AMD Launches the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770

AMD today launched the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 graphics processor, a groundbreaking product that harnesses the state-of-the-art 40 nanometer manufacturing process for the desktop PC market, delivering best-in-class performance and energy efficiency at anticipated launch prices as low as $99.

“Consumer pressure in this economic downturn is shifting demand to lower prices and the price band around $100 has the highest demand and highest volume,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “AMD has responded with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4770, targeting this market with cutting-edge technologies like 40 nm processors, support for DirectX 10.1 gaming and GDDR5 memory."

The card performs better than Geforce 9800GT and it's slightly slower than the Radeon HD 4850, but at the same time, it runs cooler than the HD 4850. It is a dual slot graphics card and it has an external power connector, but the best attribute will definitely be the performance you get for the price.

Reviews:
AMDZone
X-Bit Labs

Supporting Resources:
· Video: ATI Radeon HD 4770 product features
· Video: What gamers are saying about the ATI Radeon HD 4770

AMD releases new Phenom II X4 945 and 955 BE

AMD will now refresh the lineup with two new processors: the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and Phenom II X4 945. Both processors are modestly priced, with the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition at $245, and the Phenom II X4 945 at $225.

The 955 Black Edition and the 945 are clocked at 3.2GHz and 3.0GHz, respectively. Black Edition processors have unlocked multipliers to make overclocking easier for PC enthusiasts. The processors differ only in clock speed, and have identical specifications otherwise. The Phenom II X4 processors will come with 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor), 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor), and will also have a shared 6MB L3 cache.

The two new processors are based on AMD's AM3 socket but will also work in most AM2+ motherboards. Because they support both sockets, the processors also support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, respectively found in AM2+ and AM3 socket based motherboards. Using DDR2 the processors will have 17.1GB/s of memory bandwidth, and using DDR3 the bandwidth jumps up to 21.1GB/s. Older Phenom II X4 processors, like the 940 Black Edition and the 920, use AMD's AM2+ socket.

The Web site Ripping.org notes that hobbyists with early access to the X4 955 BE chip have been able to clock it at up to 6.7 GHz.

Below are the reviews we found on web:
AMDZone
PC Perspective
Firing Squad
Tech Report
AnandTech

ATI Radeon HD 4890

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 graphics card, driven by the world’s most powerful graphics processor . The newest addition to the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series boasts a whopping 1.36 TeraFLOPs of compute power, superior GDDR5 memory, and super-high engine clock speeds capable of nearly 1GHz. The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers the best game experience in its class, including the latest ground-breaking DirectX® 10.1 titles. In addition, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4890, AMD continues to enhance its “Dragon” desktop platform technology, designed to provide exceptional value to OEMs, channel partners, and do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers.



The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card continues AMD’s proud tradition of technology leadership with support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games, including Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.™, Electronic Art’s BattleForge™ and SEGA’s Stormrise™ released last month, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear
Sky. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies offering a variety of custom board and cooling solutions. Partners include ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology, VisionTek and XFX. It is available immediately for $249 MSRP (USD), and priced at select etailers as low as $229 (USD) after mail-in rebate.

For more information, visit www.amd.com/radeon4890/presskit

Check out the supporting videos for the new ATI Radeon HD 4890:
DirectX 10.1: What the Experts Say
Experience The DirectX 10.1 Difference
Dr. Jon Peddie’s Thoughts On The Future of Discrete Graphics and the Video Game Market
The Making of an ATI Graphics Card

My baby Vic has been born

Dear all, just FYI and to share our happiness, wanna inform you that my firstborn son, ‘Vic Marcell Wu’ has been born on March 19, 2009 at 8:35 AM. Weight 2.8 kg and length 49 cm.

Here are some of his early photos :-)

First Day :


Day 2 :


Day 3 :


Also check out my Photo Album on Friendster specially dedicated to my little boy.

