AMD Tuesday agreed to settle in its longstanding class-action lawsuit by investors for making misleading guidance over its first-generation accelerated processing units (APUs), codenamed "Llano." AMD was alleged to have oversold the potential of "Llano" in driving up revenues to the company, causing losses to investors. AMD is reported to have reached an agreement with the class to settle for USD $29.5 million. The settlement is yet to be approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who has been hearing the case since 2014, sitting in session for the US District Court in Oakland, California. Under the proposed deal, AMD's insurers foot the bill for the settlement, while it continues to deny any wrongdoing.

As you may remember, "Llano" was somewhat of a disappointment for AMD, to put it mildly. Production issues with partner Global Foundries meant that Llano's roll-out was affected and extended beyond its predicted time-frame. This, in conjunction with other various factors, such as lack of product appeal over disappointing performance and the usual competition from Intel, forced AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing relative to diminishing demand, which resulted in unsold inventory, thus forcing an inventory write-down of "Llano" chips valued at around $100 million. This reduced the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanked the value of the AMD stock. This, of course, didn't sit well with investors.

The as-of-yet ongoing securities fraud lawsuit over AMD's "Llano" APUs has just achieved a milestone, in having been authorized by the Court to proceed as a class action. The Court's decision doesn't imply that the defendants (Rory P. Read, Thomas J. Seifert, Richard A. Bergman, and Dr. Lisa T. Su) did anything wrong. The defendants have not been ordered to pay any money, no settlement has been reached, no money is available as of now and there is no guarantee that there will be in the future.

Over-promising and under-delivering with its very first accelerated processing units (APU), codenamed "Llano," is coming back to haunt AMD, with a US District Court ruling that the company must face claims from investors over potential securities fraud. Launched in Q3-2012, AMD's A-series "Llano" APUs went largely unsold due to various factors including lack of product appeal, competition from Intel, forcing AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. The related development first took shape in January 2014.

The swelling unsold "Llano" inventory forced an inventory writedown of $100 million, reducing the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanking the value of the AMD stock. While AMD talked about the concept of an APU for years, Intel was the first to come out with a processor that integrates a graphics processor, with its Core i3 and Core i5 "Clarkdale" processors. The suit claims that AMD misrepresented production of "Llano" chips to its investors despite supply issues from its foundry partner GlobalFoundries, artificially inflating the value of the company in 2011-12. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing resulting in unsold inventory, and in consequence, the $100 million writeoff.

Some investors in AMD, who purchased company stock between October 27, 2011 and October 18, 2012, filed a class action lawsuit against AMD, through law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd. The class action alleges that AMD and its officers and directors committed violations of the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934. AMD allegedly misled its investors over how popular its first generation "Llano" desktop APU would get, claiming that there were much greater prospects for the APU than it actually ended up selling.

TechPowerUp released version 0.6.7 of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility. The new release brings some feature-additions, support for more graphics processors, and stability improvements. To begin with, we made room in the GPU-Z window to display TMU (texture memory unit) count. Support for a large number of recently-launched GPUs, including Radeon HD 7870 "Tahiti LE," mobile GeForce 600 series MX, and from Quadro family, were added.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 also brings a few UI enhancements. To begin with, GPU-Z remembers window position from its previous session, cutting you time for positioning it right for screenshots. Next up, when minimized, its tray icon does more than just show you the app is running. Its tooltip (visible when hovered), displays some important sensor data. A new "-tab" command line parameter allows proverclockers to script-launch GPU-Z showing a specific tab. Among the bugs fixed are one related to a crash occurring on CrossFire setups (a Catalyst-related bug), another crash occurring on NVIDIA setups when updating sensor data (GeForce driver-related bug), temperature reading on AMD "Llano" APUs is improved.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7, TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 ASUS ROG Themed

The change-log follows.

Despite losing in market share to Intel, AMD has reason to cheer as its APU gambit is beginning to pay off. According to the latest architecture- and core count-specific sales figures for AMD given out by Mercury Research detailing Q3-2013 in context of two preceding quarters, APUs make for nearly 75% of AMD's processor sales, and the company's recently-launched "Trinity" line of desktop and mobile APUs are off to a flying start.

