Buyers look at many variables in making their client decision (ie brand, reputation, system quality and reliability, post-sales service and support, energy efficiency, managability), one which is software performance.  One way purchase evaluators measure the software performance of the potential systems is through benchmark packages aka “benchmarks”. These are software packages that basically measure the software performance then use the results to compare different PCs being considered.

I wanted to poll the “community” of PC purchase evaluators in business and government to see what they use.  Sure, we have quantitative information and have face-to-face meetings with key commercial end users, but the “community” never ceases to amaze me with their insight and answers.  Please don’t let me down.

Each IP address can vote only once and you only get one choice.  I’ll post a real-time summary of the aggregate results – I won’t be identifying individual voters or their choices.

Thanks for the insight and any details on “why” you chose what you chose would be apprecuated in the comments section.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Week of 7-27-2009

Week of 8-3-2009

Observations

• 14 notebook SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 7/27/09, and 20 SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 8/3/09.

• In these advertisements there is still only one battery life measurement being advertised.  This is like buying a car and only seeing the “up to 52 MPG,” even though you would never realize that gas mileage in city driving.  Also, it’s like advertising battery life for a mobile phone and only listing “up to 300 hours battery life”.

• Battery life as I observed it is being advertised four different ways:
  • “up to X hours, Y minutes”
  • “up to X hours” (no minutes)
  • “X+ hours” (no “up to”)
  • “X cell battery life for longer performance”

• Only two retailers out of eight I observed provided disclaimers for the advertised battery life information.

During the holiday time frame, we hope and expect this situation to change. A few retailers have unofficially indicated that they are planning to adopt a “Min and Max” (aka guardrail approach) to notebook battery life communications.  Based on the lack of consistency I observed in the circulars, I expect this will be a very welcome change for consumers.

Above is a sample graphic that AMD has proposed for this guardrail approach.

If you would like to read more about the battery life discussion, please find the links below:

Nigel Dessau’s blogs on battery life

Pat Moorhead’s (me) blogs on battery life

FriendFeed page with select press articles

Improving Understanding of Notebook PC Battery Life Measurements

Let me know what you think!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

As a reminder, MobileMark 2007 is now being advertised and merchandised in retail circulars across the US. This benchmark is developed by the Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCO).  (More background and our suggestions for more accurate battery life metrics can be found here, here, and here.)

Applications in MMO7 compared to consumer use

In my opinion, it is not credible to construct a consumer benchmark consisting primarily of applications that business people use. To demonstrate my point, take a look at the battery life benchmark applications now being used in consumer adverts.

These benchmarked applications inside MM07 include: Microsoft Project 2003 for project management, Microsoft Excel 2003 for calculation sheets, Microsoft Outlook 2003 for email, calendar and scheduling, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 for presentations, Microsoft Word 2003 for word processing, WinZip Computing WinZip 10.0 for archive compression, Adobe Photoshop CS2 for manipulating and compressing images, Adobe Illustrator CS2 for manipulating images and Adobe Flash 8 for vector graphics and animation.

Do these look like your most commonly used consumer PC applications to you?  Here’s my personal list of most commonly used consumer applications as a starting point:

• Web browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome or Internet Explorer. And with browsers come Google, Gmail, YouTube, Hulu, ESPN.com, Disney.com, etc.
• Music apps like iTunes or Windows Media player
• Video or movie playback for DVDs, Blu-ray or iTunes movies or TV shows
• Games like Spore, Sims, and Worlds of Warcraft

Like I said, you be the judge.

Application % weightings in MM07 compared to usage patterns

Even if we pretend for a moment that consumers don’t use web browsers, listen to music, watch videos or play games, and they primarily use the listed MM07 apps. Surely someone on the planet does that, right?

BAPCO has published MM07’s “distribution of measured application task times“, or in other words the apps the tested notebook was running 5-10% of the time when it wasn’t idling or resting 95-90% of the time.

Inside MM07, The “measured application task times” for Adobe Flash Creation is 33.6%, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is 21.8%, Adobe Illustrator CS2 is 16.7%, Microsoft Excel is 16.6%, WinZip 10.0 is 7.1%, Microsoft Word is 1.1%, Microsoft PowerPoint is 1.0%, Microsoft Project is 1.2% and Microsoft Outlook is 1.0%.

I ask, when you use your notebook, do you spend 72% of your time recoding Flash videos, manipulating and compressing pictures in Photoshop and Illustrator?   I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that is not an accurate reflection of most of our usage profiles!

MM07 Applications compared to retail notebook software loads

One final aspect I would like to examine is the software preloaded on retail notebooks compared to the MM07 load. I also looked up the potential costs associated with a consumer adopting the MM07 software load if they bought it on their own.

I took what looked like popular notebooks and those which advertised battery life and compared their software load with MM07’s software load. I looked at five notebooks advertised in major Sunday circulars last weekend and here is what I found.

Granted this is a pretty limited sample, but as you can see above, there was 0% correlation between the MM07 software load and what is installed on these notebooks. Note: SKUs #1 and #2 did have a 60 day edition of MS Office Pro⁽¹⁾.  SKUs #3, 4, and 5 came with 60 day edition of MS Office Student Edition⁽²⁾.  Close but no cigar.

I then looked at what it would cost a consumer to buy the latest and greatest MM07 updated apps.  Here is what it could cost at retail:

As you can see above, it would cost the consumer approximately $2,701 at retail to load all of the updated MM07 applications.

Conclusion

My goal was to compare MobileMark 2007 (MM07) application selection and activity distribution and compare that to a consumer’s behavior. I showed the following:

1) MM07 Productivity is utilized in consumer facing advertisements to indicate comparative notebook battery life.
2) MM07 Productivity tested applications do not contain a single web browser, music app, video playback app, or game.
3) 72% of MM07’s application usage comes from Flash video encoding and photo manipulation and compression in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
4) MM07 tested applications have a 0% correlation between what is pre-loaded on retail notebooks and are six years old on average. (Yes, I admit it was a small sample, but you get my point…)
5) If a user bought software representing the MM07 test suite, it could cost $2,701 at retail.

I ask you, do MM07 applications represent real world consumer usage behavior and purchase characteristics?  You be the judge.

Notes:

⁽¹⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office Pro2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher)

⁽²⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office 2007 Home & Student Edition (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote)

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

The facts about MM07 and notebook display brightness

MM07 requires the following (1): “The display brightness should be measured for a white screen while on battery and be set at the lowest possible setting, no lower than 60 nits.” One needs a nit meter and yes, we have a few of those in our labs.  :-)

So what is a nit?  Wkipedia defines a nit as a “candela per square meter.” Yes, that really helped me too.  Think of a “nit” as a unit of measure of brightness.

How does 60 nits compare to brightness of other home electronics?

I pretend to be a technically-capable business, strategy and marketing guy, which according to the engineers, makes me REAL dangerous.  You see, 95% is good enough for my trade, but for theirs, its 99.999% and I respect that.

So I wanted to know what 60 nits really related to, as I didn’t know nits from nuts.  You should have seen the look on the engineer’s faces when I asked them to borrow their nit meter. Chad, his real name J, showed me how to use the nit meter and instructed me how to use the nit meter and to make sure to have a white background on all devices.

I literally went around my house testing many of my home electronics and tested them without changing any settings outside shutting off “auto adjustment” on the phones which I am told is best practice.  I suppose I can call this my family’s “comfort setting” based on the setting my family and I actually use the devices.  So there is variation in room setting, light, etc. that dictates this.

Here are the test results:

Net-net, the lowest nit measurement I observed with my “comfort setting” was still 2.58X brighter than the MM07 brightness level of 60 nits on which notebook battery life is measured.

I then wanted to see how nits related to notebook screen brightness.  So I tested a few notebooks I had in my office to see what the “max nits” were when the screen was set to the highest setting.

As you can see from the figures above, the MM07 requirement was between 20-30% of the samples notebooks’ max screen brightness.

What notebook display brightness setting do consumers use?

Now, I know that a sample set of one doesn’t represent anything, and I’m far from normal, as my friends frequently tell me, but the results of my home survey were interesting – interesting enough to make me  real curious about what others  are doing with their screen brightness settings.

So last week I started Tweeting and Facebooking questions to real users on what is the display brightness setting on which they place their notebooks. I received qualitative and quantitative responses.  Yes, I know, this isn’t a 17-country, global discrete choice, double blind methodology survey followed by focus groups, BUT there were telling, directional  indicators.

Quantitative: I wasn’t expecting anything like the response I got from Neowin respondents.  They actually placed a poll on their community website asking the question, “What brightness level do you run your notebook?“  Over 1,100 community members voted in a few days, and according to Shane Pitman, Editor-in-Chief, “Polls require a member account, and to be logged in to said account. Provides accountability, keeps people from voting multiple times.”

The results were overwhelming in that 75% of the Neowin community member respondents kept their notebook display brightness between 61% and 100%.  Somehow, I don’t think that fits into the 60 nit range.

