Items tagged with Piledriver
The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that the chip won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. This was always surprising, but AMD adamantly stuck to the published roadmap and the Q4 2013 availability. Or at least, they did. What the company is saying now, in the wake of a rather confused DigiTimes story (more on that in a moment) is that while Kaveri will ship to customers (read: OEMs) in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. Whether...
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AMD is stepping up its efforts on the CPU front by announcing two new FX-series chips, the FX-9590 and FX-9370. The company claims that the FX-9590 is the world’s first commercially available processor clocked at 5GHz (Max Turbo), and the FX-9370 isn’t far behind at 4.7GHz(Max Turbo). Based on the Piledriver architecture, the 8-core processors are unlocked so gamers can push the already-high CPU clock even further. They also feature AMD Turbo Core 3.0, which is designed to optimize performance across all of the CPU’s cores. MAINGEAR SHIFT with AMD's New 5GHz CPU AMD isn’t offering up too many additional details on the FX-9590 and FX-9370, although of course they’re...
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AMD announced a pair of new FX-series processors, the AMD FX-4350 and AMD FX-6350, which will serve to add a couple of new SKUs to the Piledriver/Vishera mix. Previously, AMD’s latest crop of high-end desktop chips consisted of the 8-core FX-8350 and FX-8320, the 6-core FX-6300, and the 4-core FX-4300. The FX-4350 (four cores, 4.3GHz Max Turbo) purports to offer a 10% performance increase over the previous generation and features 12MB of L2 and L3 cache and a 125W thermal envelope. The FX-6350 (six cores, 4.2GHz Max Turbo) has 14MB of L2 and L3 cache. Both are unlocked to give overclockers a little something to work with beyond their high stock CPU clocks, and both are compatible with AM3+....
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There have been a number of spec leaks around the PS4 and Xbox 720 in the last few days, including updated information on what the latest dev kits from Sony contain. We'll cover these first, courtesy of Kotaku and then offer our own analysis, HotHardware style. According to Kotaku, the latest dev kits for Sony's PS4 contain: 8GB of video RAM 2.2GB of GPU memory 4x "Dual-Core Bulldozers" (this is nonsensical as written but presumably refers to BD's "dual-module" design) GPU: AMD R10xx (aka GCN, aka the Radeon HD 7000 family) EuroGamer, meanwhile, says that the new device is built around an eight-core "Jaguar" CPU married to a cutdown variant of the 7970M. That makes sense as far as floating point...
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AMD's fourth quarter results for 2012 are in, and they're as bad as everyone has been expecting. The only good news is that since everyone has been expecting it, the company's stock shouldn't take too hard a hammering. Total revenue for the year was $5.42B, down 17.5% year-on-year. Gross margins fell from 45% to 23% thanks to a much higher cost of sales. AMD ended 2012 with a $1.1B net loss, compared to a $486M income in 2011. Computing Solutions (CPU sales) revenue fell to $4B for the year, down from $5B in 2011. Graphics revenue was down 10% year-on-year, to $1.41B in sales, as opposed to $1.565B for 2011. There are a few glimmers of positive news. Computing solutions revenue was down sharply,...
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AMD's new Piledriver-based Opterons are launching today, completing a product refresh that the company began last spring with its Trinity APUs. The new 12 & 16-core Piledriver parts are debuting as the Opteron 6300 series. Originally, AMD had planned to add still more cores with this refresh and had anticipated a line of 10 and 20-core products. The company scrapped this plan last year, stating instead that Piledriver was enough of an improvement that they saw no need to widen existing parts still further. Now that the next generation of Opteron CPUs is here, what can we expect? In SPECjbb2005, at least, significant performance gains. This graph isn't as informative as we'd like; SPECpower_ssj2008...
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Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver was already on-deck and that it would offer IPC and power improvements over existing architectures, which would result in roughly a 10% to 15% uplift in performance. We have already shown you what Piledriver could do in mainstream APUs in our coverage of the desktop AMD A10 and A8-Series of products here and the mobile A10-4600M here, but today AMD is finally...
