Items tagged with K8
After more than six months of high-to-mid profile executive departures, AMD has major news to announce on its new executive hire -- and he's a welcome addition. Starting today, Jim Keller will serve as a vice president and the company's Chief Architect for CPU Cores. Keller has spent more than thirty years in the semiconductor business, including a few at AMD. When AMD brought members of DEC's Alpha team aboard in the late 1990s, Keller was one of the CPU architects that came along. Having worked on Alpha's EV5, Jim was lead architect on the first K8 project (the first iteration of K8 was eventually canceled and Fred Weber became lead architect on the design that came to market). Keller moved...
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Enthusiasts and professionals alike have long been curious about Bulldozer's performance. It's been hard to predict how the CPU will perform compared to Intel's Nehalem and Sandy Bridge; Bulldozer's unique shared execution units are a considerable departure from anything else on the market. Leaked benchmarks courtesy of openbenchmarking.org have shed some light on what we might see when the processor launches. David Kanter of Real World Technologies has compared the Bulldozer results against Magny-Cours performance, but warns that it's unwise to draw conclusions based on engineering samples. There's a dearth of information regarding which compiler options were selected or if AVX was enabled....
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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 successfully stabilized AMD while simultaneously concluding strategic initiatives including the launch of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the successful settlement of our litigation with Intel and delivering Fusion APUs to the market." What makes this situation unusual are all the things AMD doesn't say. The press release neither gives reason for Meyer's departure nor explains why Dirk is being ousted immediately after launching...
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To say that the AMD K10 has suffered delays is an understatement. Many in the industry were honestly expecting this holiday season to feature a heavyweight CPU bout for the ages, but sadly it looks like we'll have to wait just a little bit longer.While the entire world is getting ready for that bout, it seems that AMD has decided to transition many of their existing K8 CPUs over to the 65 nm manufacturing process.“The AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ will be the first to jump on the new 65nm K8 bandwagon with a 65W TDP. The previous Windsor-based chip of the same featured an 89-Watt TDP. AMD will also add 100 MHz to the core frequency of the Athlon 64 X2 5600+, now rated at 2.9 GHz. Total L2 cache...
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The gang over at CRN have managed to sit-down with AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz for an in-depth interview. Although the interview mainly focuses upon the economic status of the company, there are some interesting tidbits of information regarding AMD's upcoming K8L core and how AMD plans to roll out the technology. AMD's "Barcelona" core will be a native quad-core solution that many are expecting to give Intel's popular Core 2 Duo architecture some serious competition. Unfortunately, it sounds as though AMD will be unable to get the K8L core out to the masses and will be forced to have it trickle-out over time. Hopefully, AMD can find a way to get the new architecture...
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If you don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend updating your new rig with one of AMD's socket AM2 CPUs, Thermalright is doing its best to keep your old AMD K8 CPUs running cool with their Thermalright SLK-948U until upgrading your processor isn't life threatening to you're wallet. "The Thermalright SLK-948U is an oldie but a goodie. This 635 gram chunk of copper is still a relevant heatsink however, resembling something akin to a metallic Toblerone with copper fins. It's this design which keeps the SLK-948U alive and kicking, and as you'll see in a moment more than capable for any K8 processor. The heatsink ships in a very plain cardboard box with a small...
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AS PCstats.com reports, $75 can certainly buy a decent Socket AM2 motherboard. Though Nvidia's nForce 590 SLI has more features, VIA's K8T890 is able to keep up performance wise, which makes it a viable gaming solution. "In this review of the ASrock AM2V890-VSTA motherboard we'll be looking at how the VIA K8T890 handles itself around the socket AM2 Athlon64 FX-62 processor. The ASRock AM2V890-VSTA Socket AM2 motherboard is the first motherboard to cross PCSTATS' test bench based on the VIA K8T890 chipset. This compact ATX motherboard has four 240 pin DDR2 memory slots which accommodate up to 8GB of DDR-2 memory. The AM2V890-VSTA...
