AMD

Think PCs are dead? Check out these crazy mods

AUSTIN, Texas--The PC is so not dead.

That's what AMD, one of the world's largest makers of processors, wants the world to know. And at SXSW, the chipmaker is putting its money where its mouth is and showing off a collection of modded PCs masquerading as art.

During its Technograffiti event here tonight, AMD will let the world get a glimpse of a series of PC mods that it hopes will convince people who think mobile devices have fully supplanted PCs that there's still some life remaining in the full-size computer.

"We want people to reimagine … Read more

AMD limps through Q4, and 2013 doesn't look much better

Chipmaker AMD suffered yet another brutal knock to its financials as it came crashing to the end of the 2012 fiscal year with yet another poor quarter.

The chipmaker reported a fourth quarter net loss of $473 million, or 63 cents a share, on revenue of $1.16 billion, down by 32 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 14 cents a share.

Wall Street expected AMD to report a fourth quarter loss of 20 cents a share on revenue on $1.15 billion.

For the year ending December 29, AMD reported a net loss … Read more

AMD sues ex-managers for allegedly copying 100,000 files

Advanced Micro Devices is taking four former employees to court -- one vice president and three managers from the firm's Boxborough, Mass., plant -- who left the company to go and work for rival Nvidia last year.

The chipmaker is accusing them of coping more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets to take with them.

The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, claims former vice president Robert Feldstein, along with managers Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk and Richard Hagen, took the files before they left the company. AMD said it wants to recover the … Read more

ATI 7000 series graphics coming to the Mac?

Yesterday Apple released a developer preview build of OS X 10.8.3 to its testing community, and upon investigating the build a few people have found it includes new drivers for AMD's high-end Radeon 7000 series graphics cards. People who have tested the build with PC versions of the Radeon 7970 have found that the card is recognized and works, and suggests that possibilities for new hardware offerings from Apple are in the works.

In the past, Apple has switched back and forth between graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia with iterations of its hardware, with its latest … Read more

AMD reportedly hires bank to explore options such as a sale

Struggling chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has reportedly hired J.P. Morgan to help it explore strategic options -- in other words, to look at possibly breaking up its operations or selling the entire company.

Reuters reported that an outright sale of the company isn't a priority and that AMD may consider selling its patent portfolio.

A person familiar with the situation told CNET that AMD has worked with J.P. Morgan, but it's not considering selling the company.

An AMD spokesman, meanwhile, said that "AMD is not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets … Read more

Titan steals No. 1 spot on Top500 supercomputer list

Predictions that Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer had become the most powerful machine in the world have turned out to be right.

The machine, powered by Nvidia graphics processors and Advanced Micro Devices computer chips, stole the No. 1 spot on the Top500's list from another U.S. machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia.

Sequoia, which uses processors from IBM, became the top computer in June with a performance of 16.32 petaflops a second. Titan beat that showing, sending Sequoia to second place on the list, with a result of 17.59 petaflops per second. … Read more

Titan supercomputer debuts for open scientific research

Forecasting for weather like this week's "Frankenstorm" may become a lot more accurate with the help of the Department of Energy's Titan supercomputer, a system that launched this month for open research development.

The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan -- believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world -- to research things such as climate change and … Read more

AMD preps layoffs that could hit 30 percent of its workers

Advanced Micro Devices is prepping for layoffs that could impact a significant percentage of its staff, CNET has learned.

The company, which makes processors for PCs and servers, could let go 20 percent to 30 percent of its employees within coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, though they added that the number of affected workers might also be lower.

AMD may announce the move -- its second big staff cut in the past year -- as soon as next week. It reports quarterly earnings Thursday. AMD had 11,737 employees as of the end of the second … Read more

AMD launches its response to Intel's tablet processor

Advanced Micro Devices has announced its answer to Intel's tablet chip, just as Windows 8 devices are about to flood the market.

AMD's Z-60 chip is being marketed as a chip for the "performance tablet" segment.

Translation: it's packing high-performance graphics silicon, which boasts 80 Radeon graphics cores, with the graphics processing unit (GPU) rated at a speed of 275MHz (see chart below).

Its two central processing unit (CPU) cores are rated at 1GHz.

The chip can be squeezed into designs as thin as 10mm, AMD said in a statement.

The first tablets based on … Read more

BlueStacks deals in Android with AMD

BlueStacks's technology for running Android apps on Windows fuels a new way for people with AMD-powered computers to get Android apps on their Windows PCs, the two companies announced today.

AMD's new AppZone Player brings more than 500,000 Android apps to AMD-powered computers, and works on Windows 7 and Windows 8 now.

"This will unify the Win 8 and mobile ecosystems," wrote BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma in an e-mail to CNET explaining team-up. "Just by virtue of the size of the deal, it's started a giant ball rolling that will be difficult to … Read more