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.

Reports suggest that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could receive manufacturing contracts by AMD, and long-time customer NVIDIA, for graphics processors based on the newest 40nm silicon fabrication process. The two giants in the visual computing industry, are expected to skip the 45nm process altogether. This is seen as a move to cut down manufacturing costs, and use the most feasible manufacturing technologies. Miniaturizing circuitry at that scale would allow them to build even more complex silicon machinery, with much higher transistor counts, while maintaining size constraints.

AMD on its part would have to use the services of TSMC, since the foundry company's fab in Dresden is only capable of 45nm SOI fabrication process, and that it would take as long as 2010, by the time the expected 32nm process is ready at the New York fab. The next star-entry for AMD would be the ATI RV870, and as for NVIDIA, it would continue development of monolithic high-end GPUs with GT216, a successor to the G200 GPU. Meanwhile, the companies could continue aggressive competition, with projections of up to 20% price-cuts by Christmas 2008 shopping season. Their 40nm GPU designs could be ready by the end of this year, and 40nm GPUs could be supplied by June, 2009.

The United States Department of Justice had issued notices to both NVIDIA corporation and AMD for their alleged involvement in malpractices with fixing prices in the graphics processor market, and inducing staged competition. Both companies were to be penalized if the antitrust investigations found the charges to be true. In its most recent press release, AMD states that the Dept. of Justice closed its investigation into these charges, and that no action would be taken against the company, in this regard. Press release follows:

On October 10, 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice informed AMD [NYSE: AMD] and ATI Technologies that it has closed its investigation into ATI Technologies' pricing and marketing practices in the sale of graphics processing units ("GPUs"). On December 1, 2006, AMD announced that ATI had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice.

AMD spokesman reassured today that the deal between AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company won't violate any of the patent agreements AMD made with its main competitor Intel. Let me remind you that earlier that day Intel said it would review its processor licensing agreement with AMD, especially the agreement which allows AMD to use Intel's x86 chip instruction set, to ensure the ATIC deal does not violate any patent agreements. Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman, wrote in an e-mail today:
"We are completely confident the structure of this transaction takes into account our cross-license agreements,"
"Rest assured - we plan to continue respecting Intel's intellectual property rights, just as we expect them to respect ours."
Financial analyst Hans Mosesmann even believes that the dispute between the two giants may become a weapon for Intel to solve some of its problems in court. If Intel manages to find something is wrong with this deal it can use it against Advanced Micro Deviced and make AMD drop the long-standing anti-trust suits against the company. Continue reading the full story here.

Here's an interesting story I found today. It's short, but I'm sure it won't end just like that and there'll be a lot more to discuss later.

Intel Corp. said on Tuesday it has "serious questions" about a deal announced by Advanced Micro Devices to spin off its manufacturing business and focus on chip design, and is ready to defend its patents. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said that AMD and Intel have a patent cross-licensing agreement under which AMD pays royalties to Intel. "Intel has serious questions about this transaction as it relates to the license and will vigorously protect Intel's intellectual property rights," Mulloy said of AMD's announcement. Mulloy said Intel has asked AMD to make the agreement public but he said it would not, so he was not at liberty to discuss the matter in detail.

AMD and the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi today announced the creation of a U.S.-headquartered, leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing company to address growing demand for independent, leading-edge foundry production capabilities. The new global company, to be temporarily called "The Foundry Company", will serve this need by combining advanced process technology, industry-leading manufacturing facilities and aggressive plans to expand its global capacity footprint. At the same time, the Mubadala Development Company will increase its current investment in AMD to 19.3 percent on a fully diluted basis. AMD will contribute to The Foundry Company its manufacturing facilities, including two fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany, as well as related assets and intellectual property rights.

AMD conducted a presentation at CEATEC Japan, where the company took a sneak-peak at how the role of GPUs would become critical to the PC of tomorrow. This of course revolved around the company's newly adopted "The Future is Fusion" slogan, integrating all of AMD's technological expertise into object and function oriented solutions for the PC industry.

Among the numerous slides that formed part of the presentation, one such slide, shows some very interesting points on what the year 2009 looks like, from AMD's perspective. It shows a lot of things slated for much later to make it to the industry. To begin with, the DirectX 11 API and Windows 7 (Vienna) operating system could make it to the industry in 2009. However, there's no mention of them being "released" as such, or if they could just be working prototypes, such as alpha releases for use by select parts of the industry for mutual technology development.

