That was back in December. Today, we’re looking at a slightly different landscape for the memory market. While DDR3 hasn’t reached total price parity with DDR2 yet, we have seen a significant drop in price. So much so that now the price premium for DDR3 can be less than 10 percent.

Over these past six months, AMD has brought to market a number of products to take advantage of the greater memory bandwidth of DDR3. To name a few:

- AMD Phenom™ II Black Edition processor provides maximum control

- Wide variety of AMD technology-based motherboards that support DDR3 (from Asus, Gigabyte among others)

- AMD OverDrive™ 3.0 software features the new DDR3 SmartProfile for optimal performance tuning*

Additionally, the design compatibility of the new AMD Phenom II and AMD Athlon™ II processors allows users to easily upgrade systems across AM2+ and AM3 infrastructures. That means these processors are equally compatible with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory, allowing users to choose if and when they wish to upgrade.

The bottom line: we’re providing customers with a choice. 

We now have a full line of AMD products on the table. And, at today’s price points, the cutting edge no longer needs to be bleeding.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

*AMD’s product warranty does not cover damages caused by overclocking, even when enabled via AMD OverDrive™ software. 

Similarly, netbooks may look like notebooks, but ― as we’ve previously pointed out ― they’re not the same.

NPD released a survey last week finding that 60% of consumers who purchased a netbook thought it would have the same performance as a notebook. Additionally, out of the 18-24 year old demographic – a major segment for netbooks – an astounding 65% said they bought their netbooks expecting better performance.

It’s no wonder that some netbook resellers saw a 30% return rate, as reported by Brooke Crothers at CNET.

Clearly, there is confusion in the market over the functionality of a netbook. And I don’t blame the consumer.

So what do we do? BusinessWeek’s Olga Kharif wrote a call to action for PC makers and retailers to better explain the difference in netbooks’ and notebooks’ capabilities. Speaking from personal experience, she writes, “I loved using [my netbook] to quickly check Hotmail or to watch a video off of YouTube. But try multitasking, such as downloading a photo or a document while streaming a video off of YouTube, and their performance falls off the cliff. Consumers need to be made aware of this before they make their purchases.” 

In some cases, consumers may even encounter problems during normal Web surfing. Many Websites now have video or flash right on their homepage. If you’re a parent buying a netbook for your kid, try loading Disney.com.

As with battery life, we think the PC industry has a role in helping consumers make educated decisions. In fact, Best Buy calls out on their Website that, “Netbooks may look like laptops, but they don’t have the full capabilities of a computer.”

What I also find interesting about the NPD survey is that the percentage of consumers who bought a netbook expecting the performance of a notebook closely parallels the percentage of netbooks that never leave the home (60% according to NPD). To me, this signifies that there is an opportunity in the market for a higher-performance product that is inexpensive and lightweight, satisfying consumers’ desire for a small, powerful machine while not disappointing on performance.

Of course, AMD’s response is the “ultrathin” category. If you’re looking for a lightweight, sleek laptop that is still powerful enough to handle your day to day activities, we recommend you check out the HP Pavilion dv2, powered by the AMD Athlon™ Neo processor for ultrathin notebooks. 

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Last week we posted on our developer site a pre-release version of the x86 Open64 Compiler Suite.  Targeted at high performance and parallel computing workloads, this suite is derived from the Open64 suite of compiler development tools. The compiler is a valuable new open source alternative for C, C++, and FORTRAN developers.

Calling All Developers! 

Open64 currently supports the IA64, x86, CUDA and MIPS architectures.  AMD has extended and productized Open64 with optimizations designed for x86 multi-core processor advancements and multi-threaded code development. With this Open64 suite, AMD is introducing a quality code generation tool designed for high-performance parallel computing workloads so that developers can use this tool to bring additional levels of optimization to their code and take full advantage of AMD’s Open64 architecture.

The x86 Open64 Compiler Suite also extends AMD’s active participation in key open source software projects like Linux, Xen, X.org, KVM and GNU Compiler Collection GCC.  This compliments AMD’s contributions and efforts with GCC, PathScale, PGI, Sun Studio, and other compilers in providing developers a variety of options for software development on the Linux operating system.

