Items tagged with Read
AMD's burgeoning profitability took a hammering in Q1 thanks to a $700M deal with GlobalFoundries, its purchase of SeaMicro, and a sequential decline in sales. Total company revenue was $1.59B (down from $1.69B in Q1 2011), but Sunnyvale delivered a $590M net loss. Much of that is attributable to the company's new deal with GlobalFoundries, in which AMD paid GF $700M, and transferred all of its ownership stake in the company in exchange for "non-exclusivity" for 28nm APU production. Put simply, AMD paid GF for the right to manufacture 28nm APUs somewhere else -- and they paid through the nose. Computing solutions revenue fell 6 percent sequentially while graphics revenue held constant. One positive...
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It's been six weeks since Eric Demers, AMD's CTO of graphics, left the company to pursue other opportunities, and another former ATI employee has followed his example. Godfrey Cheng, who recently served as one of AMD's Director of Client Technologies, has left the company. Cheng was part of AMD's high-profile Llano launch and reportedly chose to leave after it became clear that AMD wasn't going to follow Rick Bergman's ideas for how to best leverage AMD's graphics and APU assets. How much truth there is to that assertion is unclear. Bergman's departure was certainly surprising, but the slides AMD showed at Financial Analyst Day in February confirmed the shape of the slides Bergman showed in June...
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AMD has confirmed that Eric Demers, AMD's graphics Chief Technology Officer and head of the graphics business unit, has left the company to "pursue other opportunities." His job will be taken over by Mark Papermaster until a replacement is found. AMD notes in a prepared statement that it "remains fully committed to our critical graphics IP development and discrete GPU products. We have a tremendous depth of talent in our organization, a game plan that is resonating with our customers and our team, and we are continuing to bring graphics-performance-leading products to market. We will attract the right technology leader for this role." Demers is just the latest executive to leave AMD--in...
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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, Carell Killebrew, who played an integral role in rescuing AMD's GPU division after the disaster of R600, also got the axe. Key members of the FirePro product team are also gone. None of the staff had any idea that the cuts were coming, or that they'd focus so particularly in certain areas. An email, purportedly from CEO Rory Read, sheds additional light on...
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T-Mobile sure isn’t wasting any time: The G1 has only officially been available in stores for just a few hours, and the company is already talking about an update, albeit a small one.Users who purchased via pre-sale should start seeing a notification alerting you to the availability of the over-the-air update tomorrow, with other users getting it around the 31st. People who receive their device after these dates should get it within 2-3 days of activating their phones, and new phones will come preloaded with the update. If you’re one of the unlucky soles who doesn’t get it right away, T-Mobile recommends waiting a bit longer or checking your software version to see if you got it (the new version...
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Opera is much-loved, but it's more of a cult browser. Its users swear by it, but it's never been able to make inroads into browser market share. And the star of the week, Google's Chrome, which stole the headlines away from IE8, has already topped Opera in market share. According to NetApplications, which has been tracking Chrome usage hourly, on 9/4 at 2:00 AM EDT, Chrome reached 1.57% market share. Since then it's dropped down somewhat, but it's never dropped below Opera's 0.74%, and at the time of this writing is at 1.16%. This is all despite the fact that Chrome is definitely a CPU and memory hog. Personally, while Chrome is great as a basic browser, it's missing too many features, doesn't...
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Everyone and their Aunt Sally wants to sell users on a different use for broadband. You can stream HBO shows, Netflix videos, using tons of bandwidth, and that's not even taking P2P into account. Ah, and NBC would love it if you would watch the "Olympics on the Go." Problem is, you poor folk with metered-use broadband, which may soon come to the rest of us, might have to watch just what you ... well, watch.We’ve talked before that metered access is a boneheaded idea that is bad for innovation, bad for Microsoft and Google, and ultimately bad for you. Until today, the idea seemed like an eventuality, not an immediate reality. But then NBC and TonicTV launched a new service that...
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The Firefox browser from Mozilla is on version three. And version three is currently available as "Prerelease Candidate 2". That means it's not ready for public consumption, but many people are using it. It's unlikely that much will change after Prerelease Candidate 2, so let's go with it. According to Walt Mossberg at least, Firefox 3 is the best browser you can buy right now, and of course, like all the other major browsers, you can't buy it -- it's free. I’ve been using prerelease versions of Firefox 3.0 for months, and have recently been testing a near-final version and comparing it closely to IE and to Safari. I have tested it on multiple Windows PCs and Macs, on desktops and laptops, over...
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Activision keeps on rockin' with the mega-popular Guitar Hero brand. The gaming giant just announced plans for the next installment of the shreddin' series. Get ready, 'cause Guitar Hero: World Tour is set to hit shelves before the holiday season.In response to the racket created by Rock Band, Activision has turned up the volume with a new set of peripherals for World Tour. Faux rockers will be able to buy a drum kit and bass pedal to form a full band. With the promise of a "battle of the bands" mode in the offing, button-pushing buddies can strut their stuff and face off against four of their closest friends.We're sure to see a full complement of new bands on board, extra downloadable tracks...
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As we become a less and less private society, helped (or hindered, depending on your point of view) by the web, data breaches, and the like, the question actually should be raised: is anything really private any longer? In its fifth-annual study of outbound e-mail and data loss prevention issues, Proofpoint found that large enterprises continue to incur risk from - and take action against - information leaks over outbound e-mail, as well as newer communications media such as blogs, message boards, media sharing sites and mobile devices.Outbound e-mail remains a key source of risk for U.S. enterprises with a record 44% of surveyed companies reporting that they investigated an e-mail leak of confidential...
