The Inquirer

AMD eggs on Nvidia's war of words with Intel

Paul Hales — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:00:34 GMT

Paul Hales the Inquirer, Thursday 15 May 2008. 16:22:00

Hopes it'll help

THE WAR OF WORDS that broke out between Nvidia and Intel has AMD chuckling along from the sidelines. "One says the CPU is not important, the other says the GPU is not important. The beauty of AMD is that we provide a balance with a strong CPU and a strong GPU - the company best tailored to provided a balanced PC," puffed Giuseppe Amato, AMD's technical director of sales and marketing in EMEA. "We hope we see some gain from the fight these two are having together." Amato was talking to the INQ from AMD's Dresden fab where he'd been outlining the firm's global channel strategy to partners and selected channel hackery....

Intel updates gaming notebook chips

Charlie Demerjian — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:34:49 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Thursday 15 May 2008. 09:19:00

Quads at 35W and Montevina on June 22

INTEL IS GOING to launch a raft of 35W 'desktop' parts on June 22 of this year, but no one thinks they are going to go into many desktops. What you are seeing is the new line of XTReeM(1) gaming laptops. The new parts are going to replace the X9000, X7900, and a lot of T series parts from the 7xxx to 9xxx range. New in June are the X9100@3.06GHz, T9600@2.80, P9500@2.53, T9400 also @2.53, P8600@2.40 and the lowly P8400@2.26. All but the last two are 6M caches, those have 3M, but all are on a 1066FSB. The costs on them are $851, $530, $348, $316, $241, and $209 respectively if you order enough to use as building materials....

Intel carves up the world into seven categories

Charlie Demerjian — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:34:48 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Thursday 15 May 2008. 09:22:00

Roadmappery Figuring it all out

INTEL NOW HAS seven discrete price points for systems with handy guides to each level. We hope you will find as much enjoyment reading about them as we did. The ranges go from Atoms under $249 to fire-breathing Quads over $1200. These ranges comprise the Intel-Retail-World-As-We-Know-It-Program, also known as IRWaW-ChIMP. Here you have the lineup for 2H/08. The low end is of course the Atom range up to $249, and it is a "Simple device for web-browsing". The CPU is an Atom 230 (1.60GHz) teamed up with the smashingly adequate 945GC chipset, 512M of memory and an 80G HD. The OS choices include XP and Linux, Vista is not an option....

Intel's shaken Chinese chip firm back to work by Friday

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:42:26 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 14 May 2008. 18:15:00

Earthquakes don't warrant a whole week off

INTEL RECKONS it will be business as usual again this Friday for employees of the company's chip packaging factory in the Chinese city of Chengdu, only 100km away from the epicenter of Monday's deadly quake. The chip plant was closed after the huge earthquake ripped up roads and tore down buildings, killing tens of thousands. Intel gave a statement saying that it was currently conducting a "seismic assessment" (Yep, that was definitely an earthquake alright), before dragging its traumatised employees back in to work. "While the current situation is dynamic, we hope to resume operations as soon as possible pending the completion of a seismic assessment of our facilities and restoration of infrastructure in the region," read the statement....

AMD's Dirk tells the troops what is happening

Charlie Demerjian — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:28:24 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 23:06:00

Memowatch Message to the masses

IF YOU ARE running a large company like, say AMD, you occasionally need to tell the troops about the changes going on over their heads. This is how you might go about it. µ ----------------------------------------------- TO: All Employees FROM: Dirk Meyer, President and COO RE: Allen Sockwell New Chief Talent Officer The Chief Talent Officer at AMD is a key member of the Corporate Staff, focused on developing our leadership and technical talent to help AMD differentiate itself in the industry, and ultimately to win. In addition, this person is a key advisor and counselor to me and our senior executive team, especially during times of transformation....

AMD's asset-light hype boosts Chartered Semi

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:51:38 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 10:27:00

Making waves by standing still

CHARTERED SEMICONDUCTOR saw its share price rise to a four-month high on speculation it will get a boost from AMD's mooted asset-light plans. Shares in the Singaporean chip shop were up six per cent over the weekend after AMD chairman Hector Ruiz failed to share details of his strategy at the firm's stockholder meeting last week. AMD was Chartered Semi's second-biggest customer last year. Some investors obviously think the fab will get more AMD orders as a result of the big hive-off to come. µ

Nvidia talks chops - again

Wily Ferret — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:31:59 GMT

Wily Ferret the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 09:13:00

DAAMIT, Chipzilla both square up in the firing line

NOT CONTENT WITH WAGING war with Chipzilla, Nvidia is back on the PR offensive against ATI, too. Yes, it's the man with the plan, the inimitable Roy 'The Boy' Taylor who, not content with his job liaising with development houses to implement its TWIMTBP scheme, is piping up about ATI's market share. Or, rather, the perceived lack of it. Talking to legendary hardware hack Jeremy 'Don't call me Lord' Laird, Taylor said that "The UK is the only place in the world where anyone talks about AMD or ATI, "referring to marketshare and mindshare statistics that put DAAMIT's graphics card share at around 12 per cent....