To combat Intel's Atom-embedded ITX motherboard linueup, and the platform itself, there has been an influx of mini-ITX motherboards based on the AMD 780G chipset lately. Perhaps the thermal design of the 780G allows implementation in form-factors this small. To combat the dual-core Atom, AMD had built up plans to release low-power processors based on the AM2 socket. Notably, the Athlon X2 22W and Athlon single core 15W chips. Perhaps it is these processors that are inviting companies to plan Mini-ITX motherboards based on the AM2+ socket with the 780G chipset.

Albatron is about to release the KI780G motherboard, and they seem to have packed quite a lot to it. To begin with, the board features an AM2+ socket (that supports processors only upto 65W TDP), two DDR2 SO-DIMM slots for using the more compact memory sticks notebooks use, four SATA II ports, an IDE connector, Gigabit LAN, 7.1 channel audio with SPDIF optical and co-axial pass, display connectors that include D-Sub, DVI and HDMI (HDCP capable), and finally a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot. The motherboard goes head-on against the feature-set that the MINIX comes with. This is meant to be a full-featured HTPC board. Its pricing is not known at the moment.

According to sources at server builders, AMD has notified that it would be releasing nine models of quad-core AMD Opteron 45nm processors this month. The processors would be based on the Shanghai core and mark the company's entry into the 45nm silicon fabrication for CPUs.

Out of the lineup of 20 processors that would come out, the ones slated for this month include CPUs of clock-speeds between 2.3 and 2.7 GHz, of which five of them are 2000 series (2-way) models and the rest, 8000 series (8-way) models. The processors are based on Socket F (s1207) design, and sport 6 MB level 3 caches. The sources also mentioned that in February 2009, AMD will launch five 55W energy-efficient enterprise CPUs, three 2-way and two 8-way; and two 105W high-performance models a 2-way and an 8-way each.

AMD Shanghai is the codename for a new enterprise processor the company is working on. It is a monolithic quad-core x86 processor that retains the design methodology of the K10h generation of AMD processors. It carries forward the Opteron brand. This time around, the company promises to have made numerous changes, big and small, learning from the shortfalls of the Barcelona chip. Shanghai will be the first 45nm AMD processor to make it to the market. Originally slated for Q1, 2009 its launch was pushed to Q4, 2008.

In a press event held yesterday, the company claimed that the company is all set to roll out the new chip. Initial volumes of the processor would run off existing core logic platforms by NVIDIA and Broadcom. It will retain the Socket F (aka s1207) package and support DDR2 memory. The lineup shows that most of these chips would retain the 2000 MT/s system bus, and all of them come with 6 MB of level 3 cache. A new company slide sourced by C|Net shows that the Opteron processor could embrace DDR3 memory only by 2010, with the introduction of the Magny-Corus 12-core processor architecture. Until then, the Istanbul 6-core processor the is slated for H2, 2009, could be the company's flagship product.

Performance projections for the upcoming Radeon HD 4830, made news yesterday, where it is projected to outperform the GeForce 9800 GT. Two new slides published by VR-Zone shed light on how the RV770LE graphics processor manages to do that, and there's a surprise: It was earlier known that the RV770LE comes equipped with 480 stream processors, and one of the earliest reports even suggested that it could have a narrower 192-bit memory bus. The slides published, show that the new GPU could carry as many as 640 stream processors, double that of the RV670. It comes with a proper 256-bit wide GDDR3 memory bus. Also included, is hardware support for 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA).

It is also known that the new card is gearing up for an October 21 launch and would be priced below US $150. AIBs would be able to sell custom designed cards right upon launch. While the new GPU does look "tougher" and more equipped than expected, here's something to ponder: with twice the amount of stream processors as the Radeon HD 3870, as projections suggest, is it going to be only 10% faster than the 9800 GT?

As reported earlier, AMD is preparing a scaled-down version of the RV770 graphics processor, called RV770LE. The new graphics core would go into making the Radeon HD 4830 SKU. The new graphics core was created to compete with the GeForce 8800/9800 GT, which seem to be in a comfortable market position owing to their price and price/performance. They are comfortably placed between the GeForce 9600 seties and the 8800 GTS 512M/9800 GTX/GTX+.

