Apple

Advanced Micro Devices worries that lingering issues--both real and speculative--with Apple MacBooks are giving laptop graphics a black eye.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Stan Ossias, director of marketing, mobile graphics, at AMD, began by asserting that my March 11 post "overstated" the case about heat and the instability of graphics processors in laptops and that some readers may interpret heat issues too broadly.

"In the case of Apple's product, I don't know what happened with Nvidia's GPU but we'd like to avoid having the negative aspects taint the entire industry," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

Most recently, there have been reports of performance issues with Apple's new 17-inch MacBook Pro, which has the Nvidia GeForce 9600M chip. But it's unclear whether Nvidia's chips are really the problem and it's not known how widespread the issues are.

Ossias started off the discussion by spelling out how AMD mobile graphics processors can adjust performance and power consumption to different conditions. (The technology, it should be noted, is applied in various ways by many graphics chips.)

"When the system is calling upon the GPU to do more work, we either increase the voltage or increase the clock speed or increase the operating attributes of the system in order to maximize the performance, and when those things are not in demand we can scale them back so they're not constantly being run at their maximum. This is the way we go about trying to avoid overheating," he said. Strict implementation of these design parameters is particularly critical in systems where there is the greatest potential for overheating: thin notebooks and high-end gaming notebooks, according to Ossias.

AMD provides tools to PC makers, he said, who make the final design decisions on how the GPU will perform in different power-usage scenarios. But sometimes the laptop maker won't make the best choice.

"Somebody may choose a GPU that doesn't necessarily have the best operating characteristics or doesn't deliver the optimal power consumption in all operating ranges. That's a constant development challenge" for laptop makers, he said, then added: "A very, very large proportion of our customers do a very good job of this."

"I don't think Apple does a bad job of this in general. They are extremely meticulous generally," he said. However, in some cases "a product decision is made (where) maybe there is more emphasis put on performance characteristics than on another characteristic. Again, that's another choice that can be made," Ossias said.

Ossias gave an example of the type of graphics chip that would not go into the new MacBook Pro, which is about an inch thick. At the high end of its mobile graphics chip lineup, the ATI Mobility Radeon 4870 can draw as much as 45 watts--a big power draw for a mobile chip. Due to these power characteristics, this would not go into a thin form-factor notebook like the new MacBook Pro, he said.

AMD announced new mobile GPUs last week based on a cutting-edge 40-nanometer process

(Credit: AMD-ATI)

Last week, AMD announced groundbreaking mobile GPUs, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 and 4860, based on a cutting-edge 40-nanometer process. Both chips compete in the same general performance category as the 4870 but start at a much lower power-consumption level (the low 20-watt range) and "therefore you can actually get the 4830 into a thin and elegant notebook design," according to Ossias. AMD's current 4650 and 4670 can fit into thin form factors also, he said. These latter two chips would be in the same class as the Apple MacBook Pro's Nvidia GeForce 9600M, he claimed. The 9600M is the chip alleged to have heat and performance issues.

"I know that when Nvidia announced (in October of last year) publicly that it was recalling or having to rework some of its products and they took a big write-down, we had to address concerns from our customers that we were not also experiencing packaging failures because of the overheating and design flaws that they were experiencing in their product line," he said. "So, we basically had to go and calm down a lot of our customers and say, look, this is not something that's inherent to our technology, it's not something that you have to expect from any GPU."

AMD took a big step toward improving its mobile offerings earlier this month, but it reportedly has other plans to match Intel's moves into this market.

Electronista spotted a post from a German site called Eee PC News on an AMD processor apparently known as the "BGA CPU," according to what appears to be a presentation slide authored by AMD. As The Register notes, the BGA CPU sounds an awful lot like a processor core called Bobcat that AMD first unveiled in 2007 but has said very little about since.

