addition, ARM and TSMC announced a partnership to optimise next generation ARM processors and physical IP and TSMC’s FinFET process technology.”
AMD’s 8350 Clocked At 4.0GHz
We have got some information about AMD’s upcoming FX 8350.
However, today we learned that AMD will push this CPU from Q3 to early Q4 2012 as now it claims that it can launch this processor in late October. AMD FX 8350 is an eight-core with 16MB cache, Vishera based 32nm core with 4.0GHz default clock and ability to jump to 4.2GHz with turbo core automatic overclocking.
This is an impressive frequency jump as the AMD FX 8150 works at 3.6GHz default and with turbo gets to 4.2GHz. The FX 8350 is supposed to replace the 8150 as AMD’s flagship processor.
According to current schedule production ready samples are expected in roughly a month (early August). Mass production starts in early August, probably days after they finalize the clocks and give it a green light for mass production but the launch is pushed for late October 2012.
Will More Win8 RT Hybrids Start Showing Up?
June 29, 2012 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
Comments Off on Will More Win8 RT Hybrids Start Showing Up?
Rumour has it that Nvidia has the best drivers and might be close to fine tuning its Windows RT platform, but we are sure Qualcomm and Texas Instruments aren’t far behind.
The Asus Transformer series has set a new trend by providing tablet users with a keyboard dock with some extra ports and an additional battery. This is definitely the way to go as you get the best of both worlds in a single package Windows 8 RT is finally bringing Microsoft in the ARM market and needless to say there will be many systems to be ready for launch.
Nvidia with Tegra, Texas Instruments with OMAP and Qualcomm with S4 are getting ready to embrace tablets as well as hybrid notebooks based on Windows 8 RT. The Asus Transformer 600 is just the first of many to come and there will be at least a few more similar designs to launch this year with Windows 8 RT, so we have no doubt that we will see quite a few convertible Windows tablets.
AMD Officially Launches Trinity Mobile
AMD has finally and officially lifted an NDA veil off its mobile Trinity A-series APU lineup based on the 2nd-gen Bulldozer CPU core, aka Piledriver, and VLIW4 Northern Islands GPU squeezed together on a 32nm SOI die.
Architecture-wise, AMD’s Trinity combines two to four Piledriver x86 cores combined with up to 384 VLIW4 Radeon cores on a 32nm die which ends up as a 246mm2 chip with 1.303B transistors, slightly more than Llano’s 228mm2/1.178B. Since it is made in the same 32nm manufacturing process as Llano, the greatest win for Trinity are actual CPU and GPU performance improvements as well as impressive power consumption improvements when compared to Llano APUs.
Same as the FX-series desktop parts based on the Bulldozer architecture, AMD’s Trinity CPU part has a 2+1 integer/floating point design where you get two integer cores that share a single floating point scheduler. Although it appears to the OS as two cores, each Piledriver module actually has less resources than traditional core design. But with Piledriver, those Bulldozer kinks got ironed out as much as possible, improving IPC (instruction per cycle), reducing leakage, reducing CAC and giving it a slight frequency uplift.
As far as the GPU is concerned, we are looking at quite familiar Northern Islands VLIW4 part, a same one that was behind Cayman Radeon HD 6970 graphics card. Of course, the GPU has been cut down to up to 384 stream processors (organized in 6 SIMDs) with 24 texture units and 8 ROPs. The clocks have also gone down to 497MHz base clock that can “turbo” up to 686MHz.
Trinity Launching On Desktops This Summer
Comments Off on Trinity Launching On Desktops This Summer
AMD is expected to introduce its new mobile Trinity APU in a week or so and now we are hearing some timeframes for desktop parts as well.
According to Digitimes, desktop Trinity parts are coming in August, while Brazos 2.0 chips are expected in June. There is no word on Trinity ULV parts yet and we believe they will be the most interesting of the lot.
AMD Shows Off New Radeon Chips
AMD has now officially updated its HD 7000M lineup of mobile GPUs with HD 7700M, HD 7800M and HD 7900M GPUs that are all based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture. The first in line that should show up in notebooks is the flagship HD 7970M GPU.
As noted, the entire lineup is based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture, but as always, the naming scheme of the AMD mobile parts has nothing to do with the desktop ones. The HD 7900M, codename Wimbledon, is actually based on 28nm Pitcairn destkop GPU that features 1280 stream processors, 80 texture units, 32 ROPs and up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
The HD 7800M series, codename Heathrow and the Radeon HD 7700M series, codename Chelsea, are both based on Cape Verde desktop GPU but with a slight twist. While Heathrow, HD 7800M series features fully enabled Cape Verde GPU with 640 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, the Chelsea HD 7700M series is based on a “crippled” Cape Verde core with 512 stream processors and 32 texture units. Both the HD 7800M series and the HD 7700M series will feature up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. Of course, we expect at least two SKUs for both HD 7700M and HD 7800M series.