Qualitative: These responses were as valuable as the quantitative as they gave insight into “why” they did this.  Some comments gave insight into the folks who use their notebooks at very low display settings.  I didn’t use their Twitter names to protect the innocent. :-)

Here was the response to my question, improper grammar and all, “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT)”.  Here is just a sampling of public tweet responses.

• “On the machines I see, normally I prefer to have them fully backlit with the slider up to around 75% or so.”
• “I run my laptop at maximum brightness unless the battery is really low, or I have an external screen. “
• “Now running MBP 15.4″ 3.1 at 75% brightness with auto adjust turned ; but was at 100% without auto adjust til you asked! “
• “90 – 100% brightness, 90% of the time. “
• “depends entirely on my battery level and surroundings. “
• “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT). I run full bright 95+% of the time. “
• “oh sorry , 100% unless I’m running low on battery, where I bring it down to a minimum, I’m guessing 50%, but thats rare”
• “usually around 60-70%”
• “i don’t use them much, mainly desktop, but i either have brightness at full or minimum: latter at night and if battery low”
• “When running laptop on battery, i set brightness to 25-40%, when plugged in -100%.”
• “100% brightness. Left default setting (and I appreciate it that way… old eyes). “
• “slammed up to full when possible, monitor screens vary though”
• “mine is usually as bright as I can make it. I hate dim screens. “
• “max brightness notwithstanding battery impact. “
• “I lower my screen brightness to the lowest, usable level that’s comfortable. It’s all about the battery life. “
• “Agreed…I think mine is usually around 30% or so. “
• “it varies by location due to lighting levels. Usually around 30% or 40%. Never > 50% when on battery. “
• “ME: 90 to 100% on AC, about 50 % on battery when I’m watching movies and about 20 to work. “

I also received some really interesting responses related to interpretation, explanations, tools and resources on brightness after asking about 60 nits. Got to love social media.

• “not all that hard. Need 800+ nits to read screens in direct sun, 30-150 for night highway signs: http://bit.ly/cjxJB“
• “60 nits = table in an office with 300 lux illumination: http://bit.ly/FvoKe BTW sRGB calibration target = 80 nits. “
• “oh and here’s a Kodak guide on how to use a digital camera and gray card as an ad-hoc nit estimator: http://bit.ly/1IMLK3“

You be the judge

I titled this blog, “MM07, 60 Nits, One Nit-picker and you” and now I ask you, am I just nitpicking? I ask you to make that decision for yourself.  I have described a few things:

• First, MM07 test requires a 60 nit or higher display brightness. To maximize battery life benchmarks, systems are set at the minimum allowable 60 nit level. This setting is thereby integrated into this battery life benchmark that is then used in consumer advertisings.
• Secondly, worst case, the display brightness of many electronics inside my home at my family’s “comfort setting” is 2.58X more than the MM07 nit setting requirement. Based on the small set of notebooks I tested, MM07’s 60 nits equated to around 20-30% of the max notebook brightness. Your mileage will vary, maybe.
• Third, my unscientific querying last week says many classes of users crank their screen beyond 61% and many at max brightness. Yes, I said max. Some self-selected a lower brightness setting to conserve battery life.

Nuff said, you be the judge.   Agree, disagree, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

(1) MobileMark 2007 White Paper, March 2008, Revision 1.0. 4.2.1 “Display brightness”

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

We want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to prevail because the truth is on AMD’s side. 

What if you were knee-capped?

As we said from the beginning, we do not seek special treatment from competition regulators in any way, shape or form. We crave a fair fight. If the other guy tries to injure you, preventing you from making it onto the field of play, that doesn’t strike me as fair (or legal).

I don’t recall anyone ever blaming Nancy Kerrigan for getting assaulted with a metal club by those who wanted to put an end to a level playing field in Olympic skating. Should Nancy have just accepted her clubbing as something that “goes with the territory” in an ultra-competitive endeavor, as some seem to indicate AMD should? Did Nancy demand special treatment when she went to the authorities? You know the answers already. As the victim, of course Nancy wasn’t seeking special treatment at all. She sought justice, pure and simple.

We may not have had our knees bashed in with a metal pipe, but AMD was no less injured in a business sense, and we are entitled to seek justice for that. Joe consumer was robbed of a full spectrum of marketplace choice by Intel. Sadly we cannot go back in time and undo the damage that was done to our business, and we will never know what the state of play may have been today if not for Intel’s monopoly abuses. 

Was there a cover-up?

One thing that was found by European investigators that appears to have gone under-reported is that Intel apparently went to “great lengths to cover up its anti-competitive actions“. Let me ask you this: If Intel truly believes that it has done nothing wrong why would they go out of their way to deliberately hide evidence? What’s the truth? 

Obama, the innovators and the entrepreneurs

I’ve also seen speculative pieces regarding the Obama administration’s apparent get-tough stance on antitrust, and what that may mean for Silicon Valley. I argue that any fear and loathing about what might come to pass is premature, and also misplaced. Am I an expert in this field? No. But as a technologist working for a company that innovates on the bleeding edge, do I have an informed opinion? Yes.

Only time will tell how much the Obama administration is able to help protect the economically suffering American consumer through encouraging vibrant competition. But I can say today with confidence that rather than fear or fight the change that is coming, I would encourage entrepreneurs to embrace it – because I am convinced that robust antitrust enforcement is the innovator’s best friend; perhaps the only friend they have in the dog-eat-dog world of the high tech industry.

Sane innovators and entrepreneurs will only expend the vast amounts of monetary and intellectual capital necessary to bring competitive products to the marketplace if they have a reasonable expectation of a fair return on their investment. In other words, a fair fight. 

Look at it from the other side- who in their right mind would dedicate the time, money, and everything else that goes along with a bet-the-business proposition if they knew going into it that their business’ world-beating product was most likely to be taken, boxed-up, and relegated to the top shelf in vast warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. The answer, of course, is no one. 

My humble request

So if you really love technology and what it can do for people the way I do, I urge you to support any effort that gives innovators – both large and small – the confidence to create. Let these independent investigations into Intel’s business practices play out and let the truth speak for itself.  Japanese, Korean and now European competition investigators don’t have any skin in the AMD versus Intel technology game. They don’t care about us. They don’t prefer gaming on either an AMD rig or an Intel rig. All they care about is how the facts line up with their rule of law, in an effort to protect consumers.

And by that measure, Intel is “0 for 3″. As one prominent legal reporter so succinctly put it, “Even before this palpable pendulum shift, Intel’s legal arguments looked dicey. Now they’re beginning to look far-fetched.”

So what do you think?  Let me know and leave a comment and I will respond.

The Intel World View

“AMD needs to innovate, not litigate.” Also worded as, “When AMD has a product lead, it gains all the share it deserves.”

Here’s the way even my friend Kyle Bennett of HardOCP expressed it on Twitter:

Kyle’s primary audience who we love is the PC hardware enthusiast where small differences in performance may seem dramatic (as in, a car that goes zero to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds is 9 percent slower than one that does it in 5.0 seconds flat. Both are damn fast, but the discussion is focused on the 9 percent), it’s understandable that he would imply that all AMD is missing is “better processors”. But I can’t help but point out and appreciate that Kyle’s well-respected site Hard OCP has issued awards to AMD for both our AMD Phenom^TM II processor and ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 Series graphics in the last 6 weeks alone – our hardware enthusiast products.

With others, the discussion goes like this: “Those who have the most competitive products gain share, those who don’t lose share.”   All things equal this could be true, but when there is law-breaking, and as the European Commission put it: “exclusive payments” and “pay to delay” tactics, the equation gets thrown out the window.

The Reality

This ruling from the European Union makes it clear that it doesn’t matter how much innovation AMD pours into its products. The better positioned the product, the more Intel uses its overwhelming position to illegally block or wholly shutdown customer segments and sales channels to AMD. The rewards AMD reaps from having clearly superior or differentiated products is broken into fractions of what they should be through Intel’s behavior. A healthy competitive environment should allow AMD to hone its focus and R&D spend to design and develop future innovative products and platforms, rather than distracting dollar and human resources into fighting Intel’s monopolistic practices.

But now let’s even put that aside.

Others new to this debate may ask: Even with Intel illegal behavior, does AMD have great products and technologies?

Standout Product Innovations So Far in 2009

In 2009 alone, AMD has introduced the world’s first 40nm and the world’s first 1 GHz graphics processors, created the affordable ultrathin notebook category, delivered a world-record setting desktop PC platform, and introduced the most energy-efficient quad-core server processor in our history. We feel these innovations stand tall in the industry, and have real value for their intended customer segments.

Let me provide another recent example in the notebook space where I believe AMD has earned the right to claim “most competitive product”.  Please, if you disagree, please let me know in the comments section and I will respond.

