How ARM will impact Intel market

The hard battle between Intel and AMD seems to be long way to go. While Intel clearly has the upper hand in client processors and AMD is playing catch-up, there is another battle brewing for PC processors, particularly in notebooks. Here, we will discuss about the battle for the “secondary” processor and how this battle will not pit Intel against AMD, but rather, x86 architecture against ARM. And it’s not looking good for x86.

Dell and lenovo have come out with the “instant” laptop, which has capability to instantly access mail, calender, web without full boot up of the machine. They run a version of the Firefox browser for Web surfing and provides direct connection to Exchange, GroupWise or IMAP/POP3 e-mail systems through direct memory access. Also included is a dedicated document viewer for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, dedicated Wi-Fi and a VPN for secure connectivity. In essence, what Dell has done with Latitude ON is provide an embedded “smartphone-lite” device that uses the main screen, keyboard, power and memory systems.

What makes the Dell and Lenovo approach interesting is that first, they utilize low-cost, low-power, ARM-based chips adapted from the smartphone industry. Second, they provide dedicated-function processing. And third, each subsystem is capable of being functionally extended, possibly even by third parties through a future API to include additional convenience and protection capabilities.

It is safe to assume that other manufacturers will follow suit and provide coprocessor subsystem in business and higher-end consumer machines—particularly as prices for ARM chips continue to fall. It is also highly likely that additional functionality will be added over time.

Finally, it is apparent that neither Windows nor x86 will be the preferred platforms utilized by these coprocessor subsystems—at least until x86 can match the low cost and low power of ARM (potentially with future Atom chips).

The bottom line: With the potential of one or more coprocessors per PC, ARM has a lucrative path in which to infiltrate the PC market—a market it has never impacted. While it’s unlikely that ARM will displace x86 for the core processor anytime soon, it nevertheless gives ARM a large potential market of many millions of units—a fact not lost on ARM licensees (for example, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Qualcomm and Samsung).

However, the coprocessing subsystems potentially offer another point of machine failure and/or instability, especially in corporate settings where consistency, security and device management is critical. Companies should be careful when and how to deploy these coprocessor-enabled systems until they prove their worth.

source : www.eweek.com

AMD based netbook , Why there are always late

It is already well known that AMD has their own bechmark in high end computing product, especially for games and graphical works ( though I think Apple got extra mark on the second). However, they should not just ignore the huge desire from middle and lower rank users, which could contribute narrowing the gap between its competitor, Mr. Intel.

As I always said, AMD should go after the gaping hole between netbooks and thin-and-lights by releasing a low-power platform with solid graphics abilities, and it looks like the company’s finally coming around — AMD’s John Taylor just told us that the chipmaker will be releasing a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid codenamed “Ontario” with integrated DX11 graphics sometime next year. If Ontario sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it leaked in the past — it’s a part of the “Brazos” platform built around the low-power Bobcat core. Of course, AMD has been promising Fusion chips of all stripes for years now without a single shipping part, so saying that a Fusion chip will get it into the netbook game in 2011 is mildly amusing — while AMD’s definitely turned things around, it’s still incredibly late to the low-end party, and Intel’s solidly beaten it to the hybrid CPU / GPU punch with the Core 2010 and Pine Trail Atom chips. Add in the fact that NVIDIA’s Optimus-based Ion 2 chipset seemingly offers the extended battery life of Atom with the performance of a discrete GPU, and we’d say the market niche Ontario is designed to fill may not actually be so niche when it finally arrives. We’ll see what happens — a year is a long, long time.

CPU battle - is AMD really going to die?

I still remember somewhere in middle of 2000 when I bought my first PC with my own money ( still 19 that time), the latest AMDk6-II 500 MHz. Really awesome. And I ran it with Windows 2000 (Win2k) since I still blind with Linux during that time. That was my first PC and I really love it. I don`t care if the blower make jumbo jet sound or even the CPU can cook egg 2 or 3 times as long as I can get rid of Intel PC (bad experience when my father bought me stupid 486 with win 3.1).  As the time goes along, so do my PC as well, from Thunderbird to Sempron and the latest AMD Athlon X2-dual  core (waiting for phenom X4 series ). All generation dammed good. Even the market penetration done by AMD (Anti- Microsoft Development ….heheheh)  was very very great until the middle of 2006.

The AMD performance start shrinking. Why?..People say it is because of the huge debt due to big acquisition of the Fat Uncle Bob maker, ATI  Company, and some from other side claim that AMD fail to deliver Barcelona or Opteron Quad-core processor on time. Not even that, AMD also now suffer of the battle among the Top Management due to their performance recently. Poor Ruiz. Undoubtedly, for me, AMD really need ATI in order to boost their track on the game-line compare with Intel. But, is it really a right time just to get the uncertain result from the acquisition together with a bulk loan from Ah Long (shark loan)? Just to remind, Not all PC user are gamers and not All are really highly dependent to great workstation. Most are simple user. And they really not bother about highly giga performance PC.

Another de facto is that most of the users are really comfortable when they heard about intel, compared to AMD. From day one, everybody knows that AMD is an electronic boiler, able cook while operating. And most still think of that till now even though AMD has made a great step to overcome the ‘boiling CPU’ issue.Why?because AMD really not get close to the simple users to sell their new ‘chilled’ CPU series, instead they fight for high end performance features. That is the problem actually. Just do not expect users to go to amd website or anandtech or even tomshardware website to read about new AMD ‘chilled’ CPU series.

From the bottom of my heart, I do believe that AMD will sustain to compete the giant shrek, Intel.  But how long they can survive is depend on their road-map. Whether they really want to gain on gamers and workstation segment, which is really niche market or they have to do something to change people`s mentally about their product performance and quality (if they really have).

Why Dell, or HP, Acer, IBM, Compaq really hard to change to AMD processor? Just think - Politics? performance? friendship? monopoly?…

‘The future is fusion’ - and a lot more confusing……..

CPU clock beat up to 7.0 Ghz : only with AMD

A group named LimitTeam successfully overclocked AMD’s Deneb 45nm Phenom II X4 955 processor (Black Edition) back on April 30, and submitted the results for validation to CPU-Z. During the process, the group used the Asus M4A79T Deluxe motherboard, dubbed as the Asus “multidimensional performance platform” featuring support for an AMD 140W CPU and the AMD 790FX/SB750 chipset. Additionally, the group threw in 4 GB of DDR3 memory from Apacer Technology and a ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card. As a result, the group reached 7.127 GHz, beating the previous score of 6.7 GHz. However, LimitTeam didn’t reveal any specifics in regards to cooling during the overclocking process.

Late last month, AMD said that it managed to hit 7 GHz in “extreme overclocking tests,” more than doubling the original 3.2 GHz clock speeds enjoyed right out of the box. Apparently the CPU can be safely overclocked at home with speeds up to 3.8 GHz; anything greater will need “exotic cooling materials.” AMD’s product manager Brent Barry was noted saying that liquid nitrogen and liquid helium are best suited for high-overclocking environments, the former bringing the temperature down to about -140 degrees and the latter to around -240 degrees. Unfortunately, both solutions are somewhat dangerous to use. “This is fairly insane, science experiment stuff,” Davis said.

Earlier in February, Team Finland reached 6.7 GHz with an early version of the Phenom II X4 955 chip using a similar configuration. However, neither LimitTeam nor Team Finland has overcome to the world-wide #1 score listed by CPU-Z. Clocking in at 8.1 GHz, a user simply named “duck” overclocked Intel’s 65nm Cedar Mill Pentium 4 631 processor back on July 20, 2007 using the Asus “Commando” motherboard and 2 GB of DDR2 memory.