Chip maker AMD this morning announced that it has recruited Rajan Naik to become part of its management team.

Formerly a senior engineer at the company’s main rival, Intel, Naik was most recently a partner in McKinsey & Company‘s Technology practice, where he worked for the past 11 years.

Naik, 40, will become senior vice president and chief strategy officer of AMD, where he will be responsible for helping out with strategy development, partnerships, M&A and investment decisions. He’ll report directly to AMD president and CEO Rory Read.

Naik has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in engineering from MIT.

His hiring follows that of AMD’s appointment of Mark Papermaster as senior vice president and CTO.

The Intel-AMD war has been going on a long time, and I hope it will be going on longer. The last few years have been hard on the underdog, however, with huge growth by Intel in both the low-power and high-performance sectors. The Core 2 Duos excelled, as did the Core i* series, and its most recent consumer series, the Sandy Bridge update to the i*s, is a monster. AMD has consistently lagged behind, though from the other side of the table you might say they’ve been nipping at Intel’s heels quite effectively for years.

Bulldozer was supposed to be the platform that finally brought them up to speed, but it’s been delayed for a long time, and now it’s launching to less than stellar reviews.

I’ve skimmed through Anand’s thorough-as-usual review, and the conclusion is that it’s just not competitive. HardOCP, PC Perspective, Tom’s Hardware, and Neoseeker agree. Whether it’s synthetic or real-world testing, AMD’s best FX processors don’t stand up to the middle of Intel’s line, or even to their own processors from last year.

Is it a disaster? Not exactly: I’m guessing at some point along the line, someone at AMD said “look, we have to release something sometime. Our customers aren’t going to wait forever.” And despite the fact that they have many improvements waiting in the wings (according to a roadmap AMD shared, presumably as a sort of covert apology), they went to market with the processors they had.

Unfortunately, despite the new architecture and insane transistor count (the 8-core 8150 has around 2 billion), performance and efficiency per core just plain isn’t that good. There are a few tests on which Bulldozer takes on Sandy Bridge well, such as those truly optimized for high core counts, but on single-core tasks it gets destroyed.

There’s hope: this is just the first iteration of the new architecture, and it’s likely we’ll see both a new line and a serious performance boost when Windows 8 hits. In the meantime, while the Bulldozer processors provide decent performance for a good price, no one seems to have found a good reason to buy one other than that they’re not Intel.

If you do decide to buy, get the 8120. It’s the same silicon as the 8150, apparently, but the better-testing samples are getting 8150 branding and a higher stock clock speed. If you don’t mind a doing the overclocking yourself, you can save $50 by going with the 8120 and giving it a little boost.

It’s amazing what people can do with one of AMD’s new eight-core FX processors, a specially built chassis, and a few tanks of liquid helium. In a pre-release stunt, AMD rounded up a small group of expert overclockers to take the new processor to world record speeds and beyond.

Don’t expect to do the same at home when the FX chips ship in late Q4 2011: overclockers Brian Mchlachlan and Sami Maekinen had the pick of the processor litter, and PCWorld reports that they looked specifically for chips that performed well at higher voltage levels. They took things slowly at first, with the FX eventually bumping up against the 8.0 GHz barrier thanks to a little liquid nitrogen.

It took the application of some liquid helium to really kick things into high gear, as the super-low temperatures allowed the FX to hit 8.429 GHz, besting the old record of 8.308 GHz. How well the system would actually perform under those conditions was left unexplored — this was all about hitting the highest clock speed, so the stress testing and benchmarking that comes with actually using an overclocked CPU was left by the wayside.

AMD was formally presented the Guinness World Record for Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor at their Fusion Zone event in San Francisco today. The timing and location seems to be yet another jab at their eternal rival though, as Intel also chose today to kick off their SF Developer Forum.

Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has named Rory P. Read its new president, CEO and board member, effective today. Read joins AMD from PC maker Lenovo, where he worked for five years and most recently served as president and COO.

Thomas Seifert, who served as AMD’s interim CEO since January 2011, will return to his role as SVP, Chief Financial Officer.

Seifert replaced Dirk Meyer, who led the team that designed and developed the Athlon processor and went on to become CEO at AMD until he was ousted in January 2011, following a dispute with the board about AMD’s direction.

The search for a new CEO took AMD, which rivals Intel, took over half a year but has now finally come to an end with the appointment of Read.

At Lenovo, Rory P. Read worked his way up to the role of president and COO in 2009, and helped turn Lenovo into the world’s fastest growing major PC manufacturer. Prior to Lenovo, Read spent 23 years at IBM, where he held a range of management positions.

