AMD

Fast on the heels of Apple nabbing a designer from chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, AMD turned around today and hired an Apple chip architect.

Jim Keller, 53, will join AMD as a corporate vice president and chief architect of AMD's microprocessor cores, reporting to Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster, another former Apple employee.

"Keller will lead AMD's microprocessor core design efforts...with a focus on developing both high-performance and low-power processor cores that will be the foundation of AMD's future products," AMD said in a statement.

Keller had been a director in the platform architecture … Read more

The latest AMD chip engineer to pop up at Apple is a graphics and system-on-a-chip expert.

John Bruno is now a system architect at Apple, as of July.

Over the last decade or so at AMD, he has held positions such as senior ASIC design manager and, most recently, system architect.

He started as an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) designer at ATI in 1996. That company was later acquired by AMD.

His AMD job description on LinkedIn states that he "completed hardware specification for the APU (CPU + GPU SoC) including cost, target die size, power budget and low-power … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest PC processor supplier, had some sobering things to say about the PC market when the company reported earnings Thursday.

"For the first time since 2001, client PC shipments have declined sequentially for three consecutive quarters-and have been below historical averages for the last seven quarters," AMD CEO Rory Read said during the chip supplier's second quarter earnings conference call.

"We also believe the PC industry may be resetting to a new [lower] baseline," he said.

Revenue declined 10 percent to $1.41 billion for the the Sunnyvale, … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices said today that revenue for the quarter ending June 30 is expected to be off 11 percent sequentially.

That's a very different outlook from what AMD forecast previously when it said that second-quarter 2012 revenue was expected to increase 3 percent sequentially, plus or minus 3 percent.

"The lower preliminary revenue results are primarily due to business conditions that materialized late in the second quarter, specifically softer-than-expected channel sales in China and Europe," the company said.

But AMD also attributed the worse-than-expected result to "a weaker consumer buying environment impacting the company's … Read more

Intel has begun an appeal against its record antitrust fine, calling the evidence against it "profoundly inadequate."

The fine was levied by EU antitrust regulators in 2009, after Intel was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in order to hinder rival Advanced Micro Devices through the use of rebates and contract conditions.

After an eight-year investigation, Intel was fined a record $1.06 billion in 2009, or more than 4.1 percent of Intel's 2008 turnover. The fine, the largest ever levied by the EU against a company, currently stands at $1.34 billion due to … Read more

Intel will not join a chip-related alliance aimed at making it easier for software developers to take advantage of the compute power locked up in graphics silicon.

Advanced Micro Devices, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., and Texas Instruments announced the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation on Tuesday.

Here's how Lisa Su, an AMD senior vice president, described it in a phone interview with CNET.

"The point is, even if you put a really powerful CPU next to a really powerful GPU, if these [chips] don't interact and the applications don't know when it's better to … Read more

How much does Advanced Micro Devices matter these days? Not much.

But you won't find many headlines proclaiming this and then explaining why. This post at The Verge does a pretty good job, though.

I, for one, have been waiting for a bigger, badder AMD to emerge since CEO Dirk Meyer "retired" at the start of 2011. And waiting and waiting and waiting.

AMD's problem for many years has been to overpromise and underdeliver. It began in earnest with the quad-core Barcelona chip debacle and has continued with the perennial promise of a CPU-GPU combo that … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices new Trinity chip doesn't deliver the performance trifecta necessary to threaten Intel's market-leading position, according to most initial evaluations.

It's an old story line now: AMD comes out with a new processor that offers better graphics performance, but, overall, does little to change Intel-AMD market dynamics -- which of course heavily favors Intel.

And AMD has done it again. Tapping into the graphics processing unit (GPU) expertise it got when after acquiring ATI in 2006, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company continues to ding Intel on GPU performance.

But AMD fails to threaten Intel on … Read more

Now that rival Intel has launched the first wave of its third-generation Core i-series processors (also known as Ivy Bridge), AMD is launching its own processor update. These new parts are the second generation of A-Series accelerated processing units, previously known by the code name Trinity.

Rather than CPU, or central processing unit, AMD these days uses the term APU, or accelerated processing unit, meaning that a CPU and discrete-level GPU are combined.

Named the A4, A6, A8, and A10, these new laptop processors claim to double the performance over the previous generation of AMD APU chips, and to offer … Read more