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AMD Shows Piledriver Opteron
AMD’s Piledriver rollout is all but complete. With Trinity in the mobile and desktop space, new 3300 and 4300 Opterons are bringing the new architecture to data centers.
The Opteron 4300 series offers six different parts, in quad-, six- and eight-core flavours. Stock clocks range between 2.2GHz and 3.5GHz, with TDP’s in the 35W to 95W range. The cheapest Opteron 4334 costs $191, while the priciest 4332HE comes in at $501. The 3300 series consists of three quad- and eight-core SKUs, priced at $125 to $229. The pricing of both series is pretty aggressive.
But what’s next for AMD? Well things should be eerily quiet on the server front in 2013. Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Delhi/Orochi C should last throughout 2013 and even a good part of 2014. That’s when we can expect some major changes, as AMD transitions to 28nm and goes about transforming its Opteron lineup.
Future Low Power CPUs and APUs (as AMD calls them) should replace Dehli/Orochi-C in 1P and dense server markets, but AMD is also planning “Client APUs for market enablement,” and this sounds a lot like ARM-based low voltage parts. Of course, in the high end AMD plans to stick with big Steamroller cores, but mid-2014 is a long way off.
Is The x86 Falling
According to Mercury Research, worldwide shipments of x86 parts saw a sharp decline in Q3. Researchers claim the drop was the biggest seen in more than a decade, 9 percent year-over-year.
Despite the drop, Intel still has something to brag about. Intel’s share hit 83.3 percent, up from 80.6 percent sequentially. AMD’s share dropped to 16.1, down from 18.8 percent, while VIA garnered a 0.6 percent share.
Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron told PC World that both AMD and Intel experienced declines, but AMD took more of the hit than Intel.
“AMD was simply hit by what OEMs saw in the markets… and hitting the brakes,” he said.
What’s more, the third quarter is supposed to be traditionally strong for x86 chipmakers, thanks to the back-to-school shopping frenzy. However, x86 CPU shipments dropped 4 percent in Q2, followed by 9 percent in Q3. Things aren’t looking good for Q4, either.
“The key is how the macroeconomic situation is, which is not looking good for the next couple of quarters,” McCarron said. “Hopefully things will improve next year.”
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.
Intel’s Core i7 2700K Discontinued
The Core i7 2700K, an unlocked 3.5GHz Sandy Bridge part, will meet its marker even sooner than many expected. Intel has decided that this processor launched in Q4 2011 and currently priced at $342 for boxed version is ready for processor discontinuance notice as soon as Q4 2012.
This means that in this quarter Intel plans to take last orders for the processor and will continue to ship them to customers until the EOL or end of lifecycle for this product that is planned in Q2 2013, or two quarters later.
If Intel ends up with some extra stock, it will surely ship it to customers but these are the official rules.
Core i7 2700K is not alone in PDN and EOL plans. Core i7 2600 and 2500K will also get product discontinuance notice in Q4 2012 and will reach the end of its professional career in Q2 2013 and it’s no coincidence that this happens days before scheduled Haswell launch.
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.
Intel Changes Course
Intel has changed its strategy when it comes to talking about its next generation technology. Back at IDF 2012, the company mentioned Haswell second generation 22nm CPUs and even explained some of its core technology, although it didn’t actually show any demos.
People got excited about Core i5 and Core i7 next generation Haswell parts that can ship with 10W TDP, but Intel hasn’t actually shown anything. When we asked a few people inside the company, they said that Intel isn’t planning on revealing too much, as they want to surprise the competition a bit more than they used to.
It’s quite clear that Haswell has every chance to beat AMD’s including 2013 Vishera successors. Intel obviously wants to see the market’s reaction to many ARM competitors, since some of them run Windows 8 RT just fine.
Intel Going High-Performance
Intel has been hinting that it is developing high-performance lower power server chips to speed up cloud services or data-intensive applications like analytic.
Apparently this will involve the integration of a converged fabric controller inside future server chips. This will make server communication faster while helping data centers operate at peak efficiency.
Raj Hazra, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group said that Fabric virtualises I/O and ties together storage and networking in data centres. If you add in an integrated controller you get a wider pipe to scale performance on cloud platforms. He said that the integrated fabric controller will appear in the company’s Xeon server chips in a few years as part of Intel’s cunning plan to bring the controller to the transistor layer.
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.