So why does AMD optimize our own Open64 complier as opposed to just increasing our efforts with GCC?

AMD’s support of the Open64 compiler project is intended to provide users with the choice of an open source compiler that has optimizations that specifically target AMD64 technology and both of Intel’s 64-bit architectures. The reality is that the x86 Open64 environment represents more of a system-specific compiler for building and optimizing C, C++, and Fortran applications that target 32-bit and 64-bit Linux platforms. We have always strongly supported and actively contributed to the GCC community, and we view the GCC as the default compiler for Linux systems both in the near term and the foreseeable future.

People ask:  Is there a Windows® version of the Open64 compiler? At this time the Open64 compiler does not offer support for Windows. However, we work closely with Microsoft to drive optimizations into the Microsoft Visual Studio developer toolkit, which is used by the majority of Windows developers and with tools vendors like PGI and Absoft who offer Fortran-based compilers for Windows developers.

Source code, documentation and support information for the x86 Open64 Compiler Suite can be found at AMD Developer Central.

Happy coding!

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

I want to set the record straight: here is what happened. 

At D7 this year I saw the presentation by playwright and activist Eve Ensler on the issue of “rape-free products.”  I have to admit that before that I was ignorant of the violence taking place in the DRC. You can learn more about what she said here.

At about the same time, others who were educated about this violence started to make the (again, unintended) connection between our product code name (which are meant to be internal but have a way of becoming public) and the tragedy in the DRC, and this made it into some blogs.  This was happening as the team was in the process of formally transitioning from the code name to the more formal product name (in the same way, “Yukon” became our “1^st Generation Ultrathin Platform”), so we were already referring to the product as our “2^nd Generation Ultrathin Platform.”

Two conclusions:

1.       Anything that gives awareness to this issue is a good thing.

2.       We get to make the point that we are introducing our 2^nd generation product while others are still on their first.

Given these two things we were happy to expedite the transition that was already in place.

For more on Eve Ensler’s work visit her site.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

I first learned to edit video at school, maybe 30 years ago, on reel-to-reel Sony black and white video machines. The process was not as disruptive as, say, editing sound tape with a razor blade (see my years at the BBC about 25 years ago) but one error could ruin many hours of great work with one wrong button press.

Since then we have come a long way, and now video editing is a real-time (nearly), computer-enabled marvel.  What back then only a well-funded company could do with a Quantel Paintbox,  now you and I can do on PCs that, even when you go crazy and over-configure, cost less than $1000.

Ironically, the software can now cost more than that, but that is where the power is.

For many years, off-line editing on PCs was a bust for me. It was expensive and the drivers for the video boards were terrible; I used to joke that the time it took to update the drivers was faster than the time it took me to do an editing job. I did love Adobe Premiere (first really good editing software I used) but I hated the PC experience.

Truth is I went Mac!  

But now, happily, I’m at AMD and have a new AMD Phenom™ II 3Gz Quad-core with Dual ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 cards. That’s one heck of a lot of processing power.  But the issue for me was that, from my Mac days, I know FCP keyboard shortcuts in my sleep: since I went Mac – could I go back?

That question may now be irrelevant thanks to two pieces of software and some nifty enablement courtesy of AMD Fusion.

I will write more on Sony Vegas 9 another day (but I LOVE the new interface and it’s much faster) but today I wanted to talk about Adobe Premiere as part of the latest CS4.

The Next Wave of Video Editing

AMD has just announced a beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that dramatically improves the performance of a range of complex video editing tasks. The plug-in is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Adobe and AMD engineers designed to take advantage of ATI Stream technology in a way that allocates processing between available system CPU and GPU resources for maximum application performance.

The Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 plug-in draws on the computational power of both the CPU and GPU to improve the program’s performance. ATI Stream technology allows the powerful GPU to be used for more than just graphics processing, resulting in improved general computing power.  This is the industry-changing power of accelerated computing ― the power of Fusion.

In the case of the Adobe Premiere plug-in, a lot of the processing is still being handled by the multi-core CPU, but what is nice here is that I finally get to unlock ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities sitting on those ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. Great graphics cards are not just for gamers.

