AMD yesterday announced some new details about the company’s third-generation accelerated processing unit (APU), “Kaveri,” for notebooks and desktops. Kaveri is the first APU using heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) in combination with AMD’s new TrueAudio technology and the Mantle API, the company said. The Kaveri is scheduled to start shipping Jan. 14, 2014. The Kaveri […]
AMD has long signaled that embedded chips will play a major role in its future, and it’s backing up that claim by providing a glance at its 2014 roadmap. The highlight is Bald Eagle, a 35-watt x86 processor designed for demanding tasks like gaming; it should include up to four Steamroller cores, and it will optionally sport on-chip Graphics Core Next video. Devices that need even more visual power will use Adelaar, a dedicated graphics chipset that includes both GCN and 2GB of built-in memory. It’s reportedly fast enough to be useful for PC video cards, not just the usual set-top boxes and smart TVs.
Two system-on-chip designs are also joining AMD’s lineup. Hierofalcon is built with data centers in mind, and carries up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores; Steppe Eagle, meanwhile, is a combination of upgraded Jaguar x86 cores and GCN that should speed up AMD’s low-power G-series processors. With the exception of Hierofalcon, all of the new embedded chips should be available in the first half of next year. AMD hasn’t named any early customers, but its embedded silicon tends to reach products that you’d recognize. Check out the roadmap after the break.
Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Home Entertainment, AMD
Source: AMD
AMD has revealed its new “Seattle” chips, processors headed to power-dense servers, and using for the first time ARM architecture as commonly found in smartphones and tablets, rather than x86. AMD Seattle, which is expected to show up in systems from the second half of 2014, will initially offer eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores running at
It was only last fall that AMD said it didn’t see a need to make its new “Hondo” chip for tablets to work with Android in addition to Windows and Linux, but it seems that the company now sees things a bit differently. Speaking with PC World at Computex, AMD Senior VP Lisa Su said that while AMD is “very committed to Windows 8,” the company also sees “a market for Android and Chrome developing as well.” Details remain light beyond that for the time being, with Su offering no indication as to when those chips might actually land in some devices. It does appear that the company is now working with developers on Android applications for AMD chips, though.
Filed under: AMD
Source: PC World
AMD has taken the wraps off of its 2013 A-Series “Elite” APUs for desktop, hoping to show Intel that 4th-gen Haswell won’t get all the chip attention this year. Building on AMD’s integrated CPU/GPU architecture, the new Elite platform consists of a cluster of new quadcore chips, ranging from the relatively power-frugal A8-6500 through to
AMD has already shown what its mobile Richland APUs can do, and it’s now ready to reveal their desktop equivalents’ potential. The company’s new, full-power A6, A8 and A10 Elite processors are more evolutionary bumps than overhauls, but they still have a few clear advantages over last year’s Trinity chips. Along with a bump in Turbo Boosted frequencies to between 4.1GHz and 4.4GHz (3.5GHz to 4.1GHz normally), the updates ship with Radeon HD 8000 video and can handle speedier DDR3-2133 memory (on the A10). Wireless is just as important as it is with the firm’s newest mobile processors: the desktop Elites improve streaming games to other devices using Splashtop, with relatively little lag when modern AMD processors are on both ends.
As for performance? AMD didn’t have the luxury of comparing against Intel’s Haswell chips at the time it gave us benchmarks, but it did claim big gains over Ivy Bridge in both general-purpose computing and gaming. A 4.1GHz A10-6800K is up to 3.3 times faster in OpenCL than a 3.2GHz Core i5-3470, and games like Bioshock Infinite are playable at 1080p (if barely) where they’re unusable with the HD 3000 graphics of Intel’s CPU. Performance boosts over Trinity are a more modest eight to 21 percent, however. If you want to know how well the Elite line fares in the real world, it won’t take much effort to find out. AMD is shipping its processors this month, at very frugal prices that range from $69 to $142.
Gallery: AMD Elite desktop APU presentation
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops, AMD
Source: AMD
Microsoft didn’t give a lot of attention to AMD during the Xbox One reveal last week, but the new console is indeed running an AMD 8-core APU, and Microsoft paid a pretty penny to make that happen. It’s said that the deal between AMD and Microsoft to have the new chips in the Xbox One costs the Redmond-based company $3 billion.