AMD cuts quad core power

Sylvie Barak — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:35:32 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 08:24:00

Opteron drops to 55W

TROUBLED CHIP FIRM AMD this morning launched five low power quad core server processors. The company reckons manufacturers will use its chips in both rack mounted as well as blade servers. AMD's x86 Opteron HE processors runs on only 55 Watts of AC power, and comes in 2300 and 8300 product lines for two, four, and eight way rack server blades. Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager for AMD said in a press release that AMD's new quad core Opteron HE processors "were designed to help data center managers who see power consumption and virtualisation as the keys to solving their overall performance equation"....

Xbox Jasper 65nm chips all lined up

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:39:32 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 09:26:00

Between IBM and the Taiwanese

MICROSOFT has lined up all the chips it needs to build its upcoming Xbox revision named Jasper. Jasper is due this summer and features chippery shrunk from 90nm to 65. IBM is supplying 65nm Xenon microprocessors for the box. Now, according to CENS, TSMC is to build 65nm graphics chips and north-bridge chips for its latest version of XBox360 game consoles Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE) will do the packaging and Nanya PCB Corp. has a hand in the deal too. The Chinese wire says Microsoft has booked foundry capacity for some 10,000 300mm wafers at TSMC. It also says a further Xbox, with integrated GP and CPU and named Valhalla, is set for autumn 2009....

Taiwanese semiconductor firms prepare to storm China

Sylvie Barak — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:03:42 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Thursday 8 May 2008. 18:38:00

Lower-profit production

A SEMICONDUCTOR QUARTERLY REPORT reckons liberal Taiwanese investment policies will cause an exodus of lower-profit production over to mainland China, making for a more Taiwanese dominated semiconductor market in China. Ma Ying-jeou, the Taiwanese president, has said that new investment policies will concentrate heavily on technological standards, intellectual property rights (Ma has promised to pursue U.S. guidelines when it comes to chip technology transfers) and control of exports. The new policies also mean that mainland China will become even more accessible for Taiwanese chip firms. Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council which produced the report explained that the Chinese chip manufacturing industry is not yet developed enough to be able to cope with a massive injection of cash or accelerated fab construction....

AMD's Hector keeps us waiting

Paul Hales — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:20:34 GMT

Paul Hales the Inquirer, Thursday 8 May 2008. 15:58:00

Rabbit still stuck in hat

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz tipped up at the firm's annual shareholder meeting today and failed to explain what is going to happen to the chip maker. The bloke has been dropping hints about going "asset light" or "hopefully a bit more profit heavy" for a number of months now, and the speculation that he some cunning masterplan stuffed into his back pocket has boosted the firms's stock price by 20 per cent in the past two weeks. That in itself was probably a good enough reason for him to keep his mouth shut. The meeting lasted less than half an hour....

Samsung blasts into top ten foundries list

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:24:50 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 15:23:00

Fab growths of 2007

SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS delivered 413 per cent revenue growth in chip production in 2007, according to researchers at IC Insights. Only three of the top 14 foundries are not Asia- Pacific based, and the top four remain TSMC, UMC, Chartered, and SMIC. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) remained king of foundries, raking in almost $10 billion in sales in 2007. In fact, just to put its clear lead into perspective, the company's sales were only 11 per cent lower than all the other companies in the top 14 put together. UMC came in second place with sales of $3.8 billion, which is 2 per cent up on 2006....

SMIC won't jump on the 450mm bandwagon

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:25:40 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 12:47:00

Let the bigger boys sort it out

AS THE BIG CHIPMAKERS Intel, TSMC and Samsung Electronics prepare themselves for the transition to bigger 450mm wafers by 2012, Chinese Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) says that it will wait it out a bit longer. SMIC admitted that moving to bigger 450mm wafers would be a good thing for the semiconductor industry as a whole, but that the company just isn't ready to plan the transition just yet. The reason? Development of the 450mm technology will be costly and the trial period will be long. SMIC probably thinks it would be a better idea to let Intel, TSMC and Samsung Electronics do all the hard work on the development, and spend lots of money on the research, which will then make it easier for SMIC to jump in at a later stage, saving both money and time....

