Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

Slides from AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) event at the PC Cluster Consortium event in Osaka, Japan offer up details regarding the chip vendor’s roadmap for its GPUs and CPUs, with the takeaways including the launch of a 300W APU targeted at the HPC segment along with the launch of new CPU cores.

At the event, Junji Hayashi, Consumer and Commercial Business Lead at AMD Japan, shared details on the vendor’s K12 ARM as well as the x86 Zen CPU cores. AMD is looking to introduce both ARM as well as traditional x86 cores in a pin compatible platform that is codenamed SkyBridge. Aimed at the server, embedded, semi-custom and client markets, both the ARMv8 and the x86-powered cores will offer 64-bit computing and will be manufactured using a 14-nm FinFET process. SkyBridge will be launching before the end of the year, although an exact launch window was not provided.

The K12 core will feature Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is a departure from the Clustered Multi-Thread technology that is currently utilized in AMD’s offerings. SMT will offer larger CPU cores the ability to achieve a higher throughput by allocating underutilized resources to an additional, slower, execution thread.

As for GPUs, Hayashi mentioned that AMD would be moving to a two-year release cadence cycle for updating the GPU architecture of APUs. There was also a mention of a High Performance Computing APU, which is said to be radically different from existing designs in that is features the Stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) memory standard. The HPC APUs will slot in between the standard server cores and the FirePro line of cards.

The current generation HBM is nine times faster than GDDR5 memory and 128 times faster than DDR3. AMD is said to be utilizing the same standard in its Radeon 300 series, with the technology itself developed in collaboration with SK Hynix.

The post AMD Reveals Five-Year Roadmap For GPUs and CPUs appeared first on VR World.

In what may turn out to be a vital move for MediaTek (TPE:2454) in its bid to challenge Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) in the mobile segment, it is believed that the Taiwanese manufacturer is set to license AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) graphics technology for its SoCs.

There are no concrete details on the alleged partnership, which is said to have occurred at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Siding with a vendor such as AMD would be beneficial to both companies as it would give MediaTek leverage a significant advantage in the realm of mobile graphics, and AMD would stand to gain a foothold in the ultra low-power market.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) already has the Tegra X1 in this segment, and even if AMD does not create an SoC by itself, siding with a manufacturer such as MediaTek would ensure that its offerings are seen in a wide variety of hardware, a feat that Nvidia has failed to achieve thus far with its Tegra chips.

MediaTek is set to up the ante this year with its range of 64-bit octa-core SoCs that offer LTE connectivity, and while its offerings are slowly gaining traction — particularly in markets like China and India — the Taiwanese vendor does not manufacture a custom graphics solution. Options in this segment include ARM’s Mali GPU and Imagination’s PowerVR offerings, both of which MediaTek has used in the past.

Qualcomm, meanwhile, holds a significant lead with its in-house Adreno GPUs, the foundation of which was built on by ATI, which AMD acquired in 2006. AMD finally sold the technology — branded Imageon — to Qualcomm for a meager $64 million in 2009. A deal with MediaTek would bring about a re-entry into the world of mobile graphic solutions for AMD.

A collaboration between the two would also lead to an increased focus on HSA/GPGPU products, considering that MediaTek is a founding member of the HSA Foundation. There’s no mention as to when we will see a MediaTek SoC powered by AMD graphics, and seeing as how Computex is where AMD is said to launch its next-generation desktop video cards, it is likely we’ll hear more about the vendor’s re-emergence into the world of low-power graphics at the event.

VR World has reached out to MediaTek for comment and will be updating this post if the company chooses to respond.

The post MediaTek’s Upcoming SoCs May Feature AMD Graphics appeared first on VR World.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced earlier this week at the Game Developer Conference that its Mantle API would be discontinued and suggested developers focus on Direct X 12 or OpenGL instead.

“Proud moments also call for reflection, and today we are especially thoughtful about Mantle’s future,” AMD’s vice president of visual and perceptual computing, Raja Koduri, said in a statement. “In the approaching era of DirectX 12 and the Next-Generation OpenGL Initiative, AMD is helping to develop two incredibly powerful APIs that leverage many capabilities of the award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture.”

AMD said that the Mantle 1.0 API will not be released to the public, however it will be releasing a 450-page API reference and guide on Mantle to interested parties.

But AMD also said that this would not be the end of Mantle per se.