Bobcat was supposed to be a sub-10 watt processor core for things like thin notebooks and UMPCs, which have since evolved into the mobile Internet device concept. The BGA processor consumes 8 watts of power running at 1GHz, according to the slide, and uses an integrated memory controller. Eight watts is a little too much for handheld devices, but could work well inside a "netbook" such as the Eee PC.

Intel has been putting lots of time and money behind its Atom processor for similar types of systems, and AMD will have to follow suit at some point if it wants to cash in on the growing mobile trend. Its revamped Puma notebook technology is starting to reach customers, but AMD hasn't really addressed the mobile processor market, despite selling graphics chips into cell phones and handheld devices.

While AMD does have experience making processors for low-cost systems such as the ill-fated Personal Internet Communicator and the more successful XO laptop sold by the OLPC project, those systems use its Geode processor, which is getting a bit outdated. The BGA processor would likely bring a significant increase in performance to AMD's products for this category, although it consumes far more power than the 0.8 watts used by the Geode chip inside the XO laptop.

The PC and mobile-computing industries are getting together to propose a standard for computing on graphics processors, and they are going to start their evaluation with Apple's OpenCL technology.

The Khronos Group, an industry consortium that already administers well-known standards like OpenGL, announced the creation of a Compute Working Group on Monday to develop an industry standard for allowing software developers to tap into the performance offered by graphics processors, or GPUs.

Many familiar names dot the list of founding members, including chip companies such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, mobile industry representatives such as ARM, Motorola, Samsung, and TI, and Apple.

GPUs are perhaps best-known for rendering realistic mayhem in the never-ending sequence of PC shooter games, but they are taking on new roles. Newer operating systems like Vista are placing more graphical demands on the PC, and programmers in the scientific community are also interested in using the power of GPUs to process certain types of applications.

GPUs are very good at taking specific tasks, breaking them down into pieces, and solving them at an extremely high rate of speed using multiple processor cores. But they aren't good at handling the random assortment of software that we all have on our PCs or Macs, which in turn hasn't been programmed to take advantage of multiple processor cores, for the most part.

To that end, companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all been working on ways to make it easier for software developers outside of the scientific computing industry to take advantage of the unique characteristics of the GPU.

In typical fashion, however, they all came up with different implementations. Nvidia has CUDA, AMD has Stream Computing, and Intel has its Larrabee project, which actually hasn't been released.

When Apple unveiled Mac OS X Snow Leopard last week during its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company noted that the operating system would feature a technology called OpenCL to make it easier for software developers to access graphics processors. The Khronos Group will evaluate OpenCL as a proposed standard, but there's no guarantee that all companies will eventually head down that path.

That's because there's a notable company missing from the founding members of this group: Microsoft. If Microsoft chooses to go down a different path with the next implementations of Windows and Windows Mobile, it will be hard for the chip companies to resist following suit.

This time around, AMD is ready with a major product launch on schedule, and is enjoying a bit of good fortune as well.

Notebook makers of all stripes are getting ready to launch systems based on AMD's Puma notebook technology, which consists of a new processor, a mobile chipset, and wireless chips from AMD's partners. The official announcement is expected to come later Wednesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, and notebooks with the chips will be arriving over the next several weeks from companies like Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, said Bahr Mahony, director of AMD's mobile business.

Assuming those notebooks ship without incident, Puma arrives in far better shape than Barcelona, the quad-core server processor that was a year late after running into major technical glitches. Puma also arrives at a time when Intel has suffered a rare--at least over the last two years--gaffe inside its notebook group: the company's Montevina notebook platform will be delayed several weeks with chipset problems, which could affect Intel's performance during the important back-to-school shopping season.

AMD's new Turion X2 Ultra processor is the first designed-for-mobile processor that AMD has ever produced; the earlier versions of its Turion processor were essentially the same design as its Opteron design with a more power-friendly implementation. But the PC market is shifting dramatically in favor of the notebook over the desktop as mobility becomes all the rage, and Intel has enjoyed a strong position in this market with its Centrino notebook products and ad campaigns.

