whispers

It's jinxed: A lot of things related to the Bulldozer go wrong, including the joined endeavor of Microsoft and AMD to improve the processor's performance under Windows 7.

Maybe Microsoft boss, Steve Ballmer, will also address various tops and flops of the company in his Keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2012 – the last of its kind, as, to the surprise of the industry, Microsoft is saying farewell to this show. The list of flops got a little longer in mid-December, with the “update to optimize the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs” (KB2592546 ). In the description, Microsoft explains that, until now, the performance of the AMD Bulldozer CPU has been worse than expected.

Once a year, at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), the experts of the craft meet to report on the advancements in transistor, memory and manufacturing technology. Intel is struggling with the C1-step of its newest processors and AMD miscounts.

It's the “worst-kept secret of the industry” – so it was said at Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) – that Intel's Haswell processor will feature transactional memory. Other leaked bits of news concern Intel's Ivy Bridge and AMD's Trinity.

About two years ago, in August 2009, Intel, IBM and Sun founded a “Drafting Group” in order to devise a common specification for transactional memory (TM). All three of them were planning to incorporate this feature into their next processor generations.

by Christof Windeck

The mass layoff at AMD overshadows the launch of the 16-core Interlagos and speculations about cooperation between AMD and ARM are, yet again, circulating. Meanwhile, Intel gives a foretaste of the next Xeons with the Core i7-3900.

A few days before AMD launched its bearer of hope for the server market, the Bulldozer Interlagos, a new strong competitor threw their hat into the ring: ARM.

At the beginning of the year, ARM had stated that it planned to extend the ARM architecture to 64 bits by 2014/15. Now, at ARM's TechCon 2011 in Santa Clara, right where competitor Intel has its headquarters, the British company announced that it's advancing much faster and that the first server processors with 64-bit ARMv8 architecture might become available in 2013. Microsoft has probably exercised quite a bit of pressure.

Look who has arrived: AMD's Bulldozer. The general enthusiasm, however, is limited, the most frequently used adjective in this context is "disappointing". Nevertheless, numerous data centers count on this new architecture, in Oak Ridge, in Stuttgart and elsewhere.

Hot chips and hot decisions hailed from Palo Alto in California: the press release from HP about the detachment of its PC business and revelations by the developers at the Hot Chips conference.

First, IBM celebrates its 100th anniversary, 50 years of IBM Golfball Typewriter and 30 years of IBM PC – and then it has to silently drop the prestige project Blue Waters. But the other players in the game are also merrily postponing their projects.

While AMD shows off numerous innovations in the interaction of CPUs and GPUs at its own developer forum, Intel presents some interesting features of the processor generation after next, Haswell: AVX2.

No, AMD didn't introduce a new CEO at the start of the Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) in Bellevue near Seattle – as had been expected by some. Instead, it officially launched the A-Series that had previously been known under the codename Llano. In what could be interpreted as a slight against the new chips (with the old Phenom core), vice president Rick Bergman already presented a laptop with a prototype of the successor called Trinity, which is scheduled to roll out with Bulldozer architecture, a DirectX 11 graphics core and 50 percent more speed next year.

"Ship, Ship, Hurray", it says on AMD's website – the Fusion processor "Llano" is now being shipped in large numbers. AMD has renegotiated its contract with Globalfoundries and Texas Instruments acquires – no, not AMD, but – National Semiconductor at a sky-high price.