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Digitimes reports that their industry sources have indicated that consumers will not see AMD's upcoming K8L CPU's until 2008. Equipped with memory controllers for both DDR2 and DDR3, the K8L CPU's will be supported on both Socket AM2 and Socket AM3 platforms. With Intel's Core 2 Duo (Conroe) processor about to launch, it appears as though AMD will be fighting for market share using pricing and the enthusiast-aimed 4x4 platform. Time will tell whether AMD will be able to fend off Intel's latest efforts to recapture the performance crown in gaming or if the company will be counting down the days until 2008. "In addition to the Athlon 64 X2, the production of AMD dual-core Athlon...
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It's a shame, really. After nearly one year on the market, Socket-939 Athlon64 motherboards are finally getting to a point where we've always wished they would be. Feature packed, refined, tweakable, and quiet. Why is this a shame? Well, as AMD is transitioning to their new Socket-AM2 interface, interest in Socket-939 platforms will undoubtedly dwindle away. However, there is a huge install base of Socket-939 users on the market already, and new Socket-939 processor sales will likely continue throughout 2006. So, while Socket-AM2 may be getting all the press lately, it's still Socket-939 that's the workhorse, powering the vast majority of AMD desktop and gaming systems...
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We spent some time in conference with AMD during their analyst call last week and for sure they are working real hard to keep Intel at bay, providing further innovation and continuing engineering on their existing platforms. RealWorld Tech has a perspective as well, with respect to what AMD is conjuring for their roadmap efforts. AMD's spring analyst day presented a lot of news on future plans, products and focus areas at the company. The most interesting part was a nice preview of the next generation K8 microprocessor. The K8L, as it has been dubbed, is a strong incremental improvement over the 65nm shrink of the K8. There will be several changes to the microarchitecture, most...
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Anandtech has just posted a article which compares Intel's Core architecture against AMD's K8 architecture. With Intel's new design just now showing up and AMD's having been sold for the last few years, it seems logical to assume that Intel should win this round and AMD will have to wait for the release of their next architecture to redeem themselves. However, don't go counting the K8 architecture quite yet as there are a few tricks up AMD's sleeve should they wish to keep the performance crown a bit longer. Compared to the excellent AMD K8/Hammer architecture, the Core CPU is simply a wider, more efficient and more out of order CPU. When I suggested to Jack Doweck that...
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Our friends at the Tech Report have just posted a review of MSI's latest socket 939 motherboard, the K8N Diamond Plus. This board is based on NVIDIA's nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset, and sports some unique features like a third PCI Express slot for graphics and integrated Audigy audio. If you're in the market for a high-end Athlon mobo, you'll want to check this one out. "SEEMINGLY CONTENT TO MAKE DO with the original nForce4 SLI, motherboard manufacturers have been slow to adopt NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI X16 chipset. For months, Asus' A8N32-SLI was the only Socket 939 motherboard capable of feeding 16 lanes of PCI Express to each of a pair...
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While the majority of our coverage here at HotHardware.com tends to favor enthusiast class products, the fact of the matter is affordable mainstream products are far more prevalent in the marketplace. Flagship video cards and overclockable motherboards are certainly nice, but there is a much larger market for highly integrated motherboards with a multitude of common features already on-board. With that in mind, we present to you the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS. Foxconn's WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS motherboard uses NVIDIA's relatively new GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 chipset with integrated graphics. Although the GeForce 6150 IGP isn't a pixel-processing powerhouse in comparison to most discreet graphics...
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Hey folks! The reviews are in for ATI's latest addition to the All In Wonder series, and VIA's latest chipset which features DualGFX Express. Enjoy! ATI All In Wonder Radeon X1800XL: Motherboards.org Viperlair Bjorn3D FiringSquad DriverHeaven X-Bit labs VIA K8T900: PC Perspective The Tech Report Legion Hardware ...
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