The RV770 graphics processor changed AMD's fortunes in the graphics processor industry and put it back in the race for supremacy over the larger rival NVIDIA. The introduction of RV770-based products had a huge impact on the mid-range and high-end graphics card markets, which took NVIDIA by surprise. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA has been quoted saying that they had underestimated their competitor's latest GPU, referring to RV770. While the Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator provided direct competition to the 192 shader-laden GeForce GTX 260, the subsequent introduction of a 216 shader variant saw it lose ground, leaving doubling of memory size to carve out the newer SKU, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. Performance benchmarks of this card from all over the media have been mixed, but show that AMD isn't giving up this chance for gaining technological supremacy.

In Q4 2008, NVIDIA is expected to release three new graphics cards: GeForce GTX 270 and GeForce GTX 290. The cards are based on NVIDIA's G200 refresh, the G200b, which incorporates a new manufacturing technology to facilitate higher clock-speeds, stepping up performance. This looks to threaten the market position of AMD's RV770, since it's already established that G200 when overclocked to its stable limits, achieves more performance than RV770 pushed to its limits. This leaves AMD with some worries, since it cannot afford to lose the wonderful market-position its cash-cow, the RV770 is currently in, to an NVIDIA product that outperforms it by a significant margin, in its price-domain. The company's next generation graphics processor would be the RV870, which still has some time left before it could be rushed in, since its introduction is tied to the constraints of foundry companies such as TSMC, and the availability of the required manufacturing process (40nm silicon lithography) by them. While TSMC takes its time working on that, there's a fair bit of time left, for RV770 to face NVIDIA, which given the circumstances, looks a lost battle. Is AMD going to do something about its flagship GPU? Will AMD make an effort to maintain its competitiveness before the next round of the battle for technological supremacy begins? The answer is tilting in favour of yes.

The company slogan change, from "Smarter Choice" to "The future is fusion" marked a major shift in core-Strategy for AMD. The company now focuses on delivering solutions, more so than mere products, with a solution comprising of several products working together to let the PC serve a purpose. One such solution is the AMD Maui entertainment platform. Maui platform makes AMD hardware work with AMD's own Live! Media Center software to deliver a complete home-theater PC solution.

On the hardware front, Maui includes a qualifying AMD Athlon X2 or Phenom series processor, a motherboard based on the AMD 7-series chipset with integrated graphics. Video is handled by the 7-series IGP, while audio is handled by a special audio component-riser card that has pre-amp circuitry onboard, which enables users to connect speakers in the 5.1 channel configuration directly to the motherboard. Future models would bring in 7.1 channel support. The first motherboard to use this design, is the MSI Media Live DIVA 5.1 780M.

Stealing money has always been the easy way to earn some quick pocket change, but what about $1 Billion stolen not from anybody but from Intel itself. At the age of 33, Biswamohan Pani, now a former Intel employee, was charged today for stealing trade secrets from Intel that worth more than $1 billion. Pani was allegedly stealing trade secrets from Intel Corp.'s facility in Hudson, Mass., and downloading confidential documents from the company's offices in California. According to the indictment, Pani gave notice to leave Intel and told his superiors he was using up about a week of vacation while looking for a job at a hedge fund. In reality, he had taken a job at Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices, and while using up vacation time at Intel, was downloading valuable trade secrets. When Pani's house was searched by the FBI, they've found eight documents described by Intel as "confidential," "secret" or "top secret." Now Biswamohan Pani is facing a major sentence in prison, so he can reconsider his theft estimated for $1 billion in research and development costs. On the other side, AMD said it was not aware for any of Pani's stolen information.

The year 2008 so far, has been very eventful for the graphics card market. A reinvigorated GPU lineup by ATI, brought in some fierce competition to NVIDIA, which resulted in a tug-of-war with pricing graphics cards in the market, with either company refusing to lose on grounds of pricing. This event, coupled with the announcement of several game titles by game publishers, resulted in bumper-sales of graphics cards, giving the present state of the global economy little or no relevance.

