Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) didn't give investors much reason to celebrate yesterday when announcing its second quarter financial results. The Sunnyvale chip designer reported revenue of $1.41 billion in Q2, which is representative of an 11 percent drop sequentially and a 10 percent decline year-over year. AMD pointed to a weak market as the reason why the numbers dropped the way they did.
By far the most common question we get asked here at Maximum PC is: “should I upgrade”? The answer to this one is never easy, however AMD just dropped word that should make anyone on the hunt for a new GPU sit up and take notice. The price of the 7000 series parts are about to see another price cut, and they are finally starting to make a pretty compelling price vs. performance case for themselves vs. Nvidia.
So far today, I've talked about Nvidia and Intel -- let's work AMD into the mix. Remember how earlier reports pegged October as the likely release window for the company's next-generation "Vishera"AM3+ CPUs? That month may just prove to busy one for AMD, as a new report claims that the launch of the desktop flavors of the Trinity APU have been pushed back from August to October.
All good things come to an end, and for AMD fans, the end is nigh for the Sunnyvale chip designer's 45nm SOI (Silicon On Insulator) processors, which will have reached end of life (EOL) status by December 2012. Among the list of soon-to-be deceased chips are five Phenom II processors, including two quad-core X4 CPUs and half a dozen dual-core X2 parts. A moment of silence is in order.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if Apple's MacBook Air provided inspiration for Intel's Ultrabook platform and AMD's push into ultrathin territory, or whether these new generation of thin and light machines represent a natural evolution of the form factor. What matters is which platform will rule the day, and thus seize the lion's share of the market and the financial rewards that come with it. At least one analyst believes that platform belongs to Apple.
We've got Ivy Bridge, we've got Trinity, when are we going to see a desktop follow-up to AMD's Bulldozer chips? Some hub-bub around the Web says we'll be seeing the Piledriver-based Vishera lineup sometime in the third quarter, with the flagship AMD FX-8350 possibly coming at the end of October.
A new Catalyst software suite, version 12.6, is available from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for Radeon and FireStream graphics card owners. The new driver packages, which play nice with Windows XP on up to Windows 7, offer up additional Dual Graphics Technology profiles for a handful of DirectX 9 games, and also stomp out a series of bugs that are mostly applicable to Windows 7.
If you've been following the PC scene for awhile, you may recall Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) beating Intel to the punch (if only by a hair) in getting a 1GHz CPU (an Athlon "Thunderbird") into the hands of consumers back in 2000. Here we are more than a decade later and AMD's still talking up its 1GHz achievements, only this time those bragging rights are related ot its GPUs, the newest one being the just launched Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card built around the company's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
Graphics professionals need big-league processing power, and AMD aims to scratch that itch with its FirePro line of GPUs. Earlier this week, the company announced the launch of the FirePro W600, the first of the line to incorporate AMD's 28nm and GCN technology. Hopefully you didn't run out and buy one immediately, because today AMD showed off that card's big brother, the FirePro W9000, and it's a memory-filled beast. And hey, did we just see the first Radeon 7990, too?
Intel and AMD took two completely different approaches when it came to launching their latest and greatest chips: Intel kicked off Ivy Bridge by launching its most powerful desktop units first, while AMD's Trinity APUs first popped up on notebooks. In fact, you still can't find a desktop Trinity chip -- but the company recently confirmed with HardwareCanucks that Trinity is on schedule to ship to component channels some time later this year and a full listing of the desktop APUs are up on the AMD website.
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