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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.
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.
Windows 7 Infection Rate Soaring
Windows 7′s malware infection rate soared by as much as 182% this year, Microsoft said on Tuesday.
But even with that dramatic increase, Windows 7 remained two to three times less likely to fall to hacker attack than the aged Windows XP.
Data from Microsoft’s newest twice-yearly security report showed that in the second quarter of 2012, Windows 7 was between 33% and 182% more likely to be infected by malware than in the second quarter of 2011.
The infection rate for Windows RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” the original version launched in Oct. 2009, was 33% higher this year for the 32-bit edition (x86), 59% higher for the 64-bit (x64) OS.
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) — the upgrade that shipped in Feb. 2011 — saw even larger infection increases: 172% for x86, 182% for x64.
Microsoft blamed several factors for the boost in successful malware attacks, including less savvy users.
“This may be caused in part by increasing acceptance and usage of the newest consumer version of Windows,” said Microsoft in its latest Security Intelligence Report. “Early adopters are often technology enthusiasts who have a higher level of technical expertise than the mainstream computing population. As the Windows 7 install base has grown, new users are likely to possess a lower degree of security awareness than the early adopters and be less aware of safe online practices.”
RedHat Takes A Fall
Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.
Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.
Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm’s earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, “This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter’s EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs.”
Red Hat’s $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.
Microsoft Silent On Windows 8 Pricing
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With just two months remaining before the retail launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has yet to provide pricing on its new OS.
Analysts today blamed Microsoft’s attempt to accommodate both desktops and tablets with Windows 8 for the lack of information.
“The delay in releasing pricing is all about uncertainty around the PC market and competition from Apple,” argued Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “Microsoft needs to price Windows in a way that looks smart versus Apple’s OS X, doesn’t leave money on the table with commercial PC customers, and enables OEMs to compete better with the iPad.”
The delay in pricing Windows 8 is real: During the Windows Vista and Windows 7 cycles, Microsoft unveiled retail prices weeks before each OS made the RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” milestone, and four or more months before retail sales started.
Microsoft disclosed Vista prices 58 days before that edition’s RTM, and 148 days before retail availability. Windows 7′s prices were made public 28 days before RTM and 120 days before its on-sale date.
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.
Windows 8 ‘Grace Period’ Ends
Microsoft has halted the 30-day grace period, a trademark of Windows 7, in the retail copies of Windows 8, requiring that users provide a product key during setup.
The change runs counter to previous practice by the Redmond, Wash. developer. With Windows 7, for example, users could run the OS for 30 days before activating the copy by providing a legitimate key.
That “grace period” was used by some to evaluate the software prior to purchasing, to save up to $100 by using an “upgrade” license to install the OS on a newly-formatted hard drive, and to create physical partitions or virtual machines for quick testing purposes.
Because Windows 8 handles activation differently, the grace period has been eliminated.
As several blogs have noted, customers must enter a unique product key — a 25-character alpha-numeric string — to proceed during Windows 8 setup. Failure to do so stops the process in its tracks. The Consumer Preview and Release Preview used this technique too, although Microsoft provided users a generic key for those sneak peeks.
Once Windows 8 is installed — assuming the machine is connected to the Internet — it automatically seeks out a Microsoft server to verify that the key is valid and then activates the OS. “If the licensed computer is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically connect to Microsoft for activation,” states the end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, for Windows 8 Pro.
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.
Microsoft’s Vista Infection Rates Climb
Microsoft said last week that an uptick in more security exploits on Windows Vista can be attributed to the demise of support for the operating system’s first service pack.
Data from the company’s newest security intelligence report showed that in the second half of 2011, Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was 17% more likely to be infected by malware than Windows XP SP3, the final upgrade to the nearly-11-year-old operating system.
That’s counter to the usual trend, which holds that newer editions of Windows are more secure, and thus exploited at a lower rate, than older versions like XP. Some editions of Windows 7, for example, boast an infection rate half that of XP.
Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, attributed the rise of successful attacks on Vista SP1 to the edition’s retirement from security support.
“This means that Windows Vista SP1-based systems no longer automatically receive security updates and helps explain why there [was] a sudden and sharp increase in the malware infection rate on that specific platform,” said Rains in a blog post last week.
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.