The months to come hold the same amount of importance for both AMD and NVIDIA, where the next round of competition begins with successors to current high-end products being slated. NVIDIA is expected to continue with its monolithic high transistor-count GPU design methodology, while AMD could bring in a little change to the way it uses two efficient GPUs to build powerful products.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC sector and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions extends its portfolio with a new compact entertainment artist specifically designed to play back high-resolution Blu-ray media. The Shuttle XPC H7 7800H complete Mini-PC system is easy to use, stands for high processing power and space for expansion.

The Windows Vista based complete system includes a Blu-ray Combo drive, a card reader, hybrid TV tuner card, WLAN and a remote control. Based on the Shuttle XPC Barebone SN78SH7, this attractive Mini-PC solution barely measures 32.5 x 20.8 x 18.9 cm (DWH).

Industry informer DigiTimes shared today some information on the upcoming Deneb processor family from AMD. According to their information, AMD is planning to launch six high-end 45nm quad-core CPUs (Deneb) and four entry-level (Propus) including 20x00, 18x00, 16x00 and 1xx00e models, in the first quarter of next year. Two of these processors will be available earlier in November of this year - the 3GHz Phenom X4 20550 and 2.8GHz 20350 for socket AM2+ systems.
AMD will also launch six 45nm triple-core CPUs (Heka and Regor) including 14x00, 12x00 and 1xx00e series. These triple-core CPUs will enter design validation test (DVT) and start shipping in the first quarter next year.
In the second and third quarter of next year AMD will also start shipping its 45nm AM3-based dual-core CPUs, part of the Regor family.
Although the chipmaker will largely enter the 45nm generation, in order to prevent potential yield rate problems from the new process, it will launch seven 65nm CPUs including three quad-core Phenom X4 CPUs (Agena) - 9950 (120W), 9850 (95W) and 9450e (65W), and two Athlon X2 CPUs (Kuma) - 7750 and 7550 in the first quarter of 2009, while two low-power Athlon X2 CPUs (Brisbane) - 5050e and 3250e, will launch in the near future.
Launching of the new Phenom processors will also lead to new price reductions and last order notices for some of the older processors. Unfortunately, there is no additional information.

"Shanghai" is the codename for the soon to be released quad-core enterprise processors by AMD, under the Quad-Core Opteron brand. It was expected of the company, to come up with these processors around this time of the year, and they have. AMD hasn't officially announced these processors yet, but the processors have made for early listings in some popular online stores. PC Connection and Buy.com have made listings of some of the upcoming SKUs. The Opteron 837x, 838x series are anything but cheap. These are processors that support multi-socket setups up to eight sockets. The Opteron 238x series processors are the dual-socket supportive variant of the same processors.

Whichever way the global economy is headed, 3Q, 2008 hasn't been a bad period for computer hardware industry. The GPU market saw its bumper sale in six years, with both NVIDIA and AMD reaping inflows. Similar trends were also reported with other sections of the industry. The CPU for one, is commodity closely linked to the growth of the industry. 3Q 2008 saw record earnings for Intel as well, as the silicon giant continued its market-share gains into rival AMD, as recorded by market observer iSuppli.

According to iSuppli figures held by Information Week, Intel now holds a massive 80.4% of the CPU market share, which is up 1.7% from Q3 2007. AMD's share on the other hand fell 1.8 percentage points to 12.1% from 13.9% a year ago. Compared to Q2 2008, AMD's market share grew by 0.1%, and Intel's grew by 0.3%. There is a clear influence of smaller CPU vendors that has affected AMD's share. These smaller vendors are finding it increasingly difficult to compete on a global scale amidst the economic crisis.

AMD today announced the appointment of Alberto Bozzo as corporate vice president and general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Reporting to Emilio Ghilardi, AMD chief sales officer, Bozzo will have responsibility for all sales and marketing operations within EMEA. Bozzo starts his new role in January 2009. Bozzo, 44, brings more than 20 years of experience with HP, where he was most recently the vice president of HP's multi-billion dollar go-to-market consumer business unit in EMEA.

"We are pleased to add another seasoned professional to AMD who brings a strong combination of sales, marketing and organizational management experience," said Emilio Ghilardi, AMD senior vice president and chief sales officer. "Alberto's successful consumer and commercial computing record makes him the right person to help AMD execute on its aggressive plans in the strategic EMEA region."

