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.

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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.

Futuremark has launched a new API Overhead feature test for its 3DMark benchmarking utility, with the test allowing users to test performance differences between DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and Mantle API.

Windows 10 Technical Preview users on build 10041 and the latest video drivers from Windows Update will now be able to access the test through 3DMark Advanced or Professional Edition. To test the DirectX 12 features, users must have DirectX 11-compliant hardware with at least 4GB RAM and 1GB video memory. To run Mantle tests, you need AMD hardware that works with the Mantle API.

Developed in collaboration with AMD(NASDAQ:AMD), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), the test’s objective is to determine the “relative performance of different APIs on a single system.” Essentially, you’ll be able to gauge how your current system performs with DirectX 11, and the differences in performance when using DirectX 12.

The API Overhead test works by sending a call to the GPU to draw an object on the screen, which is handled through the API. The more efficient the API, the more number of lines that can be drawn on the screen. The number of draw calls is increased with every iteration, with the final result calculated based on the maximum number of draw calls per second achieved by an API before the frame rate goes under 30 fps.

With DirectX 12 slated for commercial availability later this year, Futuremark’s test offers users a way to check how their current configurations will be able to handle Microsoft’s new API.

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The most interesting news from last week’s Mobile World Congress was not a new smartwatch, or flagship handset, but rather a rumor that MediaTek (TPE: 2454) and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) were on the verge of a licensing deal that would put Radeon GPUs into MediaTek’s SoCs.

While this deal is far from confirmed, on paper it’s a logical partnership that would allow both parties to score wins in respective spaces they have struggled in.

For MediaTek, the Radeon GPU technology would allow it to lessen its dependence on ARM’s (LON: ARM) Mali GPU and Imagination Technologies’ (LON: IMG) PowerVR GPU. MediaTek uses both for its GPU lineup: Mali on the low-end and PowerVR on the high-end. This would allow MediaTek to differentiate itself from other users of Mali, and would also free it from licensing GPU technology from Imagination — a company that it may be soon competing with in the SoC space if it starts bringing in some mobile hardware wins from MIPS.

And for AMD this is a chance to finally break into the mobile space. For a number of reasons, especially Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) aggressive subsidies of its chips in the mobile space, AMD could not compete in mobile. Eventually, last November, it said that it had “given up” on tablets having long backed out of the smartphone race.

What about Skybridge?

The going assumption — and it might prove to be correct — is that MediaTek would be the majority partner in this deal as it has the proven experience in the mobile space. However, considering AMD’s ambitious Skybridge plan — pairing ARM and AMD on the same die — it might be that this is a deal of equals.

Originally Skybridge was supposed to be about x86 and ARM on the same die, but this could be the evolution of the project. The big takeaway from the project would be successful interfacing of ARM and GCN, and the use of low-power Carrizo GPUs.

Remember that there is already significant cooperation between AMD and MediaTek on the Heterogeneous Software Alliance, so familiarity between teams exists.

AMD is scheduled to report its earnings in mid-April, while MediaTek has April 28 booked to report. If this deal has legs, an announcement would likely come around that time.

The post A MediaTek Deal Would be AMD’s Ticket to Mobile 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.

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After rumors suggested a launch sometime in the second quarter of 2015, it looks like AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) will unveil its R9 300 series at Computex, which is being held in the month of June in Taipei. The vendor had initially planned to launch the R9 390 series as a rebrand of the R9 280 series with improved performance, but those plans have been shelved in favor of an entirely new lineup of GPUs.

AMD’s next-gen GPU –likely the R9 390X — was on hand at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this week, with the R9 390X powering an Oculus Rift demo. The idea of a full rebrand makes sense as an AMD engineer was quoted as saying that all R9 300 series products will come with FreeSync support, a feature that was not available in mid-tier R9 200 series cards like the R9 270X. Only the Hawaii-based GPUs such as the R9 290 and R9 290X as well as the R9 285 offer FreeSync support.

