Items tagged with Steamroller
Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly on to their own motherboards to support AMD's chip. Such a move would shift the RMA responsibilities for RAM failures back to the board manufacturer. Given the limited upselling capabilities and low market share AMD currently enjoys, it seemed unlikely that Sunnyvale would consider such an option. A deep dive into Kaveri's technical documentation, however, shows that AMD did indeed...
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Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off AMD's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of Sunnyvale's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part. Bulldozer, launched just over a year ago, was a major disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, made a number of important changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built 'Dozer in the first place. In the...
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Today is AMD's Financial Analyst Day -- and it's been a long time coming. Questions about the company's future have been piling up since Bulldozer launched and AMD layed off much of its PR/marketing teams. Today, the company lifted the veil on what it's planning for 2012. In graphics, the roadmap is straightforward -- AMD's recent 7970 and 7950 launches have given the company a leg up over Nvidia and it'll be months before Team Green's next-generation Kepler is ready. Events in desktop, mobile, and server are more interesting. Note the debut of what's being called "Brazos 2.0." It's confirmation that the Krishna/Wichita chips that were originally meant to succeed Brazos were indeed cancelled....
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