“Mantle must take on new capabilities and evolve beyond mastery of the draw call. It will continue to serve AMD as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs,” Koduri wrote in his post.

One direction the underlying technology behind Mantle could go is to be the foundation of future APIs. That’s already the case with the Khronos Group, as it recently announced that Mantle will serve as the underlying foundation of its OpenGL-based API Vulkan.

While AMD faced an uphill battle with getting its API as it lacked the support of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) or Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), it did get a number of software publishers to commit to support it for upcoming titles. That should be counted as a success.

The post AMD’s Mantle Efforts Come to an End appeared first on VR World.

ATI’s poor performance in Folding@Home client was mostly due to different hardware capabilities of Radeon X1K, Hd2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series. But after couple of months of hard work on code optimization, ATI managed to crack into the big league, performance-wise.

Today we received the answer a lot of Folding enthusiasts awaited for so long… after making multi-GPU possible on Catalyst 9.2, the latest 9.3 version brings new version of ATI Stream and AMD Display Library SDKs, significantly raising the performance of F@H client.

If you fold and use an ATI card, don’t think – go and download them. If you are enjoying yourself with Windows 7 Beta (for some odd reason, version 7033 works better on my system than RC 7058 – why Microsoft, why you always have superb betas and then SNAFU the final verson?), you’ll be pleased to hear thatas of this month, Catalyst for Windows 7 are entering monthly refresh schedule.

Now, if there is one person who believes Microsoft that Windows 7 is coming out next year, wake up and start preparing for this summer. ; )

The post Catalyst 9.3: ATI now loves Folding@Home appeared first on VR World.

According to Madshrimps, Globalfoundries is working hard on improving its existing process nodes and the results are very encouraging. Thanks to engineering experts over at Abu Dhabi-powered Dresden foundry, AMD will be able to release Phenom II 955 processor.

Phenom II 955 allegedly works at 3.2 GHz, with working voltage of only 1.25V, down 0.10V from Phenom II 920 and 940. If all things work out, P-II 3.2 GHz just may be the ticket for the upcoming launch of AMD 800 series of chipsets. We’re not sure is this processor will be market as the Black Edition model or not. AMD has a policy of not commenting on unreleased products, thus treat this as a rumor.

The post AMD to release Phenom II 955: 3.2 GHz at only 1.25V? appeared first on VR World.

And then the world economy melted down, killing or downsizing a lot of events world-wide. Intel downsized its’ Chinese IDF convention to a local-event status, but IDF Fall 2009 will be held in Moscone Center in San Francisco – in its full strenght. Sadly for Nvidia, the company decided to cancel this year’s event, making NVISION a one-off. Thus, when Jen-Hsun decided to openly attack Intel and open a “can of whoop-ass”, he probably didn’t thought of how the world turns.

According to some sources, the show’s cost ranged in millions of dollars, somewhere between three and six million greenbacks. But the damage done will be much worse than this money – Nvidia fails to establish themselves as a serious player and position themselves in the very same “also-ran” company as AMD.

Intel, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Google, Microsoft – all of these companies (and many more) have at least one conference where thousands of people gather and get overwhelmed by the information shown by numerous companies. Sadly for Nvidia, the company didn’t manage to secure enough exhibitors to continue.

We hope that NVISION will return in 2010, but for now, “Visual Computing Conference” went the way of do-do birds. For the end of this news, we leave you with this picture that explains NVISION 08 in three parts:

1... 2... 3... Houston, we don't have a lift-off.

1) The world is ours and we’re bigger than your hands can spread (with Nvidia’s head of PR on the right side of the picture)
2) Will Nvidia push the button for 2009?
3) Well, they did plan to…

The post Nvidia opens a can of whoop-ass on themselves appeared first on VR World.

GTX295 naked. Picture courtesy of TechPowerUp!

Yep, you’ve read if correctly: Nvidia’s partners sold thousands of GTX 295 boards, and at the price of 520-550 bucks per card (or Euro), we’re talking about millions of USD/EUR. One can only wonder what is going on in Graphzilla’s head… there is an alleged recession going on, their quarterly results dropped by 50% to less than 500M USD a quarter, and they fail to deliver already sold boards – backorders.

We wonder what kind of excuse will nV come up with this time, if the company misses its own sales estimates. They succeeded in selling thousands and thousands of GTX295 boards, but their backlog is staggering.