According to Lenovo’s website, Read was “responsible for driving growth, execution, profitability and performance across a global $16 billion enterprise encompasing (sic) 160+ countries”.

AMD has not brought to market microprocessors designed for modern-day smartphones and few for tablet computers, focusing instead on desktop PCs, laptop, server, game console and graphics chips. We’re curious to see where AMD will be heading under its new leadership.

AMD will host a conference call today at 9:15 AM PST regarding the hire.

AMD shares are up almost 5% on the news in early trading.

Through its Fusion Fund program, chip maker AMD has injected an undisclosed amount of capital into ViVu, a startup that specializes in desktop videoconferencing solutions.

AMD sometimes makes strategic investments in companies that make use of its Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) products. ViVu is said to be working on a new generation of enterprise-class video conferencing applications that leverage AMD Fusion APUs.

Among other projects, AMD and ViVu are collaborating on the latter’s VuRoom videoconferencing solution and a prototype wireless display technology, which will enable real-time streaming of 1080p HD videos wirelessly from an AMD-powered notebook PC to one or more network-connected display devices, such as flat panel TVs, tablets or notebooks without requiring any additional hardware.

ViVu has previously raised funding; it completed a $3 million Series A round back in October 2009, from investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Quest Venture Partners.

AMD will add USB 3.0 to its AMD Fusion line of APUs. Huzzah! That makes AMD the first chipmaker to support the interface (though it’s been available in higher end motherboards from the likes of Asus and Gigabyte for about a year now). Yes, yes, Intel invented the spec, but its newfangled Thunderbolt interface seems to be getting all the love. Why would you bother with USB 3.0, then?

For one, it’s backward compatible with previous USB specs. What happens when you plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port? It works—handy. What happens when you plug a USB 2.0 device into a Thunderbolt port? Nothing—not as handy, no.

USB 3.0 tops out at 5Gbps (versus USB 2.0′s 480Mbps), so it’s mighty fast. Connect a hard drive there and you’re good to go.

AMD will brand USB 3.0′d APUs as “Superspeed USB” chipsets. The first APUs to be christened thus will be the A75 and A70M.

Exciting times, yes.

Tick tock, tick tock. What are we waiting for? No, not for Fernando Torres to finally score for Chelsea (although we are, in fact, waiting for that to happen), but for AMD to release its latest GPU, the Radeon HD 7000. Digi Times, which is about as solid as source as you can get, says mass production will begin in May. That should put retail availability at July 2011 at the earliest.

The bad news is that there’s very little info out there about what to expect from the 7000 series, code named Southern Islands. One report says that they’ll derive from the same 28nm core as the 6950 and 6970.

As with all Radeon cards, the hardware is really quite nifty (and, at least with the current generation), but there’s always something wrong with the drivers. 99 percent GPU use on the desktop? What is that about?

It’s officially the end of an era. AMD has confirmed what has been rumored for a few months now, that it plans to drop the ATI brand name. AMD says it’s doing so because consumers are more familiar with AMD, so it makes no sense to try to keep pushing the ATI brand. Pour one out for ATI when you have a moment.

AMD told Thinq that, in its surveys of consumers, they found that brand awareness of the AMD name was far and away more thorough than brand awareness of ATI. Adios, ATI.

You could see the changeover for months now. The company’s Catalyst drivers for its Radeon series of graphics cards switched over to AMD branding a few months ago, and if you were to buy a Radeon 6000 series graphics card you’d see AMD and not ATI on the box.

Nothing beyond the name changes, so you can expect the same sort of experience as you had before: pretty decent hardware often held back by relatively lackluster drivers. Sticky top right hand corner glitch, anyone?

Check out the video here. I’d probably get sick playing Dirt like that.

“Existing standards offer remarkable connectivity and together far exceed the 10Gb/s peak bandwidth of Thunderbolt. These solutions meet and exceed the bandwidth utilization of many peripherals,” a spokesperson for AMD said.

AMD believes that consumers would rather stick to USB and not deal with daisy chaining devices with monitors. They also claim that Mini Display ports already offer great speeds. ”The DisplayPort1.2 standard offers up to 17Gb/s of peak bandwidth for displays. [...] Many AMD-based platforms support USB 3.0 which offers 4.8Gb/s of peak bandwidth, AMD natively supports SATA 6Gb/s with our 8-series chipsets. [Meanwhile], the total bandwidth stated for a Thunderbolt channel is only 20% higher than one PCI Express 3.0 lane and about 52% higher than a single USB 3.0 port,” claimed the official for AMD.