This time around, AMD has changed the way it supplies power to the processor, as well as how the processor's memory controller talks to the rest of the system. It's taking advantage of the split power-plane design unveiled with Barcelona that allows the processor cores to run at variable speeds, Mahony said. The memory controller, which handles the vital link between the processor and memory, has also been tweaked for a mobile environment.

But Griffin is not the wholesale redesign of AMD's chip blueprint that Barcelona was, meaning AMD could avoid many of the technical glitches that arose as the company overhauled parts of its Opteron design to produce Barcelona.

Instead, it's the chipset that will likely be the centerpiece of AMD's pitch to notebook makers and their customers. The company is looking to cash in on its purchase of ATI Technologies' graphics business in 2006 by beefing up the performance of the integrated graphics that ship with the Puma platform.

The vast majority of notebooks sold to the general public use integrated graphics, which are graphics transistors that are welded onto the chipset, rather than coming in separate, powerful cards from companies like ATI and Nvidia. To this point, those graphics from both Intel and AMD could be aptly described as "good enough graphics," meaning they can easily handle simple Web surfing tasks but probably feel the strain when it comes to things like high-definition video.

AMD thinks it has dramatically improved the graphics performance of its basic chipsets without killing their power consumption, and that it has an edge over Intel's graphics division, which has struggled in recent years. AMD is also bringing the hybrid graphics technology from its desktop products to the notebook. This allows PC makers to ship notebooks with both the integrated graphics and a discrete graphics card in their systems, giving users the option of tweaking their graphics performance based on their needs.

For example, if you're playing a game at home with the laptop plugged in, go ahead and turn on the discrete graphics card. But if you're on the road in the airport with the same system and just need to check your e-mail with the last remaining bit of your battery, turn the discrete card off to extend battery life.

It's refreshing to see AMD deliver on a product release after the horrible year the company endured in 2007. The delay in Intel's Montevina platform might also give it a chance to squeeze a few more orders out of PC makers looking to get their system configurations locked down for the July, which is quite the reversal of fortune for a company that had no answer when Intel's server division snapped up design wins that were supposed to belong to Barcelona.

AMD is still in a tenuous position, with Barcelona revenue just starting to inflate its coffers. But if Puma can be rolled out without incident to AMD's partners, the company will have gone a long way to refurbishing its image inside the PC industry.

Advanced Micro Devices finalized a major reorganization Monday, promoting a senior executive into a new role and waving goodbye to two others.

Randy Allen, the new head of AMD's Computing Solutions Group.

(Credit: AMD)

Randy Allen, formerly head of AMD's server business, will take on a new role as senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, which until Monday was occupied by Mario Rivas, AMD said Monday after the close of the stock market. Rivas is leaving the company to pursue the famous "new opportunities" that always lie in store after a company decides to part ways with an executive. Allen will essentially oversee all of AMD's processor and chipset development.

As part of the reorganization, AMD is also creating a new group called the Central Engineering organization, which will be led by Chekib Akrout and Jeff VerHeul. This group will be responsible for developing AMD's road map, and it will report directly to AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer. Central Engineering will work with customers and the internal business units to develop AMD's future plans for its processor designs, an AMD representative said.

Changes have been long expected at AMD, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past year and a half while it struggled to get Barcelona, a quad-core server processor, out the door. As leader of the chip group, Rivas appears to be taking the fall for the Barcelona debacle. Earlier this year, Phil Hester also left AMD after serving as chief technology officer.

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has promised to get the company back to profitability in the third quarter of this year--otherwise these moves may not be the last executive changes at AMD in 2008.

AMD has dramatically revised its future road map for server processors, adding a new six-core processor and pushing out the arrival of a next-generation core well into the next decade.

Now that the company finally has the Barcelona mess in its rearview mirror, AMD has taken a hard look at its server plans. The chipmaker will extend the life of its current processor core technology through 2010, and has added a six-core processor code-named Istanbul for the second half of 2009.