AMD creates the affordable ultrathin technology platform

If you recall, as the world fell in love with netbooks last year, we asked the question, “is this the best the industry can offer”?  Would consumers want a full PC experience with HD video, Blu-ray, larger display, and ability to play games… by spending a few more bucks?  Well, yes.  AMD’s platform technology for ultrathin notebooks codename “Yukon” was born and materialized with the award winning and game-changing HP Pavilion dv2 ultrathin notebook.  What did others say?

BusinessWeek: “The bottom line for mobility-minded buyers is that the need to choose between expensive executive ultralights and cheap but underpowered netbooks is nearly over.”

Tech Report: “Compared to the average Eee PC, the dv2 packs two thirds more
desktop area, double the hard drive capacity, four times the memory,
a faster CPU, and dramatically better graphics…and it allows the system to do things most netbooks can’t, such as play many recent games and high-definition video, including Blu-ray movies.”

If these appear cherry-picked then here are a full page of accolades on the HP dv2.

Hopefully this example in the notebook space shows that AMD has great products and others are saying it too. We’re creating product categories of unquestioned value to the consumer, Keep in mind, this is true even with Intel’s abusive monopolist practices determined by the EU.  I ask you to reject the line of thinking and spin Intel would like you to believe.  Do you agree/disagree? Let’s chat.

I believe competition is the “secret sauce” that drives innovation. That’s true in any industry, and it’s also true in life. Would the U.S. have put a man on the moon if not for Sputnik? Maybe, but there’s no question that the Space Race and attending accelerated pace of innovationwas fueled by very high stakes competition between the US and the former Soviet Union.

Goliath with brass knuckles

At AMD we live to compete and innovate, and it starts by asking questions like “What will it take to deliver the next-generation computing experience?” And while innovation with impact is our calling card, it’s more than fair to say that AMD also loves a good fight. But hopefully the world now knows that we’ve fight an enormous opponent that rigs the game to ensure AMD can never fully win fair and square.

Like Nigel said, competition investigators have for a third time (Japan, Korea, European Union) collected evidence showing that especially when AMD opens commanding product leads on Intel and we take those innovations to the marketplace, Intel uses bribery and coercive tactics to block those innovations. Whole AMD customer segments and sales channels are effectively shutdown by Intel.That’s Don Corleone type stuff, folks. That’s David versus Goliath, with Goliath packing brass knuckles on one hand and a brick-filled sock in the other.

The AMD Critic: “AMD should innovate, not litigate”

I’ve heard the Intel apologists say: “AMD should innovate instead of litigate.” If you doubt we fear an innovation fight with Intel or that  we can truly compete with Intel, remember that we have proven that we can out-innovate or remain competitive against Intel, a company with about 10x the resources. We are champing at the bit to attack an open, competitive marketplace that is no longer artificially manipulated by Goliath.

You may be sitting there saying, “OK Pat – that’s your opinion, and a biased opinion at that!” Fair enough. If that was opinion, here are 10 facts that should do some of the talking for AMD in terms of theinnovation chops we have under our roof:

Fact #1

Billions of financial transactions are conducted quickly and efficiently every day by major stock exchanges around the world on AMD-based servers.

Fact #2

All 50 Million Wii gaming consoles shipped to date run on AMD technology (ATI Hollywood GPU).

Fact #3

7 of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD processors.

Fact #4

AMD processors were trusted to power crash safety test simulations for almost 2 million new cars that hit the road in the US in 2008.

Fact #5

Realistic special effects powered by AMD technology have helped Hollywood amass more than $5.4 billion in worldwide box office revenue.

Fact #6

AMD processors in the Top500 supercomputer list account for more than 4.029 petaflops of computing power (that’s more than four thousand trillion calculations per second).

Fact #7

50% of Internet DNS traffic is efficiently and quickly routed via AMD-powered servers.

Fact #8

Musicians and producers who have collectively won 70 Grammy awards currently rely on AMD technology for their cutting edge digital music production.

Fact #9

Every month nearly 23 million travelers find their ideal trip using online travel services powered by AMD-based hardware.

Fact #10

AMD graphics and slot machine are a winning combination.  More than 75% of new slot machines in Vegas use AMD graphics to power their visually stunning imagery, and more than half of those machines also use an AMD CPU.

So to borrow from our corporate philosophy, I’m more than happy to combine these facts with our employees’ passion for innovation. And I’ve never felt better about the future of innovation than I do today.  What do you think?

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Let me tell you about that.

I met up with AMD during my tenure at Compaq Computer Corp. starting in 1995. Back then, lots of PCs sold for as much as $2,000 and the idea of notebooks for consumers instead of just business people was new. AMD helped change the entire landscape on both those fronts and the market has never been the same.

I also fondly recall loving the ATI Rage^TM Pro graphics card. In fact it was at that time that Compaq actually soldered the ATI Rage Pro engine onto the motherboard [it was in fact the first motherboard-resident AGP graphics chip]. Soldering anything on a mobo back in the day was a huge commitment and vote of confidence.

In late 2000, I joined AMD and have called it home ever since.

I admire AMD for a lot of things, but three things come top of mind:

1. Integrity, the highest levels.

2. Putting customers first, sometimes seemingly at its own peril.

3. Defying the pundits and “just doing it”

#1 and #2 are reasonably self-explanatory so I will drill down into #3.  I will provide the “dialogue” as people may have heard it play-out many times before:

• 1990 Pundit: “You have the 386 mask set, but not the microcode. No way can you make a 386.”

But AMD did it.

• 1992 Pundit: “You don’t have the 486 mask set or the microcode. No way can you make a 486.”

But AMD did it.

• 1997 Pundit: “You have relied on Intel’s infrastructure this whole time so no way you can make a 7^th generation CPU with an AMD-based motherboard infrastructure. You are dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 1999 Pundit: “New and proprietary instruction sets from massive companies are the way to go. You are nuts if you think you can drive a 64-bit instruction set by yourselves. You will be dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 2003 Pundit: “No way you can get into the datacenter. You are just a consumer desktop CPU company. Get back in your box.”

But AMD did it.

• 2007 Pundit: “You’ve lost graphics technology leadership and you won’t ever get it back. The competition is too tough.”

But AMD did it.

So I hope I refreshed your memory banks on what pundits may have said, how AMD said “we can” and how AMD “just did it”.  I want to highlight that we didn’t do anything on our own without the support of our customers, their customers, and technology and infrastructure partners.

I am excited about AMD, our employees, and our future.  I am excited about what we plan to bring to our customers on cloud server computing and media-rich consumer usage models. Pundits will take shots and that’s okay, as it tends to motivate us and enhance the sweetness of our successes in the end.

Pundits laughed when Kennedy set his challenge to send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the 1960s. We like our moon-shots at AMD, too, and surprising the pundits again and again.

AMD, happy 40^th and I promise I will keep promoting the “we can” attitude and we’ll just do it.

Note: Nigel Dessau, CMO and SVP at AMD is also providing his unique blog perspective on the 40th anniversary here.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I can assure you that no devious plot exists to mislead you. It really comes down to three simple factors.

#1: Measurements are best case: Like a car’s “highway miles per gallon” which gauges the best case (cruising at a sustained speed for an extended period without stop-and-go driving), notebook battery life is typically based on MobileMark® 2007. This benchmark primarily measures battery life while the notebook is doing nothing – not even wirelessly connecting to the Internet. A “city-driving” equivalent of notebook battery life doesn’t exist…yet.

#2: Different strokes for different folks: Notebook users are different; we all use notebooks differently, and therefore will see different battery durations.  Some watch HD web videos on YouTube, some may just do email, and some play more games than others. ALL which will mean varying battery life.  You can see this data from AMD here that shows the phenomenon.  This even shows that battery life under system use can even vary by component manufacturer.

#3: Battery life varies over time: The longer you own your notebook, use it, charge, and recharge, over and over again, the more the battery loses its effectiveness.  So theoretically, your longest battery life will be on the first day you crack open the packaging.  See all the people selling new batteries for old notebooks?  Some even say, battery life is variable with heat.

So what should a consumer like you do?

• Grade battery life on a “curve”, let’s say 60%. If the label says 10 hours, my guess is it’s probably only about 6 hours in real use.  (UPDATE: this isn’t always linear, so be very careful with this.)
• Ask your retailer and systems providers to provide the “city miles per gallon” or using the tried and tested cellphone analogy, “talk-time”. They all have web sites and when all else fails, you can ask them over Twitter.

I may have not added back 40% of your battery life, but hopefully you know why you only get 60% of it!

(This blog was originally published at the Technologizer web site. Updated with full blog June 8, 2009.)

I do a lot of hands-on research on smartphones. I do this for two reasons. First, I believe they are fast becoming one of the prevalent cloud clients, and second, they are fast becoming a popular device to consume video. AMD obviously is involved in building the cloud with the AMD Opteron^TM Processors but also conversion to make a video smartphone-friendly can take a tremendous amount of compute power, and ATI Radeon ^TM HD 4800 series graphics and AMD Phenom ^TM II X4 processors do those conversions quite well.