According to a series of leaks, the R9 380X and R9 390X will be powered by the Fiji XT GPU, which is said to feature 4096 stream processors as well as 4GB of High-Bandwidth Memory, offering thrice as much bandwidth as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980. Fiji XT is claimed to be 45% faster than the Hawaii-based R9 290X, and is said to incorporate a closed loop cooling solution, much like the R9 295X2. The Fiji XT GPU has been in testing for a few months in AMD’s driver certification division in India, and the brand itself stated that it was putting the final touches on the card.

With all the advances made by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) with the Maxwell architecture — including significant reductions in power consumption — it should be interesting to see how AMD’s next-generation offerings fare.

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Virtual Reality is quickly becoming more and more immersive, but there’s one problem that ruins the illusion: lag. When a user moves their head and the virtual world doesn’t respond as quickly, the illusion is ruined.

This is where AMD’s (NASDAQ: AMD) new Liquid VR API comes in. Liquid VR uses a number of different methods to make sure the VR headset is responsive as possible. These methods are Latest Data Latch, Asynchronous Shaders, Affinity Multi-GPU, and Direct To Display. All of these methods are optimized for AMD GPUs, and support multiple GPUs working in-sync.

Latest data latch promises to reduce the latency by increasing the efficiency of CPU-GPU parallelism. With this method the GPU would be provided a bigger buffer of data from CPU, making more rendered data available so less rendering time would be needed to display virtual worlds.

Moving on to asynchronous shaders, these allow the GCN shaders on the GPU to warp the image of a user’s viewpoint before sending it to the VR headset to further reduce latency. Effectively for every viewpoint the VR headset requests, the GPU will create more data than required so re-rendering isn’t necessary.

The Affinity Multi-GPU feature allows GPUs to work together in creating the stereoscopic image. Effectively each GPU would render a single eye’s viewpoint before combining them into one stereo 3D image.

Finally Direct to Display is simply a plug-and-play feature allowing cross compatibility of VR headsets with Radeon GPUs.

All in all Liquid VR is a promising early step towards a much-needed API for VR gaming. As this API matures AMD will have no trouble getting VR headset vendors on board.

The post AMD’s Liquid VR SDK Aims to Take the Lag Out of VR 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.

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) upcoming DirectX 12 has a ton of exciting features and optimizations that we already know about. However the most interesting new feature comes via a report from Tom’s Hardware: the ability to pool resources from multiple GPUs from different manufacturers.

The ability to work with two different GPU architectures in the same system comes from DirectX 12’s support of something called Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities and Split Frame Rendering (SFR). Effectively this pools all GPU resources into a bucket and allows them to be utilized as one.

SFR allows developers to manually divide data between the two GPUs to allow them to work together on each frame with the work for each frame divided between the two cards. The older method, called Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). AFR is considered to be less efficient because it required both GPUs to have all of the data already in their frame buffers. Each GPU would render an alternate frame. The downside of this, however, is that the cards would work in parallel and not independently. If you had two cards with 4GB of memory each, you’d only have 4GB of useable space in the frame buffer in total.

The kicker is that Tom’s source said that SFR will be supported across multiple GPU architectures in the same system. It will treat both GPUs as one. Reportedly this would allow a system with an AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) APU and an Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPU to have the two GPUs work together. The same would go for a discrete AMD and Nvidia GPU in the same system.

In the end this will be up to developers to make use of and optimize their code accordingly. AMD’s Mantle already supports a form of SFR, so in a way the precedent is already there.

More details on DirectX 12 — and a confirmation of this report — will likely be available during March’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

The post Your Next Gaming PC Might Have a Radeon and Nvidia GPU appeared first on VR World.

ArrayFire found in its benchmarks that AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) integrated GPU in the Kaveri A10-7850K APU fares better at computational tasks than Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Haswell HD 4600 series on the Core i7-4790K. The software company builds  software libraries for GPU programming, with its products working on both Nvidia CUDA-based cards as well as AMD’s OpenCL GPUs.

In its benchmarks, ArrayFire tested several GPU functions such as a bilateral filter, which is a non-linear filter that is used to smoothen out edges from images. The bilateral filter test showed AMD’s integrated GPU achieving 156 fps at 720p and 69 fps at full-HD, more than twice the score managed by the HD 4600 at 62 and 28 fps.

