Posted 01/09/09 at 06:00:47 PM by Nathan Edwards

We came, we saw, we set up a meeting via twitter (true story!) and we met with AMD's Ian McNaughton and Steve Howard at CES to check out the new "ultra thin" HP DV2, featuring AMD's new 64-bit Athlon Neo mobile processor, which we've heard so much about.

Initial impressions: it's surprisingly cool! Boasting the 1.6GHz Athlon Neo processor, 4GB of RAM, a 13" screen, and the comfortable keyboard that HP's getting increasingly good at (see the HP Mini 1001xx review in our February issue), the DV2 stakes out a spot somewhere just north of the netbook range. The DV2 carries a netbook-worthy price tag ($599), but comes with a whole host of things that netbooks don't: an HDMI port, slimline external Blu-ray drive, and optional discrete Radeon 3000 Mobility-series graphics. AMD says it'll get about 4 hours of battery life, thanks to a CPU and chipset that only draw 25W of power total. 

AMD thinks the "ultra thin" notebook genre they're trying to create passes the "mom test," citing a 30% return rate on netbooks last year. They hope to snag some market share from people who like the portability and price of netbooks but are frustrated by their cramped quarters and lack of power.

We look forward to putting the DV2 and another, as yet unannounced Athlon Neo-based notebook through their paces when we can get our hands on them. 

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Posted 08/04/08 at 08:32:13 AM by Chris Moody

Okay, so maybe AMD/ATI has earned some crowing rights with it’s 4870 Radeon videocard. It’s not on top in terms of pure performance, but its price point is closer to the sweet spot than Nvidia’s top card and the upcoming 4870 X2 will beat out the single GPU GTX 280 for about the same money. AMD however, is choosing to crow about the reliability of its ATI Mobility Radeon saying that it won’t suffer from faulty packaging like the problems Nvidia mobile GPUs suffered from recently.

Xbitlabs quotes a statement they saw from AMD, “In the past couple of weeks there has been considerable media attention regarding product reliability of certain notebook GPU die/packaging material failures. AMD is pleased to reassure our customers that our ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs are not experiencing any such abnormal field failures”

ATI chose eutectic in its ASIC packaging process, because the alternative high-lead bumps were known to be more fragile and subject to field failure issues if not implemented correctly.

“Package reliability is a matter of overall design and implementation. Factors such as the power distribution in the design of the ASIC, bumping process, bumping material and the techniques used to adhere bumps to the wafer all play an important role in the reliability of the packaged part.” AMD’s statement goes on to say.

Nvidia has remained mum on AMD’s statement. Xbitlabs says Nvidia didn’t choose to comment on the story either.
 
ATI's statement is pretty concerning overall. Is Nvidia still using high-lead bumps and if so, what steps have they taken to ensure that we won't see a repeat of the issue? I hope they will choose to respond to ATI's statements and either own up to the problem and tell us they fixed it, or tell us what is really going on. The ostrich approach of burying their head in the sand and hoping it all goes away is only going to hurt them in the long run.

It’s beginning to sound like Nvidia has a bigger problem on their hands than was first supposed. Can we expect them to make this right for those users with the screwed up GPUs in their laptops or will they put the screws to them and let the users take the hit?  Sound off below!

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