Friday, July 18, 2008

Dirk Meyer Becomes New CEO of AMD

Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s second largest maker of x86 central processing units, on Thursday announced that its chief executive officer Hector Ruiz has stepped down from his top executive position and that the board of directors elected president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer to become the next CEO of AMD. Mr. Ruiz will continue to serve as the executive chairman of the board.

Refer to:
AMD News Room
X-Bit Labs

Meyer, 46, is a former AMD star engineering manager who for the past two years was groomed to succeed chief executive Hector Ruiz.

Meyer said he sees a clear, logical path to recovery for AMD. He was hinting that AMD doesn't always need to overwhelm rival Intel Corp. with better performing chips to succeed in the marketplace and make money. Turning out innovative chips with competitive performance in a predictable, timely manner will be good enough much of the time.

Meyer is considered more of a hands-on, get-the-job done type. Co-workers call him tough and blunt, driven and decisive, and with great clarity in his vision for the company.

Meyer, who earned an engineering degree at the University of Illinois, joined AMD in 1995. He led the Athlon processor project that was completed in 1999. He rose to general manager of AMD's computer chip business, helping to guide the development of the company's historic 64-bit Opteron chip, which was introduced in 2003. He was named president and chief operating officer in 2006.

Despite almost two years of losses, Meyer said AMD is on the verge of a rebound. And Meyer says AMD is just months away from a major restructuring that will spin off its manufacturing operations into a separate company, with new ownership.

Without the expensive manufacturing operations, AMD can concentrate on designing, marketing and selling chips that compete effectively against Intel, the largest company in the semiconductor industry, and Nvidia Corp., the foremost maker of graphics chips.

Meyer signaled that AMD will continue to push its legal and public relations challenge against what it describes as Intel's monopolistic behavior. AMD says that Intel has repeatedly put pressure on computer makers not to use AMD products.

There have been signs of progress on that front. Government regulators in Japan, South Korea and Europe have begun investigations into Intel's competitive practices, and Washington regulators have started to follow suit.

Source : http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/07/19/0719dirk.html

European Commission confirms supplementary Statement of Objections sent to Intel

The European Commission can confirm that it has sent a supplementary Statement of Objections (SSO) to Intel on 17th July. Refer to MEMO/08/517

In the SSO, the European Commission accuses Intel of three more elements of abusive conduct in order to monopolize the EU market of central processing units (CPUs):
  • First, Intel has provided substantial rebates to a leading European personal computer (PC) retailer conditional on it selling only Intel-based PCs.
  • Secondly, Intel made payments in order to induce a leading Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to delay the planned launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU.
  • Thirdly, in a subsequent period, Intel has provided substantial rebates to that same OEM conditional on it obtaining all of its laptop CPU requirements from Intel.

The SSO reinforces the Commission’s preliminary view outlined in a Statement of Objections of 26 July 2007 (see MEMO/07/314) that Intel has infringed EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant position (Article 82) with the aim of excluding its main rival, AMD, from the x86 Central Processing Units (CPU) market.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

YouTube Official Channel for F4


Even YouTube wanna have official sites for each of F4 fans:

VIC CHOU OFFICIAL YOUTUBE SITE:
http://hk.youtube.com/vicchou

VANNESS WU OFFICIAL YOUTUBE SITE:
http://hk.youtube.com/vannesswu

KEN CHU OFFICIAL YOUTUBE SITE:
http://hk.youtube.com/kenchu

JERRY YEN OFFICIAL YOUTUBE SITE:
http://hk.youtube.com/jerryyen

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Tea Fight attending HK IFF & Taiwan Film Festival

Vic Zhou's second movie, Tea Fight will be attending Hong Kong's Summer International Film Festival. It will be shown with English Subtitle.

http://www.hkiff.org.hk/en/programme/Tea-Fight.html

Dir: Wang Ye-Ming
Japan/Taiwan; 2008; Colour; 105min
Cast: Vic Zhou, Kagawa Teruyuki, Toda Erika, Ning Chang, Eric Tsang

Synopsis:

The ancient Curse of the Golden Tea can only be dispelled by the Female Golden Tea Leaf, long believe to be extinct. Mikio, daughter of an old tea shop owner in Kyoto has discovered that the her father Yagi actually has the Female Leaf, who ironically blames the death of his wife on the curse. Mikio decides to go to Taiwan to participate in an ancient ritual called Tea Fight, where she would meet an underground tea kingpin Yang. Yagi goes to search for his daughter and comes across Ruhua, a mysterious tea agent. Will the curse be cast again?

Tea Fight also a 2008 Taipei Film Festival Closing Film.

Official website: http://www.tea-fight.com/

Saturday, July 5, 2008

AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e


With the release of the Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition, AMD steps up from the 9850. 100MHz to 2.6GHz from 2.5GHz but also increases the max TDP to 140W. The Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition takes over the $235 pricing the 9850 had, which will be reduced to $207 starting July 7th, a helpful heads up from AMD.

The other new processors being released are the low wattage quad core processors, the Phenom X4 9350e and 9150e which have a max TDP of 65W. Previously 95W was the lowest TDP for Phenoms and it still is for even Intel's lowest clock speed quad core processors giving AMD a 30W advantage here. This could be a blessing for HTPCs, file servers, or other computers that are run 24 hours every day.

Reviews:

FiringSquad
HotHardware
Techware Labs
CRN

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