UPDATE – March 14, 2009 12:51 CET – I have uploaded the wrong picture…previous picture was the picture of 9800GX2. Apologise for any confusion, this is the right image of naked GTX295. Thanks to all readers that noticed that something is “off” with the story…

The post UPDATE: Nvidia owes millions of $ in GTX295 backlog appeared first on VR World.

If we look at a chart above, we see that in December ’08, TSMC dipped as low as negative 31.5% compared to October, while second-tier foundry VIS crashed down to negative 42.1%. Looking at the stats right now, VIS is showing 16% growth compared to October 2008, UMC is showing negative 0.3% and TSMC is down 7.5%, but announcing a slew of rushed orders for March and April.

It will take couple of weeks to couple of months for these orders to become chips, but if contractors such as AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Philips, Qualcomm and numerous other players are now ordering chips, one cannot think about anything else but a recovery.

Some analysts estimate that semiconductor industry won’t recover until 2012, but more optimistic projections pitch 2009 and semiconductor industry as the first to return to black. According to DigiTimes story, this is slowly, but certainly happening. Will recession end during 2009? We certainly hope so.

The post Recession is over? TSMC, UMC, VIS show large growth in orders appeared first on VR World.

Probably the most humorous motherboard of them all was Intel’s own Bad Axe motherboard. Intel shipped out different revisions of the same motherboard with Pentium 4 EE955, Pentium EE965, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad – and every time, a new CPU would not work in older rev motherboard, even though power consumption was cut dramatically.

This is LGA-1156A, third Socket for i5 and the one that will be the standard... until LGA-1156B and LGA-1156C arrive.

Enter LGA-1156. According to friends at Fudzilla, next 18 months will see the debut of LGA-1156 for Core i5, LGA-1156B supporting integrated graphics and LGA-1156C. If we take into account that the company previously planned to manufacture this socket as LGA-1160 and LGA-1158, we should really take a good look at mighty Chipzilla.
If Nvidia is swaying the market with “smart” rebrands of their old products, how should we comment Socket policy at Intel? Perhaps a new spin on infamous Australian ad for chips – “Same sh*t, but won’t work package”?

If IT industry needs one thing, it would be to wake the heck up and start making products that won’t confuse the consumer. Is it that hard to estimate what envelopes your products need to work within Tic-Toc model and make a single socket that would, by some crazy imagination, work with every CPU that comes out for it?

In the end, it will truly end up with AMD being right about Socket AM2, AM2+ and AM3, while Intel’s single socket policy failed miserably on both Socket 775 and LGA-1156. And that is sad, given the size of chip giant from Santa Clara.

The post Intel doesn’t know how to make a CPU Socket? appeared first on VR World.

If I recall correctly, a while ago AMD claimed world’s first OpenCL demo, but it was done on a single core (and then scaled up to all four) on a Phenom II X4 CPU. If this video is correct, Nvidia gets the pole position for being the first company to demonstrate OpenCL working on a GPU, which is “usage as intended”.

Judging from the video, Nvidia showed Nbody simulation changing following parameters: point size, velocity damping, softening factor, time step, cluster scale, and velocity scale. The company used a laptop equipped with Quadro FX 570M graphics card, e.g. GeForce 8600M after a “GL” tune-up. As far as the official debut of OpenCL go, KHRONOS Group launched the API on Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singapore, from where both AMD & Nvidia videos came from.

But don’t expect OpenCL drivers until both companies supply drivers to Apple. It looks like Snow Leopard will be the beginning of OpenCL on a PC platform and Windows Vista is sitting on backburner… that’s what Microsoft get for botching OS development and sucking up to allmighty Chipzilla.

The post Youtube video shows OpenCL running on Nvidia GPU appeared first on VR World.

Intel was the first manufacturer to introduce this “element” into the mix, way back in late 1990s. First “expensive turned cheap” processor was a certain Celeron processor that shared the same die as more expensive Pentium III processors. But the caveat was that specific boards recognized that CPU as Celeron with whole amount of cache, and those beasts were more overclockable than PIII processors (due to difference in FSB – 100 MHz vs. 133 MHz). And as the song goes, “here we go again”. Korean enthusiast web-site Playwares found out that Advanced Clock Calibration feature on SB700/750-equipped motherboards could be the way how AMD is creating X3 and X2 CPUs, and started to play with them on Biostar’s 790GX motherboard.

