Marcus Pollice, Author at VR World - Page 3 of 7

Business, Hardware

AMD Aggressively Slashes Prices on Entry Level CPUs and APUs

On November 5th AMD announced new CPU prices for their Athlon II (official price list) and Fusion (official price list) series of chips. The new prices encompass price slashes in the lower end of the spectrum, which should make AMD more competitive. The prices on the lists are for 1k unit quantities excluding any taxes but give a good indication of where street prices are going. First, let us look at the APU prices for the Socket FM1 (3000 series) and FM2 (5000 series). Most of the price slashes target the older Llano-based offerings for Socket FM1. Do note that some models have been omitted

Business, Hardware

Opteron 6300 Series Launch: An Incremental Upgrade on an Outdated Platform

Today marks the introduction of AMDs Opteron 6300 line of server processors, codenamed Abu Dhabi, based on the Piledriver core architecture. The new CPUs are poised to replace the Opteron 6200 series, codenamed Interlagos, based on last year’s Bulldozer architecture. The Piledriver cores deliver a slight performance increase and allow for a modest increase in clock rate. With the manufacturing process unchanged at 32nm SOI at GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ Fab 1 in Dresden and no change in core-count or amount of cache, the Opteron 6300 series is an evolutionary improvement. The chip package consists of two dies forming a MCM (Multi-chip module). Each die features 4 modules

Business

AMD Will Announce Strategy Update On October 29th

Today, AMD announced that they will be holding a press conference to discuss their strategy in more detail. The conference will be hosted by President and CEO, Rory Read, as well as Lisa Su, SVP and General Manager Global Business Units. The conference will be held on October 29th in San Francisco and is scheduled to begin at 1:30 PM PDT. The event will be live-streamed on AMD’s investor relations website. It was generally expected that AMD would detail their restructuring measures and revised strategy at some point in the future. However, considering that the information given during their earnings call occurred just last week,

Business

Earnings Call Analysis: AMD Restructuring, New Markets, and 28nm

A few days ago, AMD announced their Q3 2012 earnings and they were not pretty. During the earnings call, the executives gave detailed insight as to why the company is stumbling as well as their plans for a better future. We took the time to analyze their statements in broad detail. The Current Business – Trinity Adoption Going Well Sales of Trinity in the notebook segment increased by 70% sequentially and comprise almost one third of AMDs total notebook APU sales. The company also believes to have gained some share with ultrathins in the $600-799 price bracket. For the upcoming launch of Windows 8, they

Business

Earnings Call Analysis: Intel Responds To Weak Demand, Prepares Haswell

Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] recently posted their third quarter 2013 earnings release. In this analysis we try to go a bit deeper and look at the statements of the executives and their implications for the future of the company. Manufacturing The CFO Stacy Smith made it very clear that the company wants to prepared for potential upside in terms of demand. He explained that it is easier to deal with the low utilization situation the company is currently facing as opposed to not being able to meet demand. Smith detailed that a low utilization situation takes about 6 months to compensate for with realignment of factory lines,

Business, Hardware

AMD Posts Q3 2012 Net loss of $131 Million, Announces Restructuring Plan

AMD just released its financial results for the third quarter of 2012. Throughout the quarter the company earned $1.27 billion in revenues, -10% compared to the last quarter and -25% compared to the same quarter of last year. This lead to a net loss of $157 million based on GAAP, their operating loss amounts to $131 million. This amounts to a loss per share of $0.21 and a gross margin of 31%. "The PC industry is going through a period of very significant change that is impacting both the ecosystem and AMD," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "It is clear that the trends

Business

Intel Reports Q3 2012 Earnings, Hamstrung By Macroeconomic Enviroment

Intel just reported their Q3 2012 numbers which come in at quarterly revenue of $13.5 billion, operating income of $3.8 billion, net income of $3.0 billion, and earnings per share of $0.58. In other words, their figures are mostly flat compared to their Q2 2012 numbers, with the exception of 5.1% higher net income and 7.4% higher earnings per share. Since historically Q3 has been a strong quarter than Q2, this is not exactly good news. Intel already lowered their expectations for Q3 over a month ago and now came in slightly above their revised expectations. The company was challenged by a tough macroeconomic environment

