As much as releasing hardware that brings in competition and products at great prices is essential for AMD, backing it up with software is equally important. Company slides that point to tentative time-scales that pertain to AMD's software releases have surfaced. Some of the important software products AMD releases are Catalyst driver suite for ATI products and OverDrive, a tool that provides features to tweak AMD processors and graphics cards, as well as several motherboard parameters for motherboards equipped with AMD chipsets.

The slides also provide a sneak-peak into what could be in store with those releases. VR-Zone has published slides, from which the first one points to release dates for the Catalyst driver suite with respect to release candidates and public releases. The second slide points to time-scales at which software with vital changes are released. We are already past August and AMD has rolled out the feature pertaining to that release, allowing Hybrid Crossfire of AMD chipsets with integrated graphics working in tandem with Radeon HD 3400 series graphics accelerators.

Later this month, AMD is expected to launch the ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics processor (GPU). Its board SKU details have surfaced. The RV710 graphics processor will make it to the grass-root of entry-level and high-definition media grpahics boards. It is based on the 55nm silicon fabrication process. The GPU has a transistor count of 242 million, it has 80 stream processors. It is engineered in a way that makes it draw less than 25W. In the form of reference designs, AMD will release two cards: a full height, passively cooled 512 MB DDR3 version, and a low-profile, 256MB fan-heatsink cooled card. Both models have core clock speeds of 600 MHz with the memory clocked at 800 MHz on a 64-bit wide memory bus. The GPU schematic shows it to have 8 texture address and 8 texture filter units. There's only one render back-end. The 512MB variant is expected to be priced at US $49~59, while the 256MB variant in the $39~49 range. These cards are expected to compete with the GeForce 9400 GT GPU.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC) professionals who require maximum performance from their workstations can turn to AMD and the powerful new ATI FirePro V8700 graphics accelerator, which provides a 40 percent performance gain1 for memory intensive applications. Additionally, the new ATI FirePro V3750 delivers superior performance in an entry class professional graphics accelerator. Delivering on the AMD commitment to the professional graphics market, these products join the ATI FirePro family of professional graphics accelerators introduced last month at Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles: ATI FirePro V5700 and ATI FirePro V3700.

AMD plans to offer two processors for the ULPC. Cost-effectiveness being the mantra, AMD plans to offer processors that provide users of ULPC with a level of performance that takes it closer to that of regular PCs and eradicate the netPC/netbook moniker as the processors offer more performance at a low cost than what the likes of Atom or Nano could. Of course this comes at the expense of much higher TDP and slightly higher price. Perhaps the performance to price ratio is what AMD is banking on.

There are two parts under the Athlon X2 banner. The 22W, 1.50 GHz dual-core 3250e processor aims to compete with the desktop variant of Atom dual core where the Athlon's architectural superiority aims to give it a leading edge. The issue of energy savings dampens when it comes to desktop. Another processor, the single-core Athlon 2650e that is available now is rated at 15W with a 1.60 GHz clock speed. It comes with 512 KB L2 cache.

The chipset division of AMD really is reminiscent of former ATI Technologies that jumped into the business of making chipsets looking at rival NVIDIA's success with nForce series. After being acquired by AMD, the chipset division started making chipsets under the AMD banner. AMD has had a good amount of success with its recent 7-series chipsets for the desktop platform. It has managed to snatch a 20% market share away from NVIDIA which even today leads in market share for platform core-logic technologies for AMD. Not only have they had a desktop line of nForce products but also an equally popular enterprise chipset for the Opteron platform in the form of nForce Professional series server and workstation core-logic.

Phenom X2 is intended to be the latest dual-core processor from AMD. It is based on the newer K10 architecture. The 65nm Kuma core is what sits inside the first to release models of the Phenom X2. Although based on K10 architecture and Kuma core, the initial batch being 65nm, AMD for some reason chooses to call it Athlon X2 saving the Phenom brand name perhaps for the 45nm batches? At least the sample Expreview got had the Athlon X2 etching on it. The chip carried the "AD6500" label and came with a 2.30 GHz clock speed.