One smartphone element that needs some more discussion is the value of battery life figures that one finds at the point of purchase or research. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry Bold, Blackberry Storm, or Nokia N96, there initially appears to be variability between claims, tests, and personal usage. Let’s take a look at each phone and see if that’s the case.

iPhone

Apple’s web site lists the following for the 3G iPhone:

• Talk time: up to 5 hours on 3G, 10 hours on 2G
• Standby time: up to 300 hours
• Internet use: up to 5 hours on 3G, 6 hours on WiFi
• Video playback: Up to 7 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 24 hours

The birdseed print states that the testing was done with pre-production handsets back in June, 2008. I also found the methodology interesting in that different features were sometimes toggled on/off during the tests: WiFi association, WiFi “ask to join networks”, call forwarding, and auto-brightness.

Anandtech did their own testing and reported the following battery life for the 3G iPhone:

• Talk time: 4 hours 44 mins (284 mins) on 3G; 6 hours 4 mins (364 mins) on EDGE
• Web browsing: 3 hours 17 mins (197 minutes) on 3G; 6 hours, 40 mins (400 minutes) on WiFi; 4 hours and 3 mins (243 minutes) on EDGE

Anandtech’s number confirmed and disputed some of the numbers listed by Apple, but then again they may not have tested exactly the same way. I am impressed by Apple’s depth and transparency of information as you will soon see why…

Blackberry Bold

RIM’s web site lists the following for the Bold:

• Talk time: 4 hours, 30 mins
• Standby time: 324 hours (13.5 days)

I found it interesting that there were no disclaimers evident anywhere on the web site and there were no battery life scores for internet, video or audio.

I looked long and hard and found some testing reviews by Boy Genius and Asian One that listed what I would describe as good “compilation battery remarks”, but couldn’t find as detailed a review as Anandtech had for the iPhone.

BoyGenius commented that their testing had included:

• 300-500 emails a day,
• one hour of web surfing over 3G,
• Wi-Fi usually turned on, Bluetooth turned off,
• JiveTalk connected, and around one hour of phone calling (although they admitted that they didn’t normally use the BlackBerry as a phone), and that their test phone’s battery lasted from 9AM until 4:30AM (or 7 ½ hours).

The talk time figure is around what I get, but I would like to see more granularity by usage model with more details around specific usages around internet use and video playback.

Blackberry Storm

RIM’s web site lists the following for the Storm:

• Talk time: 6 hours
• Standby time: 356 hours (15 days)

As with the Bold, I also found it interesting on the Storm that there were no disclaimers evident anywhere and again there were no battery life scores for internet, video or audio.

CNet reported the following test results for the Storm:

• Talk time: 7 hours
• Music: 14 hours, 45 mins

As with the Bold, the Storm’s talk time figure is around what I get, but I would like to see more granularity by usage model with more details around specific usages around internet use and video playback.

Nokia N96

Nokia’s web site lists the following for the Nokia N96:

• Talk time: up to 150 / 220 minutes (WCDMA / GSM)
• Stand-by time: up to 8 / 9 days (WCDMA / GSM)
• Video playback: up to 5 hours (offline mode)
• Music playback: up to 14 hours (offline mode)

There is an asterisk that disclaims that “Operation times may vary depending on radio access technology, used operator network configuration and usage.”

All About Symbian reported the following activities they could complete in 16.5 hours on the N96 on one charge:

• YouTube Videos: approx 1 Hour playing using the S60 browser through 3.5G
• General Web Surfing: approx 1 Hour using both WiFi and 3.5G
• Mucking about with settings and navigating menus, etc.: approx 1 hour
• Setup Profimail and synced my IMAP account, 3,200 Emails, approx 400MB using WiFi, 3.5G and GPRS
• Downloaded the AAS Podcast, approx 20MB directly on the N96, and played the file using a stereo Bluetooth headset

End users may even find this test methodology the most valuable in that it shows a “day in a life” given a particular charge. This data is impossible to compare against Nokia’s corporate website, but it was nice that Nokia would, like Apple, provide video and music playback numbers. I would like to see Nokia commit to an internet battery life figure.

Conclusions

So what can we take away from this mash-up of smartphone battery life figures? First, there are some significant variances from vendor to vendor in the terminology and the information depth and transparency provided. Secondly, when a third-party review was conducted, it could sometimes be compared to the manufacturer’s specs, sometimes not. In some cases, the third-party review supported the claim, sometimes not. But that could be attributed to a difference in methodology. Net-net, not a whole lot of consistency exists with audio, video and internet battery life scoring.

My single biggest positive takeaway was the consistency with almost everyone on the usage and application of “talk time” and “standby time.” While not as cool as “internet battery” life, if you believe that talking is the primary use for your smartphone, this is good for the consumer.

What do you think about smartphone battery life marks? How is their accuracy and value?

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Technorati Profile.

Spore, the popular “casual” game from EA, has received as much sales and fanfare as it has controversy from its DRM policies. Spore sold 1M copies and 25M creations were created in its first 2 weeks so no one questions its popularity. But, does anyone question the quality of the visual experience between different notebook technologies? They should, as there are big differences that could really impact their enjoyment. One would expect that today on modern notebooks these differences wouldn’t exist but they definitely do.

Brian Henry, a software engineer in our Performance and Experience Lab, provided me with some data that I thought was interesting. He showed me a visual comparative analysis of Spore on two HP Pavilion dv5 notebooks, both with integrated graphics. One system was an AMD-based (“Puma”) and the other an Intel-based (Montevina). Interestingly, the Intel-based system demonstrated significant difference in Spore quality.

Here are the comparative screen-shots on “high” settings. You don’t need to have 20/20 vision to see there is a huge disparity.

Here is the Intel Centrino 2 (Montevina) system with Core 2 Duo CPU and GMA 4500MHD graphics (1):

Here is the AMD (“Puma”) system with a Turion™ X2 Ultra CPU and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics (2) :

Compare the water quality, shadows off the creatures, the grassy field dimensionality and the background fog elements (or lack thereof) between the two images.

The Intel game graphics performance and visual experience shown here on Spore is very consistent with what AMD, Nvidia and others in the tech press have been confirming for a years. And, just to list a few:

• Business Week: “Is Your PC a Graphics Wimp?”
• InformationWeek: “Intel Cites Graphics Problems In Centrino 2 Delay”
• Notebooks.com: “AMD vs. Intel Integrated Graphics Video”
• The Inquirer: “Intel’s G965 embedded graphics stink – official”
• NVIDIA video: “GeForce 7 series Motherboard GPU”
• AMD video: “AMD Phenom X3 + AMD 780 Gaming Demo”

Ironically, this is a phenomenon that has everything to do with the balance of the total platform (CPU-GPU-Chipset) versus the performance of one specific component. Let me explain in a little more detail. The Puma platform combined the new code-name “Griffin” CPU with the new integrated AMD M780G chipset that included the integrated ATI Radeon 3200 graphics. The M780G chipset’s graphics is a 55nm shrink of a full desktop Radeon 2000 Series graphics, which to me explains the awesome performance and quality. It also provides DX10, native DVI, HDMI and HDCP. The chipset and CPU and graphics are married together and provide sophisticated power management capabilities with ATI PowerPlay, ^TM, AMD Cool ‘n ‘ Quiet ^TM Technology, and Display Cache. In my opinion, the combined performance, quality, display, and power management capabilities are a requirement for a good mobile casual gaming experience.

Net-net, even when it comes to casual games like Spore, The Sims, or even Sim City, buyer beware: there can be major differences in the experience with these games on a notebook–differences not changed by a cutesy TV jingle. The industry (of which I am a part) has thus far failed to develop, deliver, and educate end-users on these differences. To me, playing Spore at high-quality would be the low bar game experience for a notebook you just plowed $699 to $1,599 into.

If you play casual games on notebooks, I recommend looking for notebooks with ATI Radeon ^TM branded graphics numbered 3200 and above and with AMD Turion ™ processors.

If you “beg to differ” or have your own casual game nightmare I would like to hear from you.

Note: This blog was originally published on notebooks.com here.

1) AMD notebook specs: HP Pavilion dv5z, BIOS F.05 – 6/18/2008, AMD Turion Ultra ZM-82, DDR2-800 2GB (2 X 1GB) RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics , 7.1.1.747 VBIOS, Seagate ST9100824AS hard drive, high Spore settings.

2) Intel notebook spec: HP Pavilion dv5z (CORR:dv5t), BIOS F.05 – 6/8/2008, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8400, DDR2-800 2GB (2 X 1GB) RAM, Mobile Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, 7.15.10.1502 VBIOS, Seagate- ST9100824AS hard drive, high Spore settings..

Note: No sponsorship with EA is implied in this blog.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Low-priced, 720P HD pocket camcorders (palmcorders) are gaining market momentum and I believe consumers are drawn to the value proposition of low cost, high quality, portable, and convenient video capture and playback. As these devices proliferate, it leaves me contemplating how consumers will respond when they discover just how many of these notebooks or netbooks can’t effectively play back that content. Whether or not low end notebooks or netbooks were designed to do this isn’t relevant, as a recent NPD blog posting (citing new research) may suggest.

