AMD has released its fourth quarter 2010 financial results and they're nice numbers to end a year on. The company's revenue of $1.65B was up two percent quarter-on-quarter and flat compared to 2009. Despite the sales plateau, AMD's position has substantially improved over the past 12 months;...Read more...
With Dirk Meyer out the door and AMD publicly hunting for its new CEO there's a great deal of speculation as to who AMD might want sitting in the center seat. The board's options may be more limited than it likes; several analysts have raised questions as to the BoD's credibility in the wake...Read more...
At yesterday's Common Platform technology day, IBM and the other members of the Common Platform Initiative made a major announcement. While plans to use gate-first technology at the 32nm/28nm node remain unchanged, the coalition will move...Read more...
We've heard plenty from tablet and smartphone manufacturers at CES about their upcoming 2011 products. Apple has remained nearly silent about its own plans, but Taiwanese sources have surreptitiously reported that the next-generation iPhone 5 will pose a threat to the best-laid plans of...Read more...
It's been two days since AMD's Board of Directors announced it was firing then-CEO Dirk Meyer and new information on the board's reasoning has begun to appear. As we suspected, it was Meyer's decision not to focus on a new ultra-mobile processor that incurred the board's wrath. The particular...Read more...
Sony's attempts to prevent piracy on both the PS3 and PSP have taken a number of blows in recent weeks. Today, the company announced that it intends to sue the PS3 hacker GeoHot, who's been an increasingly large thorn in the company's side over the past 18 months. When Sony released the 3.21...Read more...
This afternoon, AMD announced that its current CEO, Dirk Meyer, would be resigning immediately. Dirk, who took the helm of AMD on July 18, 2008, has guided the company through the difficult 18 months since. As AMD's Board of Directors notes, "Dirk became CEO during difficult times. He...Read more...
Intel and Nvidia announced today that they've resolved their legal problems thanks to a new, six-year cross-licensing agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Intel will pay Nvidia $1.5 billion dollars in five annual installments beginning on January 18. As part of the agreement, the two...Read more...
Microsoft's Surface has been an interesting technology platform ever since the company launched it back in 2007. The original Surface was built around a 30" LCD, ran at a resolution of 1024x768, could respond to up to 52 touches simultaneously, and was based on a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo...Read more...
Microsoft's demonstration of Windows 8 running on ARM processors may have been one of the major events of CES, but the OS's 2012/2013 release date has been criticized as a day late and a dollar short. One of the tidbits that slipped out of CES is that IT analysts aren't the only ones...Read more...
Intel's Sandy Bridge made headlines this week for its improved efficiency, reduced power consumption, and much-improved graphics engine, but there's another important feature that's not yet gotten the same degree of press. One of the new technologies incorporated into Sandy Bridge, Intel...Read more...
Nvidia launched its next-generation of mobile GPUs today at CES, the 500M series, with the pointed lead-in that it expects these products to ship hand-in-hand with Sandy Bridge-equipped notebooks. The 500M series doesn't add any additional...Read more...
VIA Technologies formally announced that its new dual-core, 40nm Nano X2 processors have been released. At present, processors are available to motherboards and OEMs, with systems available in Q1 of 2011. VIA will most likely have at least...Read more...
At CES today, AMD will both launch its first Fusion Application Processors (APUs) and discuss the new platform's design wins. According to the CPU manufacturers press release, desktop, notebook, and netbook systems should be available now, with tablets and embedded options launching before the...Read more...
Tablets and mobile devices are central to Microsoft's plans for CES 2011. In addition to its demo of an early Windows 8 build running on ARM CPUs, the software giant will be demonstrating a number of tablets running Windows 7. If this sounds familiar it's because Microsoft did much the same...Read more...
One of the big announcements at CES this year will be from Microsoft; the company plans to announce (and possibly demonstrate) a consumer-centric version of Windows running on ARM processors. The company's decision is a powerful endorsement. Other Microsoft products like Windows Embedded...Read more...
If you haven't finished your Christmas shopping or need a few virtual stocking stuffers, Steam's massive holiday sale may contain exactly what you're looking for. There are a number of excellent titles offered at anywhere from 30-70 percent off, including recent games. Have you ever gotten so...Read more...
About a month ago, we ran a story on how Walgreens was selling the Maylong M-150 tablet for $99, $30 below the regular price. While the M-150 is an obvious iPad knock-off that would never pass muster in the US, we were curious to see what sort of product $99 could buy. This is the M-150's default program layout. The display is decent for a...Read more...
2010 wasn't Tegra's banner year the way we thought it might be after seeing the Tegra 250 platform demo'd at last year's CES. There are signs, however, that 2011 may turn out differently. According to DigiTimes, multiple PC OEMs are warming up to Tegra after watching consumers ardently embrace...Read more...
PS3 gamers have been less than happy about Gran Turismo 5's load times since the long-awaited game launched a few weeks ago. Beyond3D forum member Phil was fed up enough to install a Corsair F120SSD in place of the system's traditional SATA hard drive and the performance difference is significant. We've graphed the data from Phil's load time...Read more...
Last week, Futuremark released the latest version of 3DMark. We've taken the new benchmark for a spin using CPUs from Intel and AMD as well as GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA. The new version, dubbed 3DMark 11 (in reference to its level of DirectX support, not the upcoming year) includes a...Read more...
In the thirty-plus years since the first personal computers hit the market system capabilities have increased by multiple orders of magnitude. The ways in which end-users access these capabilities, on the other hand, has scarcely changed at all. The last major innovation was the mouse, first...Read more...