Here's something to ponder: 6500 isn't a performance rating, it is just a model number. The Athlon 64 X2 6400+ had a 3.20 GHz clock speed. As performance evaluations will soon show, the Phenom/Athlon 6500 isn't anywhere close to the performance of the X2 6400+. However, architectural improvements meant that Kuma outperforms Brisbane (K8, 65nm) on a clock to clock basis. To ascertain this, Expreview used a Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition (Brisbane) that was underclocked to 2.30 GHz, the clock speed which AD6500 comes with. Super Pi 1M benchmark was run. While the Brisbane chip crunched it in 39.374 s, Kuma did it in 33.43 s indicating a performance increment of roughly 15%. The test-bed consisted of a NVIDIA nForce 750a SLI motherboard and GEIL 1GB DDR2-800 memory. Kuma AD6500 comes with a shared L3 cache of 2 MB apart from dedicated L2 caches of 512 KB per core. It uses a broader HyperTransport 3.0 system interface at 3600 MT/s. It supports DDR2-1066.

AMD today announced the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series, mainstream graphics offerings that deliver exceptional gaming and HD multimedia performance while consuming less power than a standard light bulb. Comprising the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and the ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series leverages the leading technology found in the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4800 series, including support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games, superior HD multimedia capabilities and industry leading performance-per-watt, all delivered at affordable prices for the mainstream graphics segment. The combined features and technologies and incredible prices makes the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series a superb all-around performer, ideal for playing the latest games or driving a high quality home theatre entertainment experience.

AMD plans to bring about a gradual transition with its desktop quad-core Phenom chips. Contradicting roadmap slides, Taiwanese industry observer DigiTimes has come up with fresh rumours that AMD could release a pair of AM2+ exclusive Deneb 45nm quad-core processors towards the end of this year. Their clock-speeds could range between 2.60 to 3.00 GHz and TDP ratings at 125W. Meanwhile AM3 designs would surface for manufacturing of both the processors and supportive motherboards that feature DDR3 memory support. It is expected that my May thru June next year, there will be enough AM3 based products in the market for AMD to stop producing any more of these "AM2+ only" Deneb chips. Earlier projections based on company slides showed the two chips coming up in January.

AMD today announced the availability of robust new virtualization solutions powered by a combination of technologies from AMD and Microsoft Corp. This new deployment model uses AMD Opteron processors with AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to deliver significant efficiencies to enterprises large and small. Mid-market companies in particular, which have traditionally been slower to implement virtualization, can take advantage of the combined AMD and Microsoft product offering to help reduce cost, complexity and energy consumption.

"AMD has taken a leading role in driving virtualization innovation into the x86 processor, helping to meet a compelling need in the commercial market for cost reduction, increased performance and energy efficiency," said Kevin Knox, vice president of Worldwide Commercial Business, AMD. "Now, through our continued partnership with Microsoft, AMD is expanding virtualization's reach and the benefits of resource consolidation to companies that might not have taken advantage of virtualization in the past."

TG Daily reports that AMD has cut the prices of its triple-core Phenom X3 processors once more. According to Pricegrabber.com, AMD has once again lowered the value of four Phenoms with 5% within the last two weeks. The Phenom X3 8450 now sells for $104 (down from $125 in July), the X3 8650 for $119 (down from $145), the X3 8750 for $129 (down from $175) as well as the new X3 8750 Black Edition with unlocked multiplier, which is priced at $134. Furthermore Advanced Micro Devices has released three more "new" X3 processors all featuring a TDP of 65W, 2MB of L3 cache and HyperTransport 3.0. First is the above 2.4GHz Phenom X3 8750 Black Edition which we already mentioned has unlocked multi and is sold as overclocking friendly processor. The other two CPUs include Phenom X3 8450e operating at 2.1GHz and Phenom X3 8250e at 1.9GHz. Last two Phenoms are yet to be officially priced.

There is a brief insight into what AMD has in store for the desktop CPU market till towards the end of this year. The good news however is that AMD's 45nm conquest flags off by the end of this year. Chile Hardware published yet another company slide from AMD. This one lists out AMD's desktop processors lined-up for release (both actual and on paper) by the end of this year.