The most popular chips in AMD's stable are its "Bobcat" Zacate series low-power APUs, which are being built into entry-level computing devices such as netbooks, nettops, and all-in-one desktops. The chips make up 39 percent of AMD's sales in Q3, followed by another APU line, the A-Series "Trinity", which is available in desktop and mobile variants, offers a combination of a fast integrated graphics processor with up to four CPU cores, and makes up 26.1 percent of AMD's sales. AMD's A-Series "Llano" can still be bought in the market, and makes up 7.4 percent of AMD's sales in Q3.

Following the announcement of its second-generation A-series desktop APUs earlier this month, AMD is set to reduce prices of its older A-Series desktop APUs in the socket FM1 package, according to a DigiTimes report. Prices of the entry-level A4-3300 dual-core APU, for example, are expected to go down from US $46 to $30; and A4-3400 from $48 to $35. AMD also decided to cut price of its "Trinity" A4-5300 dual-core socket FM2 APU from $53 to $30, making it an attractive lure to the new platform, stepping up competitiveness against Intel Celeron. This information comes from sources among Taiwan-based motherboard makers, there's no word on when the new pricing could take effect.

Even as launch of the next-generation A-Series "Trinity" desktop APUs remains elusive, there is already talk of what AMD will do with the 32 nm Trinity silicon, apart from using them in the A-Series. Some theories point out that the best performing parts could be sold in certain "high margin" products, while the others, could be branded as Athlon II FM2. AMD is planning a trio of quad-core Athlon II X4 processors in the socket FM2 package. The company currently has a line of Athlon II series processors carved out of the "Llano" silicon, built in the socket FM1 package.

The trio of socket FM2 Athlon II X4 processors include:

• Athlon II X4-730: quad-core, 2.80 GHz, 4 MB total cache, 65W TDP
• Athlon II X4-740: quad-core, 3.20 GHz, 4 MB total cache, 65W TDP
• Athlon II X4-750K: quad-core, unlocked BClk multiplier, 3.40 GHz, 4 MB total cache, 100W TDP

AMD gained CPU market share at Intel's expense in the first-quarter of 2012, according to the latest data by Mercury Research. Intel's CPU market share dropped from 81 percent last quarter, to 80.2 percent, while AMD's rose from 18.2 percent to 19.1 percent. Principal analyst at Mercury Research, Dean McCarron said that AMD benefited from improvements in hard drive supplies. AMD is strong in desktop processors, with 43 percent of the market, the same as last year. Customers also opted for lower-priced laptops, many of which had AMD's chips. Supplies of AMD's A-series chips code-named Llano were restored after manufacturing issues were resolved, McCarron said.

ASUS is working on an AMD-powered notebook under the K53TK line. The K53TK-SX0A8 from ASUS is a 15.6-inch notebook that incorporates AMD A8-3520M "Llano", which is a quad-core APU clocked at 1.60 GHz, with Radeon HD 6620G graphics. The APU's integrated graphics works in tandem with a discrete Radeon HD 7670M GPU, that has 2 GB of dedicated memory. Other vital components include 8 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1333 MHz memory, and AMD A70M FCH chipset.

The 15.6-inch display packs 1366x768 pixels resolution. Display outputs include D-sub and HDMI. Storage is care of a 750 GB HDD and DVD SuperMulti drive. Connectivity includes 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, gigabit Ethernet, SD/SDHC/MMC card reader, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, 1.3 MP webcam, and FireWire. The battery powering the beast can run it for 4 hours before needing a recharge. Measuring 391 x 266 x 30.5 ~ 40.5 mm (WxDxH), the notebook weighs 2.7 kg. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system comes pre-loaded. It will be priced around 79,800 JPY (US $970).

AMD's upcoming "Trinity" family of desktop and mobile accelerated processing units (APUs) will use up to four x86-64 cores based on the company's newest CPU architecture, codenamed "Piledriver". AMD conservatively estimated performance/clock improvements over current-generation "Bulldozer" architecture, with Piledriver. Citavia put next-generation A10-5800K, and A8-4500M "Trinity" desktop and notebook APUs, and pitted them against several currently-launched processors, from both AMD and Intel.