AMD has already started projecting the HD 4830 to outperform the the G92GT, in essence, the GeForce 9800 GT. In a slide titled "Best Graphics Card for <$150", the company puts up figures where the new card is projected 10% faster in most games tested. The only glitch, is that most of AMD's own increment projections are based around that 10% mark, which means it could be a very tight contest between the HD 4830 and 9800 GT. A prelude could be that for the 9800 GT, its CUDA and PhysX processing capabilities could bail it out, if it does fall into a tight spot, as in, if the two end up in a neck and neck contest. The new Radeon accelerator comes out sometime next month.

AMD would be releasing 45nm silicon fabricated series of the quad-core Opteron processor based on the newer Shanghai core. Like its desktop PC counterpart, the Deneb core, it features 6 MB of L3 cache along with some enterprise-specific features. They will be designed for high-uptime and energy efficiency. AMD banks heavily on the performance efficiency and virtualization capabilities of these processors. There are primarily two types of these processors based on the multi-processor capabilities: the 2000 series 2-way processors and the 8000 series 8-way processors. The former supports two-socket systems while the latter is designed for dense 2+ socket environments, where up to 8 Opteron processors could work in tandem. The processors continue to have Socket-F (s1207) interfaces, hence the entire lineup retains its DDR2 memory standard.

Interestingly, AMD did not rework the system interface for all its newer chips. Across the vast lineup of 20 models, only four support the newer HyperTransport 3.0 interface with 4400 MT/s interconnects. The rest continue to use the 2000 MT/s interconnects. It could be mid-2009 by the time AMD launches its own enterprise-segment chipsets, which could also be the time when the current leading player, NVIDIA launches its newer nForce Professional lineup for the Opteron. Since current chipsets from both NVIDIA and Broadcom feature only the older HyperTransport 2000 MT/s interfaces, it could explain why most of these chips feature it.

AMD would be releasing its first desktop processors based on the 45nm silicon fabrication process, based on the newer Deneb core. The company is said to have made several tweaks to the original K10 design and equipped the core with 300% the amount of L3 cache as its 65nm Agena parts. The only thing got us wondering was what would be its nomenclature like? Well, be surprised to know that after Phenom X4 9000 series, the company plans to continue the numbering with a 5-digit model number scheme with x1000 unit deviations between models. A rather confusing naming scheme, as suggested by the chart provided, seems to have been adopted.

It is now clear, that there will be two distinct kinds of Phenom X4 45nm chips: those which continue support for DDR2 memory on the existing AM2/AM2+ sockets, and those which are exclusive to the AM3 socket and feature support for DDR3 memory, DDR3 1333MHz at that. The processors would feature dual 64-bit memory controllers, which could be ganged for a single 128-bit wide memory interface, or un-ganged to step up multi-tasking efficiency.

IN the past few months, an interesting set of Mini-ITX motherboards made it to the market. There are two primary classes of ITX boards: embedded CPU and those with CPU sockets. VIA and Intel have boards based on their small-footprint embedded processors, while others made innovative solutions with CPU sockets. The Minix-ITX, an AM2+ socket based ITX board, took it to the next level with a motherboard that fulfills most requirements of HTPC users.

Magic Pro, a Chinese company that concentrates on Asian markets has now come up with another solution based on the AMD 780G chipset. The board, MP-NC81 comes with 128 MB of Sideport memory to assist the integrated graphics processor (IGP) that's housed in the 780G chipset. The IGP supports UVD, it accelerates H.264, VC1 and MPEG2 1080p playback. It comes with SB600 southbrige which routes to four SATA II ports with RAID support. The board features a single SO-DIMM slot to hold notebook DDR2 memory. It supports AM2+ processors with TDP of up to 95W. A striking feature however, is that the board optionally ships with a wireless ethernet riser-card, much in the same way as some high-end motherboards from ASUS do. The riser card is said to support 802.11n standard.

The AM3 socket finally gives AMD Processors access to DDR3 memory. The only complication is that processors must feature DDR3 integrated memory controllers (IMC). Earlier roadmap slides had shown that the RD890 and RS880 along with SB800 would be the first platform with AM3 compliance. However, sources tell Expreview that AMD would not be ready with the chipsets by the time AM3 processors come out. Hence, AMD would be using the existing high-end duo of 790 FX and SB750 which would be re-launched in H1 2009 that support AM3 sockets. It is known that 790 FX supports HyperTransport 3.1 links that would offer processors system interconnect bandwidths of up to 6400 MT/s.

Another chipset that has been pushed to H1 2009 is the AMD 760G, which is a mainstream chipset with integrated graphics. It was expected that this would come out sometime in Q4 2008.