But as my high school friends might say on those stormy days when it was possible to truly surf off the west coast of Florida: “Some waves are tasty rides, and some knock you on your tail and get sand in your jams.”

So here’s the waves created by some of the media who attended in Sunnyvale or participated via Web cast.

Tasty waves:

• “Frankly, we’re jazzed about the possibilities…” – Darren Murph, Engadget (Thanks Darren, we are too!)
• “AMD has only recently made strides toward putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but it looks like it’s hitting the home stretch.” – Andy Patrizio, Internetnews.com
• “If all of this works, Fusion could be the basis for some compelling products. Rick Bergman, the head of AMD’s Products Group, promised the technology would “literally deliver a supercomputer on your lap . . . with all-day battery performance.” That’s an ambitious plan, but it’s good to see AMD get some of its mojo back.” – John Morris, ZDNet
• “[Bulldozer is] really a very elegant design and the basis for what AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have been talking about for years now. The CPU will do what it does best while the GPU does what it is good at.” – Anand Shimpi, AnandTech
• “Companies rarely make big news at financial analyst day events, but AMD bucked that trend Wednesday by unveiling details of its newly revamped roadmap, its two brand-new processor architectures, and its plans for CPU/GPU integration.” – Jon Stokes, Ars Technica

Life’s-No-Beach Waves:

• “If chip makers competed on the basis of code names rather than products then Advanced Micro Devices might have beaten Intel a long time ago.” – James Niccolai, IDG News Service
• “AMD has long struggled in the mobile segment, but the company’s 2010 roadmap is potentially strong enough to change its fortunes.” – Joel Hruska, Hot Hardware
• “AMD’s Opteron once held the high ground when compared to Intel’s server offerings. We reckon the boot is just about on the other foot…for now at least, and we wait with bated breath to see what kind of performance Bulldozer-driven Opteron can deliver in 2011.” – Sylvie Barak, HEXUS.net

Whether it’s criticism or praise, tasty or sandy, it’s always interesting to see how different media view our telling of the AMD story, and reshape it for their respective audiences. Overall, I like the “surf report” on the 2009 AMD Financial Analyst Day in the sense that media, to a deeper extent than before, perceive AMD has a unique strategy and unique IP to execute it. Yes, there were questions about how well AMD could win at a game currently defined by its competition (CPU-exclusive marketing and benchmarking). And that question can only be answered as AMD executes to its technology vision and design points.

Now, we’ve heard what the media have to say. What’s your feedback? Make some waves.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.  This blog contains forward-looking statements.  Forward-looking statements are generally preceded by words such as “plans,” “expects,” “believes,” “anticipates” or “intends.”  AMD Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements in this release involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations.

I tend to get excited about the product and technology disclosures we shared for the first time today. It’s why I drive to work down Hill Country back roads to the AMD Lone Star Campus each morning with a smile on my face – it’s very cool being a part of a company that creates technology that truly matters in people’s lives. It’s also professionally gratifying when media start picking up on that excitement, and I think they increasingly are. After today, I predict the positive vibes will flow even more. I can see media are beginning to recognize our sustained product momentum and unique technology roadmap, and what we presented to them today further illustrates how we plan to sustain this momentum and create high-value experiences across our entire product line.

Before we jump to 2011, let’s look back at 2009.

The entire tech industry, including AMD, entered 2009 on a down note, fallout from a worldwide economic implosion. In spite of that, we’re exiting 2009 in clear, crisp fashion.  In 2009 AMD consistently executed, delivered what we promised, and launched well-received new platforms and products for every market we serve, most of them ahead of schedule. And we made sure to focus on delivering these platforms with the right blend of computing performance and superior graphics. Moreover, this year we focused on growing our partner ecosystem and strengthened our customer and OEM relationships by truly listening to customers’ and consumers’ demands and offering complete solutions to match their needs—including the AMD Server Platform featuring the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, AMD Platform for Ultrathin Notebooks, AMD Vision Technology, ATI Radeon™ 5800 series graphics cards, and Dragon platform technology featuring AMD Phenom™ II processors.

So what exactly did AMD talk about today?

We talked about all the exciting and innovative things to come in 2010 and 2011. Senior executives including AMD President and Chief Executive Officer Dirk Meyer briefed media and analysts on the great things AMD has in store for the future and discussed the state of our business. During the day, other senior execs talked about our technology strategy, future product and platform plans and led a series of more technical sessions. Attendees got to see firsthand the roadmaps outlined for platforms and technology that span the most popular usage scenarios for customers at work, at home and at play. With the growing importance and ubiquity of multimedia, AMD’s momentum and lead in the graphics market will differentiate us from competitors, enabling a complete computing experience with stunning graphics and video that consumers demand. Our strong roadmap for 2010 is scheduled to be followed with the advent of “Fusion” and the first Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) codenamed “Llano,” in 2011. This arrival will mark a new era in computing, succeeded the previous generations of first clock frequency, then multi-core driven performance gains. We also plan to bring to market the first “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat” core-based platforms, focusing on power, performance and size.

As highlighted in the platform and technology roadmaps presented today, here are the highlights of what’s scheduled to come in 2010 and 2011 (by codename):

Next-Generation Technologies for Next-Generation Graphics 

• While AMD maintains momentum in rolling out several more DirectX 11 capable parts from its wildly successful ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 series in 2H09 and 1H10 including graphics cards codenamed “Cedar,” “Hemlock,” and “Redwood,” AMD will also introduce DirectX 11 capable members of the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5000 series in 2010, bringing incredible graphics capabilities and stunning HD video to AMD’s new notebook platforms.
• “Bobcat” is AMD’s low-power x86 processor core aimed at notebook processing in ultrathin and netbook form factors, and designed to be extremely small, highly flexible and single threaded.
•  “Bulldozer” is AMD’s completely new, high performance architecture for the mainstream server, mainstream desktop and notebook PC markets that employs a new approach to multithreaded compute performance for achieving advanced efficiency and throughput. “Bulldozer” is designed to give AMD an exceptional CPU option for linking with GPUs in highly scalable, single-chip Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) configurations. 

Notebook Platforms:

• “Danube” is AMD’s new platform for the mainstream notebook market and will feature the new “Champlain” CPU, the first quad-core processor offered by AMD specifically for the notebook market that includes 2M cache and DDR3 memory support.
•  “Sabine,” is AMD’s new mainstream notebook platform slated for 2011 and will be the first notebook platform to feature the quad-core “Llano” APU.
•  “Nile” is AMD’s next generation platform for ultrathin notebooks and is scheduled for 1H10, with the dual-core “Geneva” CPU using DDR3 memory technology and is being designed to yield more than 7 hours of battery life under normal usage conditions.
• “Brazos” is AMD’s ultrathin notebook and netbook platform slated for 2011, and “Ontario” is the APU based on the “Bobcat” core.

Desktop Platforms:

• “Leo” is AMD’s next generation enthusiast-class desktop PC platform. Scheduled for 1H10, “Leo” will feature the industry’s first six-core desktop CPU, codenamed “Thuban,” for greater multi-tasking, as well as DirectX 11 capabilities for a visually enhanced gaming experience.
• “Dorado” is AMD’s next-generation mainstream desktop platform with AMD Athlon™ II processors, DirectX 11 discrete graphics options, and stream application acceleration.
• “Lynx,” and “Scorpius” are AMD’s desktop platforms for 2011. “Lynx” is the first desktop platform powered by the quad-core “Llano” APU. “Scorpius” is an enthusiast-class desktop platform featuring the “Zambezi” CPU, the first 8-core solution for enthusiast desktop users based on the “Bulldozer” core.

Server Platforms:

• “Maranello” is AMD’s next generation server platform and remains on track for introduction in 1H10. “Maranello” is a DDR3-based server platform which is expected to offer a new socket infrastructure, Socket G34, to support upcoming 8 or 12-core “Magny-Cours” processors.
• “San Marino” is AMD’s new server platform suited for large, dense deployments that require power efficiency and flexibility that is ideal for small/medium businesses, as well as web, cloud and infrastructure applications.

You can also check out AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Rick Bergman’s presentation below.

We have an exciting road ahead of us, cool technological advancements and new innovative products we plan to bring to the market, so buckle up your seat belts and enjoy the ride and full featured experience we have in store. AMD has turned the corner, going in the right direction of a fully enhanced user computing experience for every market, there’s no looking back now – full speed ahead.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.  This blog contains forward-looking statements.  Forward-looking statements are generally preceded by words such as “plans,” “expects,” “believes,” “anticipates” or “intends.”  AMD Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements in this release involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations.

Putting today in context:

“A month ago AMD introduced the world’s first quad-core processor to debut at $99… And for the consumer, AMD is providing a ton of value these days. You’re getting more transistors per dollar than Intel will give you, and it’s not just bloat, these things are fast.  The value train continues with today’s introduction of the first triple core Athlon II processors: the Athlon II X3 435 and 425.”

3 cores for the price of 2:

“They’re also quite affordable. The 435 will set you back $87 while the 425 costs $76. This puts them on par with Intel’s Pentium E6000 series dual core processors, but cheaper than the Core 2 Duo E7500. This has been AMD’s high end dual core strategy for the Phenom’s life: sell three cores for the price of two. And in the past, it has worked… The X3s AMD is announcing today are clocked high enough that you still have good performance in single threaded applications, and in those that can take advantage of three cores you’re almost guaranteed to have better performance than the Intel alternative.”

Thumbs up for AII X3:

“The Athlon II X3 435, priced at $87, is a better buy than any of the similarly priced Intel dual-core processors. In heavily threaded applications it’s even faster than the more expensive Core 2 Duo E7500. Compared to Intel, the X3 435 is a clear value leader.”

Tom’s Hardware:  “Athlon II X3 435: AMD’s Three-Core, 2.9 GHz, $87 Triple-Threat”

Great expectations:

“Today AMD introduces what might turn out to be the ideal budget CPU, with three cores for multi-threading, a relatively high 2.9 GHz clock speed, and an impressive sub-$90 price tag.”

Thumbs up for Athlon II X3:

“In the final analysis, this author can recommend AMD’s new Athlon II X3 435 as the best budget CPU for the dollar available at stock clock rates. We haven’t properly compared all of these CPUs when overclocked, so we’ll leave that judgment for a future review. Regardless, the Athlon II X3 435 is a fantastic buy, and obviously offers reasonable headroom to the overclocking fans out there. We can’t help but speculate that the Phenom II X3’s days are likely numbered with the Athlon II X3 offering comparable performance for a lower price and on a more affordable die for AMD to manufacture.”

Low-power variants:

“Aside from that, AMD has introduced a number of low-power CPU options likely to be quite attractive to the power-conscious contingent, and with a maximum draw of 45W, the Athlon II X4 605e presents the lowest demands of any quad-core consumer-level CPU, potentially idea for home theater PC deployments.”

AMD has the value crown:

“For now, AMD has an impressive product in the Athlon II X3 435. With low prices, a great deal of selection, and good scalability, these CPUs are sure to score AMD favor with the value crown in the months to come.”

Firing Squad:  “AMD Athlon II X3 435/Athlon II X2 240e Performance Preview”

AMD transitions value segment to 45nm:

“As we outlined at the outset of this article, completing the 45-nm transition is a significant step to getting AMD back in the black. These chips are cheaper for AMD to manufacture than older Phenom parts, they run cooler, and thanks to their high clock speeds, perform better. It’s a win for the consumer, and a win for AMD.”

AMD stands alone in the category:

“As it stands right now, AMD’s the clear performance leader in this space of the CPU market, and frankly it isn’t even close. From a price/performance perspective, AMD’s latest Athlon II CPUs are often priced against 45-nm Pentium, rather than Core 2, CPUs. As you saw in the benchmarks, the $84 Pentium E6300 we included in the charts was outrun by Athlon II X3 and Athlon II X2 CPUs in all of our gaming benchmarks, and only put up a strong showing in our MP3 testing with LAME. Everywhere else AMD’s Athlon II X3 435 reigned supreme. Its toughest competitor isn’t Intel, rather it’s AMD’s other Propus core that we raved about back in September, the Athlon II X4 620. Intel’s not only lacking in performance in this space either. Their value CPU lineup also lacks variety. While AMD offers a wide range of dual, quad, and now triple cores in the $60-$100 segment, Intel relies solely on dual-core Pentium CPUs.”

AMD owns value:

“AMD has this space locked down tight, and as long as Intel continues to basically ignore it in favor of higher margin Core 2 and Core i5/Core i7 CPUs, we don’t see this changing until Intel begins to introduce 32-nm parts. At that point, things may begin to get tougher for AMD. Until then though, AMD delivers the best budget CPUs money can buy.”

Different strokes:

Now you’ll just have to pick which value AMD CPU to choose from. This answer is going to depend on your needs and your budget. HTPC users will probably opt for one of the 45W CPUs, but if you need more performance, the X3 435 or X4 620 would be better buys. And if you absolutely can’t cough up more than $70 for a new CPU, the Athlon II X2 is the CPU for you.”