It found integer and floating-point performance increases clock-for-clock, against Bulldozer-based FX-8150. The benchmark is not multi-threaded, and hence gives us a fair idea of the per core performance. On a rather disturbing note, the performance-per-GHz figures of Piledriver are trailing far behind K12 architecture (Llano, A8-3850), let alone competitive architectures from Intel.

Memory overclocking feats over 3000 MHz, aren't new. Last month, we've seen G.Skill and and GIGABYTE achieve a whopping 3736 MHz on the dual-channel AMD "Llano" platform. The duo has now cracked the 3000 MHz mark with four modules, achieving 3077 MHz. The record (>3000 MHz with four modules) was set by Coolaler, using an Intel Core i7-3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor, and GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H motherboard. The memory of course was four 4 GB G.Skill DDR3-2600 MHz modules. The entire setup was air-cooled.A video of the feat follows.

A marketing slide by AMD for industry partners, which sums up what the company's 2012 Mainstream Platform led by "Trinity" APUs will offer, got leaked to the web. In it, AMD claims its next-generation APUs to offer up to 29 percent higher productivity performance (read: CPU performance), and up to 56 percent higher visual performance, compared to current-generation (Llano). At least the graphics performance figures seem to be consistent with early test results.

Apart from these, the slide claims Trinity to be optimized for Windows 8 (with AVX, AES-NI, SSE4.2, and DirectX 11.1 graphics, it could very well be). The processor is said to feature third-generation auto-overclocking technology, TurboCore 3.0. The mobile version of the chip will be designed to offer over 12 hours of resting battery-life. Lastly, there's mention of new media-acceleration features. AMD is expected to launch its new line of APUs in this quarter (before July).

AMD is pushing on with a desktop product lineup that's leveraging its Piledriver CPU and Graphics CoreNext GPU architectures in 2012. Apparently, the company will have a faster product development cycle to catch up with Intel's "Tick-Tock", as revealed in a roadmap slide scored by DonanimHaber. The current product lineup will remain unchanged in the first quarter of 2012. Then in the second quarter, AMD will launch a few more socket AM3+ FX-8000, FX-6000, and FX-4000 series eight, six, and four-core processors; along with the much talked about "Trinity" accelerated processing unit.

The fastest "Trinity" APUs will get a new brand identifier, the A10-5000 series. These APUs will pack next-generation "Piledriver" modular cores and Radeon HD 7600D series graphics. Around this time, AMD will also launch the Brazos 2.0 low-power APU for netbooks, nettops, and embedded computing devices. Brazos 2.0 will get the E2-1000 series branding. The big change is reserved for the third quarter of 2012, when AMD launches the successor of its less-than-lucky AMD FX "Bulldozer" processor family.

Overclocker "Christian Ney" of the HWBOT community claims to have cracked the 6 GHz clock speed mark with an AMD A8-3870K APU, with all four of its cores enabled. The feat consisted of a clock speed of 6067.7 MHz achieved using a base clock of 258.2 MHz and multiplier of 47.0x. The memory was clocked at 3505 MHz, just 95 MHz short of a world-record. The chip was put through a scorching core voltage of 2V. Supporting components included GIGABYTE A75-UD4H motherboard, and GeIL EVO Corsa DDR3 memory. The setup was cooled sub-zero. CPU-Z Validator rejected this submission, probably because like us, it finds 2V vCore and 258.2 MHz base clock unreal for Llano, since it uses a common 100 MHz clock domain for BClk and PCIe.

December thru January looks to be a busy time for AMD. Along with a few new graphics products, AMD will launch new CPUs and APUs. The company has chosen December 26 to launch its A8-3870K and A6-3670K Black Edition "Llano" accelerated processing units (APUs) in the FM1 package, which feature unlocked base clock multipliers for the processor component, making overclocking a breeze. In two of its presentation slides to distributors, it unveiled the swanky new box art of these unlocked APUs.