A similar set of results were observed in an erosion and dilution benchmark, with the Kaveri APU scoring four times as high as the HD 4600. ArrayFire also ran 2D convolution tests, which determine image processing, and found that Kaveri significantly outmatched Intel’s offering by achieving 191 fps to HD 4600’s 52 fps at full-HD resolution.

ArrayFire also ran a gamut of other computational tests, includingNxN matrix tests, sort functions as well as image resize and rotate tests, with AMD’s solution coming out on top in all benchmarks.

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According to a post on Linkedin, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) is hiring CPU engineers to work on optimizing the CPU side of its Catalyst driver packages.

AMD is seeking someone to work on multi-threader optimizations to write code to cut through CPU bottleneck and work with software vendors to optimize drivers for their titles.

Compared to the competition, AMD’s drivers are considered to be somewhat bloated and CPU intensive. AMD’s Mantle API, which offers the ability for developers to code close-to-metal is a partial solution to cut through the driver bloat but not everyone wants to implement it.

Most likely these engineers would be working on developing the drivers for AMD’s upcoming Radeon R300 series, which has been the subject of numerous rumors both founded and unfounded. Perhaps this card will leapfrog past Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) in the driver game.

The post AMD Hiring Graphics Driver Developers for CPU Optimization appeared first on VR World.

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2015) in San Francisco, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) unveiled the first architectural details of its Carrizo APU and Excavator core.

The APU, intended for laptops and low-power desktops, is expected to have a formal launch in China this spring but at ISSCC 2015 attendees got a first glimpse at the new silicon.

“As a part of our continued focus on building great products, the advanced power and performance optimizations we have designed into our upcoming ‘Carrizo’ APU will deliver the largest generational performance-per-watt gain ever for a mainstream AMD APU,” Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow and co-author of the ISSCC presentation, said in a press release.

Carrizo’s Excavator core is based on the 28nm process, but AMD says that it’s able to squeeze in 29% more transistors on the same die size thanks to something AMD is calling high design libraries. Carrizo has 3.1 billion transistors compared to Haswell-D’s 1.4 billion.

AMD is not yet disclosing the number of Excavator CPU cores in each Carrizo chip. However the company did say that each chip will have eight Radeon GCN cores. AMD also says that Excavator will have a 5% gain in instructions per cycle over Steamroller. Compared to chips with the Steamroller architecture Excavator will have 23% less die area and will consume 40% less power.

Carrizo will also support on-chip H.265 video decode.

As expected, Carrizo chips will support native Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as well as heterogeneous Unified Memory Access (hUMA), which gives the CPU and GPU portions of the SoC the same memory space.

More details on Carrizo will be available this spring, as AMD executives have said before that they intend to do a formal launch of the chip sometime between March to May in China.

The post AMD’s Carrizo Offers Big Power Savings Over Kaveri appeared first on VR World.

AMD’s (NASDAQ: AMD) future lies within China for many reasons, but not just as a growing market for its products. However, it is not the country that a company keen to outright takeover AMD hails from but rather it will be the source of strategic investments into AMD throughout 2015-2016.

VR World has learned China’s Loongson Technology, a microprocessor manufacturer that’s a joint venture between Beijing-based chip designer BLX IC Design Corp, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Computing Technology, is set to make key investments into AMD’s technologies and product lines. Loongson is best known for its Godson line of chips that use the MIPS architecture.

Earlier reports indicated that China’s BLX intended to initiate an outright takeover of AMD, but this course of action is unlikely due legal concerns from Intel and regulatory issues that might arise from US authorities.

These investments are set to begin immediately. Loongson’s targeted investments will be funded by a $19 billion war chest (120 billion RMB) that the company has set aside for such ventures.

Loongson and AMD have worked together before in the past. AMD’s HyperTransport and PCI South as well as North bridges were in previous Godson silicon, so for Loongson AMD is not entirely foreign territory. The two opened an R&D center in December 2003 in order to develop what the two hoped would be something to counter the goliath of Intel.

