Aug

5

Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Microprocessor | 2 Comments

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, Intel builds up its graphic chip capability solely through its in-house development effort without acquiring the know how through acquisitions of other graphics companies. In comparison, AMD has obtained its graphics chip capabilities through the acquisition of ATI in 2006.

Compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon which use proprietary graphics-focused cores, Larrabee will use the popular x86 cores with x86 instruction sets, much like a mulit-core CPU. However, Larrabee’s cores will be much simpler than the Core 2 Duo’s cores. It is being designed explicitly for stream processing and rasterized 3D graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) for games. It is also capable of performing ray tracing and physics processing in real time. Another interesting fact is that the design of Larrabee was coming from Intel’s previous Pentium 4 design team (Ref).

You may call Larrabee a GPU, or a mutli-core CPU or whatever. But the truth is the difference between GPU and CPU is now blurring.

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Jul

18

AMD changed chief

Filed Under Microprocessor, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

The world’s second largest microprocessor maker, AMD, has announced their earnings this morning. The company reported a revenue of $1.35 billion, and a net loss of $1.19 billion, in the quarter that ended June 28. A substantial chunk of the loss is the result of a goodwill impairment charge the company took on its now-defunct handheld and DTV products. AMD has classified these business segments as discontinued operations.The company’s financial reporting pales largely against its archrival Intel which reported a record second-quarter revenues of $9.5 billion and profits of 28 cents per share (Ref).

This morning, AMD also announced that Dirk Meyer will succeed Hector Ruiz as the company’s chief executive officer with immediate effect. Ruiz will become executive chairman of AMD and chair of the board of directors. His future role is on driving the company’s asset smart strategy to completion, and assisting with high-level government and strategic partner relations. The new CEO of AMD, Dirk Meyer, 46, joined AMD in 1995 and made his mark as part of the design team responsible for highly successful Athlon processors. In 2006, Meyer was appointed president and COO, and in 2007, he was elected to AMD’s board of directors. Prior to AMD, Meyer spent nearly a decade at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was co-architect of the Alpha 21064 and 21264 microprocessors. Meyer graduated from the University of Illinois, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. He also received a master’s degree in business administration from Boston University (Ref). He is the third CEO of AMD, after Hector Ruiz and Jerry Sander.

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