Llano has once again surfaced from the murky deaths to make headlines in the tech world. The last time we talked about AMD’s Llano Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), AMD investors filed a lawsuit against the company regarding its hyping up the product’s 2011 launch.
“[AMD] repeatedly highlighted the strong and...Read more...
Update: Sharp-eyed reader Justin Jaynes has pointed out that the Llano lawsuit against AMD has been filed by lawyers hoping to convince investors to jump onboard, not by AMD itself. We've updated the story accordingly. There's two pieces of news on the AMD front as the company prepares to announce earnings this...Read more...
Numbers from Jon Peddie Research on the current state of the graphics market point to Nvidia as the big winner of Q3 2012, against both Intel and AMD. Intel's share of desktop and notebook sales both dropped roughly 8%, while AMD took a much smaller hit in desktops (2%) and a far greater hit in notebooks, sliding a whopping 17%. For Sunnyvale,...Read more...
Earlier today, Vijay Rakesh, an analyst with Sterne Agee, cut his rating on AMD to Neutral from Buy, based on suggestions that PC manufacturers were being generally cautious about sales over the next couple of quarters. Rakesh notes that Trinity is tracking far more design wins than Llano did at this point last year...Read more...
Inside sources have leaked information to the press claiming that the CPU in the next-generation PS4 (codenamed Orbis) is an AMD Llano A8-3850. The chip will supposedly be paired with an AMD Radeon 7670 GPU with 1GB of integrated VRAM. With all due respect to IGN, this is the sort of report that deserves a...Read more...
A few of you might already be familiar with AMD's A4-3420 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), a part that OEMs have had access to for several months now. According to reports, AMD plans to make the chip available to retail sometime in the second quarter, giving budget buyers another compelling low cost Llano chip to choose from. In case you...Read more...
When AMD held its Analyst Day a few weeks ago, the company focused on how it was fundamentally changing its approach to semiconductor research and product development. Years of attempting to compete with Intel drained company coffers and exposed it to tremendous competitive pressure. Consumers unquestionably profited...Read more...
AMD apparently isn't finished attaching its Athlon II moniker to Llano parts, as evidenced by a couple of new Athlon II X4 processors the chip maker quietly introduced this week. Specifically, AMD added the Athlon II X4 638 and 641 to its official product price list. Both of these are based on AMD's Llano architecture and ship without an integrated...Read more...
AMD announced its fourth quarter and 2011 results yesterday. The figures aren't bad in and of themselves, but the company's overall position headed into 2012 is decidedly uncertain. Yearly revenue was flat at $6.57B, with total net income for fiscal 2011 at $495M, up four percent from 2010. "AMD shipped more than 30 million APUs in 2011, resulting...Read more...
The original A-Series APU line-up didn’t feature any enthusiast-targeted products, but AMD quickly reacted to the A-Series’ mostly favorable reception with a new flagship, dubbed the A8-3870K Black Edition, which we’ll be showing you here today. In its default configuration, the A8-3870K is a slight upgrade from the A8-3850,...Read more...
When AMD initially released their Llano-based A-Series APUs, the company targeted cost-conscious consumers looking for highly-integrated, easy to assemble solutions for an entry-level or mid-range PCs. At the time of launch, the flagship model in the A-Series line-up was the A8-3850, which featured quad CPU cores paired to a DirectX-11 Radeon...Read more...
There are different levels of overclocking. On the bottom end, a person might choose to crank things up a few MHz for a modest performance boost without really taxing their cooling setup or complimentary components. A few levels up you have the folks who invest in high end cooling and cherry components to handle...Read more...
Rumor has it that we'll see the first chips based on AMD's upcoming Trinity APU before too long, but the company isn't done with Llano quite yet. There's a fresh set of desktop and notebook chips based on the first-generation APU, though most of the changes are fairly minor. The big news in desktops is the introduction of new K-series parts...Read more...
As hard as it might be to believe, Apple came within inches of revamping its MacBook Air line with AMD's Llano platform. In fact, it was all set to go into production, but was abruptly cancelled last spring mainly because Apple lacked confidence in AMD's ability to supply enough parts. Intel, as it turns out, was Plan...Read more...
AMD's initial layoff announcement yesterday implied that the dismissals would occur across the company's global sales force. While that may still be true, it has become clear that AMD has slashed its PR and marketing departments in particular. The New Product Review Program* (NPRP) has lost most of its staff and Director of Product Planning,...Read more...
AMD's John Freuhe posted a blog entry yesterday detailing the company's first efforts to deploy Fusion-style APUs in a server environment. Penguin Computing has built and installed a cluster of 104 Infiniband-linked servers, each powered by a Llano A8-3850 processor. The company claims that the single-socket, 2U...Read more...
This week has been a good news / bad news for Sunnyvale--but the bad, at least, was somewhat expected. The company gave notice today that its third quarter revenue would be lower than expected, with estimated quarterly income up 4-6 percent from Q2 levels. That's significantly less than AMD's original projection of...Read more...
AMD and Intel are both preparing to launch new CPU architectures between now and the end of the year, but rumors have surfaced that suggest the two companies may delay their product introductions, albeit for different reasons. Taiwanese site DigiTimes refers to various unnamed "PC Players" who have apparently reported...Read more...
AMD has just announced availability of the new AMD A6-3500 APU for desktop systems, bolstering its current line-up of Llano-based Accelerated Processing Units with a more affordable model targeted at budget conscious, mainstream system builders. Unlike the first A8 and A6 APUs to hit the scene, which sport four execution cores, the...Read more...
Earlier this year, Intel unveiled its plan to redefine the concept of a PC around an ultra thin-and-light chassis reminiscent of the Macbook Air and with a standard CPU TDP of just 15W. OEM reactions to the CPU giant's attempt to reinvent the personal computer have been mixed. For all the platform's theoretical...Read more...
A few weeks back, AMD officially launched their Llano-based A-Series Accelerated Processing Units, or APUs, in both desktop and mobile flavors. If you’re unfamiliar with Llano, it’s AMD’s mainstream, low-power APU that fuses four x86 cores with a DX11-class graphics processor on a single piece of silicon. The current flagship...Read more...
A few weeks back, AMD officially launched their Llano-based A-Series Accelerated Processing Units, or APUs, in both desktop and mobile flavors. At the time, we covered the high-end variants of both A-Series offerings; our coverage of the desktop version A8-3850 APU and its companion chipsets is posted here and the mobile...Read more...