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Facebook has 70 million members, so if the owners change something about it the users don't like, the angry virtual mob that appears outside the window with digital pitchforks and torches is something to behold. Facebook's attempt to share information about user's purchases through a utility they called Beacon didn't go down too well, for instance, and the ensuing outcry included just about everything except calls for a guillotine outside Facebook's office. So Facebook is cautious now, and even though they've announced they're going to dramatically change the appearance of their website in June, they're quick to point out that it's only on a test basis. We'll go slow. Very beta. Nothing...
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We love living on the edge. We sometimes take a chance and drink milk from a carton so old that the lost child pictured on it has already been found. We've even been known to participate in beta tests of buggy software. But we're a little leery of monkeying around with web browsers until they're finished, because we don't even trust them not to tell gangsters all our passwords even when they're working properly. So even though Mozilla calls the latest work-in-progress iteration of the Firefox browser a "release candidate," instead of a "beta test," we're going to let some other brave soul monkey around with it until it's ready. Someone like Lifehacker, with their Top Ten Firefox 3...
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We have a request that we were hoping you could all help us with. First off, we want to thank you for being a part of the community here. Our forum members and readers are what we're all about at HotHardware, and we very much value your opinions. If you haven't noticed yet, HotHardware partnered with Federated Media for our ad campaigns recently, as well as other services, to help keep the lights on around here. If you enjoy HotHardware and have a few minutes, please consider filling out this brief survey. It is completely annonymous and respects all standard privacy terms for our publication.HotHardware Reader SurveryWe'd like to ensure the best...
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Just in time for the imminent release of the Windows XP SP3 update, VMware has released an update to its Mac-based Fusion virtulization application, with full support for SP3 Boot Camp partitions. The Fusion 1.1.2 update also includes a number of bug fixes as well as improved support for the MacBook Air--solving a few issues Fusion had with the Air's virtual disc and its Superdrive.Perhaps the most imporant aspect to the Fusison 1.1.2 update, however, is the ability to back up virtual machines with Time Machine:"Prior versions of VMware Fusion automatically excluded virtual machines from Time Machine backups to avoid hitting a Mac OS X-related crash when backing up running virtual machines.Apple...
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Yesterday, news broke regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate way to accelerate developments in mainstream parallel computing. And today, we've posted some details and commentary on the subject over at HotHardware. Here's a snip from the piece... "Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator of more computing horsepower. The problem, according to David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, becomes one of scheduling and balancing workloads across multiple sets of processing resources, so that you can truly get more performance out of those threaded designs. If an application is only running in one thread, upgrading to a dual- or quad-core chip won't help speed it up. It's a...
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These days, just developing a chip with a multi-core architecture doesn't necessarily equate to higher performance, since many mainstream applications are not multithreaded. As a result, big chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD are continually developing programming kits, compilers and various tools to equip software developers with the capability to tap mult-core processor resources for their roadmap product efforts. However the task at hand, though seemingly straight-forward isn't as easy, even for the likes of Microsoft. Though target applications that could benefit, like rich-media, image and speech recognition, 3D rendering and finance, are obvious, what's...
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As with all rumors, please take the following news item with a grain of salt until we receive official confirmation or denial from Intel.Intel has had quad-core CPUs on their road map for some time now, but the details have been very hard to come by until recently. Rumor has it that the high end part, the QX9300 will cost over $1000 and will feature a faster FSB to go with it's increased TDP:“The Core 2 Extreme QX9300 will be manufactured at 45nm and have a core frequency of 2.53GHz. The CPU will come in a socket P package and support FSB speeds up to 1066MHz. The chip will include 12MB L2 cache and have a maximum TDP of 45W.”The CPU should be available in the third quarter, just in time...
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Doctor Irving Biederman is a neuroscientist at USC. He's been studying volunteers' brain activity while showing them a series of pictures of various subjects. His human guinea pigs had the greatest brain activity when shown a scene that "presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted," and were offered in the format of a "good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery." Viewing such images literally releases pleasure-causing chemicals in your body, and work on the most primitive parts of our brain. Behold: it's the reason you can't stop reading the Internet.When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more...
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The "Vista-Capable" lawsuit has reached class-action status, and yesterday the judge in the case unsealed a set of Microsoft emails revealing what executives really felt about the issue. Some of these have been excerpted before, but some have not, and all are interesting.A federal judge today unsealed internal Microsoft e-mails that have been used to support the plaintiffs' case in the lawsuit over the "Windows Vista Capable" program. Snippets were previously read aloud in court, but the full messages go further to reveal extensive hand-wringing, at the highest levels of the company, over Windows Vista's hardware and software compatibility problems after the operating system was launched.It...
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Nvidia is a very successful graphics chip maker. Two years ago they purchased PortalPlayer, who make chips for Apple's iPod, for $357 million dollars. Many in the industry wondered where Nvidia was going with the acquisition. Wonder no more. They've introduced their APX 2500, a computing chip designed for today's multimedia-ready/web-browsing mobile phones. The chip is based on the ARM11 core, and can run at up to 750MHz. It can encode and decode 720p high-definition video, meaning you could use a phone based on the APX 2500 as both a high-definition player and camcorder. Nvidia also added some of its GeForce graphics technology that was designed for low-power devices, which allows...
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3D Realms made the mistake of speaking to mainstream media, meaning that what they felt was a "no comment" answer did not translate properly. No, Duke Nukem Forever does not have a release date.I'd like to address the article the Dallas Business Journal put up today. In what appears to be an unfortunate turn of events, there seems to have been some confusion between what was 'off the record' and what was not. I suppose we're used to dealing with gaming press and not mainstream press. Lesson learned. While we have internal targets, dates and goals, like every developer, we are not ready to share them. What's amazing about this is that the DBJ must have assumed that we'd actually announce...
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