ATI Radeon branding will be changed to AMD Radeon

The rumors are true! AMD intend to phased out the ATI logo on future branding of graphics processors, which are developed by engineers of ATI Technologies, which AMD acquired back in 2006.

A major motivator is the fact that AMD plans to introduce a range of new products incorporating both AMD microprocessor technology and a Radeon graphics tech on the same chip. The first fruits of the CPU-GPU "Fusion" initiative are slated to arrive soon. "Ontario," which will combine two copies of the low-power "Bobcat" CPU core with Radeon graphics, is slated to ship before the end of the year. The more powerful "Llano" APU, which mates quad Phenom II-class CPU cores with presumably a more capable GPU, is scheduled for the first half of 2011. Obviously, the combination of the firm's CPU and GPU technologies into single-chip products could create some consumer confusion, if folks were to continue to think of AMD and ATI as separate entities—especially if the ensuing marketing messages emphasize the benefits of CPU-GPU integration.

Furthermore, AMD tells us it feels confident in making this change right now because its graphics business is "on good track," having surpassed rival Nvidia in discrete graphics shipments last quarter, according to analyst estimates, and having secured high-profile design wins with the likes of Apple. Also, the chastening of Intel via its settlement with the FTC gave AMD some extra assurance that the expansion of its brand into graphics wouldn't hurt its relationships with major PC makers.

According to AMD's own survey results, consumers savvy enough to know something about discrete graphics cards tend to know the Radeon name, they tend to like AMD, and they don't mind seeing the AMD name on graphics cards once they realize AMD merged with ATI. The folks at AMD read those results as "permission" to jettison the ATI brand name.


The plan is to replace "ATI Radeon" and "ATI FirePro" with "Radeon" and "FirePro", along with a sprinkling of AMD corporate identity. The badges you see above will be used for systems with discrete Radeon and FirePro graphics cards. The lower row omits the AMD logo, so PC makers shipping Intel-based systems will be able to avoid the oil-and-water combo of Intel and AMD branding, if they wish.

However, end-users are likely to miss the ATI logotype since in general people associate the brand with high quality, performance, experience and so on. Besides, 25-years old trademarks like ATI are generally recognizable.

Some analysts said the re-branding of ATI Radeon into plain Radeon may become the worst branding decision ever made by AMD due to the fact that ATI has a larger scope on the market of discrete graphics chips than AMD does on the market of CPUs.

Official statement from John Volkmann : Evolving the AMD Brand Portfolio

AMD Reveals Peculiarities of Bobcat Design

Bobcat micro-architecture will power AMD's next-generation central processing units (CPUs) for netbooks and other innovative form-factors that require very low power chips. The Bobcat seems to be by far more progressive than Intel Atom, but it will consume more power and its performance is likely to be considerably better.

When AMD started to design Bobcat back in 2005 - 2006, it already knew that its K7/K8/K9 chips were too power hungry for mobile computers, whereas the preceding generations were too inefficient in modern workloads. As a result, the company decided to design the chip from scratch rather than to "borrow" designs from previous-generation products. However, AMD decided not to sacrifice performance in order to absolutely minimize power consumption. As a result, Bobcat seems to be almost completely contemporary chips with numerous design trade-offs to reduce power consumption. According to AMD, the micro-architecture minimizes data movement and unnecessary reads from cache or memory.


The Bobcat core sports out-of-order execution, advanced branch predictor, dual x86 instruction decoder, 64-bit integer unit with two ALUs, floating point unit with two 64-bit pipes, 32KB instruction cache, 32KB data cache, 512KB L2 cache (working at half speed to trim power consumption) and so on. Bobcat fully supports modern SIMD extensions like SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4A, but no 3DNow, AVX and so on. AMD Bobcat features an extensive set of means to reduce power consumption, including such capabilities as fine grain clock gating, integrated core power gating and so on.

The first implementation of Bobcat will be Ontario chip that features one or two x86 processing cores as well as DirectX 11 graphics processing unit from ATI. The chip will be made using 40nm process technology at TSMC and will be released commercially in Q1 2011.

First Details about Bulldozer

Advanced Micro Devices revealed numerous details about the Bulldozer micro-architecture, which will power the company's next-generation central processing units (CPUs) for desktops, servers and workstations. Apparently, the main goal of AMD's designers when it came to Bulldozer was to ensure maximum sharing of resources within multi-core microprocessors to get high performance amid moderate low power and die sizes.

Traditional approach to creation of multi-core microprocessor is very straightforward: each core acts independently and shares only the most obvious resources with other: L3 cache, memory controller, processor bus, etc. In Bulldozer designs, cores will be able to dynamically share fetch and decode blocks, caches and other units. At least in initial designs, multi-core chips will consist of several major blocks, each of which will have two independent integer cores (that will share fetch, decode and L2 functionality) with dedicated schedulers and two 128-bit FMAC pipes with one FP scheduler. This means that each major block (Bulldozer Module) is, according to AMD, essentially a tightly-linked dual-core microprocessor with shared fetch, decode and floating point units.


