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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.
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 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.
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.
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
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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’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.
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.