These chips pack four x86-64 cores based on the "Stars" K10.5 architecture with 1 MB dedicated L2 cache per core, dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz integrated memory controller, PCI-Express 2.0 root complex, and a "discrete-class" graphics processor that packs 400 VLIW5 stream processors, DirectX 11 support, and the ability to pair with similarly specc'd discrete GPUs. The A8-3870K Black Edition features x86 core clock speed of 3.00 GHz, and Radeon HD 6550D graphics that features all 400 of those stream processors, with 600 MHz GPU clock speed. The A6-3670K Black Edition, on the other hand, has its x86 component clocked at 2.70 GHz, it features Radeon HD 6530D graphics that has 320 out of the 400 stream processors enabled, and a GPU clock of 433 MHz.

In addition to introducing the 'new' Radeon HD 7000M mobile GPUs, AMD has this week updated its A-Series family of APUs (accelerated processing units) by adding to it no less than seven models specifically targeting the mobile segment. All seven chips are manufactured using 32nm process technology and should keep laptops makers (relatively) happy until Trinity lands in the first half of 2012.

"Trinity" is the codename of AMD's next-generation performance accelerated processing unit (APU) family. Based on the new socket FM2 package, these chips will take advantage of AMD's next-generation Piledriver processor core architecture and VLIW4 GPU stream processor architecture. Together, Trinity promises increased general, visual, and parallel compute performance. Some of the slides detailing AMD's own performance estimates were put up by DonanimHaber in their recent video bulletin. We screen-grabbed the performance graphs from the low-resolution video, hence the grainy images.

To begin with, AMD is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current "Llano" APU. It spread its benchmarks across three categories: visual performance (using 3DMark Vantage), general performance (using PCMark Vantage), and parallel compute (GPGPU) performance (calculated CTP SP GFLOPs). With 3DMark Vantage, Trinity A8 (quad-core), A6 (triple-core), and A4 (dual-core) APUs are seeing a roughly 32% improvement over their respective Llano-based counterparts; with general performance, the improvement is a candid 13.8% on average; but with GPGPU performance, the improvement is a massive 56.3% on average. This could be attributed to the VLIW4 architecture. Lastly, there are notable CrossFire dual-graphics performance improvements.

Here is the first picture of AMD accelerated processing units in the existing FM1 package and future FM2 package on which the next-generation Trinity APU will be based on. Both packages are very similar, follow AMD's favourite yet archaic PGA design. The pins are physically arranged in a mostly similar fashion, though we don't have a pin map at hand. The difference comes with some of the blanked pins in the sub-central portion of the pin array. The FM2 package has 904 pins, compared to 905 on FM1. One pin is blanked, while a pair of blanked pins are arranged further away from the central cutout.

This makes FM1 and FM2 clearly incompatible. Neither will you be able to use today's A-Series APUs in the FM1 package on future socket FM2 motherboards, nor will you be able to run future FM2 APUs on today's FM1 motherboards. Yet, AMD will port the A75 FCH chipset to the next-generation "Virgo" platform. The FCH or Fusion Controller Hub, like Intel's PCH (Platform Controller Hub), is not much more than a glorified southbridge, and is portable between Fusion platforms as it's essentially a PCI-Express 2.0 x4 device. In the picture below, "Llano" FM1 APU is on the left, and "Trinity" FM2 on the right.

Intel started the trend of improving integrated graphics with their second generation LGA1155 socket Core i3, i5 & i7 line of processors. Depending on the model, these processors sport integrated HD2000 or HD3000 graphics right on the processor die, which nowadays give acceptable performance for low-end gaming and can play Full HD 1080p video perfectly. This trend is increasing with the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors, which will be able to support a massive 4096 x 4096 pixel display, as we reported here. AMD now also have equivalent products with their Llano-based A-series processors. So, where does this leave discrete graphics cards? Well, the low end market is certainly seeing reduced sales, as there really isn't enough of a performance difference nowadays to always warrant an upgrade from an IGP. As integrated graphics improve further, one can see how this will hurt sales of higher end graphics cards too. The problem is that the bulk of the profit comes not from the top-end powerhouse graphics cards, but from the low to mid-end cards which allow these companies to remain in business, so cannibalizing sales of these products to integrated graphics could make high-end graphics cards a much more niche product and crucially, much more expensive with to boot.