Investing in AMD’s various technologies and product lines would be a much easier transaction for Loongson. It would not have to deal with the regulatory burden the US government might impose, nor would it need to negotiate an x86 license from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). It is not yet clear what the end result of such investments might look like, but it could be that Loongson markets future Godson systems with more AMD inside — such as GCN GPU architecture.

Key AMD staff were in Beijing in late January and early February likely in meetings related to this deal.

There’s plenty that needs to happen to make this official, but such a deal is much more likely than an outright takeover. More details will be posted as they are available. A response from AMD will be posted when available.

The post AMD’s Real China Play is Strategic Investment appeared first on VR World.

In response to a query on Facebook, AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) said that it was “putting the finishing touches” on the Radeon 300 series of video cards. There isn’t a clear timeline as to when we’ll see the latest lineup of cards from AMD, but it is scheduled to occur sometime in the second quarter of 2015.

The statement from AMD’s official Facebook account: “We’re still putting finishing touches to the 300 series, to make sure they live up to expectation.” AMD CEO Lisa Su announced during the latest earnings call that the next-generation video cards would be announced in Q2 2015, which means that the Radeon 300 series won’t make its debut before the highly-awaited Grand Theft Auto V hits Windows.

According to the leaks, we will see two cards on offer in the Radeon 300 series initially: the R9 380X and the R9 370X. The cards are rumored to feature a new memory standard called 3D stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which AMD created in collaboration with SK Hynix. The standard is said to be faster than GDDR5, and is said to be catered toward bandwidth-hungry use-cases, like gaming.

The R9 380X is said to feature 4GB of HBM along with a 4096 GCN core GPU and a 4096-bit wide-IO memory interface, with the GPU likely called Fiji XT. The memory clock according to a SiSoftware Sandra leak is said to be 1.25Ghz, with a total bandwidth of an astounding 640GB/s. To put that into context, Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) GTX 980 has a memory bandwidth of 224GB/s. The R9 380X is rumored to be the first single-card solution to feature liquid cooling.

AMD is also allegedly working on a new card under the Trinidad moniker that will be aimed at the $200 price segment. Details are hazy as to what the card will offer, but it is rumored that the card will come with 2GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit wide memory interface.

The post AMD Finalizing Radeon 300 Series, R9 380X And R9 370X Set For Q2 Launch appeared first on VR World.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) is rumored to announce its next-generation video cards sometime later this quarter, but until such time the vendor is intent on making the best of its main rival’s woes. It has reduced prices of the R9 290X, which is now being offered for under $300.

Following Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) troubles over the GTX 970 VRAM allocation issue, AMD’s head of global technical marketing Robert Hallock tweeted an image highlighting the fact that with AMD, “4 GB means 4 GB.”

pic.twitter.com/DYOR0MhrtM

— Robert Hallock (@Thracks) January 28, 2015

The snide remark was over the memory allocation controversy Nvidia found itself in with the GTX 970 after it was discovered that users were unable to access the entire 4GB memory. To differentiate the GTX 970 from the high-end GTX 980, Nvidia lowered the L2 cache and segmented the memory differently. Limiting the cache led to the memory being segmented into two chunks, with the 3.5GB portion able to access the cache directly, and the 512Mb section having to interlace with another memory controller to access the cache. This interweaving meant that the last 512MB was slower than the rest of the VRAM, and that both segments could not be read simultaneously, effectively limiting the memory to 3.5GB.

This understandably frustrated a lot of customers, who for all intents thought that the GTX 970 was able to access the entire 4GB memory. Nvidia did its best to clarify the situation, providing benchmarks to suggest that there wasn’t a marked difference in framerates, but the fact that the vendor did not communicate the limitations before selling the card drew the ire of several users.

AMD is now cashing in on the debacle by pricing the R9 290X lower than the GTX 970. The R9 290X, which is still one of the fastest single-card solutions available in the market, features a 512-bit wide memory bus (unlike the 256-bit wide memory interface of the GTX 970), and can deliver a bandwidth of 320 GB/s, while the GTX 970 maxes out at 196 GB/s. With the same card selling for twice as much for most of last year, it is certainly an effective marketing move by AMD.