Bob Feldstein, who is currently the Vice President of Technology Licensing at NVIDIA who used to work at AMD, mentioned that Microsoft paid $3 billion to AMD for the chips, which is mad money if we say so ourselves. Feldstein stated that he worked as the corporate vice president of business development at AMD, and was in charge of “business management and supply agreement negotiations” regarding the Xbox One, so it seems he had the inside scoop on a lot of information about the new console.
He says that the entire project with Microsoft “is valued at $3+B,” and this includes “the coordination of multiple functional teams within AMD, as well as regular customer meetings with leadership teams responsible for handling the challenges of complex, muti-year deals.” That seems like a crazy amount of money, but if Microsoft expects to sell a lot of units, perhaps it’ll worth it.
Feldstein also noted that he worked with the PlayStation 4 while he was at AMD, but he didn’t reveal any numbers on that project. The PS4 uses AMD’s new Jaguar processor, and while Microsoft hasn’t disclosed what exact chip they’re using, it’s most likely the Jaguar as well. Nintendo is also using AMD components in their new Wii U console.
He posted the figures on his LinkedIn account, although it’s limited to who can see it. Frankly, we’re probably guessing that AMD won’t be too happy when they find out that Feldstein talked about this information, but it’s not like he has anything to lose — he and other former AMD employees were sued by the company for allegedly stealing company secrets and giving them to NVIDIA.
VIA: Gamechup
SOURCE: LinkedIn
Xbox One AMD deal worth over $3 billion is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
AMD wants to knock Intel and ARM off their mobility perch in 2013, and the new Temash APU is how it expects to do it. Targeting media and performance tablets, as well as keyboard-dockable hybrids and 10- to 13-inch touchscreen ultraportable notebooks, the new A-series of Temash APUs feature Jaguar cores – boasting a 20-percent performance jump over Bobcat – for consumer Windows machines with the perky performance usually associated with an iPad.
As AMD sees it, Temash and Windows is a combination that means the flexibility of a desktop with the performance of a multimedia-centric chipset. The first true AMD SoC, with a choice of dual and quadcore options, Temash offers up to a 212-percent graphics boost-per-watt compared to 2012′ AMD C-70 and up to a 172-percent jump in x86 performance per watt.
However, that doesn’t come with a battery hit, AMD claims, despite offering between 2x and 5x the performance of Intel’s Atom Z2760 in AMD’s testing. A Temash-based system can manage up to 12hrs of idle battery life, or up to 45-percent longer than a Core i3-based Windows tablet.
AMD sprinkles some of its extra feature magic on the new A-series. The A400 gets GPU acceleration for apps, along with native video stabilization; the A600 adds AMD Screen Mirror, which wirelessly squirts the contents of the display to a supported TV, together with gesture controls using the webcam, and AMD Face Login, for biometric security. Both have Radeon HD 8000 series graphics.
Connectivity support includes up to two USB 3.0 ports, up to ten USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, HDMI, PCI Express, VGA, and more. There’s also support for up to 8GB of system memory and AMD’s Turbo Dock system, which boosts performance when a tablet is slotted into a keyboard base station, while prolonging battery life when it’s removed.
Perhaps most impressive, AMD says the sub-5W versions of Temash can be used in fanless systems. We had a chance to play with a Temash-based Windows 8 tablet, and the experience was impressively good: it was a Quanta reference design, the BZ1T, but the Radeon HD 8180 GPU and A4-1200 1GHz CPU were certainly strong enough to keep Full HD video playing smoothly on the 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 touchscreen.
Inside, there was 2GB of DDR3U-1066 RAM and a 128GB mSATA SSD drive, loaded up with HD content that we could then push over wirelessly to a nearby HDTV with a Screen Mirror-compatible adapter. The whole thing was lag-free.
AMD’s second Temash demo machine was a compact Acer ultraportable, the Angel. That ran Windows 8 on a lightweight touchscreen notebook with a Temash A6-1450 processor and Radeon HD 8280 graphics. Unlike the tablet, the Angel had a traditional 500GB hard-drive inside, but doubled up RAM to 4GB. It was certainly a fast-moving machine, multitasking between office apps and multimedia quickly, though we’d need to spend more time with it to see whether it really does offer a significant step up from the Intel equivalent.
