The power of AMD Processor

Envy 15 Envy 13 and was named the size screen and run the operating system Windows 7.

For HP, Envy 15 Envy 13 and will launch in October last. Two models are named after the screen size. HP has not disclosed information about price, where sale and specifications, only that, the product will be more than a month after the village again.

As Notebookcheck, everything is revealed before "now G is Envy 13 with 13.1 inch screen, two USB ports, an HDMI port and running Windows 7. This special model trackpad wide, thin hull, balloons and light.

Recently, HP also introduced a model is considered to Envy 15-1060ea on your site, with the parameters:

- Processor 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7 720QM (6MB L2 cache).

- HDD 320 GB, speed 7200 rpm.

- Top 2-in-1 reader (SD / MMC).

- ATI Mobility Radeon HD4830.

- Chiclet keyboard.

- Webcam Night Vision IR LED equipped.

- A USB / eSATA, 3 USB ports, HDMI port and Audio in / out.

- Multitouch applications.

- Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n, Ethernet, Bluetooth. - Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n, Ethernet, Bluetooth.

- Battery 6 cell Li-ion.

- Kích thước: 595 x 126 x 345 mm. - Size: 595 x 126 x 345 mm.

- Weight: 2.35 kg.

HP will provide additional information before the product launch.

Advanced Micro Devices hopes to reverse negative trend for its graphics division with a new graphics processor code-named RV670. At least, the company says it is on-track to release the novelty in November. Unfortunately, the company still says that it does not expect the new ATI RV670 to impact the company’s financial results significantly.


After finding itself half a year late with the introduction of its latest flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card, losing 40% of former ATI graphics revenues and failure to introduce the highest-performing graphics solution ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, says it is back on track with the launch of its performance-mainstream code-named RV670 graphics processing unit (GPU). At least, the company managed to increase graphics revenues by almost one third, which is still well-below results of “old” ATI, but is a record for “new” AMD.

“We will launch the RV670, the world’s first 55nm GPU in the fourth quarter. […] Based on the upcoming release of the RV670, we’re pretty bullish about being able to participate in a bigger and more profitable piece of the business. […] Customers are going to love it,” said Dirk Meyer, chief operating officer and president of AMD, during the conference call with financial analysts.

Based on what is known about the code-named ATI RV670 product, the new GPU features DirectX 10.1, PCI Express 2.0, DisplayPort and double-precision floating point calculations. While the list of improvements compared to the code-named R600 seems significant on paper, end-users getting the new graphics cards will hardly the aforementioned capabilities really useful right now. ATI RV670 is projected to deliver “R600 performance, better thermal & power”.

AMD said that the success of the new ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors led to increased unit shipments and revenue, which drove graphics segment revenue to $252 million, meaning that it grew 29% from the second quarter of 2007. Still, $252 million is considerably less than $325 million recorded by ATI in one of its last quarters. Moreover, already now AMD expects its graphics revenues to remains on the same level compared to the third quarter.

“Seasonally, the fourth quarter is not strong in the GPU marketplace. It is actually typically flat to slightly down. We’ll have to work real hard to grow sales quarter on quarter, which we’ll do, but it is hard to make a lot of progress if you don’t have it from the top line,” said Bob Rivet, chief financial officer at AMD.

“When we launch the [RV670] product, we anticipate doing so with cards available in channels and therefore, we will drive revenue in the quarter. Obviously, with a mid-quarter launch and on a quarter-billion revenue basis, that’s not going to contribute materially to the quarter, but it will provide some upside,” Mr. Meyer clarified.

AMD last week reported third quarter 2007 revenue of $1.632 billion, an 18% increase compared to the second quarter of 2007 and a 23% improvement compared to the third quarter of 2006. In the third quarter, AMD reported an operating loss of $226 million, and a net loss of $396 million, or $0.71 per share. Third quarter 2007 gross margin was 41%, compared to 33% in the second quarter of 2007 and 51% in the third quarter of 2006.

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday officially confirmed existence of two new graphics cards that will serve performance-mainstream market. While the new boards seem to offer decent performance, they will be available for a limited time in limited quantities. Still, the new products will inevitably slowdown the possible demand towards dual-chip graphics gars from AMD’s partners.


“AMD is excited to announce the newest member of its flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900-series, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro features the powerful next-generation unified shader architecture with 320 unified stream processors, comprehensive DirectX 10 support and built-in HDMI multimedia features for an immersive HD gaming experience,” a statement by AMD reads.