Intel and AMD in licensing dispute

Intel has formally accused AMD of breaching the two companies' 2001 cross-licensing agreement.

Here's why Intel thinks AMD is breaching the agreement:

Intel believes that Global Foundries is not a subsidiary under terms of the agreement and is therefore not licensed under the 2001 patent cross-license agreement. Intel also said the structure of the deal between AMD and ATIC breaches a confidential portion of that agreement. Intel has asked AMD to make the relevant portion of the agreement public, but so far AMD has declined to do so.

AMD responded with the following statement:

Intel's action is an attempt to distract the world from the global antitrust scrutiny it faces. Should this matter proceed to litigation, we will prove not only that Intel is wrong, but also that Intel fabricated this claim to interfere with our commercial relationships and thus has violated the cross-license.

Our Asset Smart transaction and the creation of a game-changing company, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, pose a threat to Intel’s business model and illegal dominance in the x86 market, as does our mix of intellectual property and our technology roadmap. And as the spotlight is cast ever more harshly on Intel’s anticompetitive practices by regulators around the globe, Intel is attempting to do whatever it can to limit competition, stifle customer choice and constrain AMD’s market share.

According to AMD's form 8-K filing, Intel isn't kidding about taking away AMD's license—it "purports to terminate [AMD]'s rights and licenses under the Cross License in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected."

Some background: The Patent Cross License Agreement benefits both companies by granting each company license to the others’ patents. This is not a technology license. To put it simply, the pace of innovation is fast and furious in our market, and the agreement’s purpose is to ensure that each company can innovate freely in its product designs, without threat of patent infringement litigation over our respective innovations. To be clear, Intel leverages innovative AMD patents critical for its product designs under the cross license. This includes AMD patents related to 64-bit architecture extensions, integrated memory controller, multi-core architecture, etc. The cross-license is very much a two-way street.

Intel currently uses AMD's x86-64 technology in all shipping Pentium and Core processors, while AMD, naturally, uses Intel's x86 tech in all of its PC processors.

AMD Launches World’s First 40nm Graphics Processors

AMD today announced the world’s first graphics processors to harness 40nm process technology: the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830. These feature-rich graphics processors redefine mobile PC entertainment with advanced capabilities including support for the latest Microsoft DirectX® 10.1 games, a home theater-quality HD multimedia experience, and energy-efficient features for long battery life at work, at home or at play.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 graphics will be featured in the forthcoming Asus K notebook.

The new 40nm production process allows notebook manufacturers to deliver more graphics horsepower in a smaller ASIC die size, giving people access to highly capable discrete graphics ideal for smaller notebooks. This milestone marks the fifth consecutive first-to-market process transition for ATI graphics processors.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 graphics processors feature powerful 3D engines derived from the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4800 desktop series architecture with support for DirectX 10.1. Take crisp, detail-rich images and outstanding visual effects wherever you go for unparalleled levels of 3D gaming realism. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 supports GDDR5 memory technology contributing to stunning improvements in game play and performance with nearly twice the memory bandwidth of GDDR3.

AMD Demonstrates 6-Core Istanbul

Tech Report looked at a demo of the 6-core Istanbul Opteron.

AMD showed several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.



The second demo was conducted on a dual-socket system with 12 cores. The main OS was Windows Server 2008, but the system also hosted three separate virtual machines: one each for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SLES 11 x64. Each VM had four cores dedicated to it.

The third demo was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because it was intended to show how Istanbul can serve as a drop-in upgrade for Socket F systems. The only requirements: the system must support split power planes, and it must have a BIOS upgrade to operate with the new processors. Second, the demo was impressive because it included a performance test. Two otherwise-identical systems were situated side by side: one with a quartet of Shanghai Opterons, the other with four Istanbul chips. Both systems were running with HyperTransport 3 active—a capability coming soon to Shanghai Opterons but not yet available in current products. To illustrate the performance difference between the two boxes, the AMD tech ran a Stream benchmark. The 16-core Shanghai system produced throughput numbers in the range of 25,000 MB/s. The 24-core Istanbul box, by contrast, hit about 42,000 MB/s.