Computer Shopper:  “AMD Athlon II X3 435″  (Rated 8.1 out of 10)

Conclusion:

“But for most users spending their time with productivity apps, playing graphics-heavy games, or watching HD or standard-definition video, a triple-core CPU like the Athlon II X3 435 is a good choice. For $87, it offers more than enough speed and multi-core processing power to keep your system from feeling sluggish, even when multitasking heavily. Those who demand more performance but who still don’t need maximum video or graphics-editing speed might want to pick up a triple-core Phenom II chip, such as the Phenom II X3 720, for about $50 more. And those who spend hours editing media with professional programs such as Sony’s Vegas and Adobe’s CS4 will definitely want to splurge for a quad-core CPU. But for everyone else, the 435 offers more-than-sufficient CPU power for under $90.”

Computer Shopper:  “AMD Athlon II X2 240e”  (Rated 7.8 out of 10)

Editors’ Take:

“This dual-core CPU offers good budget-grade performance for everyday PC tasks while consuming half the power of similar chips under full load.”

Conclusion:

“While more-powerful CPUs are available for just a little more money, the $77 Athlon II X2 240e is still speedy enough for common PC tasks, and it never felt sluggish in our Windows 7 testbed PC. Its 45-watt maximum power rating is just over half that of many other mainstream CPUs, and it’s even more power-efficient when compared with high-end performance CPUs, so it should save you some measurable money in the long run. And those looking to save money now will appreciate this CPU’s compatibility with less-expensive AM2+ motherboards and DDR2 memory. This is a safe pick for budget-conscious upgraders and builders, and well suited to efficient, everyday productivity tasks should you see it in a prebuilt PC.”

Xbit Labs:  “AMD Athlon II X3 435 CPU Review”

Multi-core value:

“Many users believe that the times of dual-core processors are coming to an end. However, so far there haven’t been any inexpensive processors with more than two cores in the market. Today AMD is correcting this: the new triple-core 45 nm CPUs are priced starting at $76!”

Competitive Comparison:

“[AMD] focused on inexpensive solutions that would be superior in functionality to Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo and Pentium processors within the same price range. For example, new triple-core Athlon II X3 are targeted for sub-$90 price range, which means that they are competitors to dual-core Pentium processors recently enhanced by Intel by raising their clock frequencies and introducing 1067 MHz bus support.”

… “New triple-core AMD Athlon II X3 processors fall into the same price category as the top Intel Pentium CPUs. That is why first of all we are going to compare these two…”

AMD Value:

“Not so long ago we reviewed a few of the first AMD solutions like that – Athlon II X4 quad-core processor family, with the junior models selling for no more than $100. These CPUs made a pretty good impression, especially in terms of price-to-performance. Today AMD went even further and announced even cheaper multi-core CPUs. Triple-core newcomers from Athlon II X3 series will be available for $70-$90. Frankly speaking, Athlon II X3 are in a way unique processors because neither AMD nor Intel have any other solutions like that. Only these CPUs have more than two cores but at the same time are extremely affordable. These particular features will make Athlon II X3 a pretty demanded solution. Multi-threaded applications become more and more popular. Today even games may benefit from an extra processor core in your system, not to mention numerous programs for work with media content that are becoming wider spread among home users.”

 X3 recommendation:

“So, Athlon II X3 processors look like a very good and, most importantly, timely solution, which we have every right to recommend to those users who work with resource-hungry software applications and value the advantages of multi-core architectures.”

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.

Before you think this is just another example of PR on PR, let me assure you this is not about patting ourselves on the back for being good communications professionals. I am going to share some of the reasons we may get it right – but these reasons may surprise you.

AMD DNA

Ask any current or even former employee of AMD to name a few things that stick in their mind about the company, and they’ll invariably say something about how AMD manages to get into your blood, almost becoming another gene on one of those DNA double helix diagrams. It manifests itself most often as a fighting spirit. No matter how you describe it, once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. The people who work in PR are no exception. We possess that spirit. We believe in the company. We believe in the products. We believe in our leadership. And we believe in what we do. We’ve got good stories at AMD, and our company sits at the center of a critical industry that enables great things for people the world over. So at the end of the day, you can believe in us because we believe in ourselves.    

VALUE OF PR

We’re fortunate in AMD Global Communications to have a management team that across the board, understands the value that our team brings to the equation. They ‘get’ our contributions, even if it they sometimes difficult to quantify in terms of bottom line dollars.  AMD has a management team that empowers us to take risks, while at the same time demand that truth, transparency and integrity remain supreme. So we might diminish the focus on AMD’s own individual product brands in favor of a mainstream consumer brand like VISION to help make purchasing decisions easier for consumers. Or we might create a heated discussion on industry issues such as battery life reporting, even if it the arguments don’t always fall in our favor.  When you’ve got truth, transparency and integrity on your side, communication is rewarding.

WE LIKE IT

Let’s face it. Working in communications is not the same as schlepping away as a telemarketer making cold calls. No, in our jobs, we get to talk with you. And here again, we’re fortunate. The media we deal with on a regular basis are extremely well-informed and receptive to the news we provide. We can also have a productive dialogue with our journalists, because we’ve developed mutual respect and trust. In other words, if we do a good job at being communicators, it’s because our customers help make our job easy.

(We also get work with some great people who also help make our jobs easier, both inside of AMD and notably the extended AMD PR team at Bite Communications.)

So a big thanks to all of the media out there who helped bestow this award on us. Raise a glass and toast yourselves. Cheers.

Catherine Greenlaw is a public relations manager at AMD. Her postings are her 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 case you didn’t have time to read the enormous volume of coverage from Yesterday’s news, we at AMD’s Global PR headquarters here in Austin, TX are happy to provide you with the following summary:

“The new chip is part of AMD’s six-core Opteron family of processors. Much larger competitor Intel Corp also has low-power chips, but its most advanced chips only have four cores. More cores allow a chip to perform more tasks at once.” Reuters

The company was way ahead of the curve when it came to delivering low-voltage, low-frequency parts that had the same feature set as the standard x64 chips it sold, but for complicated reasons, server makers and customers were not quite ready to sacrifice raw performance for the kinds of performance per watt that the so-called Opteron Energy Efficient (EE) chips could deliver. The Register

Blogger’s note: Some of you may remember back in 2004 we brought to market a single-core, max TDP 30-watt processor. Very much ahead of the curve as the article suggests.

Another key difference is the memory used. Intel uses the more expensive DDR3 memory, Kirby said. AMD currently uses DDR2, arguing that DDR3 is still not mainstream enough and too costly, he said. Memory is a key need in such environments as cloud computing, and cost is an important factor, Kirby said. AMD will make the switch to DDR3 next year, when the cost goes down. eWeek

Here’s some additional info on DDR2 vs. DDR3 memory pricing for servers. Latest data shows customers still need to pay a premium for DDR3.

“With more cores, you have more headroom for those peaky times…to support a heavy amount of Web hits, if you will,” Kerby said. “The most concerning area is power consumption, being down in the the 40-watt power band, and not extending above the power threshold.” The bottom line? More computing power in a given rack (or higher compute density) while maintaining a low 40-watt power band, Kerby said. PC Magazine

“Intel has 40-watt processors as well. However, Intel made sacrifices in performance and functionality to achieve the lower power consumption. The Intel Xeon L5506 processors have reduced memory and bus speed, and do not include Intel’s HyperThreading or TurboBoost capabilities. By contrast, the AMD ‘Istanbul’ is able to deliver reach the 40-watt goal while retaining high memory speed, and the AMD-P (power management) and AMD-V (virtualization) functionality. Servers built on the AMD ‘Istanbul’ can also use DDR2 memory which is cheaper than the DDR3 memory required by the Intel CPU.” PC World

Here's a chart that shows how AMD does not compromise features in order to save power

 

Semiconductor analyst Nathan Brookwood, research fellow with Insight 64, agrees that there is room for all kinds of CPU clock speeds and power draws. “Not everybody is running all their processors at 100 percent all the time. Having a 40 watt part for people who care more about power than performance certainly makes some sense,” InternetNews.com

“Advanced Micro Devices is also hoping to appeal to cost-conscious data center managers with a new line of low-power, six-core “Istanbul” Opteron CPUs. The 40-watt models join the 75- and 55-watt versions already on the market.” Good Morning Silicon Valley

The above doesn’t even include the 100+ tweets and counting I’ve already seen on this since yesterday. Only a few of the tweets are from me. So yes, people other than me are tweeting about this amazing engineering and manufacturing feat that is the 40-watt ACP Six-Core AMD Opteron EE processor.

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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.

“Either you stand for something or you don’t”

Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy novel Clear and Present Danger

Cloud Computing is real and seems to be growing rapidly. Cloud providers need the most energy-efficient servers they can get without compromising the features and reliability of traditional rack servers. That aspect of Cloud Computing seems to be, well, the least cloudy. It’s why AMD added the 40-watt ACP Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ EE processors to our server lineup earlier this year and plans to soon offer 40-watt ACP Six-Core AMD Opteron™ EE processors.

Since we launched our EE processors, I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of what Cloud Computing really is. Now, I’m not sure why, but that over-simplistic Jack Ryan quote kept running through my head as I recently read the latest f5 networks survey results on Cloud Computing. It asked 250 IT professionals what they thought of SIX possible Cloud Computing definitions. Before reading the results, I said to myself: Either you know what the Cloud is or you don’t. It should just be that simple.

Not so fast. There appears to be a thought leadership race among analysts, service providers and numerous other industry pundits to be the one who arrives first at the accepted Cloud Computing definition.

This “define the cloud” fascination seems to be reaching new levels. This week alone, I found more than 100 articles that discussed the topic of defining Cloud Computing on Google News. Does this mean we are near the “tipping point” on coming to a consensus, or are we further away than ever?

India’s CXO Today  just posted an Cloud Computing interview with an SAP senior executive, Simon Dale. Dale said “For now it is still a marketing definition with nobody having come out with a proper and complete description of cloud computing.” Great observation and it would be nice if the industry could actually land on even a single “marketing” definition of Cloud Computing.

The good news is that even without a widely-accepted definition, interest and investments in Cloud computing are undeterred, looking at f5’s survey results. More than 80 percent of the 250 IT professionals surveyed are now in at least trial stages of Cloud deployments, and more than half have deployed a public Cloud environment.

Now as a PR guy, I’m all for the discussion about defining Cloud Computing to rage on. Particularly if it drives attention to the fact that AMD is working hard to shave every watt it can off its processors without compromising the features such as AMD-V™ or AMD-P. While the definition remains cloudy, we continue to work to keep the benefits to customers clear.

 Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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.

If you’re a fan of professional sports, you know that the stretch from April until the end of June is draft time for the big four North American leagues -- NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. Inevitably during these months, the sports media revisit past drafts and look at some of the biggest draft busts and successes. Take an example from the NFL -- Ryan Leaf (2^nd pick, 1^st round, 1998) and Tom Brady (199^th pick, 6^th round 2000) -- epitomize the concepts of bust (Leaf) and boom (Brady.)

Contrast this to the world of microprocessors. The AMD Opteron processor entered the market in April 2003 as a solid, but unproven, option during a time when the industry had been trying to determine if the 64-bit Itanium processor was more hype than substance.

I noted in my first blog that the AMD Opteron processor was met with some skepticism early on due to a lack of initial OEM support. But by the first half of 2004, the AMD Opteron processor was well on its way to being the dark-horse in x86 servers. Sun began to launch the servers it announced late in 2003 and the market was seeing some impressive performance on those systems. In February, the competition did us a big favor when they validated our approach to 64-bit computing by emulating the AMD64 instruction set extensions. In fact, it kicked off the first of several instances in that period where the competition took a page from the AMD playbook (multi-core, processor model numbers and Direct Connect Architecture are just a few more examples of them following the AMD lead.) The competition announcing its plans to incorporate AMD64 extensions served notice to the industry that AMD was ahead of the curve in understanding the needs of enterprise customers.

We had fun at IDF in Feb. 2004 reminding the world who made 64-bit migration easy.

A big helping of “Swordfish”

In the first few months of 2004, the momentum behind the AMD Opteron processor was fast and furious. The teams that supported the AMD Opteron processor were extremely busy but no one was complaining. We all had a lot of sweat equity invested in the AMD Opteron processor and we were now seeing the payoff. While IDF was going on, several of us were working on a project code-name “Swordfish”. “Swordfish” was the codename for our upcoming server launch with HP and it represented probably the biggest milestone for the AMD Opteron processor. Here’s why;

• Most industry watchers assumed HP would probably be the least likely OEM to come on board because of their investment in Itanium;
• HP didn’t make a small commitment to AMD, much like Sun, they went big right out of the gate;
• As the industry-leader, HP’s broad portfolio of AMD servers helped drive the discussion away from AMD being seen as a niche player in HPC;
• HP had a huge footprint among Wall Street IT, which was a critical customer segment for AMD in order to increase our market share.

Slide from HP's launch presentation on February 24, 2004

Rookie of the Year

In April 2004, we went back to NYC to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the launch of the AMD Opteron processor. While our event didn’t quite have the production value that our launch did a year earlier, we opted to go for substance over style. What a stark contrast from a year earlier. IBM was of course back again but joined this time by our new friends from Sun and HP along with an end-user from Verisign.