The Cameras

Let’s start with the cameras. I evaluated three different models, Flip MinoHD ($179), Kodak Zi6 ($148), and the Aiptek 1080 ($159). These cameras capture HD video at 720P resolution and 30-60 fps at around 10-12Mbps, which I consider mid-level HD video. Compare this to your typical Blu-ray movie peaking between 20 to 40 Mbps.

Compared to higher end HD camcorders priced into the $1,000s, many features have been removed like branded lenses, large magnification, optical image stabilization, night vision and auto-focus, just to name a few.  In comparing between HD pocket camcorders, the differences are found in battery life, image capture quality, external display size, memory upgradability, and physical size.

Pervasiveness

To quickly gauge pervasiveness in the U.S., I sometimes use Best Buy shelving as a proxy indicator. In my last trip to my local Best Buy, these new class of cameras had 7 slots of shelf space, which is significant. Some models that use the lowest-cost clamshell packaging are even sold at Wal-Mart and Target next to $20 JPEG picture key chains and USB flash drives. In addition, many influential bloggers are picking up on these new HD cameras, which is sometimes a good indicator of future popularity. Amazon.com is an “OK” indicator and these new HD palmcorders are relatively high in sales rank.

The Problem

As I see it, the problem is simple…. videos from these new cheap cameras won’t play well on many of the new inexpensive net/notebooks. If new research from the NPD blog is a future indicator, most consumers won’t know the capability tradeoffs between netbooks, low end notebooks and full capability (HD capable) notebooks. This could spell some real disappointment for users who may expect decent playback. In my testing on a typical netbook or real low end notebook, I get around 7 fps – close to a slide show. Think of it this way – the HD palmcorder is smaller and cheaper than any netbook. Is it logical to assume the consumer will know that the video from the palmcorder can’t play on the bigger, more expensive netbook?

Different Solution Approaches

I suggest there are a few different ways that OEMs can solve these problems. They can:

1)    Provide greater CPU power to decode the 720P HD video.  This may also increase the heat, the fan noise and lower the battery life as well. (High end dual core CPU)

2)    Provide an effective graphics solution that efficiently decodes, filters, and color corrects the image. (i.e: AMD 780G, ATI Mobility Radeon™3000, and competing solutions)

3)    Provide a special decode chip that’s expensive and bounded to specific software. (i.e: discrete accelerator)

AMD’s Approach

Our approach is simple: apply the most efficient silicon to the challenge.  In this usage scenario, the most efficient way is to decode the HD video with the GPU. Inside the GPU are special silicon blocks and special quality filters that are optimized for this function. We call this our UVD or Unified Video Decoder. It accelerates decoding of VC-1, H.264, and MPEG2 video and offloads the CPU for other tasks. UVD also applies quality filters against the video to make it look better, when using a supported player like Cyberlink 8. The result is amazing.  Very low CPU utilization, keeping the system cool and very high quality image thanks to the filters provided by ATI Avivo™ technology.

Implications

If you accept that users will increase their consumption of HD video on their notebooks, disappointment for many will follow with low, ~7 fps HD experience or apply an appropriate GPU to execute the task. Another alternative is to invest resources educating consumers on the difference in capabilities between netbooks, low end notebooks, and fully capable notebooks. With the economy and budgets the way they are, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Real-World Efficiency in Action

I want to highlight my favorite example. The new HP dv2 notebook (based on AMD’s “Yukon” platform technology for ultrathin notebooks) uses a superscalar AMD Athlon Neo ™ processor paired with ATI Radeon™ X1250 integrated graphics and optional ATI Radeon ™ HD 3410 discrete graphics to deliver not only full frame-rate HD video from these new HD palmcorders, but also higher end Blu-ray movies.

Conclusion

AMD has already anticipated the importance of HD video in multiple forms: low cost HD pocket camcorders discussed above, Blu-ray movie capabilities, and of course, some downloaded content.  And we have responded with technologies that are in-market today.  Big question remains: where does that leave netbook owners who expected their netbook to work with their even-smaller and less expensive HD palmcorder, even if that was “never the design intent”? It leaves them stranded on a non-HD island. Hopefully they have a second HD-capable PC at home, but if the NPD data is an indicator, they may not….

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2009/01/22/the-significance-of-hd-palmcorders-to-netbook-and-notebook-design/feed/ 4 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/12/31/notebookscom-poor-spore-performance-on-your-new-notebook/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/12/31/notebookscom-poor-spore-performance-on-your-new-notebook/#comments Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:23:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/12/31/notebooks-com-quote-poor-spore-performance-on-your-new-notebook-quote.aspx

Over the last 6 months, I have heard a lot of industry insiders vehemently defending the cheap mini notebook (aka netbook) as a great device to travel with given its cost, size weight and applicability to task. I don’t have anything against these new cheap mini notebooks, but I think it is VERY important that consumers are educated to their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and all I see talked about are the strengths, a disservice to consumers in my opinion. I have used five of the cheap mini-notebooks over the last 6 months and yes, there are strengths and more weaknesses compared to an inexpensive full-sized notebook at the same price. I had written a lot in previous blogs on my personal interaction with these inside the home, so I decided to put it to the test outside the home, a contrast to what I had done and written about in a previous blog.

I needed to travel to Florida last week to look for a new show horse for my wife. She is a “hunter/jumper” and competes at the local, state, and national level along with my two young girls. Buying a horse is a very personal activity, and you have very little time to ride and test many horses. It is important to videotape, take still images and be able to share the videos and pictures with the other horse professionals back home in Texas over on-line services like YouTube and Flickr.

I technologically armed myself with the following:

• Aiptek HD video camera ($179) for capturing 720P and 1080P high definition video to view high quality off-line videos
• FlipVideo camera ($159) for capturing lower-resolution, easy to upload to YouTube and will also convert to the new “watch in high quality mode”
• Kodak V1253 ($175) digital camera to capture high quality 12MP 16:9 stills
• MSI Wind U100 ($579) mini-notebook with no mods
• AT&T 3G USBConnect 881 ($149) modem to connect to the internet remotely

The daily regimen consisted of driving a half hour to the horse barn and trying out a bunch of horses by riding them, videotaping and photographing them while taking notes on the pros and cons. At about mid-day, we would load all the content onto the MSI Wind to view and/or upload the content while still at the horse barn. We would do this in the car and on the way home. That’s when some of the challenges started hitting.

1) Extremely Short Battery Life
I only would get 1.5 hours battery life per charge so I was either not able to load the content in the car, view the content I had loaded in the car or had to wait until I reached the hotel to load, view and upload. I suppose I could have bought another $25-50 car adapter, but hey, these are supposed to be cheap mini notebooks, not the expensive, full featured ones, right? Additionally, because I preferred not to upload 15 separate files and preferred one, I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together all the SD (standard-def) Flip videos, which of course wouldn’t last an entire charge and could only be done back at the hotel. Even basic usages like surfing the web at the pool was useless given the low battery life. By the time you would get to the pool, you might get an hour to read the news, get caught up on current events, etc. After that hour, its right back up to the hotel room to plug the unit back in. Forget it, easier to use the BlackBerry.

2) Choppy, Unplayable 720P Video Playback
I like slide shows, but not when myself, our trainer, and I are trying to evaluate a horses timing, skill, personality and potential problems with health and price. I estimate that the 720p video playback on the Wind was operating at 15 frames per second, a slide show. This was MOV files read from VLC player and of course QuickTime. Completely useless 720P video playback with the cheap mini-notebook. I didn’t even kid myself into thinking it was a good idea to stitch the HD files together. Encode would have been painful.

3) Choppy NBCOlympics.com Internet Video and Compromised UI
During the downtime, we wanted to watch some of the events on NBCOlympics.com, you know, with the Microsoft SilverLight experience… I then discovered a new challenge with the netbook’s 1024×600 screen resolution and maybe even with the Silverlight performance on these new notebooks. This may seem like a nit, but a couple big issues surfaced. When I clicked on the left icon “Olympic Sports” many sports icons were cut off at the top. Not real useful or intuitive and not a big deal to everyone, but new netbook and new website, it should work.

On the “Most Watched” icon on the left rail, once clicked, you cannot read the white text at the top of the screen. Annoying.

The worst part was the “As Seen on TV”, where if clicked, you get a bunch of cool videos selected by day. The big problem was that the days were covered by the browsers at the top. See that yellow half moon at the top right? That’s supposed to be a day. You can theoretically pick previous days if you could actually see them……… but you can’t.

I can’t blame the browser, I need to blame the display and controller for not being able to display those vital 168 (768-600) missing pixels. When I could actually get the videos to play, they were hit and miss, most being choppy and pixilated, some very good. The CPU varied between 75-100% depending on the content.

