AMD on Tuesday revealed a plethora of new features for their upcoming Bulldozer processor cores, CPUs that will be implemented on high end computers along with the AM3+ platform.

Using presentation slides the company revealed a Bulldozer die with eight AMD64 cores and 8MB of L2 cache while features two 72-bit DDR3 memory channels and four 16-bit receive/16-bit transmit HyperTransport links.

According to Electronista, “the new architecture splits eight cores across four Bulldozer modules, each with two integer cores and a floating point core.”

With the AM3+ socket architecture CPUs add support for low-voltage DRAM and increased current for higher frequency HyperTransport connections and two memory channels.

For legacy users the sockets will also be backwards-compatible with older AM3 processor.

The new Bulldozer processor also utilizes Turbo Core technology which can increase clock speeds across all of a chipsets cores when TDP headroom is available.

AMD will begin rolling out the Bulldozer CPUs by the end of 2011, although specific launch dates have not been revealed at this time.

[via Tom's Hardware]

AMD Bulldozer Details Revealed, Prepares For High-End Computing Glory is a post from: The Inquisitr

Today seems to be a big day for news about people looking for new jobs. First of course is the big layoff rumored to be happening at Myspace, then comes news out of Redmond that President of  Server and Tools Business Bob Muglia has been shown the door, even though he’ll be hanging around until summer.

Now e get word that AMD has decided that it’s time for some new leadership as the board announced that CEO Dirk Meyer is by mutual agreement with the board of directors resigning immediately.

All this is rather puzzling since it was under Meyer’s leadership that AMD managed to engineer a turnaround and actually pull ahead of Intel in some cases.

The CEO search committee will be headed by Bruce Claflin, chairman of AMD’s board. Claflin will become executive chairman as he assumes additional responsibilities during the transition. Seifert will maintain his current job as CFO and has asked not to be considered for the permanent CEO job.

“Dirk became CEO during difficult times.  He successfully stabilized AMD while simultaneously concluding strategic initiatives including the launch of GlobalFoundries, the successful settlement of our litigation with Intel and delivering Fusion (accelerated processing units) APUs to the market,” said Claflin.

”However, the Board believes we have the opportunity to create increased shareholder value over time,” Claflin continued. ” This will require the company to have significant growth, establish market leadership and generate superior financial returns.  We believe a change in leadership at this time will accelerate the company’s ability to accomplish these objectives.”

via VentureBeat

One has to wonder, given the circumstances, what kind of possible scandal is lurking under the surface. It sure makes one think of the whole HP and Hurd fiasco.

AMD kicks current CEO to the curb is a post from: The Inquisitr

It was bound to happen but Intel’s fancy new Sandy Bridge chips that is headed to new computers has Hollywood happy like a hooker on crack.

For those who don’t know about this new chip it is Intel’s newest offering that combines both a CPU (computer processor) with a GPU (graphics processor); which does away with the need of a separate video card without giving up video quality.

Except these chips come with a little sumpin sumpin extra – lock down digital rights management (DRM).

According to The Inquirer this has got everyone in Hollywood all warm and fuzzy:

Apparently the media cartels are dead keen to get their content on PCs that are locked-down even to the level of the chip.

Mooly Eden, Intel’s VP and general manager of the PC client group said that Intel’s embedded DRM allows content to be streamed to computers with Sandy Bridge chips and that Chipzilla is making deals with all the studios and content distributors to make it available.

So while punters will get saddled with DRM on their computers, Intel thinks that it can suck them in and buy them off with improved multimedia processing.

As of right now AMD and Nvidia aren’t going down this road but you can be sure that if there isn’t some kind of consumer backlash against this idea they will be forced to just to stay competitive. When that happens we all get screwed.

Thanks Intel.

image courtesy of Fork In A Toaster

Intel to Hollywood “You’ll love our new chip” – Kiss Kiss is a post from: The Inquisitr

Talk about being nickeled and dimed to to the point of extreme pissed offness.

I understand that companies – especially gaming companies of all types – are looking for new ways to increase their profits any way the can. With gaming companies it is the increasing use of DLC’s (downloadable content) that includes everything from cool new content to accessories you need in order to play better, but one has to wonder just how far this type of thing will go.

Well it seems that we may have the beginnings of an answer.

News is out that Intel is selling a processor that has been intentionally hobbled. The CPU is their low-end Pentium G6951 where they have limited both the cache and the hyperthreading features. However you can remove the limitation by paying Intel  $50.00 for an unlock code.