We had our cake, and ate it too at the AMD Opteron one-year anniversary celebration in NYC

One final thought: at its launch in April 2003, the AMD Opteron processor delivered some unique innovations to an x86 server market hungry for choice. The AMD Opteron processor initially fell into that category of a draft pick that had loads of potential, but not quite a first rounder yet. However, looking back at some of the milestones AMD achieved with the AMD Opteron processor from April 2003 to April 2004, it probably was a clear-cut “Rookie of the Year,” in the x86 server business. Particularly if you read some of the following….

“AMD is viewed as a credible tier-one server processor supplier, which certainly wasn’t the case a year ago,” said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. InfoWorld, April 19, 2004

The Opteron processor has vaulted AMD to the front lines of the competition between IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems--three of the top four server makers. CNET, April 19, 2004

Since introducing the 64-bit processor a year ago Thursday, AMD has been granted new access to the major server makers, seen its red ink turn to black and even managed to get powerful Intel to rethink its own product plans. CNET, February 22, 2004

Weiss said Gartner believes that HP’s embrace of Opteron in particular has created the most waves throughout the server industry, by forcing IBM to broaden its commitment to Opteron, and forcing Dell to take another look at the technology. But most of all, it has forced Intel to play its hand regarding its CT technology, which, like Opteron, is a 32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions. Internet News, February 22, 2004

Overall, AMD shattered industry expectations for Opteron’s first year. The fact that the company’s product is even discussed as a serious Intel alternative in the server market is a major accomplishment. The Register, April 23, 2004

There you have it, some great quotes that sum up the first year of AMD Opteron. Perhaps in another year or two, you will see another blog from me about the first year of our Six-Core AMD Opteron processor, also known as “Istanbul”. Thanks for reading.

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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.

AnandTech:  AMD’s Six-Core Opteron 2435

“It is out of the scope of this article, but it is clear that even if the CPUs cost the same, the AMD based server will be less costly.”

“Our power consumption data is preliminary. We really have to double-check all the power data. Very roughly, we find that the Opteron 2435 machine consumes about 35-45W less than the Xeon X5570. On a total of slightly more than 300W, that is about 10 to 15%. Idle power seems to be slightly in favor of the Xeon “Nehalem”.

“There are two types of applications where we feel that the AMD six-core deserves your attention: decision support databases and virtualization. . . .  Of course, performance-critical applications are by definition more demanding when it comes to processing power. That is exactly what vApus Mark I measures: how well do performance-critical applications perform when they are virtualized? This is a relatively “new” market where the AMD 2435 shines. The new Opteron 2435 at 2.6 GHz was a pleasant surprise on vApus Mark I: it keeps up with more expensive Xeons on ESX 3.5 update 4 while consuming less, and offers a competitive performance/watt and performance/price ratio on vSphere 4. The six-core Opteron is about 11 to 30% slower on vSphere 4 than the 2.93 GHz Xeon X5570 but the overall cost of the Istanbul platform is significantly lower (DDR-2 versus DDR-3) and the 2.6 GHz 2435 consumes less power in a virtualized environment (*). On the condition that you optimize your hypervisor well to take advantage of the six cores (cell size is for example one critical optimization), we feel that the six-core Opteron is a worthy opponent for the Xeon “Nehalem” in this market. We tested only the 2435 versus the X55xx series.”

(*) Virtualized servers do not run idle very often

Tech Report:  “AMD’s ‘Istanbul’ six-core Opteron processors / We crack open a six-pack”

AMD Executing Early:  “AMD had originally planned to introduce this product in the October time frame, but the first spin of Istanbul silicon came back solid, so the firm pulled the launch forward into June.

“The most notable change, though, is probably the addition of a feature AMD calls HT Assist. HT Assist is essentially a probe filter intended to reduce the overhead required for the synchronization of cached data across CPUs in multiple sockets. HT Assist reserves space in each processor’s L3 cache, in which it stores an index of where that CPU’s cache lines are being used system-wide. The CPU then becomes “host” of the cache lines stored in its directory. If any CPU needs an update about a particular cache line, it will often know which CPU is the correct host to probe for that information. This reduction in probe traffic can yield big gains in available system bandwidth, as we reported when we saw AMD demo a 4P system whose Stream bandwidth increased from roughly 25GB/s to 42GB/s with the addition of Istanbul processors with HT Assist.”

“Yet Istanbul should be a clear improvement over Shanghai for many workstation-class workloads and most server-class workloads—i.e., those that are essentially parallel and widely multithreaded. The Opteron 2435 manages to deliver this higher performance not just within the same power envelopes, but quite empirically with almost the exact same measured power consumption as the Opteron 2389.”

“This combination yields a nice increase in power efficiency, which was enough to put our Istanbul-based test system in the same territory as our Xeon X5550 system. The competition between the two was remarkably close in SPECpower_ssj, and the Istanbul system required notably less energy to render the Cinema 4D sample scene in Cinebench. So despite that fact that Intel leads in outright performance, the Opteron 2435 is entirely competitive on the power-efficiency front, with lower peak power draw, to boot. Those who evaluate systems strictly on this basis would do well to keep Opterons in the mix.”

“And if you have existing, compatible Socket F servers, the Istanbul Opterons should be an excellent drop-in upgrade. They’re a no-brainer, really, when one considers energy costs and per-socket/per-server software licensing fees.”

ZDNet:  “AMD Istanbul: Field Upgrade Only If Your Hands are Nimble”

Unlike Intel’s Nehalem, which requires entirely new and unproven mainboards, systems, chipsets and sockets, the “Istanbul” is based on existing, mature AMD chipsets and uses the existing 1207-pin Socket F, allowing current Quad-Core Opteron systems to be field upgraded rather than requiring entirely new server purchases. . . . .  The 24xx and 84xx series CPUs are actually compatible with systems going back four Opteron quad-core chip generations, ever since the 2000 and 8000 series were introduced in August of 2006. . . . . AMD also was able to engineer and manufacture the Istanbul during a period in which it also spun off its entire manufacturing capacity as a separate company, GlobalFoundaries, so the fact they were able to get this product out in record time (six months ahead of schedule, according to the company) to compete with Intel’s Nehalem is a significant achievement.”

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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.

Starting in third quarter of 2003 following IBM’s launch of its 1U, 2P e325 server, AMD Opteron was slowly building momentum and creating industry buzz. IT customers in the financial services sector who were doing testing on a variety of different AMD Opteron-based systems were seeing impressive results, particularly in 4-processor servers. It was soon clear that the Wall Street IT community talks amongst themselves about technology, and word was spreading quickly about the results they were seeing. The tech press and analysts were starting to catch this feedback indirectly through the Wall Street analysts who heard the chatter from their IT guys.

While this critical end-customer community liked what they were seeing with AMD Opteron, none of them could commit to any large-scale deployments due to lack of enterprise-class systems from a tier-one OEM. The IBM e325 was great for HPC environments, but lacked many of the features required in datacenters.

There are no secrets

This is what I quickly learned about life as a public relations professional in the PC business, it seems like no secret is safe. While not on the same scale, I can sympathize with my PR brethren in the pro sports business trying to keep potential player trades and signings under wraps until negotiations are finalized. Once negotiations between Sun and AMD kicked into high gear the third quarter of 2003, it suddenly became public knowledge. More than two months before Sun announced it planned to offer x86 servers based on AMD Opteron, word was already leaking out.  While we were fending off the press with our standard “can’t comment on rumor and speculation” or “you’ll need to contact Sun regarding its future server plans,” there was lots of enthusiasm internally over the upcoming deal with Sun that was code-named “Stinger.”

Even though Sun had little presence with x86 servers at the time, they had a rich history of server innovation and a great reputation for delivering a legitimate enterprise-class solution stack. They were going to launch a diverse portfolio of AMD servers and optimize the Solaris operating system for AMD64. It was a huge morale boost internally and was the start of many activities over the next 6 months that would cast a spotlight on AMD Opteron.

Going back to my earlier point regarding no secrets, two weeks before the announcement, CNET’s Stephen Shankland broke more news on the Sun-AMD partnership, including the announcement date.  After that point, the only unknown was how many and what form factor servers they were planning to offer. At his keynote at Comdex, CEO Scott McNealy revealed Sun’s plans for a broad partnership with AMD, details of that announcement can be found here.

A strong finish

While Sun would not begin shipping AMD Opteron servers until early the next year, the announcement gave us more of what we really needed at the time: credibility. It was a turning point in demonstrating that AMD Opteron was more than just an HPC solution.

As 2003 came to a close, AMD Opteron had been in the market for about eight months and market share numbers were starting to show some impact. While most of the early AMD Opteron servers were shipped into HPC environments, there was enough traction for analyst firms such as IDC to start tracking systems that were based on AMD Opteron processors. In December 2003 IDC issued its third quarter system share numbers and a number of reporters latched on to the fact that the AMD Opteron processor was shipped in more servers than Intel’s Itanium processor.

Our intent was never to go after Itanium’s market share as we knew we couldn’t be successful if that was our goal. Both Itanium and AMD Opteron were 64-bit processors but that’s where the similarities ended. AMD Opteron was perhaps the best x86 server processor available by the end of 2003 and our objective was to bring 64-bit into the mainstream server market, not the proprietary space Itanium was playing in. Intel soon recognized this and my next blog will discuss the new battleground that emerged in 2004.

I’ll conclude with this excerpt from an end of year wrap-up story InfoWorld ran at the end of 2003:

“AMD’s Opteron processor truly is the Little Engine That Could. When Opteron launched in April, the Intel x86-compatible 64-bit processor faced a steep uphill battle against Intel’s Itanium. By year’s end, IBM and Microsoft delivered on early promises, and Sun joined the bandwagon. Will Dell and HP be next, or can’t they see Opteron from where they sit behind Intel?”

 Up next: “Swordfish anyone?”

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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 dialogue from all corners has been fascinating to watch unfold. So many levels, tangents and rampant speculation abounds, including what moves antitrust regulators in the United States may now make in having stated loudly and clearly that the laissez faire approach to antitrust by the Bush era was officially over.  

Like most things, one can quickly get way, way into the weeds on the reasons behind Intel’s antitrust problems and the issues underlying them. For AMD, and for others in the industry who have been watching Intel’s antitrust snowball slowly but surely rolling downhill  for years now, it’s really pretty simple…

1. Protection of consumer welfare is the fundamental purpose of antitrust law across jurisdictions all over the world.

2. By any measure, Intel has monopoly power in the x86 microprocessor market.

3. Antitrust enforcers in three separate markets (representing roughly half a billion consumers) have uncovered evidence that Intel engaged in anti-competitive behavior and harmed consumers.

Some of the most thoughtful journalism – and I admit,  favorable to the EC’s ruling and skeptical of Intel’s claims -I’ve seen on the ruling and Intel’s weak arguments have appeared in FORTUNE, Intel’s hometown newspaper The San Jose Mercury News, and  EE Times. I encourage you to read them and let me know what you think.

Commentary speculating that AMD would rather regulate instead of innovate could not be further from the truth.  As fellow AMD bloggers Pat Moorhead and Nigel Dessau have said before me, we do not want or need special treatment. All we want is the assurance of a truly competitive market where our innovations, and those of all tech companies, are able to be freely adopted by consumers who want them, and not blocked by anti-competitive business practices  perpetrated to preserve a dominant firm’s control of the market. 

In any event, with two live antitrust investigations into Intel’s practices by the US Federal Trade Commission and NY attorney general’s office, as well as the first day of our US civil antitrust trial approaching, what can safely be said is that this movie is far from over.

A common frustration among those who I talk with regularly on this subject matter is that much of the evidence that has so far trumped every Intel argument that its business practices are legal and pro-consumer have been concealed behind protective orders and locked away in antitrust investigators’ files.  One exception is a translation of the Korean FTC findings provided courtesy of the American Antitrust Institute.

The lack of evidence available in the public domain is frustrating, but that’s the way the system works at this point.  Eventually, we are confident the facts will come out. The best we can really do at this point is to encourage you to read the civil antitrust complaint against Intel that AMD filed with the Delaware Federal Court in 2005. This complaint is filled with examples of Intel threats and coercion like those that presumably the Japanese, Korean, and European regulators found in files taken from Intel and Intel’s customers.

Michael Silverman is a senior manager of public relations 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Depending on what headlines you read, Intel was either “slapped” (ChannelInsider), “slammed” (BusinessWeek) or “punished” (Economist) by the European Commission’s ruling on Wednesday. Some reporters went further, with the Economist writing that he European Commission had wielded its “heaviest antitrust hammer against Intel.” 

Matthew Newman of Bloomberg reported one EU regulator’s comment that, “Intel’s unlawful practices must stop immediately” and that it would “actively monitor Intel’s compliance with this decision.”  

