AMD

Recently, AMD has been in quite a bit of turmoil. While their graphics division leads that market and has been highly successful for the last couple of years now, their CPU division still lags far behind the competition, their best CPUs being forced down into the bargain bin by Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPUs. Additionally, while a strong force in the mobile GPU market, their mobile CPUs are arguably worse off than their desktop CPUs, and until recently, ULV offerings were non-existent. Through this, the majority of AMD's leadership was ousted, including CEO Dirk Meyer. There were even rumors of the company being up for sale. However, AMD seems to be working towards having a fully-functional leadership again shortly, starting with the hiring experienced executive Mike Wolfe from Freescale Technologies as their Chief Information Officer. ...read more

Aside from producing motherboard, MSI's other major business is producing AMD/ATi Radeon graphics cards. As one of AMD's biggest board partners, they are always ready with launch-day products, and they are also one of the first two branch off into their own custom PCB and cooler designs. While MSI's Radeon HD 6950 Twin Frozr III may not be the first non-reference 6950, it is a very overclockable, well-cooled card, MSI claims. ...read more

AMD has not been very competitive with Intel recently, as they are still stuck on a very old architecture, trying to stretch its useful life as long as possible until Bulldozer, AMD's first all-new architecture in a number of years, arrives. Constituting the high-end of their "Fusion" intiative, AMD claims that these CPUs will be very competitive performance-wise than Intel's Sandy Bridge processors while also drawing less power. To prove this, AMD has made a video comparing a Core i7-2630QM machine to one sporting a quad-core AMD Llano processor. ...read more

An unknown AMD representative has commented on Intel's Thunderbolt technology, saying that it will just be another proprietary standard that never attains good adoption. One obvious reason is that there are currently very few products that can actually take advantage of the new interface. Whilst Thunderbolt promises speeds up to 10Gb/s, modern copper thunderbolt wires cannot come close to this theoretical throughput, meaning other technologies such as SATA 6Gb/s encroach upon the performance levels of Thunderbolt. ...read more

AMD's old CEO Dirk Meyer was reportedly ousted for being slow to jump on the ultra lower-power bandwagon as Intel has been working on doing for a while now. However, AMD can't be counted out entirely, as their low-power Fusion APUs have been shown to be quite potent. MSI is putting this to the test, unsheating a tablet packing a dual-core 1Ghz AMD Ontario APU. This will be one of the options on their interestingly-configurable WindPad tablet. ...read more

AMD's latest driver suite, Catalyst 11.2, has been posted on AMD's site. Bringing a bevy of bugfixes and optimizations to the table, AMD continues along its monthly release schedule as promised. The majority of the improvements pertain to performance enhancements and added features for the Radeon HD 5000-series cards. ...read more

Recently, AMD's stock shares have shot up 42 cents, or 5%, and the reason appears to be that there are rumors abounding that AMD might be up for sale, and that Dell might be interested in buying. With the vast majority of AMD's top leadership leaving, the rumor only has extra fuel, with analysts making comments such as Patrick Wang's quote: "there is no management team there[at AMD]." Whilst some thought that top shareholders simply wanted new leadership to take the reigns, no mention has been made of replacements for the departed executives, and it is being speculated that AMD just might be up for sale. ...read more

Today AMD is announcing the release of five new Opteron server processors. Intended for multi-socket server systems, two of the new CPUs have 8 cores, and three have an impressive 12 cores. All additions to AMD's expanding Opteron 6100 series, they range in clock from 1.8Ghz to a relatively speedy 2.6Ghz. With this release, AMD is pumping up the scalability of their Magny-Cours architecture, as some of the processors have good performance with low power usage, whilst the top-end SE Opteron guns for the top Xeons with a more generous power envelope. So which CPUs are included in this release? ...read more

Nvidia has to be feeling pretty good about itself right about. Having recently released the GeForce GTX 580, Nvidia now owns the single-GPU performance crown, which it plucked from AMD's head. But with Cayman reportedly ready to ship on November 22nd, it looked like Nvidia's time at the top was going to be short lived.

Maybe not. AMD this week confirmed that it's pushing back the release of its Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 videocards build around the much anticipated "Cayman" architecture. The new release date is December 13, though it's tough to tell if there will be much quantity when the NDA lifts or if this is pretty much a paper launch.