They say two heads are better than one, but in processors with integrated graphics -- think Intel's Sandy Bridge or AMD's APUs -- the GPU and CPU actually do very little communicating. For the most part, the GPU does its thing while the CPU knocks about on something else. There has to be something better! And as it turns out, there is: a group of researchers from North Carolina State University recently coaxed CPUs and GPUs on integrated processors into helping each other out, and they report a performance boost of over 20 percent as a result.
AMD won't be popping open any champagne bottles to celebrate 2011, during which time the Santa Clara chip maker pulled in $6.57 billion in revenue, falling flat year-over-year. Revenue also fell flat sequentially at $1.69 billion, representing a net loss of $177 million, or $0.24 per share, along with operating income of $71 million. But all things considered, it could have been much worse.
Coming up with new and hip brand names isn’t an easy task, that is unless you take the easy road and just stuck “I” in front of everything. For those most part these days marketing departments are finding all the reasonably catchy buzz words have been snatched up, and much to the surprise of AMD, so was Fusion. 
AMD didn’t stay silent while Intel and Qualcomm were talking up their new chips and business opportunities this week. In fact, AMD made waves of its own at CES with an impressive tech demo that showed off the capabilities of its next-gen Trinity APU chips, which are scheduled to launch later this year. The company also outlined some of its plans for the ultrathin notebook market.
AMD didn't want to let the year slip by without making one final hardware announcement, and so the chip designer today announced the addition of new A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) based on Llano. There are more than a dozen new chips in all, split between the desktop and notebook, and all of them sporting mostly minor updates, but updates nonetheless.
With a minimum of fuss and fanfare, AMD and NVidia have made some changes to their mobile lineup over the past few days. First off, AMD quietly released seven new Llano A-series APUs to its lineup, but that’s overshadowed by the launch of the new Radeon HD 7000M graphics chips. Actually, the Radeon HD 7000M series only sort of launched. Rather than unveiling new, awesome 28nm GPUs, the HD 7000M models announced yesterday are basically just rebranded 40nm HD 6000M chips. Nvidia's new GeForce 600M series is likewise pretty much rebranded 500M chips.
From a manufacturing standpoint, it's been nothing short of a challenging year for AMD. Poor yields affected AMD's 32nm Llano Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), which ended up delaying its release. Looking ahead, it appears AMD's next generation Trinity APUs will enjoy a smoother rollout and won't be hit by the same yield issues that plagued Llano.
Oh, AMD, you wiley stage magicians. While the company was busy showing off its Opteron 6200 and 4200 enterprise processors with one metaphorical hand earlier this week, the other metaphorical hand was secretly tweaking prices on several of its processors while everyone was distracted. Heck, they even introduced a new quad-core processor and next to nobody noticed! Penn and Teller, eat your hearts out.
Announced earlier this year at AMD’s Computex press conference, the Trinity accelerated processing unit (APU) will replace the chip maker’s Llano APU, which has been experiencing shortages due to poor 32-nm yields at Globalfoundries. Until recently, we only knew that Trinity would arrive in 2012. But thanks to Thomas Seifert, senior vice president and chief financial officer of AMD, we now have a much better idea about Trinity’s releases schedule.
After somewhat of a rough start to the year, chip designer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) bounced back in the third quarter and posted a 7 percent sequential and 4 percent year-over-year increase in revenue of $1.69 billion, net income of $97 million on earnings per share of $0.13, and operating income of $138 million. All of these figures are higher than the ones posted in the same quarter one year prior, and that's in large part because of AMD's Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).Connect with MaximumPC
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