AMD is ready to take on Intel, showing off it’s hotly-anticipated pair of smaller-device centric core processors.

Horses for courses, it would seem.

Hot on the heels of the announcement that the Intel Atom 550 was ready to ship, AMD has begun showing off the “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat” like proud parents of newborns. Newborns that can run netbooks, that is.

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The collected brains at Asus Towers must be working overtime as barely a day goes past without them announcing a new product, and today they’ve decided to announce a shedload all at once.

The company has just revealed that seven brand new all-in-one-PCs – all part of the ET2400 series – will be hitting the market in the very near future.

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Financial reports don’t always make for the most riveting of reading we’ll admit that, but nonetheless, quarterly figures and share prices are always worth keeping an eye on if only to see where the tech industry is heading. With that in mind, today sees some figures that point to Intel and AMD facing some less than happy days ahead.

Shares of the pair of chipmakers feel sharply yesterday after analysts downgraded both companies stocks, warning that “once-robust personal computer sales were quickly deteriorating”. Continue Reading

A surge in tablet popularity, not to mention continually increasing notebook sales, may well help GPU sales dwindle by well over 10% during the next four years and in turn drive the development of graphics-enabled CPUs.

Tablet devices are having an impact.

Market research firm iSuppli maintains that sales of tablets and notebooks will depress discrete graphics device shipments from 73 million in 2009 to 62 million by 2014. Their rise in popularity may well fast-track the take-up of new graphics enabled processors including CPUs to replace the old style GPUs. Continue Reading

After a much publicised legal battle, the USA’s Federal Trade Commission and tech giants Intel have announced that they have agreed to settle charges of anticompetitive behavior that the agency claimed “stifled competition” in the market for computer processing and graphics chips.

AMD should benefit heavily from today's ruling.

The New York Times reveals that the settlement prohibits Intel from the practice of paying customers to buy its computer chips exclusively or to refuse to buy chips from other manufacturers. It also prohibits Intel from redesigning its chips purely to harm a competitor. Intel also agreed not to retaliate against computer makers if they do business with non-Intel suppliers. Continue Reading

According to new figures, AMD has overtaken Nvidia for graphics chip shipments. The numbers from Mercury Research show that in the second quarter of 2010 AMD’s ATI graphics unit took 51% of the standalone, or ‘discrete’ graphics chip market compared to Nvidia’s share of almost 49%.

A good 12 months for AMD evidently.

Mercury Research tracks graphics chip shipments globally, and when looking at their figures from this time last year it shows that AMD has boosted its share of the market greatly over 12 months. At the same point in 2009 Nvidia had about 59% of sales and AMD just under 41%. Continue Reading

Microsoft’s upcoming update to its suite of office applications, Microsoft Office 2010, will be adding the ability to draw on users’ graphics cards to push the suite’s performance a little.

They're getting serious about using people's GPUs now...

Word of the hardware acceleration in Office 2010 comes via AMD, which has posted a blog about some of the new features in this release, as well as its various hardware requirements. Of course, the whole thing shouldn’t prove too much of a surprise, given the fact that Microsoft has been touting the fact that the next version of its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will boast the ability to do very much the same, taking advantage of users’ GPUs in order to more smoothly and quickly render their web-based content.

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AMD might not be the biggest name associated with cloud computing, but it seems as though the company has given considerable thought to the idea of the cloud and the reasons people might not want to move towards it, and has come up with an interesting solution.

AMD has some interesting ideas for the cloud... and dockable PCs

According to a report from TechRadar, AMD’s ‘Fusion’ project aims to merge the world of thin and fat clients. For those who aren’t aware of the distinction, a ‘thin client’ is essentially a relatively low-power device that stores most of its data in the cloud, while ‘fat clients’ are more like the relatively thankless desktop PCs we all know and love already; they boast superior number crunching ability and usually a bundle more storage. Still, it seems that AMD has made some fairly interesting moves in an attempt to marry the two.

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Hewlett-Packard and Dell have both significantly reduced their investments in developing 10-inch netbooks according to reports in Taiwan. In fact, HP, according to Digitimes, is also reportedly even considering quitting the 10-inch netbook market altogether and turning its focus to AMD-based 11.6-inch notebooks.

The HP Mini 5102 was one of the 10 inch models launched at CES 2010.

This move is said to be because profits from its Intel Pine Trail-based netbooks – three of which were launched at CES in January – have been lower than expected.

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In an attempt to win back market share lost to Intel, AMD has said Acer will start using its server chips for the first time. Acer will build machines based on the 6000 series of Opteron processors that AMD recently introduced, according to Business Week.

Acer will build machines based on AMD’s 6000 series of Opteron processors.

AMD’s new server-chip design, Magny-Cours (during the design phase, AMD often names chips after Formula 1 race-tracks), is the company’s first major push to recover ground it lost amid earlier product delays. Taiwan-based Acer is trying to repeat its rise up the ranks of laptop and desktop PCs in the market for servers.

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When it comes to building a new PC, there are a few things you’ll really want to cut corners on. Some are things where you’ll know exactly what you’re getting if you shirk and pay a little less, and some are areas where you’ll find yourself wondering… will there be a noticeable difference if I drop €50 less?

Of course, the processor business has been ALL about looks for the last three years

Processors tend to be one of those areas where people will most often tend towards caution, throwing money at a processor that’s often going to be at least a little more heavy-duty than they’ll need, while some will push money into a processor that’s several orders of magnitude more than they’ll ever need or use. If nothing else, we’ll hopefully be able to save you from that kind of simple headache.

Essentially, we sat down in the office and looked over the various processors available and weighed up which would be best for low-end, mid and high-end machines for anyone looking to do some upgrading.

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The Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition was released last summer and much like Terminator Salvation it was initially deemed as a possible step down from its predecessors. Time has not seen many change their minds on McG’s misguided noisefest but in the months that followed the X2 550’s release, public opinion has warmed to its capabilities.

The 550 is based on the same specifications as the rest of the Phenom II family, but featuring half as many cores, being a dual-core processor; hence some early fears about its performance. It operates at 3.10GHz, so about 100MHz slower (per core) than the flagship X4 955 but, as the reviews showed when we went looking, it seems AMD hit the nail squarely on the head this time around. There are four star and four-and-a-half star reviews all over the place, not to mention several ratings of nine out of ten.

The press bumf that accompanied the Phenom II series’ launch on the market told how these would be processors “for high definition entertainment, gaming, creativity, and beyond”. TechRadar announced at the beginning of its review that the Phenom II CPUs had “managed to bring the processor wing of the company back into competition with Intel”.

Honing in on the 550 BE in particular though, they did ask that one big question everyone seems to have had when initially weighing up its merits; with affordable four-core chips roaming about looking all powerful, was the release of a dual-core processor like the 550 a retrograde step?

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