It’s hard for me to give exact measures of the improvement at home ― I just don’t have the measurement tools, but our labs (who have those tools) tell me with the latest Catalyst driver you can see  up to 8 times greater encoding performance. ¹

More specifically, for those looking to build DVDs (or in need of MPEG2 streams) the AMD Fast MPEG2 encoder performs over 178% faster than Adobe default encoder.²  I still like H.264 for quality and compression and the AMD Fast H.264 encoder performs up to 668% faster than Adobe default encoder.

I also dipped into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop and there are lots of ATI Stream accelerated features there too – more on that another time.

Editing has been almost real-time for a few years, and now I’m waiting for rendering and compression to catch up.  In a pre-Stream world it took 8 hours to render my China Olympics video which ended up being 50 GB ― now I need to compress that to fit onto a DVD and onto a Blu-ray. The beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is really starting to take huge chunks out of that problem.  

The future really does seem to be about Fusion.

Now if we could just get Blu-ray players to work faster…

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

¹The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an H.264, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 47.3s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 372.5s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 128 kbps), demonstrating an almost 8x faster encode time.  The input file size for each comparison was 367 MB.

System Specifications:  AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 3.2GHz processor; 8GB Corsair Dominator CM3X2G1866C9D memory; Sapphire ATI Radeon™ HD4870 1024MB; Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1.  Performance of the Adobe Premiere Plug-In will vary based on system configuration, ATI Radeon product, source file and output settings used. 

²The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an MPEG2, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 38.8s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 108s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 192 kbps), demonstrating over 178% faster encode time. 

So did Winston Churchill.  And George Patton.

And Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, John Chambers, Jay Leno and Tom Cruise have dyslexia, too.

So do I.

It has never stopped them, and in more than twenty years in technology sales and marketing, it has never stopped me.

I don’t usually use my blog for this sort of thing, but I think this is worthwhile and so wanted to share with my readers. So, if you would like to know more, here is a website I found (http//:www.thepowerofdyslexia.com).

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied

For desktop and notebook users what’s important today isn’t necessarily the speed of the processor, it’s the experience you have while using your machine that counts (quick: how powerful is the CPU in the machine you’re using to read this?). 

We’re making that reality even more relevant today.

At Computex today we announced two new AMD dual-core desktop processors:  the new 45nm AMD Athlon™ II X2 250 processor, which is designed to provide mainstream consumers with superior performance and efficiency at a value price-point, and the AMD Phenom™ II X2 550 Black Edition, the first ever dual-core AMD Phenom™ II CPU, which gives enthusiasts the power of the AMD “Dragon” platform technology in dual-, triple- and quad-core configurations.

What does this mean to you?  More performance and more choice across a range of offerings.

And if that’s not enough to make you look askance at your current system, we also introduced  the ATI Theater^TM HD 750 PC TV chip, which offers HDTV viewing capabilities on desktop and notebook PCs using analog, and digital, and free-to-air broadcast signals.   This means you can have an authentic HD experience on your PC or notebook ― virtually worldwide ― giving you a superior TV-on-the-PC experience on the go.

Does this mean I can watch American Idol virtually anywhere in the world?  I hope so ― even if Adam was robbed!

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

*AMD warranty does not cover damage caused by overclocking, even when enabled via AMD OverDrive™ software.

Yes, more for the same.

Today we announced the industry’s only six-core processor for x86 2P, 4P and 8P solutions, the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor. This new processor provides up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt using the same socket as previous platforms. The new chip also offers lots of differentiation around our AMD-Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology and AMD-P technology, and it is available today. And more versions are planned to roll out throughout the year.

Today we start to redefine the server business by offering customers more choice. The new AMD Opteron processor represents a move toward usage-based platforms that are designed around key workloads – not benchmarks. That enables us to give the superior value at every price-point for those key applications that are driving data center growth. We are making management and migration easier with a “no compromise” solution to our product line, which means you get all the same function on all the chips. Not some function on some and other functions on others.

In the end we believe that customers will be very interested in the performance-per-watt capabilities of this new chip. They will love that we keep adding in more performance within the same power envelope.  And they’ll love more flexibility and more performance in the same power envelope.

