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In the future, everyone will have their own Jeopardy-style video walls. Or at least that’s the future AMD envisions.

In addition to new notebook chipsets, AMD today introduced Eyefinity, a new technology that allows for up to six displays to be driven off of one video card.

Eyefinity will make its way into upcoming DirectX 11-based ATI Radeon graphics cards, the company has announced. With Eyefinity, you’ll be able to arrange up to six displays per graphics card in any configuration, using either landscape or portrait mode.

How insane can this get, you ask? At a media event aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA, AMD demonstrated 24 monitors hooked up to a single PC, driven by four Eyefinitiy-based cards. The four GPUs–each driving six 24-inch Dell LCD monitors–powered a 3D flight simulator across all 24 screens.

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System builders who received samples a week or two ahead of today’s worldwide launch say they aren’t ready to issue benchmarks just yet. Nevertheless, sources tell ChannelWeb that the processor AMD calls “the first native quad-core” is faster than they had anticipated. They say three key advances are testing out as advertised — a tri-level memory cache hierarchy with fully shared L3 cache for all four cores, a floating point unit with 2×128-bit loads/cycle, and independent power supplies for each of the processor’s four cores and to the memory controller. The last feature distinguishes AMD’s quad-core product from Intel’s, in that it’s possible to idle one, two or three CPU cores for a workload to better manage power consumption.

CMP Channel’s Test Center last week received an engineering sample server equipped with dual Barcelona CPUs. After putting it through its paces, Frank Ohlhorst reports, “Those who have waited for the arrival of AMD’s next generation CPU won’t be disappointed.”

As far as pricing, AMD is remaining tight-lipped about how it plans to scale its new quad-cores against Intel’s or its own dual-core chips. Partners in the know say Barcelona will be “competitively priced.” Market watchers say it will have to be, given Intel’s recent slashing of its own quad-core prices down to levels nearly in line with its Core 2 Duo products.

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The first Barcelona models, formally called Quad-Core Opteron, will run at clock frequencies up to 2GHz and will be available in standard and low-power versions. Faster models, both of the standard and more power-hungry special-edition ilk, will arrive in the fourth quarter, the company said. The first servers using the chips will come in September…

AMD’s Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls “native quad-core,” and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete.

Intel’s second-generation quad-core server processors, “Harpertown” a server member of Intel’s “Penryn” family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.

For decades, typical computer processors had a single processing engine, but dual-core models with two engines began arriving this decade as a way to try to improve performance without consuming inordinate amounts of power and producing corresponding amounts of waste heat. Now chipmakers have moved to quad-core and octo-core models; Sun Microsystems plans to debut its 16-core “Rock” chip in 2008.

Putting multiple cores on a chip isn’t a miracle cure, though. For one thing, it’s hard to adapt software for the chips–especially software for PCs.

For another, a chip with four cores consumes more power than an otherwise comparable model with two, so multicore chips typically run at lower clock frequencies to keep power consumption down. Current dual-core Opteron chips run as fast as 2.8GHz.

A faster clock frequency will let a processor execute a given task more quickly, but multiple cores will let it do more jobs at once.

Also this year, AMD plans to release a quad-core chip for PCs. It and high-end dual-core models will sport a new “Phenom” brand.

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AMD is losing the “X” prefix of its ATI graphics lineup, and slapping on “HD” to denote the changes and advancements in its R600-based DirectX 10 cards. Up top is the Radeon HD 2900 XT (the rumors were close), with 320 stream processors, double that of the GeForce 8800 GTX from NVIDIA. The lower-end RV630- and RV610-based cards will go as the HD 2600 Pro / XT and the HD 2400 Pro / XT. HD on all these cards denotes the Avivo HD technology on board for decoding H.264 and VC-1 video off of Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. The 2900 series also has full HDMI outs, with integrated 5.1 surround sound. No exact launch date or pricing yet, but we shouldn’t have too much longer to wait.

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AMD Improves Price-Performance Ratio of Its Chips

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday officially reduced prices of its desktop microprocessors, making dual-core chips available at less than $100 price-points and reducing the price of its top-of-the-range offerings from $999 to $799. The price-cut may boost interest towards AMD’s microprocessors, but the fierce price war with Intel reduces both chipmakers’ profits.

The furious competition from Intel’s Extreme processor series has forced AMD to start selling two Athlon 64 FX microprocessors for $999, the price-point of one former top-of-the-range offering, and now the firm had to reduce the price-tag on its fastest desktop solution that consists of two AMD Athlon 64 FX-74 chips by 20% to $799. In addition, AMD removed AMD Athlon 64 FX-70 and FX-62 central processing units from its price-list, leaving only two processor bundles – FX-72 and FX-74 – in the family.