How to make a "Phenom X4 10": One X3 10, Overclocking-friendly motherboard and Page Down key on a keyboard.

As you can see in picture above, really interesting thing happened. One press on Page Down key in BIOS turned X3 into an X4, and by the stroke of luck, this X3 didn’t had a broken down core, but was one of those CPUs that was “cored-down”. Sadly, I don’t have Athlon X2 or Phenom X3 CPU here (have ASUS and GigaByte 790GX+SB750 motherboards) to test myself, but those motherboards have the same BIOS feature as tested Biostar one.

Unless this story is a hoax, all we can say is – it looks like AMD is not certain how many heads its Dragon platfrom has. It morphs

The post Impossible is nothing: Turn your Phenom X3 into an X4! appeared first on VR World.

As company description explains, this company has extremely long lead-times, needed for implementation into designs of computers from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer and many others. If we take into account that the mainstream Nehalem platform (Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors, probably branded as Core i3 & i5) is set to debut this summer, it’s no wonder that i5 design appeared on AVC’s website five months before introduction.

This cooler fits almost all sockets on the market - including the upcoming LGA-1156 ;)

The company now lists several products compatible with LGA-1156 socket, from OEM solutions (competing for the boxed cooler contract) to a retail multi-heatpiped beast called Napoleon (Plus). In order to win the OEM contracts for enthusiast-class machines, Napoleon (Plus) fits inside the Intel Socket Load Limit policies – e.g. weighs in exactly 450g. A lot of enthusiast coolers weigh more than double that, and while it may be ok to keep a 1000 gram cooler mounted vertically on a horizontally mounted motherboard (e.g. testbed configuration), it is definitely not ok to keep such a monster in a chassis. Napoleon (Plus) has no such issues and can be mounted on any LGA-1156 motherboard without additional strengthening.

For the end of this post, we can probably state that most or even all LGA-1366-compatible coolers can support LGA-1156 processors as well.

The post AVC launches a cooler for upcoming Intel Core i5 processor appeared first on VR World.

If you’re wondering who is Sedo.com and why the company does not sell Nigerian make-money-fast schemes, the fact of the matter is that Sedo is a serious company – at least they’re trying to get you to believe that. According to their own website, Sedo: “employs close to 180 employees from 25 countries at the offices in London (UK), Cologne (Germany) and Boston (USA). Sedo has brokered some of the industry’s most important sales over the last five years, including Vodka.com, website.com, blue.com and wifi.com”

Mr. Sedo Cybersquatter, for the last time, MAD AMD is not Dubai, it's ABU DHABI!

To make things absolutely clear, Sedo is just a domain reseller for the domains somebody cybersquatted. We won’t go into details who from Sedo (or their customer) cybersquatted www.thefoundrycompany.com , but the fact of the matter is that they’ve enlisted themselves in a potentially dangerous legal situation. We contacted Sedo.com with an interest to purchase The Foundry Company .com domain and got the following answer:

“Unfortunately your offer is too low and cannot be accepted! Please submit an offer above the seller’s minimum price of: 7500 EUR.”

So, AMD’s Marketing/Legal/Public Relations division made a $10 save by not reserving thefoundrycompany.com domain and now they won’t pony up 7500 Euro for “first come, first served” domain registration. If AMD was saving cash, the company should have known that there are sites that offer free .com domain registrations (you just have to endure ads for male enhancement pills).

All in all, sad affair for company that is now splitting in two.

P.S. At the time of writing, www.amdglobalfoundry.com wasn’t registered. We wonder is AMD now waiting that somebody cybersquats them again

The post 200th Story: AMD’s cybersquatter wants 7500 Euro for TFC domain appeared first on VR World.

Even though the new company is constantly referred to as The Foundry Company, official website is located at a different address and it named the company as AMD Global Foundry.

The separation date between AMD and MAD is set for March 2, 2009 – just by accident, first day of CeBIT in Hangover, Germany (press day, to be more exact). On March 3, 2009 you can expect to see a press release with more details about this new company.

Also, AMD’s treasure will become richer by billion and some small change in US, helping the mother company to cope with returning the credit taken for purchase of ATI Technologies (given by the number of goodwill write-offs, I would say that credit was taken to make some folk very, very rich). Good luck to AMD and MAD AMD. They’re going to need it.

P.S. Yes, I am aware that somebody cybersquatted The Foundry Company domain. AMD obviously didn’t had the cash to buy the domain before the news about The Foundry Company became official.

