It was only a matter of time, but AMD is dropping the ATI name from its Radeon video cards. It seems they have done some research to see that the perception of ATI and Radeon were fairly equal and when Radeon was paired with AMD it was actually seen as a stronger combination. Other branding changes include the dropping of Sempron, Athlon Turion, and Phenom from the processor names. The Opteron brand will remain for servers and workstations. Here is a graphic if you are confused as I am:
This is definitely not good news if you are an AMD fan or just someone hoping that AMD can stay competitive with Intel to keep prices down. According to the road-map, it looks like AMD will be riding the 45nm wave for their CPUs through 2010 until these chips featuring its new micro-architecture. This means that AMD will be at least 1.5 years behind Intel in getting 32nm products to the market. However, there are a lot of promises in store for these new chips including a complete redesign which will bring about considerably higher performance and the SSE5 instruction set. I just hope I can wait that long to get some great chips. I’ll take an Istanbul 6 core chip to hold off though!
As the video says, available in the second half of 2009. I am really liking the progress AMD is making with their server chips. The 4 core 45nm Shanghai processors just came out this past fall and here come newer 6 core chips. While not as exciting as the 8 core Intel Xeon chips, it is still great to see a bit more affordable server processors. These should help drive down the cost of the Shanghai chips as well. I’d love to have 24 cores going!
And they are still behind Intel. AMD today released five more chips based on the 45nm manufacturing process including the first ever 3 core CPU at that size. The results are overall pleasing to the reviewers but still leaves a bit to be desired as they are still behind Intel in performance. The upside is that they are good for overclocking and cheaper overall. They could be appealing for budget gamers and those looking for a decent CPU for a nice price. Check out the links below for reviews and the official announcement.
Before the chips were even released to retail, AMD has gone ahead and dropped the price on them. Both the Phenom II X4 940 and 920 represent the ‘Dragon’ line of chips and AMD’s first venture into the 45nm die process for highend desktop chips. More chips on the 45nm process will arrive later in 2009 for consumer desktops and notebooks. The new chips will drop about 18% to $225 and $195 for the 940 and 920 respectively. Intel also dropped its prices on January 18th which probably led to AMD dropping theirs to stay competitive. The news overall is not good however, with AMD expected to release its lower Q4 2008 numbers and cut 1,100 more jobs as computer shipments are down considerably and not expected to recover until 2010.
AMD has finally released their die shrink CPUs with their server based Opteron processor. Available now will be the 75 watt quad core CPU ranging from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz sporting 6MB of L3 cache. The desktop based processors, code-name Dragon, are planned to arrive Q1 2009. The performance gains on the Opteron chips are pretty impressive with 35% performance increase while reducing power consumption by 35% while idle. The best part is that they will simply drop in the previous 65nm Barcelona sockets so that upgrading won’t require a new motherboard.
The EE Times article really gets in-depth into the internals of the CPU and how it didn’t use a brand new metal combination for the transistor gates. Intel did use a new combination that allows it to get some better performance for its 45nm chips but overall these AMD chips do very well. The best feature seems to be the lower power consumption and lower heat production. These two factors are crucial in building datacenters because soon the costs of electricity will overrun the costs of the hardware itself. They give one example of a datacenter powered exclusively on solar cells, Affordable Internet Services Online, which already uses existing AMD Opterons in its servers.
I have not read any previous articles from the EETimes, but I am really impressed with how in-depth and technical they get, it is quite refreshing. It is a long ready, but definitely worth it if you are interested in these sort of things. It is good to see AMD back on track, hopefully my next server will have one of these Shanghai Opterons.
AMD just issued a release saying that president and CEO Dirk Meyer will be making a “significant corporate announcement” tomorrow, which sounds ominously like those breakup rumors are coming true — particularly since Dirk’s on record saying that the chipmaker plans to spin off manufacturing and fabrication into a new company.
Well, I don’t know how I feel about this. It should help out AMD from a financial standpoint, but it won’t help from a quality control standpoint since they won’t be able to control the manufacturing process as closely. I guess we shall see what tomorrow brings.
Beginning this November AMD plans to introduce its Ultra-Value Client (UVC) processors to challenge the Intel Atom. The two chips that will be offered are the single-core Athlon 2650e and the dual-core Athlon X2 3250e. The dual core series currently bests what Intel has to offer unless the future dual core Diamondville uses hyperthreading to present four cores. The power consumption of these new chips will also be lower than Intel’s offerings once you compare the CPU and chipset power consumption. AMD plans to sell the chips to OEMs for low cost desktops and netbooks.
AMD is planning on bringing back the FX series of their CPU line sometime in mid 2009. The FX line in the past had represented the top notch offerings back when AMD was running over Intel. These processors offered unlocked multipliers allowing enthusiasts to ramp up the clock speed. However, when Intel woke up and released the Core 2 duo in 2006 taking over the performance top spot, the FX series was no more. The Black Edition of the Athlon and Phenom lines were the only unlocked processors AMD released. But the FX line will be back and will feature the Deneb FX core with four processing engines on a 45 nm manufacturing process. Will AMD be able to creep back up to the performance powerhouse it once was? Either way trying to attain the top spot will definitely make Intel stay on top of its game.
AMD was hit by a rough one-two punch today. First Hector Ruiz stepped down as CEO. This news was a long time coming and may even be welcomed by many as Hector didn’t fair very well on top at Motorola. As if that wasn’t bad enough, AMD reported a $1.2 billion Q2 loss. With the announcement they are reportedly exiting the handheld and digital television business. I had not even known that they were in this business to begin with, but I am sure it was mostly what ATI had been involved with before AMD bought them. However, things for AMD aren’t that terrible. The new Puma mobile platform performs great and with the recent change in trend in the video card industry which saw nVidia lose ground in performance and dealing with flawed chips things should be looking up for AMD. With less industries to focus on, AMD should be able to get back to its bread and butter and work on Barcelona. Even if you aren’t an AMD fan, you still want them to remain strong to push Intel to keep up its innovating. Without them, we would not have seen what we have out of Intel.