To begin with, AMD will continue to make additions to the Athlon X2 energy-efficient dual-core processors. On October the 2nd, Athlon X2 5050e would be released in both tray and processor-in-[a]-box (PIB) stocks. This processor is rated at 45W and has a clock speed of 2.60 GHz, that's 13.0x 200 MHz. It is based on the Brisbane 65nm core. Later in November, this line would be expanded by the Athlon X2 3250e. This Brisbane-based part comes clocked at 1.50 GHz and a rated TDP of an incredibly low 22W. There's also a single-core part based on the Lima core, the Athlon 2650e, an energy efficient single core rated at 15W with a clock speed of 1.60 GHz.

DigiTimes made today the early announcement of two low-power AMD desktop processors that are to appear sometime in November. The Athlon 2650E and Athlon X2 3250E will both be part of the company's UVC (Ultra-Value Client) product line targeting OEMs. The single core 2650E CPU will have a core frequency of 1.6GHz and TDP of 15W, while the dual-core Athlon X2 3250e will have a core frequency of 1.5GHz and TDP of 22W. The two CPUs will be fabbed on a 65nm process and will initially be provided to OEM customers only. Manufacturers like ASUSTeK Computer, Acer and Shuttle, are expected to show up machines powered by the two processors in December. In additional news, AMD is also planning to launch a triple-core Phenom X3 8850 CPU using a 65nm process in early October. The CPU will feature a core frequency of 2.5GHz and a maximum TDP of 95W. The company will also launch a new Black Edition CPU in December.

Within this month, AMD will release a FireStream GPGPU card based on the successful RV770 graphics processor. This card provides computing parallelism derived from 800 stream processors, that churn out a peak collective computational power of 1000 GFlops. That's a 100% improvement over the FireStream 9170 in terms of computational power and a 60% improvement in terms of GFlops per Watt. That said, the power draw of this card has gone up to 150W compared to its 100W predecessor. This card is the fastest in the industry in terms of double-precision floating point performance. It packs 1 GB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit wide memory bus.

FireStream series of cards to catered towards delivering blistering performance of AMD's GPUs to business users in high performance computing situations such as financial analysis, seismic processing, simulations, rendering, climate research, protein folding etc. Apparently the card retains the display logic with a single DVI connector though normally GPGPU devices lack it. This card will be out within this month and will carry a price-tag of US $999.

Without doubt, AMD needs something revolutionary to pull it out of the mess it set itself in. AMD's first reaction to the Conroe onslaught was to lower prices and build up a "Smarter Choice" repute, though with successive price cuts from Intel and down-scale products based on the Core architecture coming out by the fortnight, and the transit to 45nm fab process, there's been an increasing need for AMD to get back to the drawing boards with their CPU division.

From what looks like an excerpt from an AMD company slide, can be seen AMD's CPU plans for 2009. The chart broadly shows that K10 architecture is here to stay. Throughout the year, desktop CPUs based on the K10 architecture feature in the roadmap, with no signs of their "truly next-gen" architecture. AMD completes its transit to the 45nm silicon fabrication process and will finally embrace DDR3 system memory standards. To begin with, the fact that the Deneb core's entry slightly steps into the 2008 column shows that the Deneb core-based desktop CPU could release sometime towards the very end of this year. Sources note that two models based on the Deneb core could be out by the end of this year. It supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory standards and socket compatible with current AM2+ and future AM3. From what's known so far, AM3 is the same 940 pin design that adds pins for the DDR3 memory interconnect between the CPU and the memory.

AMD has added weight to its CPU lineup by bringing in new CPUs and cutting prices for some older ones. New CPUs aside, the price cuts by AMD are rather dramatic to say the least. To begin with, it's known that the Phenom X4 9950 has a rated TDP of 140W, and that only a chosen few motherboards support it, perhaps leading to cold market response. AMD has revised the processor with a lower rated TDP of 125W. This isn't new, AMD did the same with the 125W B3 stepping model X4 9750 months ago, releasing a revised 95W B3 part. What's more, the Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition could sport a surprising price of US $186. Perhaps it's AMD paving the way for its 45nm parts. At its new TDP and price the X4 9950 is a much better buy.