Unlike expected previously, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics card features the same fully-fledged ATI R600 graphics processor with 320 unified shader processors (SPs), 16 texture units (TUs), 16 render back ends (RBEs) and 512-bit memory controller, but clocked at 600MHz instead of 742MHz on the HD 2900 XT model. The Radeon HD 2900 Pro also retains 512-bit memory bus and can come equipped with 512MB or 1GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1600MHz, just a little down from memory frequency of HD 2900 XT models.

AMD’s partners will sell ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB for $249, whereas the model with 1GB of memory will have manufacturer suggested retail price of $299. It is interesting to note that some 1GB versions will have print-circuit boards with 12” length that may not fit into mainstream computer cases.

“The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro is available today on a limited basis subject to supply constraints,” AMD stressed in its short press statement.

AMD has been criticized for quite some time for having a gap in its DirectX 10 lineup between $179 and $399 price-points on which the company responded that its partners will sell dual-chip ATI Radeon HD 2600 X2 graphics cards for about $249 to fight Nvidia’s GeForce 8600 GTS. But now that AMD’s partners started to sell the HD 2900 Pro for $249, it will not only distract attention from the lower-performance Radeon HD 2600 X2 (in fact, even two Radeon HD 2600 chips have only 240 unified shader processors compared to HD 2900’s 320 units), but will also cause some potential ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT buyers to change their minds, as the XT model has just a slight performance advantage over the Pro.

Typically, add-in-board partners would hardly be happy with a product that does not fit into the current lineup, however, this does not seem to be the case with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro, as it is an extremely limited edition offering.

“The HD 2900 Pro is not something AMD needs. Those are just ‘defective’ graphics cards [that could not run at 742MHz’ and there are very few of them, just about several thousands worldwide. In fact, we only accepted orders [on them] for several days,” said a representative of an add-in card supplier who wished to remain unnamed.

Closer Look at AMD Phenom Processor

General Information
No matter what the outcome of our today’s test session is going to be, we cannot deny that AMD managed to outpace Intel with the launch of a true quad-core processor. While, Core 2 Quad processors manufactured with 65nm and 45nm process are none other but two dual-core processors combined together in a single package, Phenom is a fully-fledged quad-core solution. This processor die (currently manufactured with 65nm production process) contains four cores at the same time.



This AMD’s approach to multi-core processor design allowed company engineers to implement functional units shared between all four cores. These are the units implemented one of each in the new AMD Phenom: controller for HyperTransport bus that serves to transfer data from CPU to the chipset, DDR2 memory controller and L3 cache. AMD has already used a shared HyperTransport bus and memory controller in their dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors before. So we were not surprised to see them in the new AMD Phenom, too.



The shared L3 cache, however, is being used for the first time. The current Phenom models have a 2MB L3 cache. The bandwidth of this cache is not very high compared with the memory subsystem performance, however it boasts pretty low latency. Moreover, it allows to significantly speed up the data transfer rate between the processor cores without loading the memory bus: this is actually its major purpose in the new processors.



However, putting four processor cores onto a single dies also has a negative side to it. The thing is that these semiconductor dies, even manufactured with contemporary 65nm process, come out pretty big in size. Of course, it leads to significant drop of the chip yields and increase in production costs. However, AMD seems to have found a way to put most of the defective dies to good use. Next year they will start supplying triple-core and maybe even dual-core processors manufactured from original Phenom dies with one or two failed cores.

Another issue resulting from large die size of the new processors is their relatively low clock frequencies, because they have to watch out for growing heat dissipation of the CPU. While quad-core Intel processors manufactured with 65nm process are currently running at up to 3.0GHz speeds, AMD will hardly be able to introduce a Phenom with the clock frequencies beyond 2.6GHz in the nearest future. Moreover, the currently announced models work only at 2.2GHz-2.3GHz. It looks like they will be able to resolve this issue only in H2 2008, when AMD is planning to switch production of their quad-core processors to more advanced 45nm manufacturing technology.

So, it’s time to compare the basic specifications of the new Phenom processor against those of its main quad-core opponent – Core 2 Quad from Intel. The table below shows two Intel Core 2 Quad models: the old one codenamed Kentsfield and a new one codenamed Yorkfield manufactured with 45nm process and scheduled to become widely spread in early 2008.



New Phenom processors are extremely interesting not only due to their four processor cores on a single die. AMD engineers managed to introduce a number of improvements into the actual micro-architecture thus making the actual cores work faster (compared with the Athlon 64 processors). And although core micro-architecture in Phenom processors doesn’t differ too much from the classical K8 micro-architecture, AMD used a new codename for it: K10 - that was later replaced with a more poetic “Stars Microarchitecture”.

