I think you have to be a real hardware geek to find this stuff funny, so it’s no surprise that it made me smile. Although it’s not exactly credited, it’s pretty clear that this is a low-key effort by AMD to discredit NVIDIA — the cartoon casts a bediapered dinosaur as NVIDIA’s troubled last generation of video cards and makes fun of their limited and faulty hardware.
Whether it’s “official” or not is hard to say, but it’s fun no matter what.
[via HardOCP]
AMD, Intel’s arch nemesis, is rolling out its first 45nm quad-core Opteron processors today. The move to 45nm brings lower power consumption (a decrease by about 35 percent) and increased (by 35 percent, too) “performance,” a term so nebulous it can mean anything.
The processor uses the code name Shanghai. The previous 65nm Opterons went by Barcelona, who are absolutely tearing up La Liga, as it were.
The new Opterons run from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz.
It’s being wildly speculated this morning that AMD will announce an Intel Atom smasher tomorrow at a financial analyst meeting. So, in short expect AMD to announce their netbook strategy tomorrow, which they said they’d talk about during the Q3 earnings call.
The Reg
Notebooks
Likely irked by the rapid adoption of Intel’s Atom CPU, it’s expected that AMD will announce its own netbook-specific processor this week, according to APC Magazine.
The company is claiming that battery life and video performance are the two key areas that need to be better addressed. AMD’s VP of Advanced Marketing, Pat Moorehead, says that we should expect 8 to 9 hours of battery life out of a netbook and that the “hottest” netbook he’s tested only topped out at an hour and 45 minutes.
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There’s word that Acer may well release a nettop, sort of a headless netbook, without the Intel Atom processor early next year. It’s not that Acer is tired of the Atom or anything, but because sales of its Aspire series of netbooks are doing so well that the company doesn’t want to jeopardize the supply of Atom processors. So, it’s reportedly looking at using processors from the likes of AMD and VIA Technologies.
Or, if the supply turns out to be in tip-top shape, Acer might just continue with the Atom.
And maybe after that we’ll find out exactly who nettops are designed for!
Yet another big, successful company feels the crunch; 500 people were eliminated from AMD’s worldwide operations today, although AMD did not say what jobs were cut or where. We haven’t heard similar announcements from the other major players in AMD’s game, Intel and NVIDIA; the former may be banking on the its new Core i7s to buoy earnings, the latter probably made a packet on the Apple deal.
That’s two blows against the embattled AMD, which is having trouble competing despite the excellent performance of the 4800 series of video cards. It may also have something to do with the company splitting in two, although that wouldn’t jive with their stated goal of “eliminating duplication of efforts.” Good luck to those given the boot.
AMD’s 4000 series has been exceptional in that not only has it exceeded NVIDIA at the high end while keeping the price down, but the budget offerings going all the way down to <$100 are good performers for the money as well. The new HD 4830 slots right in between the 46XX series ($70-80) and the 4850 (~$170). At around $130 or less, the Radeon HD 4830 provides DirectX 10.1 support and pretty decent performance. There’s a good review over at Hot Hardware with more info, but it’s pretty much what you expect. Support for everything you need and every dollar’s worth of performance but not more.
The graphics card market is stuffed to the gills right now and you can find competition and clear choices practically at every $10 interval. If you’re looking to upgrade, just set your own price, be it $100 or $500, and seek out the best deal for that money.
[image credit: Hot Hardware]
In systems where both energy limitations and heat flow are major considerations, passive cooling has been an increasingly popular solution, though not always the best one. Heatsinks are often just not enough to do the job, but as they become more sophisticated they are closing the performance gap with active heat reduction like fans or piping. Celsia has made the heatsink into something more complicated, with water vapor and micro-scale grilles aiding in spreading the heat around faster and better.
AMD is teaming up with these guys to make something nice for its high-end video cards. That’d be another leg up on NVIDIA, as they’ve already pretty much got them beat in price and performance; efficiency and low heat would be icing on the cake.
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Every so often, hardware makers strike out in a new direction, improving their product in an almost random manner — double the shader processors! stick two cards together! — and sometimes it actually has good results. The big move happening right now is a vast increase in the amount of RAM available to the video card, even though that’s not really what’s limiting game performance these days.
But if you trust HardOCP (and I do), that doubling of video RAM makes for a simply better gaming experience , and at a relatively small premium to boot (a 512MB 4870 costs ~$275, a 1GB 4870 ~$300). Although games are pushing more on the performance front than the RAM front, it helps to have that cushion of space for swapping, caching, and so on.
Oh my. Facing mounting debt and increasing costs, AMD is splitting into two parts: one to design chips and one to make them. The move is made possible by a $6bn infusion by two Abu Dhabi investment firms, an amount which will go a long way toward relieving debt and covering the cost of establishing the manufacturing arm (”Foundry” for now) as a workable partner. They’ll be splitting the debt and building a new chip fab in upstate New York (with some help from the state — where’s that money coming from?)
If this desperate move doesn’t succeed, AMD will surely fall, and then Intel will reign supreme. And those would be dark days indeed.
Direct X 11 is on track for a 2009 release, according to AMD’s little slide up there. You’ll also note that the company expects Windows 7 in 2009, too. That’s cute.
And how many Direct X 10-only (or even DX10-enhances) games have there been since its release, what, two years ago? Doesn’t look like too many to me.