AMD expects the Temash series of APUs to begin showing up in tablets, notebooks, and other form-factors over the coming months.
AMD Temash official: iPad smoothness and x86 grunt for tablets and hybrids is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
It’s all-change for AMD‘s APU line-up for mainstream and performance notebooks in 2013, as the company attempts to hit Intel where it hurts with chips that, bang for buck, offer more performance from less power. That’s the claim, anyway, and Kabini – for the mainstream – and Richland – for the performance end – are the processors that are expected to deliver it. Among the boasts are the first ever quadcore for small-display touchscreen notebooks, and up to 72-percent of the gaming performance than Intel’s comparable chips.
Kabini is AMD’s mainstream platform for portables in 2013, targeting small touchscreen notebooks as well as entry-level laptops. The company is making a big push for battery life, with machines running the new APUs apparently capable of up to 10hrs of resting runtime, or over 9hrs of web browsing. Even playing Full HD 1080p video, they should be good for more than 6hrs of use.
The single-chip SoCs use Jaguar cores with 2MB of shared L2 cache, and come in 9W to 25W TDP variants. Each supports two simultaneous displays of up to 4096 x 2160 resolution, with DisplayPort 1.2, DVI, and HDMI 1.4a output capabilities. Other connectivity includes provision for up to eight USB 2.0, up to two USB 3.0, two SATA Gen2/Gen3, and an SD card reader.
There’s also AMD’s Steady Video technology, for smoothing out jerky camera footage, and AMD Perfect Picture HD, which does real-time processing of on-screen graphics to bring out the best contrast and colors. Compared to last year’s chips, the new Kabini E1, E2, A4, and A6 APUs offer up to an 88-percent boost in performance.
AMD Kabini Mainstream APUs
As for the performance end, AMD is taking on Intel’s Core i3 and Core it with the new Richland series of APUs, replacing Trinity in the process. They offer up to 71-percent better graphics abilities than the Core i5, AMD claims, while still being capable of over 10hrs resting battery life or 7.5hrs of web browsing.
Compared to Trinity, overall performance is up by up to 19-percent, the company claims, while graphics performance is improved by as much as 40-percent. The A8 gets gesture control and face login, for chip-level biometric security, as well as AMD Screen Mirror for wirelessly pushing graphics to a nearby TV. The A10 throws in game bundles, a strategy AMD has tried with success before, including a number of games with each qualifying PC purchase to show off the abilities of the APUs.
There’s also provision for AMD Dual Graphics, with the onboard GPU in the Richland chips capable of working simultaneously with a discrete GPU from the company’s Radeon HD 7000 or 8000 series. That should make for ultraportables that can still put in some solid gaming, AMD claims.
The first notebooks running AMD Kabini and Richland APUs will show up in the coming months.
AMD Richland Elite APUs
AMD Kabini and Richland fight Intel for mainstream and performance notebooks is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
AMD isn’t focusing all its attention on its entry-level mobile APUs today: it’s also providing details for the faster Richland-based models. The new A6, A8, and A10 mobile variants fall under the Elite Performance badge, and theoretically beat Intel to the punch with up to 71 percent faster 3D graphics than the current Core i5 family. They also muster about 7.5 hours of battery life with web use, or about an hour longer than we saw in the previous generation. The roster includes both regular power (35W) and low-voltage (17W to 25W) APUs, in dual- and quad-core editions.
We’re more interested in how well the chips play with other devices and software, however. Besides the face and motion gesture recognition that we’ve seen before, AMD touts a new take on Wireless Display with low enough latency for game sessions, support for 1080p60 video and native Miracast sharing. The Richland upgrade also introduces a new Dock Port standard that can feed both USB 3.0 and up to three external DisplayPort screens through one cable. If you like what AMD is pitching, you won’t have to wait to try it — Elite Performance APUs have already been shipping with MSI’s GX60 and GX70, and other vendors shouldn’t be far behind.
Gallery: AMD Richland presentation
Source: AMD
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