Posts tagged with Athlon
AMD: 40 Years of “Just Doing it”
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 10:30 PM
(17 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
Loading ...AMD celebrates its 40th anniversary May 1st and I want to provide my thoughts and perspective. Yes, I am a proud AMD employee, so this blog is biased in that I am personally invested in AMD’s future success and its history. To me AMD means a lot of things, but the best way I can express it is to say: AMD means “We can” and “Can do”.
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 RageTM 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 7th 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 40th 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.
How I Accelerated My Outlook Performance with a Gaming Utility
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 2:32 AM
In Nigel’s latest blog, he wrote about using the Fusion for Gaming utility 1 to improve his notebook battery life while in-flight. Since launching and blogging on the Fusion for Gaming utility last week, I have also done some simple, ad-hoc testing outside of the gaming space. While it may seem counter-intuitive to do so given the name, I wanted to see if the underlying technology could help me with a challenge I have “at work.” I am excited to say, after a few hours of testing, my Outlook experience feels significantly faster with the utility running.
At work, like many AMD employees and enterprise users, I run Microsoft Outlook 2007 along with the full Office 2007 suite. I run a Microsoft Vista Enterprise-based, multi-monitor desktop in order to do many different things at the same time. I “megatask,” which is simply hard-core multi-tasking.
If you have used Outlook lately, you know that it’s a lot more than just an email client. Outlook links to literally everything… it connects your email to your calendar to your task management system to your journal to your contact list to your … you get the idea. Good product. But for about a year now, I have experienced inexplicable “pauses” when I task-switch between Outlook apps, or when Outlook is synchronizing (you know, when you get the two envelopes in your systray). I had all the obvious things checked out: hardware, corporate software image, Exchange Server settings, archiving, vaulting, network, etc., which always yielded some temporary relief. Then Outlook would start ”pausing” a few weeks later, which I chalked up to doing a lot of work and getting a lot done while increasing my Exchange folder size: I fully plead guilty to AMD IT in using the folders as a file system.
So I loaded the Fusion for Gaming utility and saw an immediate improvement in my Outlook performance. Things loaded quicker, those inexplicable “pauses” went away and it is simply delivering a more productive and enjoyable compute experience. Sounds bizarre, I know, you should see the looks on the faces of my co-workers when I tell them this! So I did some simple digging into the Performance Tab in Windows Task Manager to see if I could attempt to explain any of this.. and it became clearer. On the left, you can see the relative performance data without the Fusion for Gaming utility enabled, and on the right, with the utility enabled.
It appears that on my system, Outlook likes a more limited number of “threads,” “handles” and “processes” or simply put, background tasks. I am sure there is a more comprehensive, long-winded technical explanation from folks who are much smarter than I will ever be, but this is my experience and of course, your mileage will vary :>.
It has worked for me on Outlook, and I urge you to give the Fusion for Gaming utility a spin and let me know what you think.. also, if you are one of those scary-smart guys who can explain why technically my Outlook is faster I would love to hear from you.
My desktop work rig: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ processor @3.2GHz., ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics, Gigabyte GAMA69GM-S2H motherboard (BIOS F3A 8/3/2007) with AMD 690G chipset, 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive (10,000 RPM), 4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM (recognized by Vista 32 as 3GB), ATI Catalyst Control Center 8.8, AMD OverDrive 2.1.4.
¹ THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING.
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.
(4.18 out of 5)