Such "dual-core" major block will not be as efficient as two traditional cores, but will consume less power and will use less die space, which in effect means that more of major building blocks can be installed without increasing thermal design power or die size to unacceptable levels. Moreover, AMD reasonably claims that the approach is more efficient than simultaneous multi-threading or chip-level multi-threading. In fact, according to AMD, each major block can provide 80% performance of a dual-core microprocessor.

AMD also implied that Bulldozer will feature a new predication-directed instruction preset mechanism to overlap instruction miss requests to cache or memory and thus improve efficiency of execution. In particular, this will help AMD to maximize utilization of the "dual-core" major blocks of Bulldozer microprocessors.

Given the fact that AMD's Bulldozer architecture seems to be very modular, we can expect AMD to tailor designs in accordance with performance and/or power requirements.


The first Bulldozer processors will be made using 32nm SOI fabrication process in 2011 and that with 33% increase of the number of cores, up to 50% of additional performance may be received in server applications, at least, based on AMD's internal simulations.

More info : TechReport - AMD's Bulldozer architecture revealed

AMD reduces CPU prices to keep market share

AMD recently reduced prices for about 20 of its desktop processors. According to sources from motherboard players, the price cuts are aimed at defending against competition from Intel.

AMD's quad-core Athlon II X4 640 CPU has seen its price drop from US$122 to US$99, while the dual-core Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition CPU dropped from US$105 to US$93, and the quad-core Phenom II X4 955 and 965 Black Edition both dropped US$26. Most of the company's other processors have seen drops up to US$10.

The above prices only apply to "direct" AMD customers buying CPUs in trays of 1000, but the savings should start trickling down to street prices. So stay tuned!

Upcoming AMD CPU & GPU Update

New Phenom II and Athlon II are scheduled for launching on September 21. Leading the new batch will be the Phenom II X6 1075T. With a $230-240 price tag and a 3GHz clock speed (or 3.5GHz with Turbo Core), that part should bridge the gap between the $199 1055T and the $295 1090T.

At the same time, the 3.5GHz Phenom II X4 970 should become AMD's new quad-core flagship. There will be two types of AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE CPUs: boxed versions aimed at retail market will be based on the well known code-named Deneb design that has four cores in total; tray flavours of the chips designed for system integrators and OEMs will be based on Zosma design, which is basically six-core Thuban chip with two disabled cores that can be unlocked on certain mainboards.

Also coming : a couple of CPUs priced at around $100: the Phenom II X2 560 and Athlon II X4 645. The new parts will indeed be 100MHz quicker than the existing Phenom II X2 555 and Athlon II X4 640, or 3.3GHz and 3.1GHz.

Meanwhile, AMD is preparing to introduce the Radeon HD 6000-series (Southern Islands) formally in October with retail availability to follow in November. DigiTimes claims that changes in foundry firm TSMC's roadmap led AMD to scrap plans for 32-nm GPUs (code-named Northern Islands) and build Southern Islands products using the same 40-nm process as today's Evergreen chips. Build on the same 40nm, savvy pricing and architectural improvements should be the only weapons at the new Radeons' disposal.

DigiTimes adds that AMD will cut prices across the Radeon HD 5000 series "in the near future".

KaraokeSys 1.1 Released

KaraokeSys is a Karaoke Management Software that simply needs a Windows based computer with dual monitor (or a projector) and sound enabled. No need to worry about damaged VCD discs anymore. Your favorite MPEG videos were stored on your PC and easily launched via this multifunction software.

Highlighted features:

1. Multiple monitor support to view live video at secondary screen while still doing anything else in the primary screen (including searching and selecting songs)
2. Manage songs (add, edit, delete, and multiple edits of song properties)
3. Drag & drop files to upload songs
4. Search anything (any displayable text within title, artist, genre, and even tag)
5. Manage playlist (add and delete songs for future use)
6. Play, pause, stop, next song, previous song (this is very obvious)
7. Switch to left, right, or stereo audio channel for vocal + music or music only
8. Pitch control (transpose –12 to +12) [NEW]
9. Tempo control [NEW]
10. Volume control
11. Preview song in mute volume

Screenshots:

Apple’s New iMac & Mac Pro Powered by ATI Radeon

Apple has selected the world renowned ATI Radeon™ graphics solutions for the new line of Apple® iMac® and Mac Pro® tower. Now featured in Apple Stores as well as online retail, ATI Radeon graphics offer outstanding power and performance as the standard configuration for the new iMac and Mac Pro tower which will hit store shelves soon.

“Apple buyers demand the best, and AMD’s award-winning ATI Radeon graphics enable exceptional visual experiences for iMac users,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice- president and general manager, GPU division, AMD. “AMD has conducted extensive testing and research to create superior graphics products for the iMac. This research is designed to dramatically enhance the Mac-user experience so that Apple users can enjoy responsive performance and play the newest games.”

The high-performance ATI Radeon™ HD 5770 graphics card features 1GB of GDDR5 memory from AMD and enables blistering fast Mac Pro graphics technology. Ideal for motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering, or animation, the card comes standard; for more demanding tasks purchasers can upgrade to ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 graphics.

ATI Radeon™ HD 5750 graphics are available in the new 27” iMac. The ATI Radeon™ HD 5650 graphics are available in the new 22” and 27” iMac.  Last but not least, ATI Radeon™ HD 4670 graphics are available in the new 22” iMac .