The Phenom X3 8750 would sell for $139, making it very competitive with Intel's offerings at that price-band. Additionally, AMD added new dual-core processors based on the Brisbane core, the Athlon X2 6500 Black Edition priced at $105 and an Athlon X2 5050e 45W low-power part at $90.

AMD Fusion could well be the first CPU to feature a graphics processor core. It will incorporate a graphics processor with specifications identical to the RV710. This CPU would be based on the 45 nm silicon fabrication process, and this processor will be manufactured at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). This GPU will be called "Kong". Here are its specifications:

• Core Frequency between 600 ~ 800 MHz
• 128-bit wide memory bus (DDR3, Side-port supportive)
• 40 Stream Processors
• 8 TMUs, 4 ROPs
• DirectX 10.1 support
• UVD

AMD released the ATI Catalyst version 8.8 drivers. This driver brings in two new features among a host of bug-fixes specific to games, performance increments as such aren't indicated.

The driver suite can be downloaded here.

The two new features include new Avivo video features such as Dynamic Gamma/Contrast correction and improved video presets for ATI accelerators, Radeon HD 3000 series and upward. Another feature addition is that of the Hybrid Graphics feature being available to users of Windows XP. This technology allows pairing of the integrated graphics processor (IGP) of the AMD 780G and 780D chipsets with a Radeon HD 2400 or Radeon HD 3400 series accelerator. For a comprehensive list of fixes, please read the Release Notes.

XpertVision is Palit's European VGA graphics cards brand. Only recently they released an announcement that the brands will merge again to become "Palit Microsystems Ltd.".

At the show we saw several new ATI based cards from Palit. Since their booth is located in the AMD hall, no NVIDIA cards were on display.First up is the new Palit HD 4870 which does not use the AMD reference design. The cooler is equipped with two fans and is much quieter than the normal cards. The HD 4870 Sonic Dual features DisplayPort and a Turbo switch which allows you to change the clock frequencies on the fly. When in "Turbo" mode, the card runs at 775/1000 and 750/950 in "Normal" mode. Even in normal mode this is still an overclock over the AMD reference clocks.

IBM and its chip development partners announced today that they've developed the first functional 22nm silicon fabricated SRAM cell. This puts them ahead of Intel, which had announced its technological entry into the 32 nm domain in September, 2007. SRAM is usually the first semiconductor device a chip-maker tests a new fabrication-process on, before working on microprocessors. These devices were developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). They were built in the conventional 6-transistor design and on a 300 mm wafer. This level of miniaturization made the SRAM cell shrink to a mere 0.1 sq. μm, compare this to the SRAM cells that go into making caches on the 45 nm Intel processors, 0.346 sq. μm.

The HyperTransport Consortium released an updated specification, HT 3.1, that increases the base clock speed of the HyperTransport bus from its previous version 3.0 limit of 2600 MHz (5200 MT/s) to 3200 MHz (6400 MT/s). The upcoming 45nm processors will be given a host of architectural updates, one of them being a revised HT 3.1 system bus. Since AMD processors use a 32-bit wide HyperTransport link to the core logic, the aggregate bandwidth of the system but would be raised to 51.6 GB/s (25.8 GB/s in each direction).

This 10 GB/s increment is supposed to favour the upcoming AMD Fusion processors, where a graphics processor would be embedded into the CPU. That could also mean that the CPU could carry PCI-Express switches, effectively eradicating the northbridge. This would mean performance gains with the CPU communicating with PCI-E devices directly instead of through a northbridge-based PCI-E switch, much in the same way as integration of memory controllers five years ago helped AMD processors. It is expected that motherboard vendors have no problems implementing HT 3.1, the AMD 790GX and 790FX chipsets offer native support to HT 3.1 with 45 nm CPUs.