Hopefully others can learn from my latest science experiment….. when in doubt in my opinion, if you want to do ANYTHING other than surfing basic, light websites AT HOME without the bells and whistles, go for the full-size notebook, not one of these cheap mini-notebooks. With any form of decent video playback or any video recoding, even with Microsoft , I wouldn’t, couldn’t recommend these cheap mini-notebooks in their current state and configuration.

I would love to hear your feedback on this or of your experiences have been any different.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I’m a fan of benchmarks. I think they are very helpful in allowing consumers to make informed purchase decisions about products. But they generally have some flexibility built into them so you can focus on those elements you want. And this means you can use a benchmark to tell a number of stories – which means you can choose to tell the story you want.

For example, take a recent review by AnandTech entitled “Sixteen Cores, Four Sockets” published on June 17, 2008. This article featured Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems. One of the performance evaluations in this article was a SPECjbb2005 benchmark estimate. What is particularly interesting about this article is that the published estimates list the 4 socket server running AMD Opteron processors model 8356 as 25% faster than the competition while running at similar frequencies and 7% faster than the fastest competitive solution. These results vary widely from the official scores posted on the SPEC site. Now you might ask – how can that be? How can you run what is considered to be an industry standard benchmark and get a different set of numbers? That can’t be right!

Taking a closer look at the SPECjbb2005 benchmark helps to unravel this mystery. SPECjbb2005 is a memory-intensive benchmark that is intended to evaluate the performance of servers running typical Java business applications. Its results evaluate the interaction of the CPU, caches, memory hierarchy, JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler. SPECjbb2005 can be configured to run in a variety of ways, resulting in different performance outcomes. Different configuration = different story. For example, you can get different results based on the operating system used, the version of JVM used, the level of optimization of the JVM and JIT, JVM tuning options, and thread allocations.

The SPECjbb2005 scores published by SPEC tend to be achieved using very aggressive software tuning and processor settings. These settings help to achieve a “best possible score” but do not necessarily reflect how a system would be configured in a data center environment to provide the most stable and efficient performance. The scores published in the AnandTech article, according to the author, are more likely to reflect real world configurations with optimizations used consistent over the different processor architectures.

Indeed – if you do a survey around the internet you can find reference to other SPECjbb2005 scores and estimates that reflect a variety of configuration options and the resulting differences in the benchmark scores:

http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_fire_x4440_best_opteron

Blog featuring SPECjbb2005 results with the 4 socket Sun Fire x4440 running quad-core AMD Opteron processors with Solaris 10 and Sun JVM. Also highlights power consumption of featured systems – reminding us that in today’s economy of escalating energy costs raw performance has less meaning to data centers than performance/watt.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/4

An article by TechReport featuring SPECjbb2005 estimates for 2 socket servers running quad-core processors with Windows Server 2003 x64 edition and the Sun JVM. The author states the goal of this performance evaluation was to test relative performance on equal footing.

Taking a closer look at the official SPECjbb2005 scores and the estimates published in the various articles, you can see how confusing a benchmark can be. This serves as a reminder to us that benchmarks are just an indicator of performance and that a benchmark like SPECjbb2005, which allows for a wide variety of configurations, can produce a wide variety of results. And remember – the story being told is not always the one that best reflects reality….

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

In my last blog, I talked about some top things to look for in a latest “2nd generation” notebook. Interestingly, no one debated my analysis of the situation. So I will take your silence as agreement with my position! On the other hand, I did get a lot of questions about availability of notebooks built on AMD’s next generation platform codenamed “Puma”, which we launched on June 4. There’s some real excitement about this ground-breaking platform, and so I took a little trip around my neighborhood of Austin, Texas to see what is already available at the local technology retailer. And remember, retail is a good test of availability, because it has the longest distribution chain.

Before I jump into the pics and SKUs, let me give a little background on the “back-to-school” selling season, which varies a bit by region. It’s been about 5 years since I ran the AMD channels group, so I needed a refresh on the BTS delivery dates. I spoke with some of my AMD biz-dev buddies and this is what they told me:

• In China and Taiwan, the “back-to-school” summer selling season starts the first week of June.
• The North America “back-to-school” season starts the last week of June or the first week of July. It starts when the ads start, like Thanksgiving right after Halloween :>.
• In Europe, the “back-to-school” season varies wildly, starting in July in the Nordics and progressively later as you move southward. In some countries, the new models don’t hit until late August or early September. I will attribute that to awesome vacations. : >

The key point here is that the “back-to-school” seasons vary by region and that “Puma” nailed them all. As this article indicates, our competitor was not quite as timely with some of its BTS deliveries…

I live in North Austin, TX, USA and it is literally the “land of retail.” I don’t live here to be or feel cool, I live here because it is a great place to bring up a family. To provide the proper care and feeding to the inhabitants, there are retail stores everywhere. So this weekend, I went on my own “Puma hunt” to really see what was going on. As I noted above, retail has the longest distribution chain and therefore is a good meter of availability. If you can get it at retail, then you can likely get it most anywhere else, like direct or on the web.

Within a few miles from my house, here is what I found. Now remember that these are the posted sticker prices I observed on actual notebooks available in Austin, Texas last weekend – taxes and additional options like extended warranties are not included. And as the retailers themselves point out, these notebooks can be subject to availability and change without notice. But they do tell a compelling story of “Puma” availability:

Best Buy

HP Pavillion TX2525NR at $1,049 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 RM-70 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. As a tablet, you can use it as a standard notebook or flip the screen around and use it as a tablet with pen input. It also came with a remote to control your media from afar, bluetooth and a fingerprint reader. Cool!

HP Pavillion DV5-1004NR at $899 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display, HDMI output, an eSATA/USB combo port, webcam, 4GB RAM, cool new design (the trackpad looks like a mirror) and Microsoft Vista 64. The kitchen sink.:>

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4830 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 14.1″ display, 4GB RAM, 1394 port, Microsoft Vista 64, and webcam.

Toshiba U405-S2852 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Also comes with a 13.3″ display, 1394 port, and webcam.

Circuit City

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $1,049 a tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 12.1″ display and similar to the TX2525NR above.

Toshiba Satellite L305D-S5881 at $729 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and webcam.

Fry’s

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $999 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Similar to the TX2525NR above.

HP Pavillion DV5-1002US at $949 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Also comes with Microsoft Vista 64, 4GB RAM and a massive 320GB hard drive.

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4828 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 14.1″ display and webcam.

Toshiba Satellite A305-S6849 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite U405-S2846 at $699 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 13.3″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite L305-S5873 at $649 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display.

No, these are not typos. Twelve notebooks built on AMD’s next generation “Puma” platform. All available within a few miles from my house and in the longest leadtime channel, retail. That’s not to mention what is available over the web, if that’s the way you like to shop. And these aren’t the end of the SKUs, either. I expect to see more emerge every month.

So it really is “reigning” Pumas! But wait – I also said it was “raining” dogs. By that I mean that during my visits this weekend I saw a lot of “dog” systems out there as well. I won’t say which ones specifically, but to me a system is a “dog” if it has a difficult time playing HD video and games, come chock full of “generic” graphics and “generic” wireless and is poor value for your hard earned dollars. Basically, a notebook which is the opposite of those described in my last blog (and of course the opposite of the “Puma” notebooks listed above).

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9creigning%e2%80%9d-pumas-and-%e2%80%9craining%e2%80%9d-dogs/feed/ 12 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:40:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses.aspx Historically as an industry, we would typically pigeon-hole 3D system capability into the categories of “games”, “design”, or “visual analysis”. While historically that was the case, in my opinion, we are about to experience a serious breakout in mainstream 3D. Many of the planets seem to be aligning on the content, interfaces, devices and back end services to make this a reality. For end users, they need to make sure they aren’t buying systems with under-powered graphics solutions.

One simple example is handsets. Almost every major phone maker has licenses some form of 3D technology for phones. Recent news regarding Freescale, STM, and QUALCOMM exemplify this and gives a sense of the future. The iPhone showed with its 3D (albeit, 2D engineered to look 3D) that the population as a whole prefers 3D. It makes sense, right? We see in 3D, so it makes sense that that we would prefer images that reflect our reality.

There are even more things going on in the PC space. It would make sense given the increase in monitor sizes, display resolutions, and the improvements to the 3D engines on mainstream systems. Larger average monitor size gives you the ability to see more on the screen. If you keep your resolution the same on that large display, everything will look huge. So you increase the resolution to, let’s say, 1920×1080 (1080p). Now you are set … except you need apps where you can actually benefit from the “z-axis”. For mainstream consumer computer users, games are obvious. Outside games, it may not be as obvious.

I have tested a few of these 3D apps and wanted to share them with you. Have fun!

• SpaceTime- 3D web search with its own UI. Images, video, and tabbed browsing. Very useful … I love it.

• CoolIris Piclens- 3D web search, images and video, but start search in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

• Google Picasa- Has a few 3D enabled viewing and organizational capabilities.