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Video card vendor Sapphire is launching another R9 290X version with 8GB RAM, but this time around, the card features the Tri-X cooling system as well as higher clocks and dual-BIOS.

Boasting AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) GCN architecture, the R9 290X has 2816 stream processing units with a base clock of 1070 MHz and boost clocks of 1375 MHz. The 8GB GDDR5 memory has a 512-bit wide interface. As is often the case with overclocked versions, the R9 290X Tri-X edition features a custom PCB layout.

The card comes with two 8-pin power connectors, and has a power consumption of 375W when running full-tilt. The design of the fans is targeted at maximizing heat dissipation, which is handled via a main 10 mm heatpipe that is fed by four ancillary heatpipes. The fans are fitted with bearings that protect against dust, and come with aerofoil section blades that “deliver highly efficient airflow at low noise levels.” The cowling itself is designed to route airflow efficiently.

As is the norm for high-end cards, the focus with the R9 290X Tri-X edition is to drive monitors with resolutions of 4K and above as well as multi-monitor configurations, like AMD Eyefinity. The card also features AMD’s TrueAudio technology, which is aimed at delivering a more immersive sound during gaming.

Pricing was’t mentioned, but the R9 290X Tri-X will be available shortly from retailers.

The post Sapphire Announces Higher-Clocked R9 290X With 8GB RAM appeared first on VR World.

As AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) continues its to struggle with consistent profitability, rumors are consistently appearing about possible contenders to buy the company out.

The latest rumor comes from China’s My Drivers, which outlines possibility of an AMD takeover by China state-owned semiconductor firm BLX. BLX is owned by China’s Institute of Computing Technology, Academy of Sciences and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group and currently designs (it’s a fabless firm) a MIPS-based processor targeted to embedded devices.

While AMD’s GPU assets would be easily up for grabs, its x86 license is another deal. Part of any x86 license is a strict condition that it is non-transferable. This means that BLX would have to negotiate with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and come to an agreement that satisfies both parties. The possibility of Intel transferring the x86 license shouldn’t be ruled out entirely; Intel has come to two notable deals in China two give Rockchip and Tsinghua Unigroup access to x86 for mobile development. Considering Intel’s willingness to work with Chinese firms — its $100 million investment in Shenzhen is another example of this — it would be foolish to entirely discount a licensing play.

However such a takeover deal is unlikely to occur simply because AMD isn’t at that make or break stage quite yet. Lisa Su — AMD’s freshly minted CEO — hasn’t had time to prove herself. It would be odd, as Bernstein analyst Stacy A. Rasgon blogged, for Su to decide so early in her position to sell the company as her first act. Plus, BLX would have to make the case to shareholders — which includes Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Company — that there’s more value in selling the company than continuing to push for a recovery and turnaround. AMD has not had to recently deal with aggressive activist shareholders, so there may be a desire amongst its large shareholders to see if a better return can be made pushing for a turnaround.

AMD’s stocks rose by 5% during the Monday trading day as some investors were cautiously optimistic that this rumor might have legs.

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Despite a rocky quarter which involved three key executives departing the company, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) reported earnings Tuesday that missed Wall Street’s expectations for earnings but hit revenue targets.

For the quarter, AMD reported a net loss of $364 million or 47 cents per share on revenue of $124 million. For the 2014 fiscal year, AMD reported a loss of $403 million — up from last year’s loss of $83 million — on revenue of $5.51 billion. This represents an increase of 4% year-over-year.

Looking at AMD’s various divisions, revenue from the Computing and Graphics division was $662 million for fiscal 2014. For the year prior, revenue was $888 million. Quarter-over-quarter revenue declined by 16%.

For the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom division earnings were for the quarter came in at $109 million compared with $108 million in Q3 2014 and $129 million during the same quarter last year. Annually revenue was down 51% when compared to 2013 due to slower sales of semi-custom SoCs.