The post AMD to split into two on 1st Day of CeBIT 2009 appeared first on VR World.

Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.

15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...

Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?

On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?

My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.

This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.

All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.

On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager )?

The post STEAM: Intel 8-core Skulltrail almost outsold 3-core Phenom X3 appeared first on VR World.

The post Nvidia unlocks SLI technology for everybody appeared first on VR World.

What happened? AMD’s leadership had to receive a Yes vote from more than 50% of all stockholders. Sadly for AMD’s management, the company had a glitch in the system and sent out necessary 400-page documentation only in the dying days of January. We are unsure why this happened, especially with the vote as important as this one.

Don't click there! ;)

By this morning, AMD received 42% of all stockholders, with 97% of those giving an approval for the split. However, not all is bad. At least we got a glimpse into the future, and we can now say that it is 99.99999999….n% certain that AMD will split in two. We just have to wait until February 18, 2009. My personal comment would probably be that AMD’s stockholders went on AMD’s site and tried to get extra information by accessing Manufacturing Technologies page in About AMD section… and were greeted by 404 Error. Then again, according to the same AMD.com webpage, we’re actually in 2007, given the state of their Formula One World Championship calendar.

With expected Yes vote on February 18, 2009 – we can mark the date as the birthday for the new company, Mubadala Abu Dhabi/ATIC powered The Foundry Company (Arab Micro Devices) and the new and lean Advanced Micro Devices. Needless to say, analysts with whom we spoke weren’t exactly ecstatic over this SNAFU.

P.S. In its current state, largest shareholders of AMD are Oppenheimer Funds Inc. (13.47%), Mubadala Development Company (8.05%, Mubadala Abu Dhabi, same fund that owns 5% of Ferrari s.p.a), Maverick Capital Ltd. (5.93%), Galleon Management L.P. (5.33%) and Vanguard Group Inc. (4.23%). Expect an “interesting” change once the vote passes.

The post AMD stockholders fess up the vote appeared first on VR World.

Leo is on course for being late the whole year...

According to original plans, AMD’s platform challenge was consisted out of Spider, Leo and Python. When K10 (Barcelona/Agena) hit delays, AMD introduced Dragon to the roadmap, combination of 790FX/GX chipset with DDR3-compliant Socket AM3. When AMD realized that they are unable to launch Phenom II with DDR3 at first, Dragon was named 7-series chipset, Radeon 4000 series GPU and Phenom II – thus putting AM2+ chipsets in the frame as well. “Original” Dragon platform debuted yesterday, with the introduction of AM3 processors, and our sources were implying that AMD is doubtful about launching the Leo platform in time.

According to the story mentioned above, motherboard makers were skeptical with a reason, since AMD decided to postpone Leo to Q4’2009. This is a slippery slope, because there is inherit danger that Leo misses the design phase for HP, Dell and others – all those Windows 7 powered computers for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas may go without AMD Phenom II + Leo if company misses the boat. In 2007, AMD missed the Q4 design window and decided to launch Phenom+Spider in channel alone, limiting the platform’s potential. In 2008, everything was about fixing the Phenom II and chipset guys couldn’t finish Dragon platform because the CPU was missing out, and it looks like 2009 is a year of issues on the chipset site. We wish AMD all the best and hope that for once, every piece of the puzzle will fit in place with Leo or Python (Bulldozer+DDR3+DX11). AMD needs to get following right for Leo:

• New Phenom II processors
• DirectX 11 GPU – mainstream and high-end discrete parts
• RD890/SB850 – update the SB with USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 spec

This would be a money maker for AMD. If they get 3 out of 3, AMD can be forgiven for being a full year late with Leo.

The post AMD delays Leo platform to end of 2009? appeared first on VR World.

New benchmark/system utility offers plethora of information...

New feature is also Alert – sensor monitoring utility that triggers audio visual alert on overheating, voltage drop, overvoltage or cooling fan failure. This might prove quite useful in checking is your power supply good enough. Standard features include support for the latest processors and chipsets, such as  Core i7, Atom, Phenom II and others. Support for OpenAL and High Definition Audio were also added. UI also underwent some changes – Windows 7 users should be happy, and if you use Vista Sidebar, you should like the newly designed information “widget”.

Everest 5.0 is available now at www.lavalys.com.

The post New Everest utility supports OpenGL 3.0 appeared first on VR World.