AMD also decided to ditch the PCI-Express 3.0 support on the HD 7700M series mainly as this one is aimed at lower-performance platforms that are all about power saving, and performance gain was simply too low.
For now, AMD has only shed precise details regarding the HD 7970M GPU that is based on the fully enabled Pitcairn GPU with 1280 stream processors that will end up clocked at 850MHz for the GPU and 4.8GHz for 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
As you can notice, the HD 7970M has lower GPU clocks than its HD 7870 desktop counterpart, but AMD also decided to keep the memory at the same level resulting in 153.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. According to AMD slides, HD 7970M should end up to be anywhere between 30 and 60% faster than HD 6990M and anywhere between 16 and 76 percent when compared to Nvidia current high-end GTX 675M GPU.
AMD’s Trinity To Have Fewer Cores
AMD’s soon to launch A10 5800K is a 100W quad-core Trinity 32nm CPU with 3.8 GHz base clock and 4.2GHz maximal clock possible with AMD turbo core dynamic overclocking technology.
The A10 5800K has 4MB of L2 cache, supports DDR3 1866, dual graphics configurations as well as AMD’s new FM2 socket. The fun part is new HD 7660D GPU that works at 800MHz and comes with 384 shader units. The current APU market leader A8 3870K that works at 3GHz has HD 6550 graphics with 400 cores running at 600MHz.
AMD claims that new Radeon cores from Trinity CPU including A10 5800K are more efficient and this is the main reason why you have fewer cores that can deliver superior performance. The other reason is that with 800MHz core clock they can probably process more data, meaning that HD 7660D of A10 5800K should end up quite a bit faster than the Llano A8 3870K.
All these Radeon cores are a key feature of the Vision Engine that accelerates GPU enabled applications. AMD also tells the world that Trinity is DirectX 11 compatible, supports Direct compute and the new A series of processors, including the A10 5800K all the way to dual-core A4 5300, should not have any issues playing Blu-ray 3D. The GPU part of Trinity supports AMD V, UVD3 as well as Open CL acceleration.
Android Apps To Run On Windows
Software firm Bluestacks is on a mission to close the gap between Microsoft’s Windows and Google’s Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta earlier this week.
App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run around 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said in a statement.
Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard’s Slate 2 and Dell’s Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year’s Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.
The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the previous Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM’s Mali, Nvidia’s Tegra or Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake is able to take advantage of hardware accelerators from companies like AMD found in x86 chips.
Source…
AMD 7990 Specs Unveiled
As we draw close to the official Nvidia GTX 680 Kepler GK104 launch day it is no wonder that we’ll hear more and more about AMD’s upcoming dual-GPU HD 7990 graphics card and Chinese site INPAI has shed some new light on the dual-headed beast. Apparently, the HD 7990 will pack two Tahiti XT chips squeezed together on one PCB.
According to the post at INPAI, the upcoming HD 7990 features two 28nm GCN Tahiti XT chips, same one found on the HD 7970 graphics card. This means that we are looking at a card that will have 2048 stream processors and 3GB of memory per GPU. Appearently, these two Tahiti chips will end up clocked at 850MHz while memory will work at 1250MHz (5GHz effective).
Did AMD Want nVidia Instead of ATI?
While it is ancient history now, it seems that the story about the controversial buying of ATI by AMD was not an easy process.
Forbes has found a deep throat who has left AMD who has told it that AMD approached graphics processor designer Nvidia about an acquisition before snapping up Nvidia rival ATI in 2006. AMD leaders believed that shrinking transistors would create an opportunity to add new capabilities to the processors AMD and rival Intel designed for PCs and servers.
AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz decided to bet that AMD could get ahead of rival Intel by grabbing a piece of the market for GPUs. Fusing CPUs and GPUs would let AMD hit the PC market with something Intel wasn’t ready to offer. Initially AMD thought that Nvidia was the best bet but the deal was killed off because Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang insisted on being chief executive of the combined company.
Ruiz decided it was better to buy Nvidia rival ATI in July of 2006 for $5.4 billion. Nvidia replied by unleashing several strong products, gobbling up market share. AMD has fought its way back, with a strong lineup of graphics processors, Nvidia pushed into mobile processors. Nvidia has a market capitalization of $9.7 billion.