News

AMD has just released the 10.10c hotfix to their drivers! Normally AMD releases these hot fixes due to missing something in the main drivers. But it would seem that AMD has released this hotfix with the new Open GL 4.1 beta as well..........Hmm, post in the forums if you give this a try, and let everyone know if you get performance boosts or not.

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AMD Catalyst 10.10c Hotfix Features:

* OpenGL 4.1 beta support
* Support for the new Morphological Anti-Aliasing feature
* Dead Rising 2 – Crossfire profile (Resolves negative scaling)
* Crossfire Performance Improvement for:
o Metro 2033
o F1 2011 - (Direct X9 version)
o Fallout New Vegas
* Performance optimizations for systems with an AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 series of graphics products installed
o Aliens versus Predator performance enhancements
o Star Craft 2 performance enhancements
o OpenGL performance enhancements – gains can be seen in Prey, Quake Wars: Enemy Territories, and Heaven v2

Jump on over to the official Catalyst 10.10c hotfix page to read more and download the new drivers.

According to AMD/ATI the new Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix drivers address some issues with the HD4850x2 and HD4870x2 video card performance. Hopefully this is the case, and hopefully it will address an issue that has been seen around the web dealing with CrossfireX on some of the HD48xx's and even some HD5xxx series of cards running specific motherboards. This issue is not really wide spread, however there are some of the "gamer" series of motherboards that have experienced this issue, and we can only hope that AMD/ATI has addressed these issues in the new "hotfix" drivers. This issue was addressed in the Catalyst 10.8b drivers, and we have to wonder why this was not carried over to the original Catalyst 10.9 drivers.

At any rate, this is what AMD/ATI has to say about the new 10.9a Hotfix Catalyst drivers:

* ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 series of products use both Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for high performance
* Intermittent hangs with Pop Cap games in a system with an ATI Radeon series graphics card installed
* High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) overscan / underscan settings are restored upon system reboot

Instructions:
Download and install the ATI Catalyst hotfix from the following location:

* ATI Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix for Windows® 7 / Windows Vista®

Refer to Article 20870 for detailed instructions on how to properly install the ATI Catalyst™ hotfix.

Note! This hotfix is provided as is and is not supported by AMD. It has not completed full AMD testing and is only a driver update.

Applicable Products:
This article applies to the following configuration(s):

* Hardware
o ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series of products
o ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 series of products
* Operating System
o Windows 7 32-bit Edition
o Windows 7 64-bit Edition
o Windows Vista 32-bit Edition
o Windows Vista 64-bit Edition

For further information, or to download the new Catalyst 10.9a drivers you can go to the main download and information page below.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICatalyst109Hotfix.aspx

Looks like Intel has some weight over AMD in the area of licensing. Intel sent a letter to AMD saying they will cut the cross-licensing agreement in 60 days if they don't fix a problem. This has something to do with AMD splitting into a design and a foundry company. AMD will not wholly own the foundry company and there is the problem.

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For AMD, the 2001 Intel agreement allows it to manufacture chips using Intel's X86 design and rely on chip foundries for up to 20 percent of their total manufacturing capacity. Intel, meanwhile, receives royalties from AMD, under the deal. The companies, despite their heated legal battles over antitrust matters, have had a long-standing patent and licensing relationship, going back to 1976. But this latest turn of events could result in a change in that relationship. AMD, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, said Intel sent it a letter that alleges AMD: Committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the company's Global Foundries joint venture and purports to terminate the company's rights and licenses under the cross license in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

What about x86-64? And how can this stuff be patentable? Yet another reason why patents stifle innovation.

AMD's brand new Istanbul processor will be pin compatible and thermally compatible with the current line of Shanghai CPUs. AMD says once they are released (2H, 2009), adoption should be quick. Here's hoping that the chips will take some thunder away from the Core i7.

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Despite putting more cores in the processor, we managed to keep it in the same power and thermal ranges as our existing "Shanghai" processors. And since it fits into the same socket, our OEM customers should be able to bring products to the market quickly. End users will be able to quickly qualify and deploy these servers because the overall platform is the same as what they are using. In today's challenging economic times, that's music to the ears of IT departments both near, and as far away as Turkey. So what did we show? We showed a platform being easily upgraded from Shanghai to Istanbul, some amazing memory throughput courtesy of the new HT Assist feature, and a 4-socket server with all 24 cores being stressed by one of our development programs.