AMD updated the graphics driver hotfix titled, 737-38664: Far Cry 2 and Stalker Clear Sky HotFix. The hotfix aims to address issues with the two game titles and improves performance. Highlights include:

• Performance improvement for the DirectX 9 version of Far Cry 2 on CrossFire installations
• Performance improvement for the DirectX 10 version of Far Cry 2 on single GPU and CrossFire installations
• Improves performance for the DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 version of STALKER: Clear Sky on both single and CrossFireX configurations at higher resolutions

This hotfix includes STALKER performance enhancements for the DirectX 10 version of the game. Also be sure to download the STALKER Clear Sky DirectX 10.1 patch, which will provide further performance enhancements (up to 10% at higher resolutions) and image quality enhancements over DirectX 10. AMD strongly recommends you download the game patch and test it in conjunction with this Catalyst hotfix. For more information on the hotfix and downloads, please visit this page.

Windows 7 is Microsoft's next major PC operating system. Early non-retail versions of this OS may have already made it to certain sections of the industry, and this calls for hardware support. AMD is ready with its ATI Catalyst driver suite for Windows 7. The driver itself is titled ATI Catalyst Windows 7 Preview Driver Package. As the name suggests, it is at an experimental/early stage, much like the OS itself. Use of it is not covered by any warranty. It provides support for ATI Radeon HD 2000 series, HD 3000 series, HD 4000 series, derived mobile GPUs, and AMD 7 series chipsets with integrated graphics.

The 32-bit version of the driver can be downloaded from here, and the 64-bit version here.

AMD today announced completion of the sale of its Digital TV (DTV) processor business to Broadcom Corporation. AMD announced a definitive agreement to sell its DTV business on August 25 as part of its strategy to become leaner and more focused, while seeking to create a business model to deliver sustainable profitability and leadership in core x86 computing and graphics businesses.

In connection with the business sale, AMD received approximately $141.5 million in cash, subject to certain escrows and adjustments pursuant to the terms of the definitive asset purchase agreement.

AMD today announced that it is providing its Quad Core AMD Opteron processor for Windows Azure Compute Service, the cloud service operating system which is featured this week at PDC, as well as its selection as a key processor partner for cloud computing solutions by leading global web-based companies such as STRATO and DAUM Communications. Cloud Computing Environments (CCE) provide an opportunity for companies to increase capacity and capabilities without significantly increasing investments in software, personnel or infrastructure. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor with AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and Direct Connect Architecture was selected because of its ability to deliver significant performance-per-watt efficiencies, successfully handle heavy peak workloads without sacrificing performance, enable massive cloud scaling and offer a reliable foundation that helps global, web-based CCE better manage the demands of a 24/7 uptime for enterprises large and small.

World economy may be at risk, but industry experts report that the graphics chip market is literally on fire. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), AMD's newly released credible video cards in both its desktop and laptop segments, led to the biggest increase in third-quarter shipments in six years. In the third quarter of 2008, more than 111 million GPUs were shipped, the market researcher said. During the same quarter last year, 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter. That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent, according to JPR. In the overall market AMD saw a good year-to-year growth of 22.8%, while NVIDIA lost 6.4% year-to-year. For desktop GPUs, AMD/ATI is also on the bright side claiming to 20.3%, while NVIDIA slipped to 32.6%, the other 43.9% of the portion are for Intel. On the laptop front, Intel GPU shipments dropped one point to 56.2 percent, while NVIDIA GPU shipments declined to 21.8 percent, and AMD jumped to 20.9 percent, JPR reported. It was about time and AMD desperately needed this good results, congratulations. ATI's graphics cards are temperately rising their share in the fight with rival NVIDIA.

Earlier this week, when evaluating samples of the new Radeon HD 4830 GPU-based graphics card, W1zzard, who also authors the GPU-Z diagnostic utility, had found an anomaly with the stream processor (SP) counts on samples sent by AMD. The GPU could access only 560 out of its 640 SPs available. This affected the card's performance significantly, and TechPowerUp's findings were validated by several other reviewers with similar samples.