We have a separate article on our site devoted to all the details of the revised micro-architecture. So here we are going to briefly list all the innovations made in the AMD Phenom processors:

Wider data path between the execution units and the L1 processor cache, and between L1 and L2 cache. The bus width between L1 and L2 cache of the new Phenom processors was increased to 128bit in each direction and the CPU can now perform two 128-bit data loads from L1 cache per clock cycle.
Advanced memory prefetcher. Phenom processors can now deliver the data directly to L1 cache without loading it first into the L2 cache that would inevitably increase latency. Moreover, the memory fetcher recognizes repeated "stride patterns"and predicts which information to prefetch.
32-byte instruction fetching. The code is loaded into Phenom decoder in 32-byte, not 16-byte blocks. This allows reducing the idling time of the processor execution units.
Improved branch prediction. Processors with revised micro-architecture started processing indirect branching correctly. This improved significantly the probability of correct branch prediction in programs created with object-oriented languages and contemporary compilers.
Speculative out-of-order data loading. Like CPUs on Core micro-architecture, Phenom may deal with unidentified data loads ahead of other operations that may alter this data.
New Sideband Stack Optimizer algorithm. It allows lowering the resource expenses during stack operations thanks to independent monitoring of the ESP register status.
Implementation of 128-bit floating-point units (compare with the 64-bit floating-point units in Athlon 64 processors). As a result, each Phenom core can process up to 4 FPU instructions with double-precision per clock, and most 128-bit SSE operations can be processed within a single clock. Moreover, new processor support new SSE instructions from the SSE4A set. Although SSE4A is incompatible with SSE4.1 supported by new Intel processors.
Improved virtualization technology speeding up the performance in applications run on virtual machines.

The chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, Hector Ruiz said in an interview that he had no plans to announce his resignation in 2008. The interview, which is scheduled for broadcast on the same day that AMD holds a meeting with financial analysts, may indicate that the current team of executives is still confident about the success of the company.


Mr. Ruiz confirmed in an interview with CNBC Europe that the current team of top execs at AMD sees Dirk Meyer, who is currently president and chief operating officer, as the next chief executive officer for the world’s second largest x86 microprocessor vendor.

“We started doing [the succession planning] four years ago and I’m delighted that Dirk is a strong player. When the time comes for me to hand the reins over to him, it's going to be fantastic,” Mr. Ruiz is reported to have said.

Hector Ruiz joined AMD in January 2000 as president and chief operating officer, just months after AMD released its first AMD Athlon central processing unit (CPU) that helped the chipmaker to seriously challenge market leader Intel Corp. and stop to be a supplier of low-end microprocessors. Hector Ruiz was named chief executive officer in April 2002, just a little ahead of AMD’s launch of AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors, which have been outperforming rivals from Intel for years. He was appointed as chairman of the board in April 2004. Despite of the fact that the successor of Mr. Ruiz is known already, the current CEO, who turns 62 on the 25th of December, has no plans to announce resignation in 2008 and currently has no schedule of his resignation to publicize, he said in the interview.

“I can’t tell you that, but it’s not any time soon. Not next year,” Mr. Ruiz reportedly said.

While under the rule of Mr. Ruiz AMD managed to increase its market share rather considerably from about 18% to approximately 23%, the key technologies that helped AMD to transform into a leading CPU maker from an underdog – HyperTransport, K7 and K8 micro-architectures – were developed under the supervision of the previous chief executive and the founder of AMD, Jerry Sanders. But Hector Ruiz could not fix several fundamental issues that AMD has always had. The ramp up of new processor micro-architectures has always took a considerable amount of time at AMD and the delays of chips based on K10 micro-architecture with up to four processing engines is a good proof of such issues. Additionally, transitions to new manufacturing technologies have also been slow at AMD. Finally, AMD’s acquisition of graphics and multimedia chip developer ATI Technologies has yet to confirm its viability as the new company has not achieved profitability in its first year; instead, it lost massive amount of CPU, graphics, multimedia and set-top-box revenues of both ATI and AMD along with $1.6 billion.

The interview will be broadcast on Thursday, December 13 at 23:00 Central European Time (22:00 GMT), the same day that AMD holds its financial analyst conference in New York. An e-mail including excerpts of the interview was sent to Reuters news-agency on Tuesday and was confirmed as authentic by CNBC.

AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz acknowledged Thursday that 2007 was a bad year for his company, but that didn't stop AMD's board of directors from raising his salary anyway.

"We blew it and we're very humbled by it and we learned from it and we're not going to do it again," Ruiz told financial analysts in New York Thursday.