It seems AMD is a bit worried, especially when they claim Thunderbolt is only “52% faster than USB 3.0.”

Does AMD have to worry, or will Thunderbolt be a dud?

Adobe released version 10.2 of its Flash Player yesterday, but this bit of news may have flown under the radar. It seems that Adobe worked with AMD in order to bring hardware acceleration to Flash video—provided you’re using recent AMD hardware, of course. What could be better than hardware accelerated YouTube videos?

AMD hardware going back to its 4000 series (desktop and mobile) will be able to accelerate Flash Player 10.2.

You’d probably expect something as powerful as the 5000 or 6000 series to be able to accelerate Flash, but the fact that AMD’s “lesser” hardware, including its APUs, can now accelerate Flash, yeah, sorta neat.

Having said all that, I’d still like to know why playing Flash video on my old MacBook causes my CPU to spike way up to 100 percent use. It makes playing Flash slightly inconvenient.

Flickr’d

Are graphics cards (and processors) now going green? AMD is certainly trying, having noted that its E-350 APU “demonstrated a significant reduction in the overall product ‘carbon footprint’” compared to previous AMD Anthlon processors and Mobility Radeon graphics cards. We’re talking a 40 percent reduction in carbon emission over the life of the APU. This is the part where the smart-aleck know-it-all calls into our radio show and demands that all the egghead scientists complaining about global warming should come and plow his driveway. There’s a difference between weather and climate, sir. Calm down.

AMD says that the reduction in carbon emission is primarily due to lower energy consumption when in use. (AMD also made a few changes to its manufacturing process that helped lower carbon emissions in the actual production of the APU, which is also neat.)

The lower carbon footprint can also be attributed to the fact that a single APU does the job of both a CPU and GPU.

In other AMD news, did you guys see the leaked photos of the 6990, the next-gen dual GPU card? While it’s great that AMD is committed to dual GPU cards, perhaps 2011 should be the year when AMD also commits itself to changing people’s perceptions about its driver releases? No one’s asking for 15 percent performance increases every month, but a bit of stability, perhaps some extra love and care paid to CrossFire? Something along those lines.

Let 2011 be the year of rock solid driver releases. That would be swell.

Did Santa give you an AMD Radeon HD 6950 this year? Good news: he actually gave you a 6970! It turns out that with a few clicks of your mouse you can unlock your 6950 so that it runs at 6970 speeds. Nice!

This “mod” (I guess you can call it a mod, but you’re merely re-flashing the card’s BIOS) seems to work on all 6950 models out there. That is, cards from AMD itself, from Asus, from Sapphire, from XFX, etc. You don’t need to go out of your way to find an esoteric brand—they all work!

So how does this work, hmm?

Again, it’s just a simple BIOS re-flash, and techPowerUp has put together a few scripts to make the process even easier than it already is.

The Radeon HD 6970, which is currently AMD’s top-of-the-line single-GPU card (the dual-GPU 5970 is faster), can currently be had on Newegg for right around $360-$370. That’s already an insane deal when you consider how much power you’re buying, but the 6950 is currently around $300.

In other words, you can have the power of a $370 card for the price of a $300 card.

Just for comparison’s sake, Nvidia’s top-of-the-line single-GPU card, the GTX 580, is currently around $530 on Newegg. Considering the 6970 (or, apparently, a properly unlocked 6950!) is just as powerful, if not slightly more powerful, well, there’s never been a better day to build a gaming PC.

Now if AMD would just pump out proper drivers every once in a while everything would be super!

AMD has released the latest version (10.12) of its Catalyst Control Center driver suite, and there’s something missing: ATI branding! You’ll recall that AMD had decided to phase out the ATI brand name on its Radeon graphics cards (AMD bought ATI several years ago), with the thinking that “Radeon” means more to consumers than “ATI.” Starting with this driver suite, ATI is nowhere to be found.

Version 10.12 of the Catalyst Control Center (actually called Catalyst Control Center 2) looks awfully like Nvidia’s driver software, which is good news. I don’t think too many people really enjoyed the byzantine layout of previous CCC releases. It worked, but it certainly wasn’t user-friendly.

AMD says CCC2 “enables a simplified user experience to help users get the most out of their AMD product.” As long as I can disable Crossfire with the tick of a box I’m happy. Good Old Games don’t tend to work well in dual GPU mode.

The release notes of the new release can be found here.

Do we mourn the loss of the ATI brand name? I’m not sure what the official community reaction is here.

