AMD readies Bulldozers to ship next month The hybrid CPU-GPU chips for mobile PCs gave Advanced Micro Devices some breathing room in the second quarter, but it's going to take continued ramping of these APU processors and an upswing in Opteron server sales to get the company back to the profit levels it should be enjoying during a retooling phase in the IT market – and …
...rosy? Well good enough to survive a bit longer and provide some Intel competition until ARM begins to hit desktops.
Bulldozer will be interesting - most of the performance (25%) comes from the move from 12 to 16 "cores" but there is still a performance bump.
Fantastic news that Hurd turned down the CEO role - he'll have to find some other company to ruin.
It depends on the use case of course, but they're no slouch. It's good to see competition in the field, so I hope the people who need 'em buy 'em. Otherwise the price for the Intel chips goes through the roof and we have no choice to follow Intel's direction for the market - like when they wanted to push Itanium (and Rambus RAM before that) and we only escaped that dire fate because AMD pulled our fat out of the fire.
How do you account for your graphics division with so many many cores are being sold on-die?
The Fusion design eliminates the mid price point market, so looking forward the 18 month old tech that most of us purchase will probably not be needed due to on-die Fusion tech. Or why buy GTX when a Radeon card will work so nicely with the Fusion on-die Radeon core.
When does the Radeon 6990 show up on die?
I expect though that the Graphics Division will start making heaps when it starts supplying Nintendo, Xbox and Sony Playstation with graphics cores. That is 50 million units at least for the various consoles. Nintendo evidently is a done deal, Xbox was announced by AMD perhaps prematurely. When do consoles start using desktop cpu's to stay competitive? Since we all know Intel can;t design GPU's and nVidia is strangely absent from the console wars, it looks like AMD will gain huge!
"When do consoles start using desktop cpu's to stay competitive?"
Er... consoles are right now using big iron CPUs, e.g. the PS3's Cell CPU, which has been used to build several supercomputing clusters. Granted, it seems Sony wants to get out of the supercomputing sector (as of the latest PS3 software updates).
Fact is, the CPUs used in today's gaming consoles' CPUs are often a level above what you can get off the shelf in a PC, or even in many workstations.
Concerning the graphics units, nVidia's absence from the console bids might be an indication that that particular market is not very profitable -- just a thought and I may be wrong. The dedicated graphics unit will certainly stay in existence in the professional level for quite a while. That's strictly high-end stuff, though.
In the short term, I guess the low- and mid-end graphics markets are going to be made redundant by the on-going trend of combining general processing and graphics processing units into a single chip; at the performance levels possible these days, I am seriously expecting to see entry-level gaming PCs without any separate graphics chips on the shelves this year, if they haven't already materialised while I was not looking.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