• Google Earth- 3D flythrough of terrain, buildings, even galaxies. Also, they just added a Flight Simulator feature which is cool.
• Google SketchUp- Simple way to create and share 3D models … like creating models for your deck, pool, or a home addition. You can embed these inside Google Earth also.
• Microsoft Live Search Maps- 3D terrain, buildings, fly-throughs.
• Microsoft Windows Vista Aero- Interface for Windows Vista Premium, Flip 3D features are most useful with a large monitor.
• Tactile 3D- 3D flythrough of your data on your hard drive and network. Not for the tech weary. Recommend 20″ monitor and above.
• AMD LIVE! TM Explorer- 3D media viewing of music, pictures, videos, and TV.

As you can see, 3D is here and available to the mainstream user. It’s only a matter of time, in my opinion, before every app will be 3D-enabled in some way, shape or form.

As you are selecting your systems, make sure you get enough 3D horsepower to accomplish the right task. We offer many types of solutions at many different price points to boost your 3D mojo, whether they be ATI Radeon^TM solutions for desktop, notebook, workstations, motherboard graphics, and even the Mac!

You don’t need to hear from me on how competitive we are in 3D …. hear it from some select product reviews below.

• HardOCP- graphics cards
• AnandTech- graphics cards
• AnandTech- motherboard graphics
• Tech Report- motherboard graphics

So there we have it …. 3D is becoming more and more important … and consumers are letting the industry know how seriously they take 3D. Case in point? The “Vista Capable” class action lawsuit!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I’d like to start off my blog today by extending my congratulations to my AMD colleagues on capturing the VMmark benchmark crown. Our CMO Nigel Dessau covers this achievement today in his blog here.

While the best way in my opinion for enterprises to compare hardware is to load their own data in their own datacenters, it is encouraging to see that “benchmarkship” is already entering the world of virtualization. Because doing real-world testing is difficult with virtualization, this is a good first step. And it’s interesting to see how benchmark developers are begining to develop guidelines around how to properly conduct these virtualization benchmarking activities. These developers are essentially telling the industry that they are going to insist that we standardize our testing methodology, so that we are comparing “apples to apples”. Personally, I think this is a great idea and I hope it will help ensure that meaningfull, truthful data is available to those who need it to make their virtualization purchase decisions.

Of course guidelines are meaningless if they aren’t enforced. That isn’t the case here. We’re seeing more examples of how benchmark developers are willing to enforce these guidelines. Adhering to guidelines is something that AMD learned the importance of firsthand in 2007. And we’re not the only ones. Recently the benchmarks for one of our competitor’s solutions had to be withdrawn from the VMmark results page due to “noncompliance”.

I also want to point out that it is possible to follow the guidelines and still not necessarily tell the whole story. For example, a customer recently pointed out to me that our competitor posted some system benchmarks, but somehow omitted any reference to the AMD-based Dell R905, even though benchmarks for this AMD system had been posted on the VMWare’s site for more than a month. Perhaps it was an oversight?

While real-world datacenter comparisons using real business data is the best way to evaluate systems, I beleive that as vendors we need to take the benchmark high road – we need to use benchmarks as one tool to help customers evaluate technology – so they can make wiser choices. We need to fairly and honestly benchmark systems and report all the pertinent data. Trust and credibility go hand-in-hand, and if we do not keep the process fair and open, then the hard work of many people within my company, at our customers and partners and even within our competitor is at risk. As a demonstration of telling the whole story, let me point you to the “complete” results of the VMWare benchmarks.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/12/in-praise-of-standardized-virtualization-benchmarks/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 08:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/13/Thirty-days-with-a-small-amp-inexpensive-sub-notebook-the-minuses.aspx

In my last blog I wrote about my experiences with a $499 Asus Eee PC 8G mini-note and a $499 HP Compaq Presario F756NR full-note and showed some of the strengths the mini-note has versus the full-note at the same price.

Those mini-note advantages come at a fairly major expense, which I will highlight in terms of few very basic usage areas:

• Basic web: The mini-note’s 7” screen size at 800×480 resolution scores high on portability, but unfortunately for basic web surfing, you don’t get a full web page and are forced to scroll to the “right” and “down” to see the relevant web content in most cases. Also, I encountered performance problems when I hit pages that were heavy with Flash, like Disney DXD, a big issue for my household. The full-note’s Flash web pages loaded much faster and the web video appeared a lot clearer. The Presario’s 15.4” wide-screen display at 1280×800 resolution fully displayed any web page I came across, no matter how wide. For comparison, I took some pictures of some popular web sites so you could get an idea of just how much more you can see on the full-note.

FoxNews.com

Disney.com

• Community web: Because many MySpace and FaceBook pages are so Flash-heavy, I didn’t have a good experience with the mini-note on “spaces” that were heavy with embedded videos. In my opinion, videos and responsiveness were sluggish when compared to the Presario.
• Media storage: With a “PC”, most users would expect to be able to save most of their photos, music, and videos. The Presario had approximately 100GB free while the mini-note had around 6GB free, a 16X difference. So what can one store with the additional 94 GB (96,256 MB)? This could store around 25 iTunes movies, 10,000 pictures, and 9,800 songs. (1)
• Basic Music: The Presario has a DVD-RW drive, which means you can rip and burn music CDs. The mini-note doesn’t have an optical drive. If you are an iTunes fan, you are out of luck with the mini-note. Because the mini-note runs Linux, it doesn’t run iTunes or its content-protected music you may have purchased from Apple. If you really wanted, you could buy Windows XP and an external USB DVD-ROM and load it onto the mini-note, but if you did, I would recommend buying more RAM and solid state storage. The Presario with Windows Vista obviously runs iTunes and Windows Media Player and plays it through integrated Altec Lansing speakers.
• Basic movies: Because the Presario has a DVD drive, it could obviously play DVD movies. If you are an iTunes fan, you can also use their download service and watch and store movies. Unfortunately, the mini-note can do neither. I could get some videos on a memory stick and get them to play, but wouldn’t expect a “mainstream” user to be able to figure that out.
• Basic photos: There were major storage challenges as I outlined above for the mini-note. I could basically view photos on both machines but it was much easier to edit on the Presario, like basic red-eye and brightness changes. If you want to look at pictures on a big and bright screen, the Presario wins, if you want to view pictures in an extremely cramped space on a smaller screen, the mini-note wins.
• Basic games: Both notebooks come with basic games like Solitaire, so would be fine for some of the most basic game players. The close comparison ends there. With the mini-note, I experienced jerkiness with kids Flash-based games available on sites like Nickjr.com, Lego.com, and Disney.com. The Presario rolled through the entire sites well. Moving up the gaming ladder, only the Presario can play mainstream Windows-based games like The Sims 2 because it has Windows and a DVD drive to load it.
• Home productivity: If you are comfortable doing your finances through web sites like Turbotax.com, the mini-note is fine. If you want to load Windows-based applications like Quicken and need a wide screen to be productive with multi-column spreadsheets, the Presario is probably better for you. Both mini-notes came with a productivity suite, the mini-note offering OpenOffice, the Presario providing Microsoft Works and a 60 day trial of Microsoft Office Student Edition. Finally, the full-sized Presario keyboard was much more comfortable than the mini-note’s mini-keyboard when writing anything over a page long.

As you can see, users have a lot to think about today when deciding how to spend their $499 on a mini-notebook like the Asus Eee PC 8G or on a full-sized notebook like the HP Compaq Presario F756NR. I believe the mini-note and full-note will both increase in functionality over time and the content will get richer, so this challenge won’t be going away anytime soon. Adding WWAN, a more powerful CPU, better graphics, and better battery life to the mini-note will make it much more compelling choice in the future, but for now the full-sized notebook sure is compelling. New models came out yesterday with larger screens and higher prices and I have a new one on order to kick the tires.

Let me know what you think.

(1) Assumptions: 2 MB per photo, 2.5 MB per song, 2 GB per iTunes movie..

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/feed/ 18 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/13/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-plusses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/13/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-plusses/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 08:22:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/13/Thirty-days-with-a-small-amp-inexpensive-sub-notebook-the-plusses.aspx

There has been a lot of excitement around some of the small, inexpensive mini-notebooks out there. One in particular that is getting a lot of attention is the Asus EeePC, with models currently priced from $299 to $499.

The Eee PC sports a 7” screen, is very small and light with a small and fast solid state drive with pre-installed Linux and basic applications. The industry certainly needs some excitement these days, but after using one of these for a few months, I wonder if consumers really understand the trade-offs versus a full-sized notebook at the same price.

I wanted to compare what $499 could get me between a mini-notebook (mini-note) and a full sized notebook (full-note) so I bought a Asus Eee PC 8G mini-note and an HP Compaq Presario F756NR full-note and have been using both for a while.

The mini-note has some strengths versus the full-note at the same price:

• Size and weight: The mini-note is less than half the weight (5.68 lbs vs. 2.02 lbs), less than half the size and fits on any airline tray table I sat in front of. It was really easy to use in my living room on my lap and even the kitchen as well.