A four-core and eight-core design code-named Montreal, on the road map as recently as last December (click for PDF, slide 21), has disappeared entirely. It will be replaced by six-core and 12-core designs known as "Sao Paolo" and "Magny-Cours" (Formula 1 race venues, I'm told), which are scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2010 and are based on the same underlying processor core technology as Barcelona, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and head of AMD's server division. That means those chips will not use the "Bulldozer" core first introduced by AMD in July 2007.

Istanbul, Sao Paolo, and Magny-Cours are the new chips on AMD's roadmap, replacing a previous plan code-named Montreal.

(Credit: AMD)

The changes seem designed to ensure AMD delivers on its promises. Barcelona was a crisis on two fronts: the technical execution problems that delayed the chip by almost a year, and the worry among AMD's customers and investors that the company was in over its head in its transition into a stable, trusted enterprise computing supplier.

After all, before Opteron arrived, AMD had virtually no track record in the server market. Opteron changed that, making AMD a well-known quantity inside the server rooms of the Fortune 500 and a supplier to every major server vendor on the planet.

But the Barcelona debacle had to have changed the way AMD's customers viewed the company, and the feedback appears to have been simple: Just make contact. Don't swing for the fences.

Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours will require a new chipset to accomodate the switch to faster DDR3 memory and will be built using AMD's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. Istanbul will drop into servers built for Barcelona or Shanghai, the 45-nanometer version of Barcelona scheduled for later this year, making for an easier transition for customers using Barcelona. Montreal was scheduled to introduce a new chipset into AMD's lineup in 2009, but that won't arrive now until 2010.

Istanbul is a clear response to Intel's Dunnington processor, a six-core server chip also scheduled for the second half of this year. But Istanbul won't be out until the second half of 2009, long after Intel's Nehalem generation of processors has begun to ship.

The chip will buy AMD time, however, to concentrate on its new plan for 2010. Bulldozer was that plan as recently as July 2007, but plans for chips based on the Bulldozer core--a powerful, modular core designed as part of the Fusion project--vanished from AMD's road map in December.

As recently as April, AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer was telling financial analysts that samples of Bulldozer were still on the schedule for 2009. But he neglected to mention how AMD intends to use it, because AMD isn't confident enough in its plans for the Bulldozer cores to share them with the public, Allen said.

Instead, AMD decided to push forward with the Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours products and reuse the existing core design used in Barcelona and planned for Shanghai and Istanbul. Upping the core count planned for that timeframe from 4 and 8 to 6 and 12 will deliver a nice performance boost, Allen said.

Server customers with heavily parallelized workloads will opt for Magny-Cours, while Sao Paolo will be the choice of customers that just need a few threads worth of performance to run at faster speeds. Clock speeds have yet to be determined, but the 6-core Sao Paolo will run faster than the 12-core Magny-Cours, Allen said.

Tearing up your road map is never a good sign, but at least it's a signal that AMD is taking a pragmatic approach to the next several years. The company is in serious trouble, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several quarters and will probably need to break even in the second half of the year to save the job of CEO Hector Ruiz.

The question now is whether or not any further road map revisions are in store for AMD's PC processor lineup. For some time, AMD had planned to introduce its "accelerated computing" initative, formerly known as the Fusion project, in 2009 in its notebook lineup.

For now, that plan appears unchanged, but with the departure of Fusion planner CTO Phil Hester and a 10 percent layoff going into effect over the next several months, something might have to give.

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday resurrected its old allegations against Intel, although it kept the salacious details under a thick layer of black ink.

AMD filed a heavily redacted brief as part of its ongoing antitrust case against Intel, saying it has new, specific evidence of Intel's misconduct but blacking out almost all of the evidence in the brief. AMD filed suit in 2005, claiming that Intel has used intimidation and predatory pricing to coerce PC and server vendors into excluding AMD's chips from their products. Intel denies all charges.