AMD on its part quickly followed up the issue with its engineering department, and released a video BIOS update that fixes the issue and makes available all the 640 SPs. AMD will be circulating this BIOS to all its press contacts and add-in-board (AIB) partners, to make sure the issue is isolated and fixed. The updated BIOS file can be downloaded from here. AMD also asserts that the issue isn't hardware related, and that updating the BIOS resolves the issue completely.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830, the newest foot-soldier from the red-camp, is AMD's answer to the GeForce 9800 GT, a gap left by the company, that may have been eating into its profits for months now. As usual, TechPowerUp received its review samples from TUL (PowerColor), AMD's long-standing partner, and AMD itself. We reviewed both of them, as soon as the product became official today. During the course of reviewing them, with the card from AMD in particular, our reviewer, W1zzard noticed an anomaly: the sample from AMD was showing an abnormal stream processor count of 560.

W1zzard also authors the GPU-Z diagnostic utility, and it is his routine chore to program the utility to detect a new GPU. The newest build of GPU-Z detected the card from AMD to have as many as 80 stream processors disabled from the original specifications for the Radeon HD 4830. In his article, W1zzard attempts to explain this anomaly.

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, raising the performance bar for graphics cards priced at less than $150 (USD) and presenting gamers with even more affordable access to award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4800 series performance. Like all ATI Radeon HD 4800 series products, the new offering delivers class-leading game performance1 and superior HD multimedia capabilities, as well support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games soon to be released for the holiday season.

"The ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card is another example of how AMD's scalable design strategy is paying off," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "With a single chip we have been able to quickly and efficiently bring to market graphics card designs ranging from below $150 through $549 SEP, with leading performance in every segment. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 continues that great trend, providing tremendous value to gamers for less than $150."

Today, AMD is announcing two new processors to its products line - AMD Phenom X3 8850 Black Edition and AMD Athlon X2 5050e. The Socket AM2+ triple core X3 8850 (TRAY OPN# HD8850WCJ3BGH) works at 2.5GHz, has a TDP of 95W and 2MB of L3 cache. The Phenom X3 8850 is the first triple-core Phenom processor to be part of the company's Black Edition series and as such it has unlocked multiplier for overclocking. The AMD Athlon X2 5050e (TRAY OPN# ADH5050IAA5DO) is a dual-core 45W processor that operates at 2600MHz.
Sooner or later AMD is also expected to commence shipments of two low-power chips - the single-core 1.6GHz Athlon 2650 (TDP 15W), and the dual-core Athlon X2 3250e, running at 1.5GHz and requiring up to 22W. November will also see AMD's "Ultra-Value Client (UVC) Solutions", the chips that will possibly compete with Intel Atom CPUs for netbooks. These are only for the OEM customers, though.

AMD and Celsia Technologies announced today a strategic partnership in which Celsia may become the cooling system manufacturer for ATI's next generation video cards. For now both companies are working on a vapor chamber based cooling solution for high end graphics cards and that's all we have. The cooling module includes Celsia's patented NanoSpreader that "significantly outperforms competing heat pipe based solutions." A NanoSpreader is a patented copper encased two-phase vapor chamber into which pure water is vacuum sealed. The liquid is absorbed by a copper-mesh wick and passed as vapor through a micro-perforated copper sheet where it cools and returns as liquid to the wick. NanoSpreaders are half the weight of solid copper, and yet they perform 14% better than heat pipes.
"Working with AMD, we were able to meet all of the design criteria for a new GPU cooler. Namely, it had to be lighter, perform better and be lower cost than the current heat pipe based design," said Joe Formichelli, Celsia's CEO. "Unlike thermal modules using heat pipes, our two-phase NanoSpreader comes in direct contact with the heat source whereby removing costly, heavy base plates."
As part of AMD's technology development project, Celsia has been invited to present at the 2008 AMD Technical Forum and Exposition tomorrow in Taiwan. Additionally, a short video explaining Celsia's NanoSpreader vapor chamber technology will be shown as part of the conference's opening presentation.

On October 23rd, AMD would release its answer to the GeForce 9800 GT, the Radeon HD 4830 graphics processor. The company has succeded in giving the 9800 GTX/GTX+ some serious competition in the form of the HD 4850 and HD 4850 1GB, and looks to take the attack across all segments. MSI is ready with its HD 4830 512 MB model.

