Hasta La Gadget!

You’d think with ATI having the performance, value and power efficiency lead for so long — at least since the Radeon HD 4000 series — NVIDIA would be in all kinds of trouble, but it’s only now that AMD’s graphics division has finally taken the lead in quarterly shipments. This is according to Mercury Research, whose analysts place the split at 51 to 49 percent in favor of ATI — still a tightly contested thing, but it compares very favorably to the Red Team’s 41% share in the same quarter last year. This data is concerned with discrete GPU shipments only (laptops included), whereas on the integrated front Intel continues to reign supreme with 54 percent of the market shipping its cheap and cheerful IGP units. ATI has made forward strides there as well, however, with 24.5% ranking ahead of NVIDIA’s 19.8%. If Apple shifting its iMac and Mac Pro lines away from the Green livery wasn’t enough, perhaps these numbers will finally start ringing some alarm bells over at NV HQ.

[Thanks, Zubayer]

ATI overtakes NVIDIA in discrete GPU shipments originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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First, the good news: AMD pulled in $1.65 billion in revenue — a record for the second quarter! Now, the bad news: the company still lost money. Just a (relatively) little bit, though, with a net loss of $43 million or $.06 per share. That’s five percent more revenue than the first quarter of 2010, and a massive 40 percent boost over the second quarter of 2009, in which it lost $330 million net. What changed? Sales of graphics hardware in particular, up eight percent over last quarter and a huge 87 percent from last year, driven by success of the Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards. Likewise, sales of mobile processors were up 18 percent over last quarter. Net profitability? Keep this up, AMD, and it’s not far off.

AMD has record $1.65B second quarter, still loses a little money originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When you name your graphics card after the God of War, you’d better hope it brings some heat, but judging by early reviews, that’s just what ASUS has done. The three slot monstrosity above is the ARES, a $1200 limited edition, fully custom board, sporting twin Radeon HD 5870 GPUs, four gigabytes of GDDR5 memory and practically enough raw copper to smelt a sword. We’re not joking: the thing weighs nearly five pounds and requires a 750 watt power supply with three power connectors (two 8-pin, one 6-pin) to even run. Of course, you’re getting a graphical behemoth for that kind of price, steamrolling every other GPU on the planet — paired with even a 3.8GHz Core i7-930 CPU in 3DMark Vantage (on Extreme settings), Overclock 3D racked up a fairly ludicrous 15,000 score, and the card ripped past 25,000 with a Core i7-980X and a second ARES in CrossFire. The card was less impressive in actual gameplay, merely spanking the (much cheaper) Radeon 5970 and GeForce GTX 480 by a modest amount, and several reviewers complained it was fairly loud… but as the old adage goes, nobody needs a Ferrari to drive the speed limit, but we’ll all drool over them anyhow. Bring on the liquid nitrogen, folks.

Read – Legit Reviews
Read – Overclock3D
Read – Guru3D
Read – PC Perspective
Read – TechPowerUp

ASUS ARES cries havoc, lets slip the GPUs of war: a review roundup of the world’s fastest graphics card originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looking for a netbook with a little more oomph, or perhaps a thin-and-light laptop that doesn’t break the bank? We’re not quite sure which category the Acer Aspire 1551-5448 falls under, but we reckon it’s liable to satisfy both camps with an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display and a 1.5GHz AMD Turion II Neo K625 CPU. Like the single-threaded Aspire 521 and 721 cousins we’ll be reviewing later this week, this dual-core machine sports a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 GPU for stutter-free 1080p playback, and extra memory to boot. Here, Acer crammed 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, 802.11n WiFi, HDMI-out and a six-cell, five-hour battery into a package weighing just over three pounds. If you’ve got $550 to drop, there’s an Aspire 1551 with your name on it, available now practically wherever laptops are sold.

Acer Aspire 1551 hits retailers with 1.5GHz dual-core Turion II CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been keeping a close eye on AMD’s big laptop comeback over the last couple of months, and in addition to gaining steam with HP, Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo, it appears AMD’s also gotten Sony back into its court. Both Fry’s and Best Buy are now carrying AMD Athlon II X2-powered machines, and as you may expect, the prices are quite tempting. Conversely, the Intel-based lineup ranges from $699 to $799, but until we get our hands on one of these ourselves, there isn’t exactly a fair comparison to draw at this point. You can hit the source links for the complete specs, but the 15.4-inch EE Series with 4GB of RAM / 320GB of storage and a Blu-ray player is going for $650 while the 17.3-inch EF with a 500GB hard drive for $720. Both also have integrated ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 graphics, but regardless, the move certainly bodes well for AMD’s newest processor / graphics, since it appears that Sony hasn’t used AMD in its systems since 2005. We guess a welcome back hug is in order.

Sony selling AMD powered VAIOs for the first time in years originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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