In its initial complaint, AMD claimed to have evidence of Intel's wrongdoing but has never shared specific allegations against individuals, or explained exactly how Intel's tactics were deployed. Now, it claims to have at least shared them with the court, although because specific individuals are named the redactions are apparently necessarily. The document is pretty much unreadable; I liked The Register's take on it.

Despite AMD's claims that it cites "chapter and verse" in the brief, as AMD's chief lawyer told The Wall Street Journal, the footnotes of the brief appear to be signals of who AMD needs to depose to prove its allegations. For example, following the first section in which AMD apparently lays out specific (if redacted) complaints involving Intel's dealings with Dell, the company's lawyers write: "Plaintiffs will likely need to depose witnesses from various levels of the Intel and Dell organizations to establish that (interesting, juicy part redacted)."

This case remains in the discovery phase, and any trial appears very far off.

Updated 3:35 p.m. PDT with additional details and comments from conference call.

As we already knew, times are still tough for Advanced Micro Devices.

The company reported its first-quarter financial results Thursday after the close of the market, and it continues to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. AMD had already warned investors that revenue would fall short of early expectations, and the official number, at $1.5 billion, was in line with the revised expectations.

For the quarter, which ended March 29, AMD lost $358 million based on generally accepted accounting principles, but that number includes $50 million in charges related to the acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006. Excluding that one-time charge, the company lost $308 million, or 51 cents a share, also in line with Wall Street expectations.

AMD's processor business had a decent quarter, despite not having its two latest server and desktop processors on hand until late in the period. Revenue in the chip business was up 30 percent compared with last year's first quarter, as unit sales increased. But the business took a step backward in profitability, losing $160 million in the first quarter after eking out a $21 million profit in the fourth quarter.

Despite Intel's upbeat assessment of the economy on Tuesday, AMD saw "a challenging global environment for consumers" during the first quarter, said Bob Rivet, AMD's chief financial officer.

It sounds like AMD is getting ready to do a top-to-bottom look at its operation to find places to cut costs beyond the 10 percent workforce reductions it has already announced. Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz spoke of "revisiting" noncore businesses, such as AMD's cell phone and consumer electronics businesses, if the company can't find a way to make them profitable.

That sounds very much like additional layoffs beyond the 10 percent cuts and the possible jettisoning of AMD's consumer electronics business, which lost $8 million on a 31 percent decline in revenue. The company needs to get its costs down from around $1.7 billion this quarter to about $1.5 billion a quarter by the end of the year, Rivet said.

The good news is that AMD will have fresh new products in place, at long last, by the time the second quarter ends. Barcelona and Phenom, quad-core chips for servers and desktops, should provide a lift to AMD's performance in those areas, said Dirk Meyer, president and COO. And AMD also expects to launch its first processor designed specifically for notebooks in the second quarter.

However, despite the new products, AMD still expects revenue to decline in line with normal seasonal patterns looking forward into the second quarter. The current quarter is always the slowest period of the year for the PC and server industries, absent any catalysts such as the back-to-school season or the holidays.

And while I had expected to hear about the fabled "asset-light" strategy on the one-year anniversary of Ruiz uttering that phrase, we're still in the dark as to AMD's plans for cutting costs in its manufacturing operation. "I know you would like (more information) and I feel terrible I can't provide you details on that," Ruiz said, sounding almost chagrined.

The first quarter of 2008 marks the fifth straight quarter in which AMD has lost at least $350 million. It's mind-boggling to understand how it's sustained such losses for such a long period of time. In total, that's $3.7 billion in losses racked up between the beginning of 2007 through the end of March 2008.

Ruiz promised to have AMD profitable by the third quarter of the year. It's going to take strong sales in the face of an uncertain economic environment, substantial cost cutting, and a bit of luck to get there.

If you want to gauge the tech winds, follow Intel.