AMD detailed its upcoming "Virgo" PC platform that consists of next-generation "Trinity" APU (accelerated processing unit), and current-generation AMD A75 "Hudson-D" chipset. A notable revelation here is that the next-gen APUs will be compatible with AMD A75, although it will be designed for a new socket called FM2. It remains to be seen if FM1 and FM2 are pin-compatible.

"Trinity" packs four x86-64 cores based on the next-generation "Piledriver" architecture, arranged in two Piledriver modules. A module is a closely-knit group of two cores, with certain shared and dedicated resources. Each Piledriver module has 2 MB of L2 cache shared between the two cores. In all, Trinity, with its two modules, has 4 MB of L2 cache without any L3 cache.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that revenue for the third quarter ending Oct. 1, 2011 is expected to increase four to six percent as compared to the second quarter of 2011. The company previously forecasted third quarter 2011 revenue to increase 10 percent, plus or minus two percent, from the second quarter of 2011.

In addition, AMD expects third quarter gross margin to be approximately 44 to 45 percent. The company previously forecasted third quarter 2011 gross margin to be approximately 47 percent.

The latest AMD 2012 market outlook slides disclosed by DonanimHaber reveal that AMD will have a brand new lineup of processors and APUs by the third quarter of 2012. In the second quarter, AMD will begin with new accelerated processing units (APUs) that succeed the current A-Series "Llano" APUs, codenamed "Trinity". Trinity APUs will make use of next-generation "Piledriver" architecture x86-64 cores, as well, as next-generation Radeon HD 7000 series graphics.

Then in the third quarter, AMD will release its next-generation "Vishera" processors that succeed "Zambezi" AMD FX processors. Vishera will make use of next-generation "Piledriver" modules, and increase IPC (instructions per clock) beyond its predecessor "Bulldozer" architecture. In the interim, AMD will update its A-Series and AMD FX processor lines with new models. These include a new high-end processor, the AMD FX-8170, and two new A-Series APUs, the A8-3870K, and A6-3670K, both of which are unlocked for overclocking.

An internal presentation slide leaked to the press reveals some details of AMD's next generation "Trinity" APUs that succeed current generation A-Series "Llano" Fusion series. The presentation was run by AMD's principal foundry partner, Global Foundries, outlining upcoming products built on the 32 nm High-K metal gate transistor (HKMG) process. With Trinity, AMD is expecting a 50% improvement in gigaFLOP performance over the present generation, which doesn't sound far-fetched considering it will use next-generation Piledriver CPU core architecture and Radeon HD 7000 series graphics, which uses VLIW4 stream processor architecture.

Piledriver is an evolved x86 architecture that uses the modular shared resource design of Bulldozer, with much higher IPC compared to Stars architecture. VLIW4 stream processors ensure higher performance per square millimeter die area. Trinity will be available for notebooks as "Comal" and "Virgo" for desktops. They will be branded in the A-Series. AMD expects a 2012 market entry for the two.

The world-renowned motherboard and video card manufacturer MSI has officially announced the all-new AMD Llano series motherboard - A75A-G55 today. In addition to continuing the motherboard advantages of the first model A75MA-G55 and scoring P1646 points for 3DMark 11's built-in display performance record, it also displayed MSI's superb R&D strength, crossing the OC Genie II technology onto the AMD Llano platform. There are no complicated settings, and it only requires one button (step) and one second to easily boost the system's overall performance by 110%.

It is the simplest and easiest overclocking tool whether it's for beginners or advanced computer enthusiasts. In addition, different from the AMD Dual Graphics technology used by other manufacturers, the MSI A75A-G55 motherboard can even work with MSI's video card overclocking software, Afterburner, to increase performance. The overall 3D operation performance can be increased to a maximum of 390%, again showing the outstanding features and multiplied effects of MSI's motherboard and video cards.