Dell and HP will start using the new quad core Opteron CPUs that are more efficient that the normal CPUs. AMD needs some slam-dunks to get back in step with Intel. These moves help, but it needs to get off a shaky image of poor quality that it recently had.

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Low-power HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz, are designed to address a segment of the server market "that must maximize performance during peak hours while managing the energy costs during idle and low-utilization hours," AMD said. High-performance SE processors, which run at 2.8GHz, are targeted at customers with "the most performance-intensive data center workloads," AMD said.

AMD is hitting some tough times lately. They will be recouping costs by firing workers. It sucks for the workers, but that's business and it sucks even more. AMD needs to get some better news, their CPUs are getting raped by Intel and AMD needs to get the ball rolling more with ATI.

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On a percentage basis, this number is still below what Intel announced to cut as part of its massive restructuring that began in 2006. Including sold departments, Intel so far has eliminated more than 16,000 people from its payroll (which is, by the way, also close to our initial prediction and more than 50% above Intel’s original guidance). According to its annual report, Intel employed about 86,300 people at the end of December 2007, down from about 102,500 18 months earlier.

AMD also announced that it expects Q1 2008 revenue to be about $1.5 billion, up 22% from Q1 2007, but down 15% from Q4 2007. A decline is to be expected because of the seasonal pattern, but 15% is probably much more than most financial analysts would have expected. AMD said that the steep decline is due to "lower than expected sales across all business segments." A loss for the quarter now appears to be all but certain and the question will be how high this loss will be. Based on its 2007 cost structure and the product and financial information provided by the company last year, we estimated in October 2007 that AMD would have to post sales of about $2 billion per quarter to deliver a profit.

AMD has shown off their quad core. Barcelona will be a nice quad core setup.

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Barcelona represents AMD's current hope for returning to profitability by stabilizing its server processor prices. The company has been forced to dramatically cut the prices of its dual-core Opteron processors to compete with Intel's quad-core server processors, which have been on the market since last November. The hope is that Barcelona's design, in which four processing cores rest on the same piece of silicon, delivers enough of a performance boost over Intel's quad-core Xeon chip to once again attract demanding server buyers. Intel chose to put two dual-core chips into a single package for its first quad-core processors in order to get out in the market well ahead of AMD; AMD contends that's an inelegant design that doesn't solve Intel's problems with memory bandwidth.

AMD will be releasing new CPUs later this year with a new name. The Phenom will be a quad core CPU.

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But AMD chose to build a single chip with four cores, which the company believes will result in better performance because information will not have to leave one core to visit its neighbor. It's the same debate over an integrated memory controller and point-to-point links that propelled AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips to prominence: Cores that are directly linked offer better performance than cores that have to exchange information by leaving the chip. Intel contends that by improving the speed and performance of its cache memory and the front-side bus--that off-chip bridge between cores--it can offer excellent performance and sidestep manufacturing concerns. Because AMD has yet to deliver its quad-core chips, the debate is mostly aesthetic, but it could become an important distinction if Barcelona and the Phenom chips open a significant performance advantage over Intel's currently shipping quad-core processors later this year.

AMD has cut the price of its desktop dual core CPU variants. The 6000+ running at 3.0GHz is only $241. Though, since AMD now owns ATI, I cannot support them fully anymore since they do not provide any open source drivers that run with any speed compared to other companies. Intel provides open specs and at least Nvidia provides proper binary drivers (though not open source).

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Athlon 64 FX-74 (64-bit, 3.0GHz, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, Socket F (1207FX)) $799/pair
Athlon 64 FX-72 (64-bit, 2.8GHz, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, Socket F (1207FX)) $599/pair

Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (64-bit, 3.0GHz, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2 ) $241
Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (64-bit, 2.8GHz, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $188
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (64-bit, 2.6GHz, 2MB total dedicated L2 cache, 2000MHz HyperTransport bus, socket AM2) $178

AMD has finally made the move to 65nm. Chips using the shrinked technology will appear soon. Expect a new wave of really good overclockers with this. Intel has been on 65nm for some time. The Core 2 Duos are awesome.