Business

AMD Cuts Revenue Forcast, Had To Write Off $100 Million

AMD issued a revenue warning today for the third quarter of 2012 that ended on September 29. The previous guidance of a 1% sequential decline plus or minus 3% (thus allowing for a 4% decline in the worst case) was adjusted to a 10% sequential decline. The company blames this on weak demand caused by the challenging macroeconomic environment. As a result their margin dropped down to 31%, down from the previously expected 44%. This was primarily caused by a $100 million inventory write-off "due to lower anticipated future demand for certain products". Back when we discussed the Llano sales slip after AMD’s Q2 call,

Business

AMD Cuts Revenue Forcast, Had To Write Off $100M

AMD issued a revenue warning today for the third quarter of 2012 that ended on September 29. The previous guidance of a 1% sequential decline plus or minus 3% (thus allowing for a 4% decline in the worst case) was adjusted to a 10% sequential decline. The company blames this on weak demand caused by the challenging macroeconomic environment. As a result their margin dropped down to 31%, down from the previously expected 44%. This was primarily caused by a $100 million inventory write-off "due to lower anticipated future demand for certain products". Back when we discussed the Llano sales slip after AMD’s Q2 call,

Software Programs, Technology Security

Firefox 16 More Responsive, But Faces Security Problems At Release

Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 16 bringing another wave of changes and new features to the open source web browser. As listed in the release notes, the release brings support for Mozilla Web Apps. The company plans to provide apps in a marketplace a bit later this year. The most noticeable change in the new version should be improved responsiveness, especially when a lot of tabs are opened. This is achieved by incremental JavaScript garbage collection, which makes sure that the browser only takes small amounts of time for background tasks while staying responsive for user input. Further details are explained in Mozilla’s blog.

Technology Security

NIST Selects SHA-3 Competition Winner, But SHA-2 Still Secure

On October 2nd NIST announced that they picked the Keccak algorithm as the winner of the SHA-3 competition. Thus, the cryptographic hash function is prepared for future use in a wide range of applications. Keccak was created by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and Michaël Peeters of NXP Semiconductors. A cryptographic hash function is an algorithm that takes a message (usually a string of text or a binary file) and calculates a fixed size digest, which is usually represented as a hexadecimal string. Hash functions are designed in a way that the same input will generate the same output, but

Hardware, Software Programs

HTC Scraps ICS Update for Desire HD, Angers Community

Last week HTC infuriated the community with an announcement that they won’t provide an update to Android 4 ?Ice Cream Sandwich? (ICS) for the popular Desire HD smartphone. This comes half a year after the announcement that the phone would receive an update to Android 4 in the July-August time frame. The anger of the community culminated in a petition, urging HTC to provide an update to ICS. Officially HTC claims that the ICS update doesn’t provide an improvement of the user experience and thus the company decided to let the Desire HD stick with Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’. The statement in the company blog reads, "After extensive testing, we?ve

Business, Enterprise, Hardware

AMD Q2 Earnings Call Analysis: Company Admits Huge Llano Sales Slip

Earlier we reported about the financials of AMD’s second quarter 2012 earnings call. During the call, AMD’s Rory Read made it clear that the results were very disappointing and that they were committed to correcting the problems that lead to it. In this analysis we will touch upon some of those issues as well as other interesting details that were highlighted by the company executives. Largely unsurprising, Brazos continues to sell very well. Rory Read claims to have achieved further market share gains in the segment of notebooks $499 and below. That seems like an odd claim, considering Intel said during their call that they

