Articles about AMD

It is very sad that countries cannot trust each other anymore. Maybe they never did and I am simply naïve, but I never gave a second thought as to which country manufactured my electronics. Hell, as an American I have to trust the goods from other lands -- we do not manufacture any! (OK, we do manufacture some things). But could my motherboard, Blu-ray player or cable box have secret spying capabilities baked in? I suppose so. Even sadder, I am powerless to do anything about it -- I am not about to create circuit boards in my garage.

What once may have been seen as paranoia, now becomes reality in the aftermath of PRISM and other Snowden-leaked programs. It seems every country is spying on the other, including allies. It is rumored that the USA may have directly spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany is supposed to be a friend an ally, so if that is happening, lord only knows what the USA would do to its less friendly world neighbors. Today, it comes to light that Russia is looking to ditch computer processors made by Intel and AMD in favor of its own, presumably to prevent spying by the USA.

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Money is the key to solving many of life's problems. If you have cash, you can just throw it at your problems and like magic, they go away. Computer-building is the same way. I mean, if you want a nice computer, you only need to buy quality parts. However, throwing money at a system-build is the coward's way. For a system build to impress me, it should be a mix of power and value. Most importantly, it shouldn't be wasteful. For example, if you buy 16GB of RAM and dual graphics cards to run in SLI, but all you want to do is surf the web, you have failed. You should have saved some money and built a more tame computer. Now, there is nothing wrong with planning on the future and building for perceived possible future needs, but it is easy to overdo it.

When I first caught wind of AMD's AM1 platform, I was immediately intrigued. Like I said, I am impressed with value and this new platform certainly meets that criteria. If you aren't familiar, the AM1 platform is socket-upgradeable and extremely affordable. The system I have been testing has a motherboard that sells for $35 and a processor (APU) that costs $60 and that is on the higher end of the platform! Excited? Read on.

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As a system builder, I always keep my eyes open for new trends in PC hardware. My latest build is powered by an Intel processor, which is a first for me. Historically, I've always used AMD. The reason being was, at the time, AMD processors delivered both great performance and value. In other words, if you needed to save money, AMD was what you bought.

Unfortunately, AMD fell behind Intel quite a bit in recent years, making the value in its processors questionable. Today however, the company announces availability of its new platform, called AM1, which focuses directly on value and low cost. Will consumers shopping on the low-end choose it over Intel's Bay Trail-D SoC?

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The Computer Electronics Show gathers a significant number of companies and prospective buyers alike in Las Vegas for four days starting Tuesday. However, many companies didn't wait for opening day. Which among the early birds stand out from the others?

From the plethora of pre-show announcements most are oriented towards general consumer appliances. For instance, LG's presentation emphasized 39 new driers and 72 new fridges, among super expensive OLED TVs. For a passionate technology enthusiast like myself CES is not Heaven, it's utter Hell. Still, within the literally hundreds of announcements there are some exciting products unveiled in all the pre-show madness.

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On a number of levels, AMD and Intel are in similar predicaments. Both are major players on the desktop chip market, but have an abysmal presence on the mobile tablet market. To correct the latter Intel recently announced its new tablet processor codenamed Clover Trail and AMD promptly followed by announcing the company's Z-60 accelerated processing unit (APU). The two will yet again battle, but for a different market on which neither has a commanding presence nor the recognition as a fearful competitor.

Just like Intel's Atom Z2760 system on a chip, AMD has a recipe that involves tackling the Windows 8 Pro tablet market instead of feature-stripped Windows RT tablets. Yet again, the two companies take the familiar approach by using x86 processors to make a splash on the diverse tablet market. The dual-core AMD Z-60 touts features such as AMD "Start Now" which is designed to deliver fast boot and resume from sleep times, six hours of HD video playback and up to eight hours of browsing battery life, all in a tablet as thin as 10mm.

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Chinese PC maker Lenovo on Monday debuted the newest model in its flagship line of desktop computers designed for medium- to large-scale businesses, the ThinkCentre M78.

Since it's built for enterprise, there isn't much in the way of new frilliness from generation to generation in this line. However, it should be noted that this time around, Lenovo has equipped these ThinkCentres with AMD's A-Series APU. The last version of the M-series was based on Intel Core i processors and AMD/ATI GPU, so if you're doing an incremental upgrade, you might be in for a different experience since it's all on a single die.

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Today, Android virtualization company BlueStacks announced it has optimized its Android App Player for all existent and upcoming AMD GPUs and APUs under the name "AMD AppZone." AMD AppZone includes a Web-based Android app store, and the AMD AppZone Player for Windows 7 and Windows 8. This announcement highlights AMD's rather precarious position ahead of the launch of Windows 8.

Earlier in September, Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung downgraded Intel, AMD, and Nvidia on the basis that the consumer PC market has fully matured, and is no longer the growth segment it used to be, and that the real growth is in the "post-PC" businesses of mobile devices and cloud-based services.

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Tuesday launched its latest professional graphics card in retail, the FirePro V4900, which targets the entry level of professional graphics workstations.

WIth a pricetag of just $189, AMD's FirePro V4900 has 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 RAM that drives memory bandwidth of 64 GB/s. It's not the most powerful of AMD's FirePro units, but it is priced to move, and will come as the default graphics card in certain Dell, HP, and Fujitsu workstations.

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Let the mobile device wars begin. Like AMD and Intel battled for desktop chip dominance in the 1990s and Noughties -- the megahertz and gigahertz wars -- mobile devices are their new territory. But instead of speed, the new marketing mantra is longer battery life, lower power consumption and better graphics capabilities. Following last month's Intel announcements for Ultrabook and "Medfield" processors, today AMD jumped in with Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

The nomenclature makes me think of some wonky, scifi "B" movie or George Orwellian-like novel. But AMD's APU pitch is something more monumental.

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