At least, that's the theory employed by economists trying to forecast the performance of the high-tech industry in uncertain times over the last two decades. The world's largest chipmaker is thought to be an early-warning sign of things to come; trouble ahead if Intel's in red.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini not only has to reassure investors that everything's going well with his company, he's also speaking to the tech industry at large.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

We already know that the two companies were disappointed in their performance during the quarter. Back in March, Intel had already made the decision that plummeting flash memory prices would dent its earnings for the quarter. AMD waited a little longer, but declared the first quarter was poor in almost every sector of its business, and announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its work force.

On Tuesday, Intel executives will hold a conference call with financial analysts to discuss its quarter, and AMD will follow on Thursday. While AMD's problems are largely of its own making, Intel's results will be closely scrutinized to see if the flash problems are the extent of Intel's troubles, or if there's evidence of a wider industry slowdown in PC and server purchases amid a sour economic climate.

The flash memory market's troubles have been well-documented, and appear to stem from the double-whammy of a reduction in demand just as capacity expanded. Apple is thought by iSuppli to be at least part of the reason behind the flash memory industry's woes, as the industry is now expecting Apple to spend about $200 million less on flash this year than it had anticipated going into the year.

But the flash market is used to boom-and-bust cycles that don't necessarily point to rough waters ahead for the tech economy at large. Intel's core business, on the other hand, is just that kind of indicator.

At late as the 1980s, miners used canaries as early-warning detection systems for the presence of carbon monoxide and methane gases in mines. If the canary stopped singing, it was time to leave.

The tech industry has long seen Intel's performance in that vein. In 2001, as the dot-com bubble was collapsing, Intel was one of the first major tech companies to report slowing sales and declining profits.

"2001 was a terrible year for our industry," former Intel CEO, and now chairman, Craig Barrett said in a press release announcing Intel's fourth-quarter 2001 results. The larger effects of that slowdown in 2001 carried well over into 2002 for other companies.

The American Electronics Association put out a hopeful press release in October 2002, announcing that 113,000 high-tech jobs were lost in the first half of 2002 but "cautiously optimistic" that the worst was over. But around the same time in 2003, the AEA reported that a whopping 540,000 tech jobs were lost in all of 2002, meaning the decline dramatically accelerated in the second half of 2002.

Last time, the downturn was caused by a sharp decline in technology spending by corporations. This time, the technology market has shifted toward consumers, who are the ones making everyone nervous this year.

The question is whether the national credit crunch, combined with soaring energy and food prices, will force consumers to put a lid on their wallets this year. Few analysts seem to expect the disaster that was 2001 and 2002 this time around, but then again, few financial analysts make money from predicting doom-and-gloom around the corner.

Intel is expected to record about $9.6 billion in revenue for its first quarter, which is a little less than what Wall Street had been expecting prior to its January earnings conference call. That would still be a 9 percent gain on last year's first-quarter revenue total, which isn't the kind of growth that makes Wall Street giddy but isn't a disaster either. Profits, on the other hand, are expected to dip 6 percent compared to last year on the flash problems.

AMD is still trying to get back on its feet. It reported weakness "across all business segments" earlier this month as it worked to get its Barcelona and Phenom processors out this quarter. Dell backed away from AMD's chips on its consumer Web site section, suggesting that AMD might have lost market share as it scrambled to fix its chips.

In addition to the Barcelona and Phenom snafu, AMD has been much more exposed to a declining desktop PC market than Intel, which might account for some of the weakness as that category continues to decline. But AMD is gearing up to launch its first notebook chip specifically designed for that type of computer, and now that Barcelona and Phenom are available, things might be looking up for AMD if it can stabilize its revenue with the new processors and cut costs with the departing employees.

There are plenty of historical reasons to be wary about Intel and AMD's results as it pertains to the tech industry, and all eyes will be on chips this week. It doesn't appear that the wheels are falling off just yet, but when the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around.