Shanghai:

Istanbul:


Scheduled to launch in the second half of this year, “Istanbul” is expected to be the only x86 six-core processor available for two and four-socket systems and higher.

This video indicates the consistency of AMD's architecture and upgrade from the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors to Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors (Istanbul):



The second video shows Istanbul running on a 2P virtualization platform, highlighting Istanbul's virtualization capabilities:



Thanks to a reader who informed me about those videos :-)

AMD Desktop Roadmap Update Feb 2009

Here we provide the latest AMD Desktop Roadmap:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F1N312SR

or

http://www.mediafire.com/?ghwrumzyjt5

Additions:
Added Phenom™ II 500 series “Callisto” processors to launch in Q209:
AMD Phenom II X2 550 3.1GHz, 7MB Total Cache
AMD Phenom II X2 545 3.0GHz, 7MB Total Cache

Changes:
Changed AMD Phenom II X4 950 3.1GHz to AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2GHz.

Phenom II X3 & X4 Socket AM3

AMD extended the value and lifespan of its Dragon platform technology today with five new additions to its AMD Phenom™ II processor family, including the industry’s only 45nm triple-core processors and three new AMD Phenom II quad-core processors. These AMD Phenom II processors deliver choice and lay the foundation for memory transition; they fit in either AM2+ or AM3 sockets and support DDR2 or next generation DDR3 memory technology.

The new triple-core (Heka) and quad-core (Deneb) AMD Phenom II processors are available immediately at the following frequencies:
AMD Phenom™ II X4 910 - (2.6GHz)
AMD Phenom™ II X4 810 - (2.6GHz)
AMD Phenom™ II X4 805 - (2.5GHz)
AMD Phenom™ II X3 720 Black Edition - (2.8GHz)
AMD Phenom™ II X3 710 - (2.6GHz)

The triple-core AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition processor is competitively priced at $145 while the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor is priced at $165; the AMD processor allows users to get more cores for less money. The quad-core AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor (2.6GHz) is priced at $175 compared to the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor (2.33GHz) at $170. Phenom II X3 710 at $125, all in one thousand units and the X4 910 and 805 available for tray only.

When AMD started moving over to a new processor socket form-factor, they also decided to give their solutions more competitive TDP. All new processors launching today have 95W TDP instead of 125W TDP as the top Phenom II models.

Today’s addition to the Phenom II model lineup finally explains the whole idea behind AMD’s processor ratings. The rating series stand for the major CPU specifications. And if we add here everything we know about the upcoming 45nm processors, we will get a very logical succession:
900 series: quad-core processors with 6MB L3 cache
800 series: quad-core processors with 4MB L3 cache
700 series: triple-core processors with 6MB L3 cache
600 series: quad-core processors without L3 cache
400 series: triple-core processors without L3 cache
200 series: dual-core processors

DDR3/AM3 boards are almost done, the hard part of the transition is the memory controller, and that is already done in the CPU. We are being told that the BIOSes, however, still need quite a bit of testing before they are ready for public consumption. The DDR3 boards are a few weeks out, and shouldn't be all that expensive when they hit the market.

Web reviews:
AMDZone
Guru3D
The Inquirer
AnandTech
Tom's Hardware
Legit Reviews
Firing Squad
X-Bit Labs
Tech Report

Phenom II X4 940 BE @ 6.5GHz on Liquid Helium

From Las Vegas XS OC Event, below is a link to the video of the world record setting overclock of 6.5GHz for Phenom II 940 BE using liquid helium. They also set the world record for 3DMark performance at the same event.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB0JodKgZ0A

This 7-minutes Dragon Platform/AMD Phenom™ II video on YouTube, has received over 250,000 hits since it was posted a week ago, on January 22, 2009.

More pictures here at XtremeSystems Forum.