AMD's "asset-light" plans hotly anticipated

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:13:50 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 11:39:00

Shares, axe raised

WORD ON THE STREET named Wall is getting fevered as the talk of AMD splitting itself in two catches hold. CEO Hector Ruiz is very attached to his fabs, but the firm's finances are in such a state that it needs to come up with an imagnative proposal to keep the investing wolves from the door. And whispers that the chip maker has been casting around for backing for its "asset light" strategy have pumped up the buzz surrounding the firm's shareholder meeting to be held tomorrow (Thursday). Shares in the firm have risen by some 20 per cent this week as investors anticipate the restructing plan....

AMD and Intel fling more legal briefs

Egan Orion — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:12:02 GMT

Egan Orion the Inquirer, Tuesday 6 May 2008. 14:40:00

David v. Goliath lawsuit slogs on

AMD AND INTEL traded more court filings last week as their ongoing legal dispute in the antitrust case AMD filed in 2005 grinds towards trial next year. The two chipmakers' briefs filed in US District Court in Delaware last Friday were made public Monday. Their trial is tentatively scheduled for April, 2009. AMD has alleged that Intel abused its domination of the x86 microprocessor market by various means in order to prevent others from competing fairly. AMD alleges Intel offered larger discounts to PC manufacturers if they used Intel chips exclusively, punished OEM vendors that considered buying AMD chips, and gave away products to prevent AMD from gaining market share....

Boffins melt defects from chips

Sylvie Barak — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:49:56 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Monday 5 May 2008. 16:04:00

Nano state

BOFFINS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY have come up with an innovative way of melting away microchip defects, in a move which they reckon will drastically improve chip quality, without raising costs. As companies strive to make smaller and smaller chips, miniscule defects are becoming bigger and bigger problems. Rough edges, breaks in lines, and other tiny flaws can all damage chip performance, causing voltage leaks, interference and worse. But now electrical engineer Stephen Chou, a Princeton Professor of Engineering, along with his graduate student, Qiangfei Xia, think they have come up with something to perfect chip making technique. Because microchips perform best when all their structures are straight, thin and tall to exact proportion, Chou and Xia knew that they had to discover a better and more precise way for companies to shape the microchip components....

AMD reveals open source client management tool

Sylvie Barak — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:28:24 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Thursday 1 May 2008. 16:08:00

Dash board

AMD TODAY GAVE OUT details about open source tools it hopes will quicken the take-up of the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF's) desktop and mobile architecture for system hardware (Dash) standard. This is the microprocessor maker's latest move to promote and push for open standards through the creation of a Dash software development kit (SDK), which it produced in coordination with IT management software supplier Raritan. The company says that it hopes the new tools will bring down the price of desktop and notebook client management, by reducing the amount of time which has to be dedicated to development, and making interoperability a priority....

Eight way Barcelona: can HP make it work?

Nebojsa Novakovic — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:18:05 GMT

Nebojsa Novakovic the Inquirer, Wednesday 30 April 2008. 16:26:00

At least, one place with Advantage: AMD

RIGHT NOW, as we all know, the CPU landscape looks pretty bleak for AMD if comparing the current products: Core 2, whether 65 nm or 45 nm, wipes the floor with the corresponding AMD offerings, whether in mobile, desktop of workstation & small server areas. Oh yeah, I didn't mention the big MP boxen with four or more CPU sockets: that's where Intel either doesn't have an offering, or the existing Caneland platform isn't exactly tuned for maximum memory and interprocessor performance compared to Opteron's multiple HyperTransport channels and dedicated dual DDR2 per CPU. In fact, the AMD HT2 platform, with three links per Opteron 8xxx series processor, has sufficient scalability to implement an eight-socket box, although it does get saturated at that point with multiple hops needed between "far" CPUs, accentuating the NUMA remote memory access penalty....

AMD's next CPU will be radical departure

Wily Ferret — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:05:03 GMT

Wily Ferret the Inquirer, Wednesday 30 April 2008. 10:53:00

The slow march to Fusion

FOLKS ABOARD THE good ship AMD have promised that its next-generation CPU marchitecture will be, as the Pythons would have it, something completely different. Giuseppe Amato, the grandly-titled Technical Direct of Sales and Marketing for EMEA, let slip in a recent interview that "If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different." He declined to elucidate further, but it seems that the statement re-iterates DAAMIT's committment to the changes previously mooted at the company's Technology Analyst Day way back in the summer of last year....