• Simplicity: Although the mini-note had more icons off of the main tabs than the full-note, the tabbed environment seemed simpler to navigate. (1) The inability to add additional software could be simpler, I suppose. The other enjoyable thing was the lack of windows popping up telling you that you need to check into every single thing from virus scanners, to firewalls, and software registrations.

• Cold-boot and shut-down: On average, the mini-note took 76 less seconds (171%) from cold boot to internet and took 27 less seconds (338%) to fully shut down. The Presario only took 2 seconds more (33%) to go into standby, but interestingly, was faster from standby to internet by 21 seconds (168%). (2)

In my next blog, I am going to examine some of the big tradeoffs users will need to consider when deciding between a mini-notebook and a full-sized notebook at the same price.

(1) The Compaq had 9 desktop icons and 23 options from start icon for a total of 32. The Eee PC had 45 icons off of the main tabs.

(2) Average of three runs. “Internet” for the Presario was indicated by the globe icon appearing in the systray and the Eee PC by the appearance of the wireless LAN connection icon. “Standby” for the Presario was indicated by the blue blinking power button and for the Eee PC, by the green, blinking power LED.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/13/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-plusses/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 13:21:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform.aspx

In my last blog I talked about the importance of a balanced platform and what I believe consumers are doing with and aspiring to do with their systems. For this blog, I would like to discuss the required type of balance between the CPU and GPU required for some of the key usage models described below. I know I’m engaging in generalizations here, but the complete variation and dependency list is so large it could fill the Library of Congress. So please don’t hammer me for the brevity.

• Content encoding and creation: While years back the exclusive domain of the enthusiasts, video, audio and photo encoding have been embraced by the mainstream. They just may not know it yet. Both iTunes and Windows Media Player offer video, audio, and photo re-encoding. This is currently 100% the domain of the CPU. While somewhat codec dependent, the better the CPU (e.g. quad core AMD Phenom™ X4), the better the encoding experience. I believe this will change in the future as the software stacks improve on the GPU to enable the parallelization of these tasks, particularly on the video encode.
• Gaming: If you start with a high performance CPU like the Phenom X4, then many titles become more GPU-limited than CPU-limited. This means that they are aching for more graphics performance from the GPU (e.g. ATI Radeon™ HD 3870). The added GPU horsepower (which can be further optimized through the use of our proprietary ATI Hybrid Graphics) allows the user to play at improved frame rates, at higher resolutions, and with the eye candy turned on, ultimately translating into a more enjoyable gaming experience. (1) Try playing a decent game with a higher end CPU and the integrated graphics of our major competitor. Pain is the only thing that comes to my mind. This is well illustrated by an Arstechnica review here. See it in action in a video here. The only major relevant exception on the GPU and CPU rule I can think of are for Flash-based web games on sites like NickJr.com, Lego.com, and Disney.com. And these are scalable with the CPU, not the GPU.
• High-def video playback: In my opinion, the most important thing to have is a graphics card or graphics chipset with special circuitry specially designed to decode (playback) and enhance the quality of high-def video like BluRay movies. Examples of this are the ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series graphics cards and the AMD 780 chipset, which both take advantage of AMD’s proprietary Unified Video Decoder technology. These free the CPU to do other tasks while playing back HD video. Generally, the better the graphics card family, the higher the 1080P BluRay visual quality as measured by third party tools such as Silicon Optix’s HQV Benchmark. While the CPU can certainly decode high-def video, a more efficient way to do it is with the GPU. In a recent Arstechnica review here, it shows how an AMD GPU + CPU system walloped our competitor’s platform by a 2:1 ratio when playing a BluRay movie. Click on the video here to see this is action.
• Multi-tasking: Generally, scaling is based primarily on the software performance of the CPU like the Phenom X4. The more things you are running in the foreground or background simultaneously, the more CPU horsepower you will need. This is true for the single user model and gets even more complex for a family that shares a PC, even if the family members physically use it at different times. For example, my home CPU gets hammered when multiple family members remain logged in at the same time, and I find myself competing with Disney “ToonTown” cycles left on in another session. Take that even further when that same PC is being used as your home server to serve up content to all the other PCs or devices in the house. The big exception to this, of course, is if you are blending GPU-limited apps with CPU-limited apps, then it becomes a toss-up. For example, you need a solid CPU and GPU if you would want to watch a BluRay movie the same time you are doing something else in the background, such as content encoding. Same thing goes for game multitasking.
• Social networking: Sites like MySpace and FaceBook have really become content showpieces for personal video, photos, and music. These sites are based on Flash, so they scale with CPU performance. As addressed in content creation above, this is the domain of the CPU.
• Productivity: Like you, I sometimes have gotten my jollies debating “how fast can someone speed up word processing”, but in my opinion, productivity is still ripe for CPU and GPU enhancements. Presentations are turning into multimedia extravaganzas. I am a marketing guy, so I know. Just try and do a pitch without video, pictures, video, 3D text blocks, and 3D rendered backgrounds. A real snoozer, particularly in our fast-paced “give it to me now” society. Finally, it’s hard not to discuss multitasking when you are doing work. How many windows and programs do you have open right now? Are you using Windows Vista with Flip3D and all the GPU rendering tricks enabled? Do you have two or more monitors? Enough said. CPU and GPU both matter here.

I hope I have made the case that a balanced configuration with the right amount of CPU and GPU processing are critical to meet the needs of what users are doing or want to do in the near future. I think I have also shown the complexity as well, particularly for an end user to really know what they need. It’s true that in the majority of cases, end users get their PCs from AMD’s OEM’s and channel partners. I believe that AMD’s job is to better educate and train these OEM and channel partners so that they have the necessary insight to create balanced platforms, which can be configured for specific end user requirements. I will discuss a few of the ways we are doing this in future blogs.

1) http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQ3MCwzLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/07/the-right-cpu-and-gpu-combination-for-a-balanced-platform/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration/#comments Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/04/25/why-care-about-a-balanced-pc-configuration.aspx

There has been an incredible amount of discussion in the high-tech community talking about “balanced platforms” or “optimized systems”. The conversation or press coverage has interestingly enough been more about which component is more relevant versus the need for a balanced platform. Statements or misquotes like “the CPU is dead”, the “GPU is not needed anymore”, or “no one needs 4 CPU cores” have been thrown around loosely in the past few weeks.

In my opinion, this is the wrong conversation to be having.

The right conversation is how the industry can optimize, deliver, and educate on the right balance of CPU, GPU and chipset to effectively and efficiently address the workloads or applications about which the customer cares most. In this and future blogs, I will frame and highlight a few of the challenges and offer some solutions to help address the issue.

It all starts with what consumers want to do or are actually doing with their PCs. Let’s look at some research from AMD and other sources, which I like to joke is sometimes like “grasping at the obvious”, because when you stand back, it looks so evident.

• Digital media goes mainstream. Consumer client usage model growth is moving toward the heavy consumption, editing and sharing of digital media (1). That’s a broad statement, but the fact that this is now “mainstream” is incredible. The digital media wave started with music, moved to digital photos and now it is video. The popularity really makes sense given that digital media is also cutting horizontally across communities like MySpace and Facebook. My friend’s and family’s “spaces” are proudly adorned with their pictures, videos, and music which are entertaining (although some of their home-grown content can be a bit “scary” at times).
• PC gaming goes mainstream. Sure, I have heard the conjecture that PC gaming is dead. The facts paint a very different picture. An employee of one of our biggest technology partners has informally told me that up to 83% of all Windows users play PC games. Recent research from NPD says that 72% of the entire U.S. population played games in 2007 and 90% of those who played online in 2007 reported using a PC to do so. NPD also described the PC as “the driving force in online gaming.” One fun fact that really exemplifies the casual gaming phenomenon is the popular title “The Sims.” This game franchise has sold over 100M copies, so by their calculations, this means that one out of seven homes in Europe and one out of three homes in America are likely have this PC game title. (2). It’s not time to call my co-workers who get up at 6A.M. every Saturday and tell them to stop playing COV/COH together.
• Multitasking matters. Mainstream consumers understand the whole concept of doing many things at the same time and how it applies to their PC purchases (1). Enthusiasts I have talked with have embraced what we like to call megatasking or extreme multitasking, defined as running multiple, multi-threaded apps simultaneously.
• Other stuff is peripheral. Consumers are still doing things like doing word processing, but they believe every PC can do this well (1). Of course.

I believe that effectively and efficiently delivering on these usage models requires the right balance of CPU, GPU and chipset. Some of the use cases above require a heavy duty CPU, some require a heavy duty GPU, some require a heavy duty chipset and some require all three. The industry needs to figure it out. While AMD can’t solve it independently, we plan to shine a big light on the issue, work with others and do our own part in the industry to help solve the problem.

In my next blog, I will be double-clicking on a few key usage models and generalize on the required balances of CPU and GPU. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

(1) Proprietary AMD Research 2005, 2007.

(2) Electronic Arts Press Release: http://info.ea.com/news/pr/pr1052.pdf

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

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