For those still wading through the flood of news, we’d recommend checking out this growing list of excellent coverage:

• A must read is Chris O’Brien’s piece at the San Jose Mercury News where he asks if Intel execs have “lost their moral compass.”
• Or check out Fortune, where Roger Parloff explores what the ruling means for Intel’s credibility (hint: it’s not good)

Also, be sure to check out Nigel Dessau’s blog post on the topic and also keep up with ongoing coverage via our FriendFeed link.

Overall, the word is out about Intel’s anti-competitive practices.  And while the European Commission’s ruling won’t be a surprise to AMD Unprocessed readers, it’s good to be vindicated by so many independent sources.  Stay tuned for additional updates.

Michael Silverman is a senior manager of public relations 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Both “Maranello” and “San Marino” will be “AMD on AMD” platforms, meaning they will leverage chipsets developed by AMD. Currently shipping AMD server platforms use chipsets from Nvidia and Broadcom. Both Nvidia and Broadcom will continue to support Socket F platforms through 2010, including upcoming systems based on our six-core “Istanbul” processors.

When asked at the press event about our relationship with Nvidia and Broadcom in the context of our server platforms, Vice President and General Manager of AMD Server Business Unit Pat Patla stated the following: “For 2010, moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time. We don’t expect to see new chipsets from NVIDIA or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010.”

Unfortunately, this led to some speculation that there were licensing issues between AMD and Nvidia. At no time did AMD offer any comment related to future server processor licensing agreements with Nvidia or any third-party chipset provider.

Dating to the ATI acquisition in 2006, the long-term AMD plan remains consolidating on our own chipsets for future server platforms. As such, it was a mutual business decision between AMD and our third-party server chipset providers that they would not develop chipsets for future AMD server platforms. This was a decision specific to the server business unit.

We are very excited about the opportunity to bring new platform-level innovations to the x86 server market later this year, starting with our “Fiorano” and “Kroner” platforms in the second half. Some of those new features include:

• IOMMU – Increased performance through enhanced I/O and improved security through hardware isolation of VMs
• HyperTransport 3 – Increased platform-level I/O bandwidth
• PCI Express Gen 2 – Optimized for Accelerated and Stream computing environments

"Hammer" time

I started with the AMD PR team in October 2002, about 7 months before AMD Opteron, then code-named “SledgeHammer,” officially launched at the Hudson Theater in New York City on April 22, 2003. Things such as energy-efficiency, multi-core, performance-per-watt and cloud computing were not part of the discussion back then.

The bridge to 64-bit computing … and credibility

Our lead message then: TCO and ease of migration relative to the fact that we could offer 64-bit computing on an industry-standard architecture with backwards compatibility with existing 32-bit applications. It was a simple one for our audiences to appreciate considering our competitor was going the path of Itanium to get to 64-bit computing. How simple? Well, our tagline initially was “Simplifying Business” and the supporting points were all about investment protection, flexibility, performance and industry support. That last one is probably the most important one for me to expand on a bit further.

The biggest challenge for AMD in the server business in 2003 was credibility. Lots of IT guys loved our desktop processors but we didn’t have any real history in the enterprise. We had only been offering server processors since 2001 (AMD Athlon^TM MP processor) and none of our system support for that processor was from tier one OEM customers.  In fact, in most of the pre-launch communications we did, our biggest credibility proof point was our relationship with Microsoft and other ISVs. Even though most of our early adopters would ultimately be Linux guys, Microsoft’s support provided credibility to a server solution that did not have tier one OEM support until the day of our launch.

The “bridge to 64-bit computing” image we frequently used in press meetings prior to the 2003 launch

All we need is one. Right?

From a PR perspective, the Bay Area press and analyst tour Kevin Knox, then AMD’s director of commercial business development, and I conducted in February 2003 included several meetings with a strikingly similar dialogue.  Nearly all recognized and agreed that the competition made the wrong move with its initial stab at addressing 64-bit computing,  but most could not accept the idea of AMD Opteron being successful until tier-one OEMs came on board.

More frustrating at that time was the fact that we were getting seed systems into end-user hands, but no high-profile end customers would go and talk about their positive experience with AMD. Many reporters indicated to us that getting a couple of CIOs to talk on our behalf would generate instant credibility, but unfortunately without tier-one support, their credibility could also be at risk by endorsing AMD Opteron.

When we did launch AMD Opteron, IBM joined us on stage in NYC (you can view the opening launch video here) and said they would be offering a 2 processor system targeted at the HPC market later that summer. While not exactly what we were hoping for, it was definitely a shot in the arm. We figured once one OEM came on board, others would follow suit. Unfortunately that was not the case. We immediately became seen as primarily a solution for HPC and research. No one felt we had the chops to do mission critical, because you couldn’t find AMD Opteron in a mainstream, enterprise-class server from Dell, HP, IBM or Sun. Also, one of our lead messages around 64-bit computing really wasn’t pulling through well because there just weren’t a lot of applications at that time that could take advantage of it.

Buzzkill

Still remains one of our favorites on the PR team

Here we were in the summer of 2003, just a few months removed from the launch and we’re approaching LinuxWorld, which was an emerging enterprise tradeshow at that time. We had no server market share to speak of, and a single OEM SKU that had yet to launch.

My challenges usually came when I would get blindsided by a reporter who had recently spoken to and OEM or system builder who said customers were not asking for AMD Opteron and while they had looked at it, they had no plans to support it. As a PR guy, I’m glad we had IBM as a proof point but that one was starting to wear thin and it kept feeling like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop with the press coverage.

COMING NEXT: The Sun also rises

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager 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.

Dave Kroll (center left, back row) and AMD CEO Dirk Meyer (center right, back row) with the AMD team in Hyderabad, India

There’s something special about this place… a spirit at AMD that is unique and different from any company I’ve ever worked (AMD alumni will tell you that, too).  May 1 marked AMD’s 40^th Anniversary and it’s worth taking the time to reflect on our history, why this company is unique and why AMD’s role in the computer industry is significant and important.

Passion

First, AMD employees possess an indomitable passion to compete and thrive in one of the world’s most complex and challenging industries.  At our core, this is what motivates us. Always has, always will.

Treat people with respect

This goes for every day work interactions as well as dealing with customers.  We win or lose together as a team. And AMD is a place that doesn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re all human, we have families, personal lives, etc. 

We’re not baking brownies here

CPUs and GPUs are arguably the most complex technology humans have ever developed (our upcoming “Istanbul” six-core server processor has more than 900 million transistors on it. Think about that for a second, mind-blowing…)

We drive performance and value for consumers

In 1997, we launched the popular K6 processor that first helped drive PC prices below $1,000, making computers more available to mainstream consumers. And today, we still offer superior value at virtually every price point. No matter how much you want to spend, AMD technology powers many of the best PCs with the best features.

AMD drives innovation

• Despite our chief CPU competitor’s resources approximating 10x ours, we’ve managed to blaze the innovation trail in our industry for10 years running. See for yourself, many of the major innovations in x86 processors have come from your friends at AMD
• In 1999, we launched the AMD Athlon^TM processor, AMD’s first CPU that didn’t plug directly into an Intel CPU socket, and leapfrogged Intel with a next-generation CPU that was the first to break the 1GHz barrier.
• In April 2003, we launched the AMD Opteron^TM microprocessor with new 64-bit extensions (AMD64) and an integrated memory controller and entered the server market. Intel has followed AMD’s path in 64-bit and multi-core ever since (and must really hate that…)
• We foresaw and drove power-efficiency as a key feature set and continue to offer industry-recognized, optimized power/price/performance CPUs for datacenter virtualization and cloud computing servers.
• We combined forces in 2006 with the great talent of ATI and were first to foresee and drive towards the integration of graphics and microprocessors to support the current and future wave of graphics, HD, video applications. Others are following.
• And we’re not done yet…

 Choice matters

• No computer manufacturer anywhere in the world wants or chooses to operate under the thumb of a monopoly supplier (let alone subjugate their brand to an ingredient brand). Despite Intel’s tactics to coerce OEMs not to do business with AMD, we continue to innovate, add value and differentiation, and stay focused on serving our customers. Growing antitrust scrutiny from regulators around the world suggests that time is running out on Intel’s monopoly grip on our industry.
• Ask yourself, what if AMD wasn’t in the space? We might all be using more expensive, Itanium-based PCs — and HD graphics and gaming wouldn’t be anywhere where it is today.
• We play a critical role of offering choice and differentiation in this market. And in a David vs. Goliath fight, trust me, it’s more inspiring and fun to be David. And we never let our David status deter us even when Goliath is clearly breaking the rules as antitrust regulators have shown.

Customers and users matter

• We love to see what people make and do with our technology, from gamers to datacenters. Helping our customers win makes our day.
• Because at the end of the day, we don’t create technology for technology’s sake. We innovate to help people improve the quality of their lives.

So, these are several of the reasons why I and nearly 11,000 AMDers come to work each day.  We love pushing the envelope of innovation – designing and building amazing computing and graphics technology to excite people, improve the quality of their lives and enjoyment of technology.  And AMD is sticky, once an AMDer, always an AMDer – and a thank you and congrats to all those who’ve worked here at some point.

So yes, when so many tech companies live and died in a fraction of the time AMD has endured, we’re proud to be 40. We’ll see you at 50…

Nigel Dessau 40th Anniversary blog: 40 is the new 20

Patrick Moorhead 40th Anniversary blog: AMD: 40 years of “Just doing it”

Dave Kroll is Vice President, Global Communications 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

Q: Describe your official responsibilities at AMD

A: At the high level, it’s managing the decision-making around what technology we will be using and developing at AMD. That includes longer term R&D considerations, as well as new directions and specific innovations we’ll be incorporating into the product line. On top of that, I’m responsible for managing all of AMD’s IP development – core processors for all market segments and associated IP such as analog, I/Os, accelerators and memory.

Chekib Akrout

Q: What are the greatest challenges facing the semiconductor industry?

A: We’re in a very different place in the industry today. We came out of a high growth rate environment – everyone was growing and could bring out new technologies and try to reach new market segments. Now things are much slower for everyone because of the global economy. However, the opportunity for innovation is still very much alive. My view is, that even in a downturn, you’ll see big winners emerge with new products and breakthrough ideas. As adding MHz becomes more and more challenging, we are being forced to look at things differently and that’s where innovation will arise. Power consumption is a barrier and we face lithography challenges in continuing to shrink dimensions. How can we leverage multi-core and GPU integration to overcome power limitations? How do we bring more performance to the entire system / motherboard to continue to deliver value? Those are questions we face.

Q: Technology standards (like networking, Blu-ray, etc.) are good for the consumer, but they have the potential to constrain innovation. How does standardization impact innovation?

A: Standardization doesn’t have to inhibit innovation. In some cases, perhaps it might slow it down slightly, but ultimately it benefits our customers and the consumers who use the products. As long as standards bodies maintain a robust exchange of ideas, innovation will rise to the top. Sometimes you might lose because you are very small and the other guy is very big, but usually the best overall solution wins, so that’s a good thing. If we all went our own way, the overall market for technology would likely be much smaller and we’d risk zero interoperability between equipment. It’s not feasible to go forward without standards; you just have to do it in a way that fosters new ideas too.

Q: What are the greatest opportunities for technology to benefit the global community today?

A: I predict that you will see more user friendly, more capable computers that are portable and more integrated into our lives. You can already see it starting today; computers and mobile devices being used to watch TV or people spending more time on the Web with networked PCs in the home. New online apps will just continue that trend and obviously the current generation has already picked it up and run with it. If you look back at the last 15 years, it’s truly amazing how far we have come. We’ve gone from DOS to Windows to portable machines with high resolution playback and networked gaming in a very short timeframe. I can’t think of any other industry that has had as large an impact in as short a time. When you give people access to that capability in an easy to use, affordable form factor you can really make the world smaller, and maybe increase our understanding of our differences and recognize our similarities. That’s powerful stuff.

Chekib Akrout

Q: What are the biggest changes in industry since you began your career?

A: I’ve seen many changes. The level of integration, for example; I still remember 20 years ago when we talked about where industry was going and how we weren’t going to be able to push the physics of CMOS anymore. Then in ‘90s we broke that barrier and clock-speed became the obsession. Then it was power – today everything has to be lower power. Also, I’m amazed by where we’re going with the systems and the notion of distributed computing. I see an explosion of consumers capable of tapping into massive computing resources through the Cloud. Consumers will have thinner clients that don’t do as much computing, but rely on what is in the data center to do it for them, which gets back to the power question. You give the end-user a much more valuable tool by pushing the battery life equation into the background while raising the stakes in the data center. These are all interrelated changes we are dealing with on a daily basis.

Chekib Akrout is Corporate Vice President, Central Engineering, at AMD. As co-leader of AMD’s Central Engineering group, Chekib has direct responsibility for AMD’s Accelerated Computing efforts, Research and Advanced Development Labs (RADL), processor cores and foundational IP, CAD and layout teams. 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.

Gary Silcott is a Product PR manager 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.

AMD Lone Star Campus in Austin, Texas

It’s been hard to miss the flurry of media coverage that’s been published in the last week leading up to, in celebration of, and in retrospect of Earth Day 2009. It seems each year more and more companies are getting “into the green”, so to speak.