AMD’s dual-core Athlon 64 X2 family also faced significant price slashes from 23% to 48%, making the fastest desktop processor from the company – AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ – to cost $241. The least expensive dual-core chips from AMD – Athlon 64 X2 4000+, X2 3800+ and X2 3600+ – now cost $104, $83 and $72 in 1000-unit quantities, making two processing engines from AMD available in value segment. continue reading…

AMD: We Can Ship R600 Today.

Originally set to be released in the fourth quarter of 2006 ATI’s first DirectX 10-compliant graphics product is now more than a quarter late, which allows Nvidia Corp. to enjoy technology leadership. But in addition to technology-related issues, the ATI R600 is facing “political” reasons with its postponement.

Henri Richard, the sales chief at Advanced Micro Devices, said in an interview that his company could have started to ship the long-anticipated code-named ATI R600 graphics processors (and cards) any time, but the world’s second largest maker of x86 microprocessors decided to wait till the more affordable derivative graphics chips get to the point when AMD can release them commercially and then ship the whole lineup of DirectX 10-compatible products.

“The R600 will be out in the second quarter. The reason we decided to delay the launch was that we wanted to have a complete DX10-enabled solutions top-to-bottom. A lot of people wrote that the reason it is delayed is because of a problem with the silicon, but there is no problem with the silicon. We are demonstrating it. We can ship it today. But if you think about it, looking at where the market is at, the volumes are going to be in the RV610 and RV630, so it makes sense for us to do a one time launch of the entire family of DX10 enabled products,” said Henri Richard in an interview with Hardware Zone web-site.

According to Mr. Richard, his partners, who had nothing new to show at CeBIT 2007 and who are not receiving a good portion of publicity because of the lack of high-end hardware that could compete against the GeForce 8800-series, agreed that the launch of the R600, RV610 and RV630 would make more sense. continue reading…

AMD today announced new interoperability testing tools, codenamed “SIMFIRE,” to help speed the adoption of the recently announced Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (“DASH”) specification. Addressing the need to shorten the time between the introduction of a new standard and the availability of interoperable solutions for end users, the new tools from AMD are immediately available to vendors to help accelerate interoperable solutions for DASH ─ web-services based desktop and mobile client management standards announced last week by the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (“DMTF”).

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Sunnyvale semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices will reduce its staff by about 375 people globally, with as many as 50 of the job cuts in Silicon Valley, the company said Thursday.

The cuts are occurring as a result of AMD’s $5.4 billion acquisition last month of Canadian graphics chip maker ATI. The positions represent less than 1 percent of the companies’ combined workforce, which currently numbers about 14,900.

“The AMD-ATI merger is about innovation and growth. As we stated when we announced the deal, some workforce reductions were anticipated,” said AMD spokesman Travis Bullard. “These decisions are difficult to make, but we believe they are necessary for AMD to achieve success.” AMD stock had fallen $0.08 to $21.63 in early trading.

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Half-Life 2: Episode One Performance

At 1920×1200 the X1950 XTX just 4% faster than the X1900 XTX, but some 17% speedier than NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GTX. At 2560×1600, the gap widens to 7% between the X1950 and X1900, while our intrepid newcomer out performs the 7900 GTX by 31%.

With an X1950 CrossFire configuration, we can see a 1.5-1.6x improvement in framerates.

Straight off we see poor performance from the 7950 GX2. It should be able to comfortably beat the single-GPU cards, though probably not the X1950 XTX in CrossFire. However, we see it’s only capable of beating X1950 and X1900 by a fractional margin.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

ATI’s cards prove to be comfortably faster than the GeForce 7900 GTX, in the region of 50% quicker, in fact. There still isn’t much of a difference between the X1900 and X1950, however, X1950 6% quicker at both tested resolutions.

CrossFire shows some impressive performance increases at 1.75-1.8x. At 2560×1600 the greatest benefit can be seen, bringing the framerate up into the realm of the playable.

At 2560×1600, the 7950 GX2 seems appropriately fast, compared to the 7900 GTX. However, it only effectively levels with the single-GPU X1950 XTX and gets trounced by it in CrossFire. At 1920×1200 the situation is worse still for the GX2, it losing out to all of our ATI configurations.

There is also a Quake 4 comparision and details on this new impressive video card. GJ ATI.

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