AMD has struggled this year, largely due to technical problems that repeatedly delayed the widespread availability of its Quad-Core Opteron chip, known as Barcelona. As a result, the company saw its financial losses mount -- $1.6 billion during the first nine months of this year -- while incurring $3.7 billion dollars in long-term debt to help keep the company's operations running.

The announcement Wednesday that AMD plans to take an as-yet unspecified charge for impaired goodwill from its US$5.4 billion acquisition of ATI -- recognition that the graphics-chip vendor is worth less than AMD paid for it last year -- only added to the company's financial woes and dimmed investor enthusiasm for its stock. On Dec. 13, AMD's share price closed at $8.84, down 56.2 percent from one year ago.

However, those issues will not affect Ruiz's base salary, which has been increased, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released Thursday, the same day that Ruiz apologized for the company's dismal performance.

That filing, which contained a copy of Ruiz's amended employment agreement, shows AMD raised his annual base salary by 7.4 percent to US$1,124,000. The amended agreement was dated Dec. 7.

In 2006, Ruiz received a base salary of $1,046,358, while stock awards and other forms of compensation raised his total compensation for the year to $12,848,435.

Ruiz's 2006 compensation was significantly higher than Intel CEO and President Paul Otellini, who took home a salary of $700,000 in 2006. Other awards raised Otellini's total compensation in 2006 to $9,806,400.

Advanced Micro Devices today said it has delayed volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors as it fine-tunes the chip.

AMD located one bug on the L3 cache of the chip that caused system problems, said Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman. There are a number of fixes to this problem, including a BIOS fix that AMD has issued, Hughes said.

AMD is working with partners to fine-tune the chip to ready it for mass shipment in the first quarter of 2008. The quad-core Opteron, also called Barcelona, is shipping in limited quantities to customers running high-performance computers, Hughes said.

The delay will affect AMD, which has already lost ground in the server chip market to Intel Corp. in recent quarters. After months of delays, AMD released the Barcelona processor in September.

Intel also took a step ahead of AMD when it launched the 45-nm quad-core Penryn processors last month. AMD still manufactures chips using the 65-nm process.

Just one day ahead of its meeting with financial analysts Advanced Micro Devices said that the value it paid for graphics and multimedia chip designer ATI Technologies last year was too high and the actual revenues the company gets and will be able to obtain from its graphics and multimedia businesses are below expectations.

AMD: ATI Is Guilty of Everything

According to a statement with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), AMD concluded that the current carrying value of its goodwill which it had recorded as a result of its October 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies was impaired. The write down will allow AMD to easily explain financial analysts why its current market capitalization ($4.97 billion at press time) is below the price of ATI it paid last year as well as poor financial results and losses with problems that allegedly existed at ATI before the merge.

“The acquisition took place at the moment, when ATI was not really leading in terms of technology… It is not like we acquired ATI and we lost market share. It was just a consequence of [ATI’s execution]: Nvidia had better graphics than ATI back then and that is why AMD lost market share. We also should consider [hardware] cycles of OEMs: if you are missing their cycles, you are out for a while. You have to be [ready] with the right [product] part at the right moment to get a cycle. When you are in, you are going to stay in for a long time. So, the main reason behind the share loss is missing OEM cycles. But we are regaining them now,” recently said Vincenzo Pistillo, director of consumer business development in EMEA region for AMD.

“This conclusion was reached based on the results of an updated long-term financial outlook for the businesses of the former ATI Technologies as part of AMD’s strategic planning cycle conducted annually during the company’s fourth quarter and based on the preliminary findings of the company’s annual goodwill impairment testing that commenced in the beginning of October 2007,” a statement concerning the write-down reads.

AMD’s Graphics Product Group Performs Below Expectations

Formally speaking, ATI Radeon X1900-series graphics cards were considerably more advanced than Nvidia’s GeForce 7900-series offerings at the time when AMD acquired the Canada-based graphics chip developer. But ATI, which at the time was already AMD’s graphics product group, could not launch its DirectX 10-supporting high-end offering last November and then was also late with mainstream DX10 graphics products.

But market share declines emerged not because ATI could not offer a competitor to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX, which still retails for $549 and higher. Just after AMD and ATI announced the transaction, partners of Intel and ATI annuled orders onto ATI Radeon Xpress-branded chipsets for Intel processors, which dramatically lowered ATI’s market share from 27.6% to 20.3%, according to Jon Peddie Research (JPR) data. However, already in Q4 2006 the market share of AMD’s graphics product group rebound to 23%, only to gradually decline to 19.1% in Q3 2007.