Also, just what is “HD+” supposed to mean?
via Gizmodo
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 graphics cards are a wet dream for gamers on a budget by delivering DirectX 10.1 graphics and an HDMI port with 7.1 channel audio while keeping the price low. The $55 HD 4550 is equipped with 512MB of DDR3 memory with a 96 GFLOPS of power. The smaller but still potent HD 4350 packs 256MB of memory for $39. ATI claims that this type of power has previously not been available at this price point and I think they are right. These are a heck of a deal when they launch sometime in October ‘08.
PR
In another installment of “Mossberg’s Mailbox” the tech pundit answers a few questions sent in by readers hoping to glean some knowledge. Not everyone is as savvy as us and knows the difference between AMD and Intel, so Walt does his best to dumb it down. Did he do a good job? How would you explain it?
Q: If I buy a PC with an AMD processor instead of an Intel one, will I run into any compatibility issues with common software like Vista or Office 2007?
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The ATI Radeon HD 4600 is out of the gate and already talking a big talk. Allegedly the new, low price card can outperform both the HD 3650 and the 9500GT while still keeping the cost under 80 bones for the GDDR3 flavor. Plus, the HD 4600 is now one of the least expensive DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.x supported graphics card. The graphic-creating power comes from a 55nm manufacturing process and the same 320 stream processors of the HD 3650. The basic 512MB, GDDR2 version is available for $69, with the upgraded GDDR3 edition going for $79. AMD even has plans to ship a 4670 version, complete with 1GB of memory later this month for an undisclosed price. As for the performance claims, we’ll wait for the benchmarks to hash out the details.
While the world oohs and ahhs to tiny laptops and green benchmarks, there is a sort of blind eye turned to the excesses of extreme gamers. This interesting article points out that as everyone else is going lighter, smaller, and more efficient, video cards are getting bigger, guzzling power, and even multiplying themselves.
A cutting edge card will draw nearly 300W at maximum, which is what we were running our entire computers on a couple years ago. Certainly performance has increased more than proportionally, but if extreme gamers are buying 1000W power supplies for their rigs, there’s something crazy going on. While hardly anyone in the world is running quad-SLI Radeon 4870s, the increasing necessity for a separate video card is driving up total power costs all the way down to the budget sector. It’s not quite “burning the rainforest” bad but as we work as a culture to reduce our energy footprint, this might be a good place to start.
The video card scene right now is like watching a boxing match. AMD dealt NVIDIA a solid shot to the face with the 4870 and 4850, causing NVIDIA to lower their prices in an evasive maneuver. NVIDIA has responded by throwing cards at the budget segment under $75. AMD of course disparaged this move, saying it was “quick and dirty,” and said something I feel is insightful:
“If you have the performance high-ground, you can price your products according to performance,” Baumann said. “If you don’t have the high-ground, you have to price them to products around you.”
And AMD is practicing what it preaches. The 4870 was such a good performer they could put it at the perfect price point, and NVIDIA had to accommodate them, and now NVIDIA is pricing around AMD’s offerings because they can’t hit them straight on. It’s a low blow, but what with increasing demand for graphics performance in low-end hardware, it may be the punch they needed to throw.
Sometime in the middle of next year, AMD has plans to bring out code-named Deneb FX microprocessors aimed right at the enthusiast market. You might recall that AMD once had competitive high-end chips, the Athlon 64 FX, but eventually, those were out preformed by Intel options. This time around, AMD might have the upper hand with these quad-core, 45nm chips, with speeds up to 2.80GHz and 3.0GHz. No word on price just yet, but if AMD is, in fact, going after the gaming market, the processors are going to cost a lot of cake.
AMD is, I think, releasing press releases just for giggles. This one is pretty insubstantial, but it linked the neat demo video above so it’s worth mentioning. Essentially, AMD is attempting to extend its current (and possibly short-lived) dominance by emphasizing how well the conquering 4800 series works with DirectX 10.1. I have to say, the lighting tools shown in the extremely long ping pong ball demo above are pretty nice — the occlusion is subtle and the global lighting is effective. I dare say my next video card purchase will be a Radeon.
AMD wanted to get out of the DTV market for a bit now and just found a buyer. Broadcom, maker of chips and bits inside of broadcast equipment, is paying $192.8 million in cash to acquire all of AMD’s assests for the digital television bisiness.
AMD’s DTV assets include Xilleon integrated DTV processors and reference designs, NXT receiver ICs, the Theater 300 DTV processor, and a line of panel processors that perform advanced motion compensation, frame rate conversion and scaling.
We aren’t sure how this is going to affect the PC DTV market, but hopefully, Broadcom will keep the AMD/ATI ball rolling and pump out more digital tuners for our computers.
SLI rendering has gained a lot of popularity lately, even to the point where people are making SLI rigs of pre-SLI’ed cards like the 9800GX2 and the 4870X2. The problem is that drivers and motherboards aren’t really set up to take advantage of two cards. Sure, it works a lot better than one card, but Hydra feels that it’s time mobos got an integrated SLI controller that works out all the SLI business in hardware. At the moment the cards have to either be in constant communication so each knows what the other has been assigned to do, or they switch off frames, which also requires them to constantly update each other, wasting memory bandwidth.
Hydra’s “Lucid” technology does all the SLI-organizing work in hardware, and is so good at it that it can work with a Radeon and a GeForce at the same time as easily as it might with two of either. It breaks up the scene, assigns and keeps track of the parts each card renders, and reintegrates it once the cards do their calculations. Man, that’d be nice, I hope it really works.