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Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver was already on-deck and that it would offer IPC and power improvements over existing architectures, which would result in roughly a 10% to 15% uplift in performance. We have already shown you what Piledriver could do in mainstream APUs in our coverage of the desktop AMD A10 and A8-Series of products here and the mobile A10-4600M here, but today AMD is finally refreshing...
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AMD’s Bulldozer chips were, to put it bluntly, a disappointment, but the company is hoping that its upcoming Piledriver, the second generation of the Bulldozer processors, will deliver on their promised performance even as the third generation of the chips (Steamroller) looms on the horizon. In advance of the official global release, shopblt.com has preorders and pricing available. The lowest-end CPU in the family, the FX 4300 QC (3.8GHz) will cost just $131.62, while the top-end FX 8350 8C (clocked at a whopping 4GHz) will be $253.06. The middle two chips, the FX 8320 8C (3.5GHz) and FX 6300 6C (3.5GHz) will cost $242.05 and $175.77, respectively. The new processors will be available soon,...
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Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) starts on Tuesday, and the chip manufacturer is expected to discuss its Ivy Bridge refresh, Haswell, talk about its upcoming 32nm tablet platform, Clover Trail, and possibly share a few details on its 22nm Atom SOC's. Performance per watt is going to be a major focus at IDF this year; Haswell is rumored to be capable of idling below 10W. Intel always uses IDF as a demonstration platform and roadmap update, but it's particularly important this year, when competing foundries have struggled with 28nm and Intel itself just cut its Q3 guidance. Several of Intel's rivals are gearing up their own demonstrations for this week. In AMD's case, that's normal -- Sunnyvale almost...
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Rumor around the 'Net is that AMD's Bulldozer follow-up, codenamed Vishera, could drop in early Q4 this year. The new AMD 8350, as its known, will supposedly be a four-module/eight-core design clocked at 4GHz (4.2GHz Turbo Mode) with a 125W TDP. Vishera could potentially deliver what last year's Bulldozer didn't; AMD's latest CPU was widely panned for failing to meet most of its performance, clockspeed, and power consumption targets. Given that Vishera is based on the already-launched Trinity core, we can make a few predictions concerning the chip's performance -- and whether it can measure up. Definitely Maybe AMD's Trinity AMD's Trinity incorporated two technologies that substantially reduced...
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AMD's CEO, Rory Read, has made no secret of his plans to take the company in new and different directions, but the company's server announcement today caught the market by surprise. Sunnyvale has purchased SeaMicro in a deal worth ~$330 million, the majority of which ($281M) will be paid in cash. The acquisition brings AMD's onetime CTO, Fred Weber, at least temporarily back to the fold; Weber left AMD to take a position with SeaMicro. If you aren't familiar with the company, SeaMicro is a server startup that made a name for itself starting several years ago when it built server rigs using Atom processors. The company has extended and built on that foundation since its inception and ironically...
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Ever since Bulldozer's less-than-spectacular debut, enthusiasts and investors have watched to see if the company would follow up with faster chips that improved overall performance. That's finally started to happen; AMD announced two new chips today -- the quad-core FX-4170 with a 4.2GHz base clock speed / 4.3GHz Turbo mode, and the six-core FX-6200 at 3.8GHz stock / 4.1GHz Turbo. Both of the new parts are clocked ~15% faster than the FX-4100 and FX-6100 and may offer a slightly faster integrated memory controller as well; rumors indicate that the IMC is clocked at 2.2GHz, up from 2GHz. The new chips are reportedly based on the B3 stepping that's been in the works for months; current Bulldozer...
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to use resonant clock mesh technology developed by Cyclos Semiconductor to push its Piledriver processor line to 4GHz and beyond, the company announced at the International Solid State Circuits Conferences (ISSCC) in San Francisco. Cyclos is the only supplier of resonant clock mesh IP, which AMD has licensed and implemented into its x86 Piledriver core for Opteron server processors and Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). "We were able to seamlessly integrate the Cyclos IP into our existing clock mesh design process so there was no risk to our development schedule," said Samuel Naffziger, Corporate Fellow at AMD. "Silicon results met our power reduction expectations,...
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