Clearly, the loss of Intel-compatible chipset sales as well as overall graphics adapter market share rather negatively affected sales of graphics products at AMD. If back in Q3 FY2006* ATI earned $325 million on its desktop and mobile discrete graphics products, then in Q3 FY2007* graphics product group of AMD only reported $252 million in revenue (only a bit higher than $228.3 million that ATI used to earn on desktop standalone products only).

It should be noted that the third calendar quarter is usually the strongest quarter in terms of volume during the year and AMD publicly stated that despite of the new product launch it does not expect graphics revenue increase in Q4 FY2007. If similar calendar periods are compared, then the picture would be even worse for AMD, as in Q2 FY2007 (which ends on June 30) its graphics product group earned $195 million, down 40% from ATI’s discrete graphics revenue in Q3 FY2006.

Consumer Electronics Sales of Former ATI Dip Further
Graphics product group of AMD evidently experienced a number of issues with transitioning to DirectX 10 architecture and its relatively weak business performance, perhaps, could be explained with technology-related issues. But is it only the division of former ATI, which performance leaves much to be desired? It seems that not really.

AMD's third quarter consumer electronics (CE) segment revenue was $97 million. Under consumer electronics AMD understands sales of chips for handhelds, TV-sets, royalties from video game console manufacturers and, quite possibly, nonrecurring engineering (NRE) works that the company’s specialists may do in one of those segments.

ATI earned $150 million ($145 million without NRE) back in its Q3 FY2006 on handheld/DTV processors, NRE and royalties. It should be noted that back in Spring ’06 there was no massively successful Nintendo Wii game console on the market. Microsoft Xbox 360 also hardly brought a lot to ATI due to weak seasonality for game consoles as manufacturers start to ramp up production of game systems for holiday season in Summer.

Even if AMD got $20 million in royalties for Wii and Xbox 360 (which is a huge underestimation) in a seasonally strong quarter that ends on the 30th of September, it means that actual sales of CE products declined nearly two times since ATI’s days, from $135 million in seasonally weak quarter to $77 million in seasonally strong quarter.

Microprocessor Sales Down, Chipset Revenues Shady
Due to the fact that central processing units (CPUs) from Intel Corp. have performance advantage over CPUs by AMD, sales of microprocessors seem to be considerably down compared to the previous year.

Back in Q3 FY2006 the world’s second largest maker of x86 chips earned $1.33 billion on its computing products (CPUs only at the time), whereas in Q3 FY2007 it reported computing solutions group revenue of $1.283 billion (which now includes sales of both CPUs and chipsets).

ATI earned nearly $170 million on mobile and desktop core-logic sets for AMD and Intel processors in Q3 FY2006, but since the lion’s share of those earnings most likely came from Intel-compatible chipsets, this number can hardly be compared to anything now. Unlike CPUs, chipsets cost about $25 - $30 in average in the best-case scenario and given the current position of AMD processors on the market, AMD probably had to concentrate on lower-end solutions.

Anyway, after the acquisition by AMD the former ATI cannot sell any significant amount of chipsets compatible with Intel processors. Therefore, its maximum chipset market share will be equal to AMD’s processors, whereas its realistic market share may be even lower, as there are still Nvidia, SiS and Via on the market.

AMD to Write Down ATI Acquisition

While it is evident that business of former ATI has been harmed considerably in the most recent seventeen months, AMD insists that the explanation of dramatic revenue decline is ATI’s issues with execution that were left unnoticed by AMD during the acquisition process going on for nearly a year: starting from December ’05 and closing in October ‘06. It is interesting to note that without former ATI earnings of AMD in the most recent quarter could be as low as $1.2 billion (thanks to later-than-expected quad-core chip launch in September), instead of $1.632 billion.

Currently the chipmaker has no idea how much they overpaid for ATI Technologies. But the acknowledgement of the fact that ATI’s business may bring less revenue than expected a while ago may pursue a number of different goals, including the one to focus analysts' and investors' attention on certain aspects of AMD’s business instead of attracting it to AMD’s business in general.

“The company expects that the impairment charge will be material, but the company has determined that, as of the time of this filing, it is unable in good faith to make a determination of an estimate of the amount or range of amounts of the impairment charge. […] In any event within 4 business days after it makes a determination of such an estimate or range of estimates,” the statement by AMD reads.

*In this news-story we compare data between AMD’s Q3 of fiscal 2007 (which ended on September 30, 2007) and ATI’s Q3 of fiscal 2007 (which ended May 31, 2006).