The fact remains that we are proud of many achievements from a sustainability perspective.

We’ve recently introduced several AMD product innovations that help reduce energy use and  increase power efficiencies, including the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ EE processor with AMD’s lowest x86 quad-core server power band, the AMD Phenom™ II X4 940 125W processors with AMD Cool’n’Quiet 3.0 technology, and the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 series graphics for notebooks. Each of these innovations helps deliver remarkable energy efficiency compared to previous generation of our products. 

From an operational standpoint, AMD also designs our facilities as a global steward. To date in 2009, AMD attained LEED Gold certification for our new Austin, Texas (USA) campus, making it the largest gold certified LEED commercial campus in Texas.  To call out just a couple of the many green elements of this campus, it features 100% native vegetation and one of the largest rainwater collection systems in the world.  And our AMD facility in Suzhou, China’s 2008 was recognized as an Environmentally Friendly Enterprise by the Suzhou Industrial Park Environmental Protection Bureau.  We’re also trying to enable others who are interested in sustainable building efforts to learn more about the experience AMD underwent in building their “Lone Star” campus in Austin. If you’re interested in finding out more, please join us at the upcoming Central Texas Green Building Symposium on May 12 in Austin. Remote participants can tune in to a live broadcast of the event at AMD Unprocessed.

When it comes to being green, no employee is left behind at AMD, as we try to raise awareness about energy conservation, encourage employees to share their ideas, and adopt energy saving behaviors in their daily lives. Some of our employee conservation programs include Go Green, an award winning North American commuter program that has avoided approximately 1.4 million miles of driving and 1.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions since July 2007, and Throw Green, AMD’s cross-site multi-stream recycling and reclaim program. At AMD’s Sunnyvale headquarters, AMD recycled 50% of its total solid waste stream in 2008.

AMD’s Global Climate Protection Plan, published annually since 2001, demonstrates our dedication to reducing our environmental impact. After exceeding our initial climate protection plan goals (ahead of schedule), in 2007 we got more ambitious.  Our greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal is to reduce normalized emissions 33 percent by year-end 2010 relative to the 2006 baseline. By the end of 2008, AMD charted progress toward that goal with a 22 percent reduction from the 2006 baseline. We also set out to reduce normalized energy use 40 percent by year-end 2010 relative to the 2006 baseline. By the end of last year, we had achieved a 27 percent reduction from the 2006 baseline.

AMD’s green efforts aren’t done in isolation. We work with numerous third parties and industry organizations to promote and improve our energy efficiency and energy savings efforts.  We’re also proud to say the USA’s grand-daddy of all groups green – the EPA – has blessed AMD, awarding us a 2008 Climate Protection Award. AMD also made the latest EPA list for the Top 50 Green Power partners in the country for our total renewable power purchases. Other companies on the list may have purchased more raw kWh of green energy, but AMD ranks higher than many in terms of total percentage of green electricity purchased.

For all we’ve accomplished so far, AMD also recognizes that the greening of our company is a never-ending endeavor. And we believe the greenest is yet to come.

Catherine Greenlaw is a public relations manager at AMD. Her postings are her 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.

Today marks the launch of the ATI Radeon^TM HD 4770.  Review press are focusing on:

• Strong price/performance ratio
• Gaming performance value
• AMD technology leadership with the first desktop GPU based on 40nm process technology

Here’s a review round-up for Those Who Know (TWKs) and a video overview.

 HardOCP.com: AMD Radeon HD 4770

• “The Radeon HD 4770 has a lot of potential for hardware enthusiasts, even at $100. We feel that AMD is finally making video cards for us hardware enthusiasts.”
• “The Radeon HD 4770 presents a very strong real-world value. At $99-$109 it provides a great gameplay experience compared to the competition. In most games the gameplay experience was the same.”
• “The Radeon HD 4770 provides value because it performs as it does using less power and producing less heat with potentially cheaper prices. It is fact that AMD has introduced new technology in at this price segment, while the competition has simply re-branded old technology. AMD’s goals of making the Radeon HD 4000 series GPU scalable have definitely worked out well for them.”

HardOCP Editor’s Choice Silver Award

Anandtech: Faster Graphics For Lower Prices: ATI Radeon HD 4770

• “40nm has arrived, and it looks pretty good. The Radeon HD 4770 always outperforms the older 4830 and sometimes gives the 4850 a run for its money.”
• “As for the competition, the 4770 comes out on top in the games we tested. The more expensive GTS 250 leads in Call of Duty World at War, while the 4770 blows the doors off everything in Age of Conan. As for the other benchmarks, they come out pretty close with the 4770 generally ahead. But the clincher is Far Cry 2 performance which shows the Radeon HD 4770 leading the GTS 250 fairly well in a heavy hitting graphics engine.”
• “It isn’t clear when NVIDIA will have a part in this generation of their architecture that competes in the near $100 market. For now, the best option is clear: the Radeon HD 4770 is the way to go.”

HotHardware:

• “There is a lot to like about the new Radeon HD 4770. With itsexpected street price of about $109, which will be brought down further to $99 throughmail in rebates, the Radeon HD 4770 offers excellent bang for the buck.”
• “In the end, the Radeon HD 4770 is one of the best buys at its expected price point currently. Performance is strong in light of competing offerings, the price is right, and the card is cheaper to operate over time than anything else in its class. Anyone in the market for a new graphics card priced around a hundred bucks should definitely consider the new AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770.”

HotHardware Recommended

 Extremetech: Radeon HD 4770--The First 40nm Desktop GPU

• “ATI has a real winner on their hands here. The 40nm process combined with GDDR5 have enabled an inexpensive card with a small GPU and 128-bit memory interface that meets or exceeds the performance of bigger GPUs that draw more power, run hotter, and are more expensive to produce.”
• “If you’re in the market for a low-cost card, especially if it has to go into a PC with a limited power supply, we highly recommend the Radeon HD 4770.”
• “This is the best value and best overall performer in the ~$100 price segment, and is especially suited to PCs with lower-wattage power supplies.”

ExtremeTech Approved

firingsquad.com: ATI Radeon 4770 Performance Preview

• “ATI’s Radeon 4770 is a deceiving performer. When you first see its “4770″ designation, you assume it’s been designed to slot in between the 4830 and ATI’s 4670. Its use of a 128-bit memory interface reinforces that assumption. But thanks to its blazing clock speeds and the use of the same 800MHz GDDR5 memory first adopted on the Radeon 4870, the 4770 is actually capable of outrunning ATI’s previous mainstream performance offering, the Radeon 4830.
• ATI should’ve designated the card as the Radeon 4840.”
• “At $110, the card’s closest competitor is NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GT. When compared against the 9800 GT, the Radeon 4770 was a little faster overall, but it certainly wasn’t a blowout.”
• “That’s probably going to be the time to pick up a 4770 in our opinion. With its 40-nm process and GDDR5 memory, the chip is begging to be overclocked, and by then RivaTuner should be up to speed with full support, opening the door to higher speeds than what we’re capped at today with Overdrive.”

legitreviews.com: ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB Video Card Review

• “The ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card might cost just $109, but the card doesn’t look and perform like what many would expect out of a card in that price range. The Radeon HD 4770 was able to keep up with the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ in numerous benchmarks as a testament to that. For those that game in the 1280x1024 to 1680x1050 resolution range, the Radeon HD 4770 should be fine for most games with average settings as our testing had the image quality cranked all the way up in almost every test and the card did fine.”
• “Legit Bottom Line: The Radeon HD 4770 512MB graphics card brings all the latest hardware and process technology to the $109 price category.”

computershopper.com: ATI Radeon HD 4770

• “Excellent performance at the $100 price point; uses less power than comparable cards”
• “Thanks to its GDDR5 memory and a new 40nm manufacturing process, the ATI Radeon HD 4770 sets a new bar for graphics-card performance at around $100, while using less power than beefier boards like the Radeon 4850.”
• “But for gaming at medium resolutions, the Radeon HD 4770 does surprisingly well considering its budget-friendly price. In our testing, it fared nearly as well as (and even sometimes better than) the more expensive Radeon HD 4850, for a fair bit less. Another way to look at the value of the Radeon HD 4770 is to consider that, in most tests, this card even defeated the EVGA E-GeForce 9800 GTX, which, about a year ago, was the fastest single-GPU card available and sold for $350. Until the laws of competition force Nvidia to release a new card to compete (or to lower the price on an existing product with more muscle), the ATI Radeon HD 4770 is the best-performing graphics card for around $100.”

ComputerShopper Editor’s Choice. Editor’s Ranking 8.9

PCPerspective: AMD RV740 is all it’s cracked up to be

• “Performance: The gaming performance of the new AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB graphics card is impressive. For a $99 part (after mail-in rebate…) AMD has created a great product and for gamers that are looking to power a system with a 1920x1200 or 1600x1200 display, it should offer more than enough power to get through most titles. In my testing, the HD 4770 was able to handle World in Conflict, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty: World at War and even Crysis at top quality settings at 1600x1200 without issue. Far Cry 2 was a bit more complicated -- we tested the game at a quality level above what the GPU and memory buffer could really handle reliably and I feel that running the game at “High” quality would result in a great, and completely playable, experience.”
• “Final Thoughts: The beauty of the Radeon HD 4770 512MB graphics card is that it brings another low price, high performance part to the market that will also potentially make AMD more money as the ramp up to 40nm technology at TSMC increases. If prices stay stable (the $99 HD 4850 withstanding) then the HD 4770 is the best card you will find under $100.”

XBIT Labs: New Revolution: ATI Radeon HD 4770 Graphics Card Review

• “It is about a year since AMD’s graphics department provoked a revolution in the sector of inexpensive gaming graphics cards with the release of Radeon HD 4850. It looks like the revolutionary aspirations of ATI Technologies have become a tradition. The newly announced Radeon HD 4770 is even better in some aspects than its predecessor. The transition to the 40nm tech process is nothing extraordinary in itself, yet the new card’s performance in games is really amazing.”
• “Summing up everything we have just said, Radeon HD 4770 has every right to be titled the best budget graphics accelerator -- it has a ton of advantages and we couldn’t find any serious drawbacks.”

Neoseeker

• “The HD 4770 offers good value at somewhere close to $100 USD. If you were judging by price, you’d classify the HD 4770 as a mid-range video card; but judging by game performance, the HD 4770 seems more at home with other enthusiast class cards than it does mid-range performers.”
• “In relation to the rest of ATI’s closest lineup, the HD 4770 is a welcome addition, and fits in nicely. If you are any more than a casual gamer, we would say the entry level ticket to satisfying gaming performance begins with the HD 4770.”
• “By taking the initial move to 40nm, AMD has won an important new milestone today. While the HD 4770 isn’t a game-changer in the video card landscape today, it is a great first step in a promising direction. Featuring improved power usage, lower operating temperatures, and high-end performance for a lower-end price, the HD 4770 bodes well for both ATI’s — and PC gamers’ — remaining months of 2009.”

Neoseeker Innovation Award

Tomshardware: ATI Radeon HD 4770: 40nm Goes Mainstream: Introduction

• “Writing about the latest and greatest hardware is fun-I’m not going to lie. Getting hands-on with technology in the lab is practically a hobby, and I’m fairly confident that most enthusiasts would share that excitement surrounded by a lab full of tech. But I’ll be the first to admit that $500 dual-GPU video cards and $1,000 Extreme Edition processors are Beluga caviar in a Big Mac world. There are some lucky gamers who really buy the pricey stuff. A majority, however, live vicariously through the reviews, and actually spends their money on components derived from high-end kit.”
• “Well, you know what they say about too good to be true. At the last minute, ATI changed the price to $109. Nothing about the card’s performance was altered. It remains a fast little board with good power consumption numbers. But it lost that “in your face for under $100″ sass.”
• “At $99, the Radeon HD 4770 was an award winner. At $109, it remains a good demonstration of 40 nm manufacturing at work and, as mentioned, a recommended alternative to the Radeon HD 4850/GeForce GTS 250 for budget-crunched gamers. Well-played ATI, well played.”

Benchmarkreviews

• “In conclusion, the ATI Radeon HD 4770 is perfect for HTPC builders and casual gamers looking for performance at a value with excellent cooling and overclocking capabilities. The HD4770 also matches well with AMD 770 motherboards, which currently sell for as little as $54.99 (after rebate). Benchmark Reviews has completed testing on the 40nm RV740, and our results have it performing at- or slightly-below the frame rate of a HD4850, and well ahead of the GeForce 8800 GT. With a double-slot cooler secured to a power-sipping 40nm GPU, budget enthusiasts can squeeze plenty more performance from the Radeon HD 4770 and get faster frame rates for no additional cost.”

Quality Recognition: Benchmark Reviews Silver Tachometer Award.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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 Phenom™ II X4 955 Black Edition and the Dragon technology platform refresh is enjoying a positive reception from review press this week. Credit for that goes to a solid product at an attractive price. Additionally, the new AMD OverDrive 3.0 Beta, with the accompanying Black Edition Memory Profiles (B.E.M.P.) and Smart Profiles, expands the performance-tuning sandbox for Those Who Know (TWKs).

