AMD Archive

AMD started delivering on their word of providing GPU specifications to the open-source community without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and now with the 2007 X Developer Summit having come to a close, we asked several key members of the X.Org community on how they judge AMD's recent move. They were also asked if they believe NVIDIA will follow suit in helping the open-source community. Those that responded were David Airlie, Daniel Stone, Jerome Glisse, Stephane Marchesin, and Oliver McFadden. Mark Shuttleworth had also previously commented on AMD's efforts.

Daniel Stone is announcing the avalability of the first AMD/ATI specs - chips RV630 and M56 apparently. The specifications are released without an NDA.

AMD has unveiled its first set of quad-core processors, three months after its original launch date. This 'complicated' design that resulted in the delay and puts the chip maker a full generation behind its archrival in terms of chip manufacturing processes.

The news already got out yesterday, but now it's official: AMD will open the specifications to its graphics chips. "AMD announced on Sept. 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. The company announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops." The new information is that AMD will partner with Novell's SUSE team.

Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer, stopped by the Hot Chips conference here at Stanford University on Tuesday to talk a little more about Fusion, AMD's plan to integrate a graphics processor and PC processor onto the same chip. By the time the chip is ready around 2009, Hester thinks the growing explosion of video and 3D graphics on PCs these days will require an affordable chip that still delivers great graphics performance.

"Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information."

"AMD recently disclosed a few details regarding their upcoming mobile platform technologies, codenamed 'Griffin' and 'Puma'. We've been given some preliminary information regarding these plans and thought we'd share a few of the more salient details with you here. The 'Griffin' codename pertains to an upcoming mobile processor that incorporates a number of features designed specifically for the mobile segment, with the intention of increasing performance and battery life. And 'Puma' is the name given to the new platform as a whole."

AMD says its badly needed quad-core desktop processors are on the way, and they'll arrive bearing a new name. Two quad-core chips will be available in the second half of the year, the Phenom FX and the Phenom X4, and a dual-core chip based on a similar design called the Phenom X2 will also appear by the end of the year.

Data Evolution has reintroduced AMD's low-cost 'Personal Internet Communicator', aimed at developing regions of the world. The 'decTOP' runs Windows CE 5.0, includes a suite of basic software, has built-in dial-up and broadband networking and a 10GB hard drive, and uses an external keyboard and monitor.

After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' processor for servers in November. But AMD's 'Barcelona' quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said.

AMD has started to ship chips made on the 65-nanometer process. These chips will consume about 30 percent less energy than the same ones produced on the 90-nanometer process when running at the same speed. In the first chips shipped on this process, virtually all of the benefit comes in reduced power consumption, said Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development at AMD.

"Last week, AMD showed off a working quad-core processor at an event in San Francisco. The company had promised a quad-core demo by the end of the year, and they did manage to deliver, even if all the audience saw was a Windows machine running task manager. Clearly, the silicon for their next-generation core microarchitecture, codenamed Barcelona (also popularly called 'K8L'), has a few kinks left to be worked out."

At an event in Mumbai, soon after the completion of the acquisition of ATI, AMD announced a line of latest Vista-ready ATI Radeon graphic processors. According to Chris Jones, corporate vice president - Windows Core OS Division, "Microsoft will deliver a series of graphics innovations with Windows Vista that provide a customer experience that is second to none. We could not have achieved this without our partnership with ATI. From day one, ATI has played a key role in helping us design and validate the new driver model at the heart of Windows Vista, and ATI has since developed robust and performant drivers that highlight the capabilities of our new operating system."

If there was any doubt that CPU maker AMD's principal reason for acquiring graphics chip powerhouse ATI was to build a mobile computing platform that would rival Intel's Centrino, it was erased this morning with AMD's announcement of a platform project it's currently calling 'Fusion'.