The early reviews have the 6870 ($239) and 6850 ($179) giving the 460 the business, and providing quite a lot of power at both those price points. Once the 6850 drops below $150, it’ll be a popular card for dual-GPU setups, just as its predecessor the 5850 was.

Check out the detailed reviews at Guru3D, HardOCP, and PC Perspective. They all seem to say that the 6850 is a huge bargain, though it’s far from a blowout; the GeForce 460 has had its price lowered a bit and still provides a lot of punch. But if I had two bills, I’d probably go with the 6850 right now.

I’m reasonably certain the first reviews of the new AMD Radeons will hit the Net on Friday, so until then we’ll have to make due with leaked slides and the like. It’s both an exciting and depressing time: excited to see what AMD has in store, but depressed to know that my once high flying 5970 is now old news.

From the looks of it, the current 5830 and 5850 will be replaced by the 6800 series, while the higher end 5870 and 5970 will be replaced by the 6900 series.

AMD compares the Radeon 6870 to the Nvidia GTC 460, to give you an idea of how the red team views the green team.

One slide is frightening: look how many generations behind the Xbox 360 is. At a certain point you have to ask yourself what’s the point of these incredibly powerful GPUs if so many of the games appearing on PC are Xbox 360 ports?

AMD mentioned in its earnings call that its next-generation graphics cards will be released next week. Details are non-existent, so don’t even bother asking. I do know that the codename of the architecture is “Northern Islands.”

I will also assume that these will be the first cards to drop the ATI branding, going full-on AMD.

So we’ll be looking at, I’d guess, the AMD Radeon 6XXX.

Again, there’s no details quite yet, as this was merely mentioned by CEO Dirk Meyer during the earnings call.

“We will be launching our second-generation DX11 graphics offerings next week,” said Meyer, before adding that the launch will be accompanied by “launch activities.” Hmm?

More as it pops up, of course.

ATI, we hardly knew ye. Word on the street is that AMD, which bought ATI for a cool $5.4 billion some four years ago, will phase out the ATI name later this year. Apparently AMD’s research indicates that people prefer the AMD name to the ATI name, but that, above that, the name that really sells is Radeon. Goodbye ATI Radeon Pro, hello AMD Radeon Pro.

Is this a big deal? Eh, kinda. I honestly could give a toss what AMD calls the GPUs so long as they perform admirably. (And I’m writing this post on a PC with a Radeon Pro 5970 on board that I shelled out quite a bit of money for!) I guess it’s more of a nostalgia thing. “Oh man, they’re phasing out the ATI name? Bummer.”

Perhaps AMD will use this as an opportunity to create drivers that don’t cause the community to meltdown!

Now, why is this happening? AMD’s research shows that, well, the ATI name doesn’t mean a whole bunch these days. Side-by-side, people have more confidence in AMD GPUs when referred to as “AMD” rather than “ATI.”

I’d like to meet the person who’s willing to buy an AMD Radeon but not an ATI Radeon. But apparently these people exist.

AMD has also found that the, truth be told, it’s really the Radeon brand name that means anything, particularly when compared to the name Nvidia.

Wall of text to explain this: beginning with the next batch of GPUs, which should be released later this year, you’ll be looking at benchmarks of the AMD Radeon XXXX and not the ATI Radeon.

Perhaps a sad day for all the ATI fans in the crowd, but at the end of the day, so long as the cards work well AMD could call them the Super-Duper AMD Graphics Processing Unit for all I care.

As the video card wars continue, the as of yet unreleased AMD Radeon HD 6870 looks to be a serious weapon. How do we know? Well, the Chinese website PCinLife.com managed to get a benchmark showing some very interesting information about the new card. A 3DMark score of 11,500 is about 2,500 more then the previous high end card, the Nvidia GTX 480 and the HD 5870. This reflects what appears to be a serious performance increase, placing the advantage in AMDs corner once again.

[via PC Perspective]

From the good folks at AMD comes this, a video explaining the wonders and joys of moving all of our computing… to the Cloud! The soundtrack makes me feel like I’m in the movie Hackers. What a simultaneously great and terrible movie.

Call me a cynical old man, but I’ve never been totally “down” with keeping all of my data on someone else’s servers. I’ve even investigated the idea of running my own mail server just to keep my personal data under lock and key. (My Facebook account was expunged some time ago; it’s basically a photo of me and comedian Jim Norton and an old e-mail address I no longer check.)

But, if the Cloud is the future, so be it.

Man is that song catchy.