While these reviews often point out that AMD Phenom II X4 955 does not challenge Core i7 at the highest end of the desktop market, there is a clear pattern of praise for AMD’s tremendous value. The introductory heading in bold italic at the beginning of many bullets is my own encapsulation.

AnandTech:  “AMD’s Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition”

·         Value:  “The prices are pretty attractive; the 955 will sell for $245 (and it already has been) and the 945 will go for $225. That pits the 955 against Intel’s Core 2 Duo Q9550 ($266) and the Core i7-920 ($284), the latter having a much higher motherboard cost of course.”

·         X4 955 beats Q9550:  “Unless you’re running applications that are very well optimized for Intel’s architectures, the Phenom II X4 955 is faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9550. Compared to the Core i7-920, it loses hands down although the chip does come close in some games.”

·         DDR3’s time has come and charts uplift over DDR2.

·         AMD has platform longevity:  “From a longevity standpoint, the AM3 platform is much wiser to invest in than LGA-775. Intel has already shown all of its cards there, and there aren’t going to be any faster Core 2 Quads – just cheaper ones. By the end of this year Intel will begin transitioning to LGA-1156 and 775 will start fading away. By contrast, AMD’s Socket-AM3 is going to be the flagship for the company for all of 2009 and it’ll continue to live on into 2010. If you’re choosing between Socket-AM3 and LGA-775, AMD has made that choice very easy – Phenom II is the way to go if you’re concerned about a long term upgrade path, not to mention that the chips are generally cheaper than their Intel equivalents.”

Tom’s Hardware:  “Phenom II X4 955: AMD’s Dragon Platform Evolves” 

·         Dragon Platform refresh:  “Now AMD is fully on the platform bandwagon and we think the decision is a good one. In fact, the company is thumping its platform drum so hard that it’s difficult to believe it ever wanted anything different…This update nudges us up 200 MHz with a flagship running at 3.2 GHz. It gives us the option of adopting DDR3 memory and a Socket AM3 interface. It’s available alongside ATI’s new Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. And it includes a new processor-in-box reference cooling solution, which is just a tad smaller than its predecessor.”

·         Value & overclocking with AOD 3.0:  “At the end of the day, this comes down to price for most folks. If a Phenom II X4 955 plus 790FX/GX-based motherboard plus 4 GB DDR3-1333 memory kit are the upper end of your budget (let’s call that about $500), you won’t go wrong here.”

Tech Report:  “AMD’s Phenom II X4 955 processor …Black Edition”

·         Compatibility & Black Edition:  “Since this is a Socket AM3 processor, it’s compatible with both Socket AM3 motherboards that support DDR3 memory and Socket AM2+ motherboards that use DDR2 memory. And since this is a new flagship for AMD, the 955 is a “Black Edition” processor with all of the privileges that title bestows—pretty much just “easy overclocking via an unlocked multiplier,” but hey, that’s not a bad perk.”

·         Price / Performance:  “The firm has made a commitment to remain competitive with Intel on price and performance, and the 955’s $245 price tag would appear to position it against the Core 2 Quad Q9550, a 2.83GHz chip with four cores and 12MB (or, more precisely, 2 x 6MB) of L2 cache. Intel’s current price list has the Q9550 at $266, so the Phenom II X4 955 undercuts it a little bit, in fact.”

·         X4 955 and Q9550 are basically equal…:  “The performance contest between the Phenom II X4 955 and the Core 2 Quad 9550 is crazy close, and even the X4 955’s one apparent weakness, a higher power/thermal rating, turned out to be a non-issue in our testing.”

·         … so AMD gets the nod on platform value:  “AMD knew what it had in this CPU: practically a mirror image of the Core 2 Quad Q9550. They’ve done two smart things, as a result. They’ve priced the chip right and have given it an unlocked multiplier to simplify overclocking. Add to those things the fact that Socket AM3 seems to have a better upgrade path than LGA775, and the Phenom II X4 955 looks to be the smarter choice for most consumers, should they be choosing between these two products.”

·         Phenom II X3 720 still popular:  “Strictly on value, one might wish to step down to one of our favorite Phenom II processors, the X3 720. Gamers, especially, don’t need four cores. If you do value multithreaded performance, the Core i7-920 could be an interesting possibility. But somewhere in between, the Phenom II X4 955 could make a whole lot of sense.”

Hot Hardware:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Processor”

·         Phenom II X3 720 still popular:  “AMD has released some mighty interesting processors as of late. The inexpensive tri-core Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition generated quite a bit of buzz upon its release, due to its excellent value and overclockability. And it didn’t hurt that a few weeks later news broke showing that some 720 BE processors could be modded into quad-cores with a simple BIOS tweak. The Phenom II 720 Black Edition was clearly a strong product in AMD’s mainstream CPU line-up. The new Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and X4 945, however, take things up a notch at the high-end of AMD’s product stack, and like the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition, they do so without breaking the bank.”

·         Available & attractive platform:  “The Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and the X4 945 will be available immediately for $245 and $225, respectively (the 955 BE has already popped up on NewEgg). Pair one of these processors with an enthusiast-class 790FX or GX-based socket AM3 motherboard and 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory and you’ve got the makings of a powerful desktop platform for about $450. That’s not exactly cheap, but considering the performance and overclockability of the platform, it certainly represents a good value. Yes, Intel’s similarly clocked Core 2 Quads and Core i7 processors still maintain a performance advantage, but there is no denying that AMD’s Dragon platform is an attractive option that has only been enhanced by the introduction of these new CPUs.”

·         Award: “Hot Hardware Approved”

FiringSquad:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Performance Preview”

·         AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “Of all the overclocking utilities that have been released from manufacturers over the years, AMD’s Overdrive suite is by far our favorite utility for CPU overclocking. With Overdrive 3.0, the best just got better, as AMD is adding Smart Profiles and Black Edition Memory profiles to Overdrive 3.0’s repertoire of features.”

·         Smart Profiles (AOD3):  “With so many games that are only dual-threaded on the market, Smart Profiles provides a nice option for enthusiasts looking to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their Phenom II processor.”

·         Good price, good value:  “Considering that the Q9400 sells for about $220, and the Q9550 for $270, AMD’s $225 price tag for the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition is actually a very good value. That $225 buys you an AMD processor that’s quite competitive with the Q9550 in performance, with the two trading wins depending on the application, but the AMD processor sells for nearly $50 less and sports an unlocked clock multiplier. Those are two very important pluses for hardware enthusiasts in this economy in our opinion.”

·         AMD is competitive: “This is definitely the most competitive AMD has been with Intel since Core 2’s arrival in the summer of 2006.”

PC Perspective:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor Review – AM3 gets serious”

·         AMD’s timing right on DDR3:  “With AMD being more of the “value choice” it would have certainly hurt them to try to push the AM3 platform with memory prices so high.  So while the AM3 rollout was a slow affair, in hindsight it does seem as though AMD timed it about right.”

·         Motherboard support and OC headroom draw enthusiasts: “AM3 motherboard support is now reaching the tipping stage, and we are seeing a variety of boards from multiple manufacturers that encompass prices from $109 to $199.  I am certain that there will soon be $99 boards, as well as more “boutique” style offerings above $200.  While AM3 is still not a value proposition as compared to AM2+ boards and DDR-2 memory, the ability of AMD to deliver a processor which can stand toe to toe with what Intel has at this particular price point is a good thing.  Add onto that a good measure of overclocking ability, and suddenly there is a rebirth of enthusiast interest in AMD parts.”

·         Great 45nm execution:  “The real unsung hero of this story is AMD’s 45 nm process.  In the history of AMD, I do not remember a process that has come out as mature and performant as this one has.  If we consider that the 65 nm Phenom was a 450 million transistor part that ran at a max speed of 2.6 GHz, and pulled 140 watts (for the first generation of 2.6 GHz parts), it is pretty amazing what AMD has done.”

·         Solid CPU / good choice:  “Make no mistake, AMD has another solid part on their hands.  The Phenom II X4 955 performs up to expectations, it does not consume all that much more power than previous versions, and the updates to the clock speeds and DDR-3 memory make it a much more interesting part.  Now that we actually have a larger selection of AM3 motherboards from $109 to $199, consumers have some very good choices in where they want to put their money.”

·         Easy overclocking:  “AMD continues to move forward with new product launches, and it is nice to see that they have now fully fleshed out their AM3 offerings.  The two new processors dropped on the market today will allow users to have a greater selection of products to choose from.  With better cooling I likely would have been able to hit 4 GHz, and certainly the 3.8 GHz I was able to achieve is outstanding compared to how little work I had to do to get there.”

PC World:  “Tested: AMD Launches New Flagship Phenom II CPU”

·         Dragon Platform:  “Though AMD has trailed Intel in CPU performance at the absolute top end of town, it’s continued to deliver an affordable and largely competitive computing platform that includes CPU, motherboard, and GPU. The current incarnation of this unified offering is dubbed Dragon, and the new CPUs top off a full refresh since its introduction at CES in January. New ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics boards hit earlier this month, Socket AM3 motherboards are rolling out, and AMD’s long-awaited OverDrive 3.0 overclocking software is expected to make its appearance at today’s launch, albeit in beta form.”

·         AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “My tests of the pre-release OverDrive 3.0 software revealed a veritable tweaker’s paradise. You can tweak processor, HyperTransport, and memory speed and voltages with unmatched granularity, or simply move a slider in novice mode.”

·         Dragon brings value and tuning:  “It looks like the Dragon refresh should compete well against the similarly priced Intel setups, especially when overclocked. That said, it’s not in the same league as top Core i7 960 setups, but it’s also far cheaper. In a mid-level power system Dragon provides a lot of bang for your buck — especially if you like to twiddle clock and voltage settings.”

Computer Shopper:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition”

·         Editor’s Rating: “8.2 / 10″

·         Dragon hits the intended mark:  “With this chip, AMD takes aim at Intel’s similarly priced Core 2 Quad 9550, rather than the company’s high-end Core i7 processors. The Phenom II, with its associated Dragon platform (which combines a Phenom II processor with a 7-series chipset and Radeon graphics) are designed to be competitive in today’s midrange-CPU market. To this end, this chip succeeds.”

·         Unlocked and compatible:  “The Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition may not feature a large speed bump over the previous high-end Phenom II chip, but it adds support for Socket AM3 and DDR3 RAM (both of which the initial Phenom II X4 940 lacked), while maintaining compatibility with DDR2 memory on Socket AM2+ motherboards. Like all Black Edition processors, the CPU multiplier is unlocked, simplifying the overclocking process.”

·         AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “AMD is continuing to court the enthusiast market by providing superb support for overclocking its CPUs. (The company does temper that support with a clear caveat that damage from overclocking isn’t covered by warranty.) AMD’s updated OverDrive 3.0 utility offers extensive control over speeds and voltages, like earlier versions, but it also adds a number of features to simplify the overclocking process. The first, Black Edition Memory Profiles, lets you automatically set optimal performance for supported DDR3 memory modules. Another, AMD Smart Profiles, can adjust settings on the fly for specific applications and games; for example, if a game only takes advantage of two of the Phenom II’s four processor cores, AMD OverDrive can boost the speed of two cores, while reducing the performance of the two unneeded cores. The initial release of OverDrive 3.0 includes 20 Smart Profiles, focusing on games and benchmarking applications; you can also create your own.”

·         AMD better value:  “When balancing value and performance, however, the Phenom II X4, coupled with an AMD 740-chipset-based motherboard and a Radeon graphics card, offers performance that’s very competitive with Intel’s Core 2 Quad series, often at a lower overall system price. As a bonus, AMD’s excellent utility bundle makes the Phenom II X4 an attractive choice for those who like to tweak to maximize performance.”

BenchmarkReviews:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955BE”

·         AMD is back:  “With the launch of the Phenom II and Dragon platform, however, AMD has made a dramatic comeback.”

·         Black Edition and AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “As this is a Black Edition processor, overclocking via AMD’s OverDrive 3.0 utility was easy. Given time restraints, I wasn’t able to push the Phenom II X4 955 to its limits. However, by upping a few voltages and increasing the multipliers, I was able to achieve a decent overclock in only a matter of minutes. The end result was 2800 MHz for the northbridge (MC + L3 Cache), 2600 MHz for the HyperTransport bus, and 3800 MHz for all four cores. The increased core speed has obvious benefits, but the northbridge itself is an important factor as well. As you’ll see in the benchmark sections to follow, when paired with high-end DDR3-1600, the overclocked memory controller leads to some serious bandwidth.”

·         Price / performance:  “Once again, it looks like AMD is the price/performance leader.”

·         AMD alone provides full platform with high-end GPU: “One other thing AMD has going for them is their ability to offer a complete desktop solution, including high-end discrete graphics. No other manufacturer can make this claim. (Although I’m sure they’re working hard at it!) For the time being, however, AMD’s Dragon Platform is one of a kind and with this refresh it’s gotten even better. The newly released Radeon HD 4890 and 790 series AM3 DDR3 motherboards are a perfect complement to the Phenom II family. Add to that great software support and you’ve got a very good system on your hands without having to break the bank.”