Business, Hardware

Xeon Phi Lacks Binary Compatibility, Breaks AMD64 Conventions

Three weeks ago Intel launched their Xeon Phi coprocessor card with much fanfare. We took the time to analyze some technical details about the chip that cast some doubt on Intel’s claim of x86 compatibility. It should be noted that Intel attempted to word their press release very carefully, to only make claims about the x86 programming model. Still, we believe it should be pointed out that beyond the basic x86 instruction set and programming model, Xeon Phi is quite a different beast compared to current and past x86 CPUs. To get a basic understanding of Larrabee, it should be known that the single cores

Graphics, Hardware

AMD Revises the Llano Fusion APU Transistor Count

In a reaction to our AMD?s 2012 Mobile Strategy analysis, one of our readers accused us of not checking the facts in regards to the actual transistor count in AMD APUs. Given that practically every article we publish comes through several layers of fact checking and going through the presentations, we decided to check what is going on. AMD Llano Explained at the Hot Chips 2011 Conference. Note the AMD engineering presentation template. 1.45 Billion transistors, 227mm2 die. A quick result of our investigation rendered the fact that it is someone else who should probably dedicate some effort to get their facts straight. We are

Cloud Computing, Software Programs

Firefox 12 Brings Silent Updates to the Masses, Firefox 13 Beta Released

Mozilla is really busy. Last week, the company released the 12th version of the Firefox web browser, and this week brings the Firefox 13 beta release. Over the course of the last year Mozilla switched from a traditional to a rapid release model, which led to an explosion of version numbers. Users seem to care less and less about the updates and with this release Mozilla makes sure that even less will actually notice that the version number got another 1up. For users on Windows Vista and upwards, the annoying prompts when an update is ready to be applied will now be a thing of

Business, Enterprise, Hardware

Earnings Call Analysis: Intel all but Confirms Foundry Plans

Few days ago, we’ve posted the news on the Intel’s earnings call for the first quarter of 2012. We focused on the aspects that will be important for the performance (or lack thereof) of the company in the future. During the call Intel executives repeatedly said that some information will be held back until their Analyst Meeting in May. ManufacturingRegarding their strategy around manufacturing, Intel executives were adamant to point out their competitive advantage in performance, power and cost versus other semiconductor companies. As an example they gave the accelerated silicon roadmap for their Atom offerings, which is moving at twice the rate of Moore’s

Entertainment, Software Programs

VIDEO: Diablo III Arrives on May 15th

Blizzard Entertainment finally announced the release date of Diablo III, the much-awaited action RPG. On May 15th the wait will be over and players from around the world are able to venture into the realms of Sanctuary and battle the denizens of hell. This relieves a lot of fans of the series who over the course of the last months have been constantly bugging Blizzard representatives about a definitive date. Until now they happily dodged these inquiries. Players were adamant that judging from the current state of the beta the game looks ready to ship. The Diablo III beta test is still going strong, or

Software Programs

Firefox Goes to Eleven

Recently Mozilla released the 11th installment of their popular web browser Firefox. Since the start of the rapid release model the amount of changes is small, but there is the advantage of having something new every 6 weeks. The company is working to make updates more transparent and less cumbersome in the future. The biggest changes in Firefox 11 are the option to migrate bookmarks, history and cookies from Google Chrome. With Sync it is now possible to keep add-ons in sync over installations as well. The media controls for HTML5 video got updated and there is added support for some new HTML features. For

Business, Hardware

AMD Ditches SOI: Kaveri goes Bulk at GF, More Details From the New WSA

On the conference call regarding the Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) amendment covering 2012, AMDs CFO Thomas Seifert delivered a few interesting statements that reveal some small details regarding the roadmap going forward. We will also go into a few details on the impact of the new WSA on AMD. There is one statement made in the Q&A section of the call on the new WSA that caught our attention: "So with respect to SOI (Silicon On Insulator), we made statements that on 28-nanometer, all of our products will be bulk." Also he basically confirmed, that Kaveri, the successor to Trinity is going to be manufactured