Simplistic as it may look, the card features a strong power circuit in the form of a 4+1 phase power design. The GPU is actively cooled by an aluminum cooler, consisting of radially-projecting aluminum fins cooled by a fan. The memory is air-cooled. The card uses reference speeds of 575/1800 MHz (core/memory). It has been benchmarked using 3DMark Vantage, where under extreme settings, it secured a score of X2372.

AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners are ready with graphics cards based on the company's newest GPU, the ATI Radeon HD 4830. Sapphire, on its part, is ready with a card based on its own PCB/cooler design. The company has already released a Radeon HD 4850 based card on the PCB and cooler. Identical pin layout of the GPU (RV770LE) and memory wiring, makes this possible. Features are listed below:

• ATI RV770 LE graphics processor, made on 55nm silicon process(by TSMC)
• 256-bit GDDR3 memory bus
• 575 MHz GPU core, 1800 MHz (900 MHz actual) memory
• 512 MB memory
• 640 Stream Processors, DirectX 10.1
• Supports ATI Crossfire X
• Supports UVD 2.0 hardware video acceleration

Odd enough, AMD has just issued a hotfix for the yet to be released PC game title Far Cry 2. The patch is meant to be used for the Radeon X1000, HD 2000, HD 3000 and HD 4000 series cards to improve the performance of Far Cry 2 in DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Both single and CrossFire compatible systems will benefit from it. The hotfix download package includes both the Display Driver and Catalyst Control Center. The hotfix can be downloaded by clicking on this link here. After all this might be a smart move for AMD/ATI. The official launch date for Far Cry 2 is October 24th, and the game will launch simultaneously on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Now ATI owners will be prepared and hopefully won't have problems running the game when it is released.

This story won't inform you about any sort of new hardware, but will only remind you that everything we like today is made by human hands and when some of these people dies we should give him the deserved respect. Yesterday, at the age of 79 died Ed Turney, one of the eight founders of semiconductor-industry giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The cause of his departure from this world is brain cancer. Turney was born March 26, 1929, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Known as "Fast Eddie," Turney's initial assignments at the fledgling AMD involved buying equipment and overseeing construction of the company's first chip factory. At the same time, as director of sales, Turney was charged with building a sales organization, including developing a network of electronic distributors - a vital step in enabling the company to compete with established companies such as Intel, Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Motorola and other companies that no longer exist. In late 1974 Turney left AMD, going on to work at various small semiconductor manufacturing and distribution companies. He later became a consultant to firms trying to get started or funded. Ed Turney will be buried in St. Theresa's Court next to his mother, Rose.

AMD today reported third quarter 2008 revenue from continuing operations of $1.776 billion, including process technology license revenue of $191 million. Third quarter 2008 revenue increased 32 percent compared to the second quarter of 2008 and 14 percent compared to the third quarter of 2007.
In the third quarter of 2008, AMD reported a net loss of $67 million, or $0.11 per share. For continuing operations, third quarter 2008 income was $41 million, or $0.07 per share, including the process technology license revenue of $191 million, or $0.31 a share. Third quarter 2008 operating income was $131 million. Loss from discontinued operations was $108 million, or $0.18 a share.

Read the complete earnings release here.

Industry sources reveal that AMD would be branding its Kuma dual-core processor as Athlon X2 7000 series. These processors are aimed to compete with Intel's Core 2 Duo E7000 series processors. Kuma continues to use the 65nm SOI fabrication process. The core sports 512 KB L2 cache per core, and a shared 2 MB L3 cache. Surprisingly, despite having sub-3.00 GHz clock speeds, the processors have rated TDP of 95W.

These processors use a broader 3600 MT/s HyperTransport interface, and feature DDR2 memory controllers that support the PC2-8500 (1066 MHz) standard. As for the models, the Athlon X2 7550 has a clock speed of 2.50 GHz, and an FSB multiplier of 12.5x. The Athlon X2 7750 comes with the clock speed of 2.70 GHz, and a FSB multiplier of 13.5x. Both processors are expected to be out by Q1 2009.