·         Award: “Golden Tachometer”

Bjorn3D:  “AMD Phenom 2 X4 955 BE”

·         Dragon platform attractive:  “The higher performance and overclockability of the new Phenom 2 X4 lineup, combined with lower upgrade costs than the competition, makes the Dragon platform an attractive choice in these economic hard times. Economically speaking, the times may be hard but AMD has shown you can produce an affordable platform with out sacrificing performance. This move not only allows users to enjoy a high end platform but shows that AMD cares about the end user by keeping the prices down. Kudos AMD!”

·         “The Phenom 2 X4 955 BE offers great performance at a good price. You can use your existing AM2+ board and DDR2 ram then upgrade to AM3 and DDR3, making it an even better choice in economic hard times.”

·         Phenom II recommended on value:  “The Phenom 2 X4 955 isn’t going to unseat the Core i7 CPU’s from their lofty throne but they rival them in some aspects. If we had to go out of pocket for a new rig at this point we’d heavily consider an X4 955. Not only is the CPU less expensive, the motherboards, on average, run about $100 (USD) less. You can snag a mid range AMD board with a SB750 and it’ll clock the unlocked multiplier X4 955 BE just as well as a deluxe board. The Asus M4A78T-E we use isn’t even a high end board and we easily hit 4 GHz.”

·         Easy overclocking:  “Speaking of overclocking, the Phenom 2 X4 955 BE overclocked insanely easy. We hit 3.8 GHz in about 15 minutes stable. Getting to 4 GHz took us about an hour, mainly by walking up the voltage on the CPU slowly. The Phenom 2 lineup is an overclocking champion and loves extreme cooling like Dry Ice and LN2, making it a good choice for air, water, and exotic cooling enthusiasts.”

·         More praise for platform value:  “We like the easy upgrade path on the Phenom 2 lineup and the price performance punch it offers. Dollar for dollar, we don’t think you’ll find a better platform out there than the Phenom 2 lineup and if you have a few bucks to spare, treat yourself to the Phenom 2 X4 955 BE with it’s unlocked multiplier and overclocking headroom. We love it.”

·         Award: “Golden Bear Award”

eWeek Channel:  “AMD Launches 3.2GHz Version of Phenom II CPU”

·         AM2+ compatibility demonstrated:  “We took a very straightforward approach to testing the 955; we simply yanked out the 940 in our AMD test system (see “AMD Guns for Intel’s Nehalem with the Phenom II”)  and replaced it with the 955.  Our test system uses an ASUS M3A78-T motherboard, which required an update to the latest BIOS to support the 955. The M3A78-T is an old standby and was developed during the days of AM2+ sockets.”

·         AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “Using the newest version of AMD’s Overdrive utility, we were able to experiment with different clock speeds on the 955 and found that, with our test system, we were able to run the 955 at 3.8GHz reliably. That increased our Passmark score to 1,146.5 and our CPUmark score to 4,846.4, a worthwhile increase.”

·         Value of compatibility:  “System builders should expect no surprises from the Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition, which in this case is a good thing. The CPU will quickly drop into current Phenom II configurations, making the transition to a faster CPU very simple, while cutting costs by a few dollars.”

CRN / Everything Channel:  “AMD Refreshes The Dragon”

·         AMD OverDrive 3.0:  “OverDrive has historically been an easy way for novices and enthusiasts alike to overclock AMD processors. With version 3.0, the company has added new features that also make it easier to fine tune some settings. With another acronym, BEMP (Black Edition Memory Profiles), AMD has worked with memory manufacturers to create a database of specifications for certain high-frequency DDR3 modules. When using a motherboard with a BIOS that supports it, OverDrive 3.0 can use BEMP to look up frequency and latency settings and automatically set the parameters within the BIOS… Other new additions to OverDrive are Smart Profiles, which allow users to create (or use preconfigured) profiles that set parameters on a per-application basis. One good example of this is with games that are only dual threaded. With Smart Profiles, it is now possible to devote more processing speed to those two cores while reducing speed to the cores that are underutilized.”

·         AMD a better buy:  “Admittedly, the X4 955 is still no match for Intel’s current high-end CPU, the Core i7-965 Extreme, but its benchmarking scores come a lot closer than we would have expected. Considering the Core i7 Extreme is priced near $1,000, AMD’s latest processors are a great value at $225 and $245 for the X4 945 and Black Edition X4 955, respectively.”

·         CPU and AOD3 are powerful:  “Overall, the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, along with OverDrive 3.0, is a powerful and stable processor at a very reasonable price. Reviewers were pleasantly surprised at the performance we saw and look forward to what the competition between the two CPU powerhouses brings next.”

DesktopReview:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Review”

·         Compatibility / Upgradability:  “One major difference between AMD’s and Intel’s most recent CPU efforts is the issue of backwards compatibility.  Due to the major structural changes on Intel’s side, such as moving the memory controller on-die, the newest processors can’t be used in any prior board. They also require new memory.  AMD saw an opportunity here and brought out their AM3 processors, giving them the ability to lock into AM2+ chipsets.  This way, users looking for a little extra oomph can drop in a new CPU and not necessarily be forced to buy an entire new system.  The PII X4 955 is no exception, and can be put in many older motherboards, needing only a BIOS update. Once they’ve bought the processor, users can buy a new AM3 motherboard and DDR3 RAM at a later time, hopefully taking advantage of a lower price tag.”

Hi Tech Legion:  “AMD Phenom II 955 X4 BE and Dragon Platform Refresh Review”

·         Dragon has AMD back in the game:  “At a price of under $800.00 for an entire system, the Phenom II 955 X4 Black Edition and the refreshed Dragon Platform has brought AMD back in the game for mainstream users and will also hand the enthusiast a plethora of overclocking options to play with. There is also the reverse compatibility factor. You don’t have to upgrade everything to take advantage of what the Dragon Platform has to offer.”

NeoSeeker:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 Review”

·         Award:  “Editor’s Choice”

AMDZone:  “Phenom II X4 955″

·         Award:  “Editor’s Choice”

Extreme Overclocking:  “AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE & 945 AM3 Processors”

·         Award:  “HIGHLY RECOMMENDED”

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.

Gary:

You joined the company almost a year ago.  What drew you to AMD?

Chekib:

I was drawn by the challenge of bringing together AMD’s intellectual property and obvious engineering talent in innovative ways.  That’s what is at the core of an engineer, right?  Solving problems and creating new things is both art and science, and I’m drawn to the tension between those two perspectives.  I’m also a big believer in process and how you apply the talents of many different people and skills sets to execute very complex projects.   Can you consistently execute in a very systematic way?  That’s what I came here to help achieve.

Gary:

What are some of the execution challenges that face chip engineering teams?

Chekib:

There are two primary issues you have to consider when you first walk in the door at a chip company:  What are the tools being used to do the engineering and what is the mindset of the people using them?  What is the priority – features or schedule? And how is that balance being managed?  Those are the questions at the heart of what I do every day.  When I first joined, the challenges with our first native quad-core product, codenamed “Barcelona”, had really woken everyone up to the idea that our processes were not perfect and needed to be fixed.  We’ve spent a lot of time since then to address both the tools and the culture to make sure we can execute, and that paid off tremendously with our first 45-nm product, codenamed “Shanghai“.

Gary:     What keeps you up at night?

Chekib:

A big one is how we will wisely use all the transistors we are going to have at our disposal at the advanced process nodes.  The processor cores will be very small – so do we use a lot of them or only a few, along with a GPU or two?  These kinds of system partitioning questions result in a variety of thought provoking scenarios, and the physical limits of the manufacturing technology will have a large impact of the power consumption and performance budgets.  The second is getting AMD’s next processor core generations, codenamed “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat”, built and delivered on time with the right performance to compete.

Gary:

How is AMD’s integrated CPU / GPU product, Llano, looking?

Chekib:

We are quite happy with what we are seeing so far and believe that “Llano” is really going to demonstrate the power of AMD’s two strengths:  x86 CPUs and GPUs.  The current schedule is for 2011 introduction so it is still early, but because we are using an existing CPU core for the first product and not making big changes in the memory structure right away, we feel quite confident about where we are with Llano.  We are doing the smart thing by taking an iterative step as we begin to tackle some of the more interesting optimizations possible with the two different types of cores.

Gary:

What excites you about the current competitive environment?

Chekib:

The leading edge chip manufacturing and design technologies available today and an abundance of high quality people available to innovate with it. That is a very rare combination in the industry. We all have strengths and weaknesses.  The trick is identifying and exploiting your strengths against the weaknesses of others in the markets where you play.

Gary:

What role does engineering play in aligning technology’s potential with business realities?

Chekib:

We develop the vision/direction on where technology is going and make sure that vision is in sync with the company’s mission and strengths. In our industry today there are a lot of competition and dynamics in the market, so the right strategy is not always obvious.  We have chief technology officers in the business units that specifically address the needs of that space and their customers. Personally, I also have a role inside the company to help promote the technical community and foster innovation.  Radical technology developments are still possible even though the industry is more mature now, so we have to keep our eyes open for those in the business too.

Chekib Akrout is Corporate Vice President, Central Engineering, at AMD. As co-leader of AMD’s Central Engineering group, Chekib has direct responsibility for AMD’s Accelerated Computing efforts, Research and Advanced Development Labs (RADL), processor cores and foundational IP, CAD and layout teams. 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.

Gary Silcott is a Product PR manager at AMD supporting ATI Stream technology and AMD Central Engineering. 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.

• Will news media focus more on the value the processors should deliver to consumers, or on the mechanics of how it is made (from a quad-core die)?
• Will they appreciate that the ability to make a triple-core is a deserved windfall for AMD customers based on our investment in making a monolithic quad-core processor first, rather than a two dual-core multi-chip module (MCM)?
• Will they rightfully extrapolate that Intel would likely emulate this approach once it also began to manufacture native quad-core processors?

The press event went well enough, but the Q&A session was a little rough. We were asked whether we thought triple-core would confuse consumers, and responded that differentiating on cores or “brains” seemed far more intuitive than differentiating on abstract brand names and the size of Level 3 cache memory. And we were asked “Aren’t these just quad-core processors with one core disabled?” with an accusatory tone that just as easily could have demanded “Weren’t you the one seen in the parlor holding the candlestick over Colonel Mustard’s body?”

Clearly, these anticipated questions didn’t surprise, and our execs handled them well. What we didn’t anticipate, however, happened soon after at the Intel Developer Forum. Here’s how ExtremeTech reported it:

“During a question-and-answer session following his keynote speech, Otellini was asked his thoughts on including three cores on a processor die, as AMD indicated it would on Monday. AMD’s solution turns off one core, which may or may not have met its rated speed. “We see a distinct advantage in having all the cores on our die work,” Otellini replied.”

Otellini’s comment was widely reported and it entered into conventional wisdom about triple-core. In hindsight, perhaps Otellini did not anticipate that his own roadmaps would deliver, only 1.5 years later, server processors with two cores on the die disabled?

Egged on by the CEO of the world’s largest semiconductor company, scrutiny of how AMD triple-core processors are made became part of the processor’s narrative within the industry, distracting from its amazing performance and value. Consider this review conclusion from Tech Report, which manages to praise performance while alluding to manufacturing approach in one fell swoop:

“Well, jeez, it’s hard not to like the Phenom II X3 720, which is just a bundle of gimpy goodness…In more widely multithreaded apps where the 720’s third core kicks in, the Phenom II X3 almost always outruns the E8400, sometimes dramatically. Oddly enough, the 720’s combination of three cores and relatively high clock speeds may be the ideal trade-off for the current state of PC software. Who knew? Add in the X3 720’s fairly tame power consumption, its apparently excellent overclocking proposition, and the fact that—regardless of memory type—the Phenom II has a superior system architecture to the Core 2, and the E8400 starts to look rather weak by comparison. The Phenom II X3 720 is our new favorite among mid-range PC processors.”

Need more convincing about the solid value proposition that is AMD Phenom II X3?

Anandtech: “…The most interesting CPU is the Phenom II X3 720; at $145 its only Intel competitors are the Core 2 Duo E7500 and the Core 2 Duo E8400, both of which are dual-core CPUs. The extra core in the 720 can provide a clear advantage in well threaded workloads.”

But then, last week Intel had its big coming out party for Nehalem EP, and I was a little disappointed with the level of analysis present in the first days of coverage, and pointed to questions of my own. Here’s one more question from me:

Why has not one reporter asked Intel, or at least published a story, about the die used for the new dual-core Intel Xeon E5502 and L5508? According to Insight64 principal analyst Nathan Brookwood, he has confirmed with Intel these are “defeatured quad-cores that create a low-end socket-compatible part.”

Intel publicly jeered AMD triple-core desktop processors with one core “defeatured,” yet they are apparently “defeaturing” two cores for their new datacenter darling.