While AMD touted the Bobcat as a definitive competitor to Intel Atom, being a low-power K8 based part with the same design advantages its ancestors had over competing Intel parts when they made up for higher performing alternatives, this part won't make it until next year, enough time for the Atom to gain a stronger foothold in the market. As immediate competition to the Atom, AMD seems to have set an Athlon 64 2000+ single core processor as its ULPC / UMPC processor part. This processor is single core, features a 1.00 GHz clock-speed and 256 KB of L2 cache, which should still give it a performance edge over a 1.50 GHz Atom judging purely by the fact that the Atom isn't based on the Core micro-architecture (yet) and uses an older design.

This processor is based on the Lima core, what's most surprising is that it is found to operate at 8 W at its 1.00 GHz frequency which brings it into the Atom platform's energy domain. The second most surprising point is that this processor will be aided by the powerful AMD 780G core logic (chipset), as opposed to current Atom platforms using a i945G adaptation that has significantly higher thermal envelope as opposed the AMD 780G while being a lot slower (in terms of graphics performance and features). Tom's Hardware conducted a comparison between the two and found that the Athlon-780G combo "knocks-out" Atom-i945G technologically.

It's been a few weeks since Intel launched its latest chipset with integrated graphics, the Intel G45. Among other things, Intel claimed this chipset accelerated HD video formats such as Blu-ray, where the integrated graphics logic is supposed to off-load the CPU of processing the video. Such as it is, Intel's integrated graphics processors (IGP) have been hugely reliant on the CPU for its functions.

Aaron Brezenski, a product engineer for Intel at its Chandler, Arizona US facility. In his recent blog entry (read here), he writes about the G45 not exactly achieving what it set out for, in other words, it was "still imperfect". He mentions about AMD hosting a demo booth where it was publicly demonstrated that a G45 based notebook made by HP failed to accelerate Blu-ray playback, the processor tipped 100% load throughout the playback which isn't what G45 is intended to bring about.

AMD seems to have decided that it won't face any more flack in the computing industry owing to the lack of success the Barcelona / Agena (K10) architecture had compared to a determined Intel that seems to be going for the kill with a string of products lined up, Intel in fact has looked forward four years in time based on its IDF slides. On the eve of IDF, AMD executives said the company's 45-nanometer Shanghai processor will enter the market by the fourth quarter of 2008. The AMD processor is designed to compete against the Intel Nehalem processor, especially in the volume two-socket server market.

AMD Shanghai is touted to be the server/enterprise version of the upcoming Deneb series 45nm quad-core processors. Unlike the Deneb that retains the 940-pin AM2/AM2+/possible AM3 socket, Shanghai would use the enterprise segment Socket 1207, there already are server boards with four sockets in the market, AMD plans to use this as something to flash before Intel, as for server applications, cost-effective Shanghai parts used in four-CPU configurations should provide high levels of computational power.

AMD is launching today a bunch of new "business class" 64-bit processors. The four new Phenom and Athlon CPUs are:

• AMD Phenom X4 9750B 2.4GHz, 2MB L3 cache, 95W, rev. B3
• AMD Phenom X3 8750B 2.4GHz, 2MB L3 cache, 95W, rev. B3
• AMD Athlon X2 5600B 2.9GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 65W
• AMD Athlon X2 4850B 2.5GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 45W

The official prices in 1000-unit tray quantities are $224, $180, $106 and $79 respectively.

Following the release of the R700 Spartan, the most powerful graphics card till date, AMD has noted that the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series products has boosted the company's market share in the discrete graphics industry from 30% to 40%. This has triggered optimism with the company, it expects to achieve the 50% mark against rival NVIDIA corporation, and that's as soon as late 2008, continuing the introduction of its products, surpass NVIDIA in 2009.

AMD also noted that it expects its discrete graphics card to IGP ratio in notebook shipments will be 35:65 in 2009. Meaning there will be growth in the sales of notebooks with discrete graphics in general against integrated graphics. NVIDIA rubbished AMD's comments saying it has the performance lead with its GeForce 200-series graphics products, while AMD claimed its Radeon HD 4800-series were clearly the more advanced lot.