Good numbers from TSMC AMD losing ground on Intel ATI Catalyst 10.4 A 5970 for 12 screens from PowerColor

Avril 2010 L M M J V S D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 You can read previous news using our archives. [ Print all news of this day ]

<< Previous day's news April 28, 2010

Next day of news >> April 30, 2010

Good numbers from TSMC   Posted on 29/04/2010 at 16:14 by Marc

	TSMC has just announced some pretty good results for its first quarter with turnover up by 133.4% on the same period a year ago (during the midst of the financial crisis) and up 0.1% on the previous quarter. TSMC says that 17% of its revenue comes from the 90nm engraving, against 27% for 65nm and 14% for 40nm. Note that 13% of turnover still comes from the 130nm engraving and 29% on engravings that are over this! Note the 40nm engraving’s star is on the rise. In the first quarter of 2009 it represented only 1% of wafer sales, a little over 1% in the second, 4% in the third and 9% in the fourth. TSMC says that demand from its clients is ever stronger and that it would need to increase production capacity by 30 to 40% to satisfy it. Over the course of 2010, TSMC hopes to be able to increase production capacity by 12.9%, against just 6.2% between 2008 and 2009. This will come through increases at factories working on 300mm wafers, the production of which should go up by 35% between now and the end of the year to represent over half of volumes engraved by TSMC. TSMC has announced that it will begin building a new factory in Taiwan in mid-2010, Fab15. At first it will be for the 40nm engraving, before being adapted to the 28nm and then 20nm engravings.

AMD losing ground on Intel   Posted on 29/04/2010 at 15:43 by Marc

	According to IDC, Intel sold 81% of all x86 processors for the first quarter of 2010, against 18.8% for AMD and 0.2% for VIA. In the previous quarter Intel had 80.5% of market share (volumes) and AMD 19.4%, so AMD has lost a little ground. However things are a little more serious if you look at the figures from the first quarter of 2009 when AMD had a market share of 22.3%! Intel’s domination is strongest in the laptop sector where 87.8% of processors are Intel against 12.1% for AMD, compared to 71.7% and 28% for desktop PCs.

ATI Catalyst 10.4   Posted on 29/04/2010 at 15:13 by Marc

	AMD published version 10.4 of the ATI Catalyst drivers last night. Among the innovations, note support for H.264 Level 5.1 videos for, among other things, a maximum resolution of 4096*2048 pixels. Note also that in terms of videos the introduction of a filter designed to reduce the Gibb effect (or mosquito noise) for the Radeon HD 4000s and 5000s. Suppport for the Windows 7 feature for video conversion by Drag & Drop has also been improved with better performance, new formats supported and the possibility of activating or disactivating GPU acceleration from the Catalyst control panel. Note also performance improvements with STALKER Clear Sky (6% with the 5970, 3% with the 5800 and 5700) as well as various bug corrections. You can download the Catalyst 10.3s here!

A 5970 for 12 screens from PowerColor   Posted on 29/04/2010 at 09:05 by Marc - source: BSN

	As you already know, DirectX 11 chips from AMD such as Juniper and Cypress can each support 6 DisplayPort type outs. PowerColor is currently working on quite an unusual Radeon HD 5970 4GB (2x2 GB) which allows you to exploit the possibilities of its two Cypress GPUs to a maximum. There are 12 DisplayPort outs that are cabled to the back of the card! An extreme configuration then, only for a handful of people but for which there is a market especially as you have to pay almost $1800 for the Matrox M9118 that can “only” support 8 screens. The PowerColor should cost around half that.