Perhaps no one wrote this story because the press now “get it” that this is just good, smart business in making a complete product family from a monolithic quad-core. But let’s just hope this remains a tri-lateral “agreement” honored by all involved parties: Intel, AMD, and the news media.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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 understand that the “Apple Ink” blog is intended to be pro-Apple, which is great. I’m pro-Apple too. And pro-Microsoft, pro-HP, pro-Dell, pro-Google. But I’m especially pro-Lauren, and pro-people out there just like her trying to find the best value in buying wondrous PCs and Macs.

Here’s the points we made to Computer World to address some of the more technical aspects of the post, and the opinions based on those points.  The text in quotes below comes directly from Seth’s blog:

1.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “It runs Vista Home on a slow AMD mobile processor”

·         The nearly three-year-old  ZDNet article to which Seth links actually refers to the Turion™ 64 X2 TL-56 processor running at 1.8GHz, while the processor included in the HP dv7 cited in the Microsoft ad is the 2.1 GHz AMD Turion™ X2 RM-72 dual-core mobile processor.  The HP Pavilion dv7 laptop launched in June 2008, so linking to a ZDNet article from 2006 is incorrect at best and misleading at worst.

2.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “it has DDR2 RAM which is what $300 Netbooks run.”

·         Current market data from IDC shows that only 29% of the entire PC market is currently using DDR3 because DDR2 is generally seen as sufficient, a statement especially true of those consumers looking for mainstream, well-priced notebooks. What’s more, even high-end notebooks, such as the just-announced Asus G71Gx, feature DDR2 memory.  

3.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “this is the type of setup that sparked the “Made for Vista” lawsuits.”

·         I think Seth is referring to the “Vista Capable” lawsuit.  This lawsuit was aimed at notebooks and desktops which failed to visually power the full Windows Vista Premium experience – devices which, by the way, employed our competitor’s integrated graphics solutions.

·         AMD is proud of its strong history of providing graphics processors capable of providing the full Windows Vista Premium experience; in fact, AMD was the first to market with WHQL certified Vista drivers. The HP dv7, in fact, is an AMD “Puma” platform-based notebook; Puma brought full HD video capability to mainstream notebook customers.

4.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “Its networking is five years old.  802.11G wireless and 100Mb Ethernet are surpassed by $300 Netbooks. 2004 called.  It wants its motherboard back.”

·         Actually, wireless technology is not found on the motherboard in this AMD platform. AMD was the first to market with platforms that included 802.11 draft n, and today our current platform based on the AMD Turion X2 Ultra features industry-leading wireless capabilities from Atheros, Broadcom, and Ralink and are compatible with both 3G and WiMAX technology.  If AMD had its way, every notebook would ship with 802.11N but it is not at all uncommon to find many notebook configurations at retail equipped with 802.11G.

5.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “The thing is almost two inches thick and weighs in at almost eight pounds.  Do you think that PC buyer wants to be hauling that thing around?  She didn’t look like she spends her afternoons pumping iron on Venice Beach.”

·         The 17” Macbook Pro weighs a substantial 6.6 pounds, while the dv7 weights exactly 7.8 pounds.  Consumers with portability as a priority would surely choose a notebook smaller than 17”. Lauren, for example, did not state ultra portability in her criteria.  

6.          ComputerWorld/Seth: “The battery is said to last 2.5 hours.  Real world usage is always close to around half of that.  That means you can’t watch a full movie on a battery charge.  It also means that it will probably poop out on that commuter flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco.”

·         Again, the HP dv7 is a desktop replacement model known for its multimedia prowess, not a model intended for someone whose primary criteria is portability. However, while unclear whether the model Lauren chose contained a 6 cell or 8 cell battery, the HP dv7 has gotten a reported 2 hours and 47 minutes of battery life when subjected to rigorous testing by LAPTOP Magazine (enough to watch an average length movie on a battery charge).

It looks as though Seth already has updated the post based on input #1 in the above list, and we’re grateful for that. But we hope sharing the full contents of our feedback to Computer World is useful, added perspective.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.

About five months ago, AMD launched a server processor codenamed “Shanghai,” about which Anandtech said:

“It is clear that the latest AMD Opteron is in the lead. We are really at the pivotal moment in time. No matter how good the current Xeon “Harpertown” and “Dunnington” architectures are, they lose too many battles due to the platform they are running on. The FSB architecture is singing its swan song.

Today, it’s Intel’s turn in this see-saw dynamic as it launches its new architecture for 2P servers and workstations. The follow-on Anandtech review this week shows strong initial benchmark performance for the highest-end “Nehalem” platforms. Let’s congratulate Intel on the performance of its all-new processors and the attending all-new OEM platforms. Competition is good for the industry. With “Istanbul” on deck for 2H09, and AMD’s all new “G34” platforms following thereafter, this competition is far from over. Here’s a little more on Istanbul:

How are the news and social media telling Intel’s big story thus far? Some already remarked on similarities between Xeon 5500 Series processors and AMD Opteron innovations[1], while we expect the most reactionary and binary (declaring AMD or Intel sucks/rules based on mostly academic benchmarks) tech press to write misguided AMD Opteron obits today.

Others will write-up even the boldest Intel hyperbole like a speckled trout takes a shrimp. Speaking of running with what Intel gives you, it’s become a source of amusement in the AMD Communications team: What new way will Intel spin its beloved “The biggest X Intel innovation since Y Intel innovation?”

·         For this launch, “Pat Gelsinger…touted the new chips…as the most significant processor launch since the Pentium Pro was released in 1995,” as quoted in eWeek

·         However, Core 2 Duo was “One of the biggest new microprocessors we’ve done in many years--at least a decade--and many people say the biggest one since the Pentium,” said David Tuhy, general manager of desktop products division, in an interview with eWEEK.

·         With High-K Metal Gate and 45nm, “Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago,” according to the New York Times.

To my ears, the Intel “biggest X since Y” tactic is now “the most-worn-out-yet-mysteriously-effective marketing tactic since the infomercial.”

While I may not get my way on news and social media tiring of an overdone marketing tactic, perhaps as the week progresses we’ll see answers to Xeon 5500 questions like these:

1.    Current platform pricing shows that Xeon 5500 systems represent a significant price premium of up to 40 to 50% over equivalent AMD Opteron processor-based systems.  Will customers see sufficient value at this price premium in this economy?  

2.    Are all the new features available across the entire Nehalem product stack? For example, do they have to reduce memory DIMM performance, lower their Quickpath speeds in order to achieve lower TDPs? Do all the models feature HyperThreading or Turbo Mode?

3.    We’re hearing much emphasis with this launch on idle power. Will “Nehalem” EP platforms consume more power at the wall versus similar AMD Opteron processor-based systems at load, as in virtualization environments?

4.    Intel termed 4P server configurations “for mission critical applications” and “with Virtualization [Intel has] seen four socket and above have more strength because there’s a larger desire to move to a consolidated environment because of the operational benefits that come with it.” When will Intel have 4P and higher solution based on its Nehalem architecture available and shipping in OEM systems?

5.    Nehalem EP is only available with DDR3 memory, which draws more power and comes at a price premium. As servers are typically configured with massive amounts of memory, will Intel need to compensate for these two considerations?

Maybe we can get a little help from Jon Stewart in asking the questions that get missed?

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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 boy, I remember the impatient process of flicking my 1970s era game console on-off switch up and down up to 20 times to get my “Adventure” game to display properly. Fast forward 30+ years, and this week I’m trying to determine where in my living room to position my 13” tall Xbox 360 to make room for a new home theater component. This week news media, game publishers and developers are abuzz once again about server-side rendering, with its promise to re-imagine the game console in our living rooms: size, simplicity, power efficiency.

There has been a huge round of initial coverage in response to the revelation by OnLive, a company demoing a new server-side rendering gaming solution, and the follow-up news this week of others innovating in similar ways. Media reactions thus far range from straightforward reporting of the promise OnLive outlined and demonstrated to more critical views of the barriers to success.

We were pleased with the response we received as well in January 2009 when AMD showed off similar technology; the conceptual demos OnLive has shown are kindred spirits to the AMD Fusion Render Cloud concept that Dirk Meyer and Jules Urbach of OTOY presented at CES09. That so many new entrants are entering the mix is validation that this concept captivates the imagination and appears poised to enhance the consumer experience in a meaningful way.

Many reporters, bloggers and industry analysts asked us what the OnLive announcement means to AMD, and whether we see players like OnLive as competition to the AMD Fusion Render Cloud concept. Simply put: the more the merrier. We’re not surprised by these developments and the warm reception from the industry. Server-side rendering has been discussed for years and, AMD had been working for a while on technology that can deliver high-quality, immersive and interactive entertainment experiences directly from the cloud. 

Ultimately, our goal is to give consumers access to HD games, videos and everything in between regardless of their location or the HD-capable device they chose. We want the consumer to be able to access HD content (be it a game or a Blu-ray movie) as easily from a seat on the bus as from a couch in the living room.

Granted, this is a tall order and AMD continues to work with a number of partners including OTOY, Image Metrics and Electronic Arts,to name a few. For those following the conversations our January announcement sparked, and similar conversations reignited this week, you can see that the hurdles to having a mass market, consumer-ready product are not minor:

-         Sufficient compression to overcome latency and network bandwidth issues still remain a key part of the question.

-         One of the things AMD continues to grapple with as well is making that experience seamless and unobtrusive. For instance, most consumers already have any number of devices in their living room, whether it’s a video game console like Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii (I have both these AMD-powered consoles in my living room), or a media center PC or personal video recorder (PVR). How can those be employed to deliver that HD entertainment experience from the cloud rather than needing yet another piece of hardware in the room?

As we work through these challenges and others as an industry, it’s clear that the AMD Fusion Render Cloud concept, and the broader idea of entertainment delivered over the cloud, offers a real growth opportunity. Like everyone else, we’re excited about the OnLive announcement. It’s important to remember that at the center of these concepts — the heart of what it takes to make this HD cloud experience possible — is a high-performance computing platform that brings together GPU and CPU technologies. That’s at the core of what makes AMD unique in the world of computing innovation, and what drives great digital entertainment experiences.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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’s begin with YouTube and the restless pursuit of viral video hits.

When Nigel Dessau joined AMD about a year ago, he drove a shift in our marketing toward activities designed to strike the bull’s eye of an intended target. For the launch of the AMD desktop technology PC platform codenamed “Dragon” and AMD Phenom™ II processors, the bull’s eye was people who like to build their own PCs for video editing and gaming. I refer to this crowd as “Those Who Know” (TWK, pronounced “tweak”) in that they understand how to build a world-class system for their specific pursuits without spending world-class amounts, and many of them like to overclock a processor to get even more performance than its official rating. I’m a level 1 TWK: I build my own systems, but you might not want me to build yours.

For our marketing and communications efforts, we really wanted to strike the target by showing that “Dragon” represented unparalleled value for TWKs. So we brought a few Level 10 TWKs at AMD to the forefront in our marketing: gifted engineers and technologists who love tuning the latest silicon to unlock maximum performance and value.

Two discrete arrows released at our target were videos handsomely edited to show world-record overclocking performances with PCs based on our Dragon platform technology in the hands of AMD’s best and champion overclockers from Finland.*

The older of the two videos dates only to CES09, and has clocked more the 400,000 views even with a runtime of 7 min. 36 sec. 662 comments to-date. 

The newer video has only been up for a few weeks, and already has more than 100,000 views. This one is my favorite in how it conveys a sense of place while shooting on-location in Finland. 219 comments thus far. 

I argue the vast majority of these views represent the bull’s-eye. The video subject is primarily of interest to TWK types; it’s decidedly not as mainstream as watching YouTube highlights of, say, Premier League goals.

That’s ½ million views combined and counting. Incredible stuff for a semiconductor design company, however some of the biggest viral marketing video hits have clocked 2X, 4X or more that number of views.

Let’s examine the other end of the spectrum of marketing video hits. How about the Cadbury Dairy Milk “A glass and a half full of joy” videos and ads. This is the U.K.’s best-selling candy bar. This is a multi-million Euro (http://www.confectionerynews.com/The-Big-Picture/New-Cadbury-TV-ad-to-drive-dairy-milk-sales) ad campaign that plays well on YouTube. The two AMD videos, in contrast, cost a tiny fraction of that to produce and were not created for a media buy.

The eyebrows video employs whimsical, fresh images set to old-school hip hop (“Don’t Stop the Rock” by Freestyle) to make a tie to the word “joy” in the candy bar tagline. More than 2.5 million views on YouTube and counting.

This video doesn’t tell us about the milk chocolate candy bar, how it tastes, or how it is Fairtrade certified (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7923385.stm). It purely entertains, in the name of “joy.” Same as a chocolate bar. But the connection is abstract.

So, web marketers, which would you prefer? Several million whimsical views that abstractly connect to your product brand? Or 500,000 views that hit your bull’s eye audience with a concrete message?

Well, Cadbury Dairy Milk sales speak for themselves, and “AMD Phenom II” is among the top searched-for products on sites like newegg.com that cater to TWKs like me. As Forrest Gump said, “Perhaps it’s both.”  

* Note:  AMD’s product warranty does not cover damages caused by overclocking, even when overclocking is enabled via AMD software.

John Taylor is Director, Global Platform & Product Communications 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.