Industry suddenly realises multi-cored chips are useless unless used

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:18:31 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 30 April 2008. 10:05:00

Core blimey

STANFORD UNIVERSITY HAS joined forces with IBM, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel to create innovative software that will let chips better process several simultaneously. According to the New York Times, the partnership between the University and the six rival computer and chip makers will be formally announced this Friday, and the project will be dubbed the "Pervasive Parallelism Lab". In mid March of this year, Chipzilla and the Vole announced that they'd be funneling a combined $20 million into building specialised labs at Berkely's University of California and Urbana-Champaign's University of Illinois for parallel computing research, which would effectively tackle the same problem....

Intel, Cray flesh out HPC plans

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:10:37 GMT

Andrew Thomas the Inquirer, Tuesday 29 April 2008. 12:46:00

Chip shop analysis Shining Quickpath

CRAY'S decision to develop its future HPC products around Intel silicon could be the beginning of the end for AMD's performance ambitions. Although Cray says its existing XT3, XT4 and XT5 ranges, which use a mix of AMD and home-grown silicon, are unaffected by the deal, the emergence of Cray's first Cascade products, billed for 2011, must put the fear of God into AMD. Its desktop offerings are increasingly being relegated to the low end of big manufacturers' ranges and to be consigned to the second division of HPC must hurt a great deal. To date, Cray's development efforts have centred around building custom interconnects supporting multiple AMD chips through Hypertransport....

Intel's upcoming AVX instructions go back to the future

Nebojsa Novakovic — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:52:25 GMT

Nebojsa Novakovic the Inquirer, Tuesday 29 April 2008. 10:40:00

Comment The Alpha and Omega of it all

WHEN LOOKING at those Nehalem slides - and Opteron slides a few years before - those of us with longer memories could help recalling similar Alpha EV7 and EV8 stuff presented a decade earlier. All the nice integrated multi-channel memory controllers, four memory-speed links to talk to other CPUs north, south, east and west, and immense scalability as a result. Ask those who happen to have used the mighty HP AlphaServer ES47 with such stuff - we had two of these in our old labs for a few months five years ago, and only now do other systems come matching their Streams numbers....

AMD mole digs up new desktop mobos

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:33:14 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Tuesday 29 April 2008. 10:13:00

Phenom cools down

SOURCES INSIDE AMD's manufacturing machine appear to have leaked details of a brace of new desktop CPUs due for release before the end of the year to Digitimes. The line-up is expected to include two new 95W rated 45nm Phenom X4 processors with core frequencies between 2.5-2.8GHz and 2.4-2.7GHz. These will replace the 125W Phenom X4 9750 which will have the last orders bell rung on it this coming June. On the low-power front, the Phenom X4 9350e (Agena) 8450e (Tollman) and the 45nm quad-core (Propus) will appear in the market in the third quarter. According to the sauces, the company is also planning to launch an updated version of its upcoming Phenom X4 9950 (scheduled to launch in June) at the end of the fourth quarter....

AMD Phenoms hit compatibility glitch

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:15:27 GMT

Andrew Thomas the Inquirer, Tuesday 29 April 2008. 08:55:00

Chipset mismatch

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS. Beleaguered chipster AMD, fresh from the upset of losing a five-year old exclusive deal with supercomputer maker Cray yesterday, is facing problems getting its 9750 and 9850 125W Phenom parts to work with the 780G chipset. The result is that some manufacturers are having trouble making the quad core parts work in their mobos. The problem isn't AMD's fault of course, according to err, AMD, which says there are no problems using the 125W parts with the 790 chipset but that manufacturers are trying to build systems on the cheap by using 780G mobos....

IBM Nippon off to form sub-32nm alliance

Sylvie Barak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:24:19 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Monday 28 April 2008. 17:41:00

Life's a gas

IBM SAID IT has teamed up with Japanese firm Matheson Tri-Gas, to make high purity gas molecules and delivery systems for atomic scale semiconductors at 32nm and smaller. Boffins from Matheson Tri-Gas, and from its parent company Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corporation, will work together with IBM at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering's Albany NanoTech Complex, in a four-year arrangement. The partnership would "reduce the significant costs associated with the research required to create the next generation of chip technology," according to an IBMer. Mike Hara, of Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corporation, said the relationship with IBM will, "enable the Taiyo Nippon Sanso Group to position itself as a leading edge material supplier in the semiconductor material market beyond 32nm"....