Some analysts expected AMD’s earnings call to be a disaster, as some saw the departure of three key executives a warnings sign of things to come.

In a press release, Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD had the following prepared remarks:

We made progress diversifying our business, ramping design wins and improving our balance sheet this past year despite challenges in our PC business. Annual Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment revenue increased over 50 percent as customer demand for products powered by our high-performance compute and rich visualization solutions was strong. We continue to address channel headwinds in the Computing and Graphics segment and are taking steps to return it to a healthy trajectory beginning in the second quarter of 2015.

Going forward, AMD is going to heavily lean on Carrizo — a high-end APU formally introduced at an event in Singapore earlier in the fall — for revenue in 2015.

“Consumer and commercial design-win momentum for Carrizo continues to gain momentum because it will deliver the largest ever generational leap in performance-per-watt for our mainstream processors,” Su said in an earnings call.

Shares of AMD are trading at $2.24 on the NASDAQ.

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AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced today via an 8K filing that three key executives were departing the company, but did not offer any further explanation of why the trio chose to depart.

According to a statement by AMD the general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, John Byrne, Chief Marketing Officer Colette LaForce, and Chief Strategy Officer Raj Naik left the company Tuesday. The three did not give a specific reason of why they were leaving. Byrne said that he decided “to pursue other opportunities.”

CEO Lisa Su will take over Byrne’s former role of running the computing and graphics business until his replacement can be found. AMD has not yet announced replacements for LaForce or Naik.

AMD’s statement on the matter was limited to the following:  “These changes, including the additions of Forrest Norrod and James Clifford to our management team last quarter, collectively are part of implementing an optimal organization design and leadership team to further sharpen our execution and position AMD for growth.”

AMD will be announcing its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2014 on Jan 20. More details, and better insight on where the company will be going in 2015 will be available then.

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With the annual Consumer Electronics Show right around the corner and the industry’s marketing efforts going into overdrive, what is it that we will likely see next week?

It’s a safe bet that if will be a week of opposites.

From hardware going to both larger and smaller designs, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) G-Sync versus AMD (NYSE: AMD) FreeSync, small displays with massive resolution, and gaming notebooks of both massive and diminutive sizes.

Small form factor hardware as is one of the fastest growing areas in the hardware segment, and no doubt there will be a lot of it on display at CES.  With hardware becoming so powerful and small we are seeing a lot of really powerful builds that can be done.  With even MATX X99 boards we are seeing that there is a move toward making things small and potent.  On the other side there is a lot of huge pieces of hardware showing up on the market, namely 4K and ultra wide monitors.  They are becoming even more prolific and the ultra wide monitors are drawing a lot of interest from gamers and power users who were once planning on going for a 4K monitor or two.  There will be a lot of talk this CES about AMD’s FreeSync for enthusiast gaming monitors as it is the newcomer challenging Nvidia’s established G-Sync.  FreeSync will draw the attention of monitor manufacturers since it is less costly to implement and license than the G-Sync solution.  The LG 34UM67 will be a curved ultra wide monitor that will feature AMD’s FreeSync, and should definitely steal a lot of the spotlight next week.

The mobile computing segment is also something to watch next week as we will see a lot of small notebooks with very high resolution displays.  It is easy to say that there will be a number of notebook models that will feature 3K and 4K screens, even at the 15.6-inch sizes.  There will also be a movement with ultraportable gaming notebooks of small size that can be docked with a desktop graphics card for superior gaming ability while at a desk.  With the shrinking of parts that make up computers we will be seeing a drastic reduction in size and weight of these ulta portable notebooks.  Not only will they be smaller but they will be potent and even come equipped with quad-core Intel i7 processors and decent graphics.  On the other hand you will also see that there is a move to the opposite extreme as there will be new 18″ gaming notebooks that will be the true embodiment of the “desktop replacement” name.  Some of these huge notebooks will even sport gaming grade mechanical keyboards featuring Cherry MX Brown switches.

Be sure to check back throughout next week as CES 2015 kicks off in Las Vegas.

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