See:  more for the same.

So, the new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor is targeted at demanding applications, is shipping now and offers a full suite of features, providing value at every price point.

I’ll take two please!

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

We still believe that.

One of the ways Fusion comes to life is in how a PC is much more than an X86 CPU. The various elements of the PC platform coalesce to improve the user experience and enable the system to get its work done, seamlessly. In that same sense, let us consider how the Fusion brand is being made real every day with ATI Stream technology.

Our ATI Stream technology, which is about sharing workloads between the CPU and the GPU, divides software execution between the various compute engines at the platform level.  Today, more and more applications are highly parallel in their execution, either because the task at hand lends itself to this approach or because software programmers want to take full advantage of the increasingly popular multi-core processors, or perhaps a combination of both. 

This may be a behind the scenes, but its impact is likely very real for you. 

A good example is how video encoding and decoding − or “transcoding” as it is known − has become a mainstream, daily event for the YouTube generation. 

It has fast become central to many consumers’ experience to make digital video content available on any screen size and resolution, high definition or standard, regardless of how the original content was formatted.  What many consumers don’t realize is that this is a highly complex problem that can consume huge amounts of compute resources, often requiring hours rather than minutes or seconds to complete.

As it turns out, transcoding is a highly parallel computing problem, with relatively few instructions being hammered against a huge amount of data, something that graphics processors are particularly good at doing.  To that end, we are working closely with ISVs like Cyberlink and ArcSoft to help them embed a video transcoder in their applications that can leverage ATI Stream technology to greatly accelerate transcoding.  We even offer a free, basic utility that performs video transcoding on many of our latest ATI Radeon™ graphics cards, using the latest ATI Catalyst™ 9.5 driver.  Click here for a blog that includes a “how to” video showing how easy it is to work with video files and the ATI Video Converter.

Beyond transcoding, programmable ATI GPUs are rapidly expanding their role in compute platforms to perform diverse tasks, such as taking advantage of their hundreds of cores for protein folding in life-science research, seismic simulations for geophysical exploration, data encryption and many more applications through ATI Stream.  You can see here how financial data analysis is greatly accelerated with a GPU. 

What is particularly exciting about ATI Stream technology is where it is going.  Programming multi-core architectures is getting more standardized and straight-forward through the OpenCL specification, something AMD is already leveraging.   AMD showed an OpenCL demonstration of Havok Cloth™ game physics at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC). 

And because OpenCL is exactly that − free and open − the barrier to entry for programming multi-core systems is getting lower.

Later this year, AMD plans to release a new ATI Stream Software Development Kit which will make OpenCL widely available for AMD hardware.  Also planned are modifications at the chip-level designed to leverage the OpenCL specification. 

I will talk more about ATI Stream throughout the year with other specific examples of how AMD’s unique combination of CPU and GPUs are supercharging performance.  In the meantime, you can read more about this here.

And as we like to say, The Future is Fusion.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Enjoy.

Fact #1

The 50 million Wii gaming consoles shipped to date run on AMD processors.

Fact #2

Billions of financial transactions are conducted quickly and efficiently every day by major stock exchanges around the world on AMD processor-based servers.

Fact #3

7 of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD processors.

Fact #4

AMD processors were trusted to power crash safety test simulations for almost 2 million new cars that hit the road in the US in 2008.

Fact #5

Realistic special effects powered by AMD technology have helped Hollywood amass more than $5.4 billion in worldwide box office revenue.

Fact #6

AMD processors in the Top500 supercomputer list account for more than 4.029 petaflops of computing power (in English: that’s more than four thousand trillion calculations per second).

Fact #7

50 percent of Internet DNS traffic is efficiently and quickly routed via AMD processor-powered servers.

Fact #8

Musicians and producers who have collectively won 70 Grammy awards currently rely on AMD technology for their cutting-edge digital music production.

Fact #9

Every month nearly 23 million travelers find their ideal trip using online travel services powered by AMD processor-based hardware.

Fact #10

AMD graphics and slot machines are a winning combination.  More than 75 percent of new slot machines in Las Vegas use AMD graphics to power their visually stunning imagery, and more than half of those machines also use an AMD CPU.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.