AMD in trouble: Barcelona bug, ATI write-down cast bad shadows
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At the opening of an analyst meeting this morning, the president of AMD lowered expectations for his company, saying it no longer needs to produce the best performing CPUs, and hinted at scaling back its R&D.
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Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.    While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.   My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal    He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.
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Company reveals a new performance tidbit, missing from initial materials, as  formal launch party for Barcelona gets under way.
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A little over 6 months have passed since ATI first announced their new high end Radeon X800 series. Despite apparent availability issues, ATI are forging ahead and announcing their refresh variants for the series.
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Blog: Bad: AMD lost $600 million this quarter. Good: Chip shipments surged.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Barcelona is finally here. Four years since its last major chip upgrade, AMD is introducing the quad-core Operton server processor, which the company has described as &quot;the most advanced x86 processor&quot; ever made.
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Enterprise apps to run on games hardware, company hopes ATI - effectively AMD - has begun pitching its Radeon X1900 graphics chip at corporates, not for running graphics on workstations but for processing large data sets much the way Intel's Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) are meant to.â¦
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Blog: The web and the desktop are increasingly blurring, as Adobe's Apollo project demonstrates.  Unfortunately, open source licensing remains in beta while we're about to go into production....
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roundup Plus: Sun expands pay-as-you go supercomputing...SGI works on Linux performance software...Good Technology supported by HP, Samsung.
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Adobe late with Photoshop Elements for Mac...iStockphoto tightens model release requirements...Canon 5D Mark II rumor...PDF now an ISO standard
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Blog: Chipmaker reaffirms third-quarter launch schedule for quad-core Barcelona chip but says shipments to Cray of different quad-core processor have slipped.
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Groovy graphics card, and a snip at Â£45 Review Since it bought ATi last year, AMD has been busy rebranding any number of chipsets and graphics chips in its range. Some of the instances make perfect sense while others are a cynical rebranding of an old chip.â¦
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Preps pair of Octals Entire computing platforms have come and gone* in the time that it has taken AMD to shove the four-core version of Opteron known as Barcelona into end customers' hands.â¦
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Although servers based on AMD's Barcelona chip are on display at Computex, details of the quad-core chips are not available.
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After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s latest processor, a quad-core server chip called Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) isÂ getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip. A successful Barcelona launch, expected to happen during the third quarter, is critical for AMD, which has seen itsÂ share of the server market batteredÂ in recent quarters by Intel. Those market-share losses came with a heavy price, dragging AMD's finances into the red. In April, the company announcedÂ a $611 million loss, largely attributed to tougher competition and aÂ price war with Intel. To stem these losses, AMD has cut discretionary spending but executives are counting on Barcelona to restore its financial health and turn the tables on its archrival. Kevin Knox, the vice president of AMD's commercial business, recently sat down with IDG News Service to discuss preparations for Barcelona's upcoming launch. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. IDGNS: Where do things currently stand with Barcelona? Kevin Knox: We're still on target for a mid-year launch with Barcelona. We're actually pretty excited about the product, particularly with respect to some of the features that we're going to enable. When we started out with Barcelona it had a certain feature set. From the time we started out, from the design perspective, the aspects we're going to address, things like virtualization and power, have become more important to the industry. We think its going to have a bigger impact than we originally anticipated. IDGNS: Is Barcelona going to reverse AMD's recent losses in server market share? Knox: I firmly believe it will. A lot of that has to do with this not being just a speed upgrade. If it was just a speed upgrade, it's a lot more challenging at any point in time to get an advantage and maintain that advantage. Barcelona is not just a quad-core chip, it's more than quad core. We've made fundamental, significant changes to the architecture as part of the chip. We looked at the overall design, at the cache and the pipelines, so it's a lot more than just taking two dual-core chips and saying it's quad core. It's a true, native quad-core design with enhancements at the processor level. IDGNS: How do you view comparisons between Barcelona and Intel's quad-core server chips? Knox: If you look at the two products, they're very different products. If you go back many years, when we designed Opteron, Opteron was designed for multi-chip, multi-core environments. When we went from single core to dual core, it wasn't a big thing for us. When we went from dual core to quad core, the reason this has taken a little longer is we made some enhancements to the core, not because going to four cores was the major challenge. What we've focused on is doing enhancements to the core and doing virtualization. This is probably a larger and more important launch than you've seen in the past. There's a lot riding on the ecosystem, the ISVs, and hardware vendors, to make sure we have all the pieces in a line so when we do launch we can have pretty quick uptake. IDGNS: How much work has been done to seed the market for Barcelona? Has AMD shipped sample systems to major customers so they can test their applications? Knox: Yes, we're starting to get some samples to customers as seeds. You definitely need to have seed programs. They're critical. People want to kick the tires, especially with something as significant as the move from dual core to quad core, and the enhancements we've made. We're going to have a larger seed program than we've ever had before on the server side. Part of that's because there's some new stuff, and part of that's because it's a pretty competitive market right now. Frankly, there are some accounts you have to seed. Whenever new technology comes out, you've got to let the Wall Street guys try it out. And it's not just the end-user community. There's a whole ISV aspect to it, as well. They've got to get ready. You've got to get the hardware manufacturers in Taiwan ready. IDGNS: What does the launch of Barcelona mean? When the launch happens next quarter, will the chips be widely available in large quantities? Knox: That's what we're going through now. Our plan is not to have a paper launch. We want to do a launch with a product. IDGNS: With large numbers of Barcelona servers available for sale? Knox: Right. And given what's been going on in the market, it's extremely critical that people understand that. We have had a number of launches in the past, I'll point to Intel's Clovertown launch as an example. They launched Clovertown and I think it was less than 10 percent of their product mix two quarters later. That says to me it wasn't really a quick ramp, product wasn't readily available. Our goal here is to get Barcelona out, and get it into the market as quickly as possible.