When you pay this blood -money you can then use the unlock code to download and apply some software that unlocks those features of the CPU. This of course means that in order to unlock the features they already had to have been there which means you are paying twice for that processor.

According to the story in Engadget this is just a test being done by Intel in the lower-end processor market.

images courtesy of Engadget

Intel holding your CPU for ransom is a post from: The Inquisitr

Intel Huron River CPUs will be arriving by the first quarter of 2011 according to recent reports and will be based around the 32nm Sandy Bridge silicon processor with dual and quad-core processors with built-in Intel Turbo Boost.

The chips are also expected to come with various forms of wireless connectivity, including WiFi and WiMAX depending on the model chosen by the user. Intel is also going to throw in wireless display technology as an added bonus.

According to SlashGear:

Intel are expected to position Huron River processors as suitable for both regular laptops and ultrathin models.  It will replace the Calpella platform, first launched in 2009, as the seventh-generation Centrino.

It’s quite a while to wait, but given the hype the processors have been getting, it’s a wait worth the time.

Intel Huron River CPUs To Be Released Upon The World With WiMax…In 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Much of the news and discussion about yesterday’s iPad announcement by Steve Jobs has centered around the pros and cons of the actual device. This is easy to understand because the iPad really is quite the sexy little beast but that wasn’t the really important news to come out of the presentation.

While the majority of blog posts and opinions about the iPad have mentioned it in passing Steve Jobs told investors that Apple was taking back its supply chain – the complete ‘from breadboard to sexy industrially designed finished product’ supply chain.

You see Apple has a habit of locking up its supply chain. Whether it be paying LG $500 million for long term supply agreements to making the same money deal with Toshiba for flash memory Apple is all about making sure it has control. There is nothing wrong with the approach and for Apple this makes perfect business sense.

The only area where Apple had a problem with this is with the CPUs that power all of its products. The PowerPC CPU was nothing but a thorn in Jobs’ side that caused him to try and cut deals with Intel and move the Mac line to their processors.

But having to rely on outside providers for a core need of the Apple products has been a source of irritation for Mr. Jobs. The solution for this was found in the specs released at the announcement of the iPad.

iPad Processor
1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip

In a single move Jobs has put Intel on notice that their days as a supplier are numbered. It also let Apple investors know that Apple would no longer be beholden to an outside company for an integral part of the product line.

Apple can now control their entire supply line.

More importantly though is the fact that by using their own CPUs and and operating system that will be specifically tunes to it – whether it be Mac OS X or the iPhone OS – this removes any future visits from the Department of Justice and the silly monopoly charge. If your OS definitely won’t work on any other type of platform (that was one reason why Apple liked the PowerPC CPU) or hardware then there is no monopoly because you are restricting its availability.

No more will Apple have to deal with little pissants like PsyStar or other hackentosh efforts because they have removed the principal agent that allowed these kind of things to happen.

Of all the people that I have been reading following the iPad announcement only John Gruber even recognized the importance of the A4 CPU

Lastly, there’s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”.

However even Gruber didn’t look past the sexy aspect of this. He is right though – this is a huge development by Apple and one that is going to have some major consequence going forward.

In a very subdued move Steve Jobs once more re-affirmed the fact that Apple products were once again a closed locked down system. In the process I can imagine he made Apple investors a very happy bunch.

The iPad might be sexy but that’s not the real news from Jobs’ new baby is a post from: The Inquisitr

Researchers at Invisible Things Lab presented information at the CanSecWest conference on Thursday in Vancouver about a security exploit that could comprise computers running on Intel processors. The exploit involves the poisoning of of the cache of a CPU operating in System Management Mode (SMM). They also noted that this was the third such types of security exploits that the team had found affecting Intel based computers in the last ten months.

The SMM exploit works by poisoning the chip’s cache memory which would allow for forced access to SMM, one of the most privileged CPU modes on x86 architectures. Even operating systems can’t access SMM – the mode that handles certain errors, power management and other features.

The potential consequence of attacks on SMM might include SMM rootkits, hypervisor compromises, or OS kernel protection bypassing, they said.

Intel has been working on a solution to prevent caching attacks on SMM memory, and a spokesperson has said that many new systems are protected against the exploit. But, writing in their paper, Rutkowska and Wojtczuk said: “Some of Intel’s recent motherboards, like the popular DQ35, are still vulnerable to the attack. Additionally, the workarounds that Intel has mentioned to us are not yet officially documented.”

Source: SC Magazine – Intel CPU exploit threatens PCs worldwide

Time to bloated Norton solution in 3 …. 2 …. 1…..

CPU poisoning affects Intel systems is a post from: The Inquisitr