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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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? → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
Tom’s Hardware got up close and personal with a sweet-looking AMD Eyefinity spread at AMD’s Ontario office. It’s running off one of the new Radeon 6990s, and the 5×1 mode lets you use portrait orientation to minimize horizontal seams. But when are we going to get some of these bezel-less monitors I keep hearing about? I know LG’s working on it, but hurry up, dudes. Check out the video here. I’d probably get sick playing Dirt like that. → Read More
AMD certainly would benefit from minimizing Thunderbolt. If Thunderbolt were to catch on, AMD would likely have to purchase components from chief rival, Intel. AMD says that they support USB 3.0 and that Thunderbolt’s speed would be superfluous. → Read More
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? → Read More
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. → Read More
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! → Read More
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. → Read More
I’ve been thinking of putting together a new system recently, and for the video card, I was almost certainly going to go for a GeForce GTX 460 — around $200 is the sweet spot for a good mid-budget GPU, and the 460 has been holding up to its competition for some time. But with the release of the new AMD Radeon 6850 and 6870, I might have to switch back to Radeon once more. → Read More
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. → Read More
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.” → Read More
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. → Read More
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] → Read More
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. → Read More
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