In today’s roundup, we look at the most interesting news around the world. AMD’s Financial Analyst Day PDFs Available for Download http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-analystday AMD’s Financial Analyst Day was marked with the stock shooting for the stars one day, and then crashing down the other, as investors didn’t got the expected Intel announcement. Intel is currently operating in dangerous territory with a month-to-month agreement with NVIDIA, after the original contract expired on March 31st, 2017. Intel has to sign either with AMD or NVIDIA, or face the (legal) music again. But forgetting about the legal wranglings, if you’re an enthusiast or want to see what AMD is cooking for
Can Baahubali and its VR Experience Break Bollywood into Mainstream?
There’s no denying that the Indian movie industry is one of world’s leading cinemas, and one of most productive industries in the world. The amount of Bollywood movies that are coming out is just staggering, and easily beats Chinese or the American production capabilities. However, the need to support multiple languages (Hindu, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu – barely any English) caused strain on the budgets, limiting the directors vision. Enter Baahubali Series, with the second movie breaking all the domestic and global records for an Indian-made movie. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion opened on a record number of theaters in India, numbering more than 7,000 screens. That is
Intel Can’t Hide Strategical Mistakes, AMD to Pounce?
If you would align your wristwatch to the sound of Intel’s tick tock, you would miss your important meeting. The launch of a new generation of processors represents a symbolic beginning of a new cycle and for Intel, “Kaby Lake” launch was everything but normal. First launching the Ultra-low Voltage parts (the U series), then the Desktop line-up and finally the mainstream notebook designs, with troublesome rumors about its enterprise, Xeon-branded counterpart. Kaby Lake is perhaps too focused on the processor power task rather than processor performance. A lullaby. The same story for the last six years continues. Admittedly, for the past 18 months there were whispers
Intel to Buy Imagination Technologies or AMD’s RTG?
This week started with a milestone announcement of Japanese SoftBank moving in to acquire ARM Holdings for a record $32 billion. Many analysts lamented that the takeover was a result of Brexit, even though everyone in their right minds should know that negotiations of this magnitude take years and typically are made in complete silence for 6-18 months (due dilligence and all that jazz). However, this might not be the only acquisition in the modest pool of British semiconductor players. As we reported on multiple occasions, Intel is reorganizing, i.e. restructuring the company. As a part of that reorganization, the company performed no less than three rounds
AMD Celebrates Vega 10 Rollout
AMD’s decision to rename and split the Northern Islands family into two is starting to unravel itself. Polaris 10 (Ellesmere) and 11 (Baffin) are coming to market as low-power mainstream cards – Radeon RX460 (Polaris 11), RX470, RX480 4GB and RX480 8GB (all Polaris 1o). On the other side, Greenland i.e. Vega 10 will be the most advanced silicon AMD has ever produced. Featuring 14nm FinFET design by GlobalFoundries or Samsung, with SK.Hynix HBM2 memory modules on multi-chip-module, i.e. MCM (TSMC calls this CoWoS), Vega 10 is looking to offer equal or higher performance than the high-end GP100. You should expect the chip to land in between
AMD is Working on a Bollywood VR Movie
With the arrival of Baahubali: The Conclusion in April 2017, the world of Bollywood movies might change forever. At the 69th edition of Cannes Film Festival, movie producers sat down to discuss the arrival of Virtual Reality into the movie industry, in a bid to change the industry paradigm. Up until last year, most of movie industry spoke of ‘second screen’ i.e. engaging the movie goers by offering additional content on their favorite device (tablets, smartphones etc.). With virtual reality, the paradigm shifts from the ‘second screen’ concept into transporting movie goers into the actual movie world. While real-time interactive movies are still a good decade away, the so
AMD is Finally Fabless, Dead Certain to Secure a Profit in Q2 2016
When Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced its first quarter 2016 results, the company executives stated that they’re on track towards return to profitability in the second quarter of this year. In Q1 2016, the company suffered a $109 million loss on $832 million revenue, during a silent quarter stifled with the lack of orders (post-holiday blues in the West meets Lunar New Year two-week slowdown). The announcement of the Chinese Joint-Venture which might lead to AMD enterprise x86 processors becoming a standard feature in Chinese government institutions is going to earn company much more than the $293 million licensing fee, as AMD now has access to a plethora of R&D grants
New AMD Corporate Strategy Starts to Pay Off
Over the course of last year, AMD’s upper management started to split the company into two key elements – one that would drive the technology forward (Radeon Technologies Group) and one to make sure the technology brings back ‘best bang for buck’, mostly through licensing agreements and new industry collaborations. Radeon Technologies Group is being lead by Raja Koduri and his management and engineering team, while Dr. Lisa T. Su is driving the monetization aspect of AMD as the corporate entity. Less than a year after making an announcement that AMD is ‘open for business’ by licensing the core IP technologies such as CPU or GPU cores. We’ve
AMD GPUs to Come from GlobalFoundries and TSMC?
AMD received a substantial coverage at VentureBeat recently, with Dean Takahashi interviewing key executives in succession. First off was an in-depth interview with Lisa Su (CEO and Chairman of AMD), followed by an interview with Raja Koduri, Head (CEO?) of Radeon Technologies Group. RTG is AMD’s spin-off which you can compare with the spin-off of manufacturing division you now know as GlobalFoundries, just without a strong sovereign wealth fund (like Mubadala Development Company)… for now. In order to execute on a huge market opportunity in the form of Virtual Reality, RTG wants to make sure all the basics are covered. For starters, one of more painful episodes from the company
AMD to Launch Polaris Graphics Architecture with a Mainstream Card
Back in early December 2015, AMD invited their preferred media partners to brief them about the new company structure, where Radeon Technology Group (RTG, also known as ATI 2.0) will continue to bring products to market under the AMD banner until the (almost inevitable) spin-off occurs. In a run-up to CES 2016, which takes place in Las Vegas, NV, AMD made a formal announcement introducing the Polaris GPU architecture. In a video bewlo, Raja Koduri (head of RTG) spoke of innovation that was enabled by a logical transition from planar transistors (single-gate, i.e. 2-D) to multi-gate (i.e. 3-D) technology, with a variant of 3-D transistors being called FinFET. If
AMD’s RTG Presents its 2016 Technologies
At the recently held event in Sonoma, California, newly formed AMD spin-off gathered selected press representatives to brief them about the developments the new company is working on. With the Radeon Technologies Group spin-off, the focus should work on pushing away from politics (which lead to a lot ‘spilled digital ink’, like the R9 Nano ‘fair reviews’ affair) into technology and products. Recent hiring of Scott Wasson, founder and editor-and-chief of the Tech Report should help with the technology development and quality control. As we were not invited for the event, we will only bring you a verbatim copy of what came from Mrs. Caitlin, AMD’s Account Executive at Edelman PR Agency.
14nm AMD Greenland tapes out: Attack on NVIDIA Pascal, Intel Xeon Phi
Couple of days ago, GlobalFoundries issued a press release stating that they ‘demonstrated silicon success on the first AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) products using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ most advanced 14nm FinFET process technology.’ “FinFET technology is expected to play a critical foundational role across multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2016. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has worked tirelessly to reach this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ continued progress towards full production readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a broad set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products,” said Mark Papermaster, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Advanced Micro Devices.
AMD should be lead by Lufthansa’s CEO
AMD announced ninth consecutive quarterly loss, this time another massive, 1+ billion USD. Is it time that AMD begins with capable