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The first chips produced by AMD on the new process will be desktop chips. Notebook and server chips will come in the relatively near future. Intel and AMD are in the midst of a manufacturing battle. Intel first began shipping 65-nanometer chips in October 2005. Chips made on the 65-nanometer process generally provide more performance and/or consume less power than those made on the older 90-nanometer process. (The nanometer figure refers to the average size of features on the chip; a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

AMD has some good problems. It is good to have high demand. On the other hand, AMD also hasn't moved to 65nm chip technology and hasn't totally moved to 300mm wafers. Those costs really eat alot.

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AMD's 90-nanometer dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 processors have a die size of 199 millimeters squared. By chip design standards, that's considered a little large, McCarron said. When AMD starts making dual-core Opterons on its 65-nanometer manufacturing technology, that die size is expected to go down to something a little more comfortable that will allow AMD to produce more chips per wafer. An AMD representative declined to comment on the die size for its first 65-nanometer products. On a conference call following AMD's earnings results last week, Chief Financial Officer Bob Rivet noted that the company would see a cost benefit from its move to 65-nanometer processors in the fourth quarter, since the cost of building the wafer can be spread over more chips. He also pointed out that AMD still hasn't made the full transition to 300-millimeter-wide wafers from 200-millimeter wafers. Obviously, the larger the wafer, the more chips that can be cut from that wafer, and--not counting the one-time expense of purchasing 300-millimeter equipment--the extra costs of the larger wafer are negligible.

Dell will be carrying more AMD powered computers. This includes desktops and laptops. Wow, this is very interesting news. AMD is in a great position now. I'm sure with ATI's manufacturing plants producing AMD boards, Dell will have a single contact for the base system.

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Dell already scrapped its longtime Intel exclusivity in May, committing to sell a four-processor server with AMD's Opteron by the end of the year. That's a relatively high-end niche for the Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker, but sources familiar with the company's plans expect a broader alliance to be announced Thursday afternoon, when Dell reports quarterly financial results. One source expected Dell to announce plans to sell dual-processor Opteron servers, a segment of the market with much higher sales volumes than for four-processor machines. Another expected the alliance to include desktop and notebook computers as well.

The new Rev F of the Opterons adds virtualization and other cool tweaks. They now use Socket F as well.

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Another significant change with Rev F Opteron is a faster version of the Double Data Rate memory technology called DDR2. With Woodcrest models of Xeon, Intel already moved to DDR2's sequel, FB-DIMM (fully buffered dual inline memory modules), which is based on DDR2 today but provides more capacity. AMD argues that FB-DIMM right now is merely more expensive and power-hungry, but the company will move to the technology later.

AMD has taken over 25 percent of the market and continues to increase. AMD has nicer technology for the server space including HyperTransport. The FSB is dead.

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AMD on Monday said it increased its share of the x86 server processor market to 25.9 percent, a number confirmed by Mercury Research's Dean McCarron, who tracks market share figures. Intel now holds 72.9 percent of the overall market for x86 processors, while AMD has 21.6 percent. Intel's share decreased from 82.2 percent in the second quarter of 2005, while AMD's increased from 16.2 percent over the same period.

It is official. AMD will buy ATI if the sale is authorized. This is a HUGE thing. AMD wants to compete with Intel on the platform front. Remember Centrino? Remember what platform AMD has? Looks for motherboards and other good stuff from AMD soon.

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Under the terms of the transaction, AMD will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of ATI for a combination of $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock, based on the number of shares of ATI common stock outstanding on July 21, 2006. All outstanding options and RSUs of ATI will be assumed. Based upon the closing price of AMD common stock on July 21, 2006 of $18.26 a share, the consideration for each outstanding share of ATI common stock would be $20.47, comprised of $16.40 of cash and 0.2229 shares of AMD common stock.

AMD has offloaded some if its foundry work to a third party. This third party foundry has shipped the first batch of chips. AMD will move to a 65nm feature set soon.

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In the fourth quarter, AMD will start to ship chips based on the more advanced 65-nanometer process from its own factories, said Thomas Sonderman, director of Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM) Technology at AMD. Chartered will follow by putting out 65-nanometer Athlon family chips in mid-2007.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=252&type=expert
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/am2-5000/
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA2NSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/5000+FX62/index.htm
http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_am2/