Advanced Micro Devices Tuesday announced the completion of the sale of its Digital TV (DTV) processor business to Broadcom Corp. For some reason, the company had to slash the price of its business unit by $51 million.
Instead of originally announced $192.8, AMD sold its DTV biz for approximately $141.5 million in cash subject to certain escrows and adjustments pursuant to the terms of the definitive asset purchase agreement.
AMD’s DTV product line includes all Xilleon integrated DTV processors and complete turnkey reference designs, as well as NXT receiver ICs, the Theater 300 DTV processor, and a line of panel processors that perform advanced motion compensation, frame rate conversion and scaling.
AMD got its DTV business unit when it acquired ATI Technologies back in late 2006.
(Full article ‘Broadcom Completes Acquisition of Ex-ATI’s Digital TV Division from AMD’)
The market of ultra low-cost personal computers (ULCPCs) is on the rise these days as many PC vendors are looking forward to add appropriate products into the lineup. Nonetheless, Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s No. 2 maker of x86 central processing units (CPUs), is not particularly enthusiastic about such systems despite of the fact that it does have a processor to address the segment.
Answering a question about AMD’s response to Intel Corp.’s Atom processor, the new chief executive officer of the company, Dirk Meyer, said that AMD was looking forward the market, but would discuss actual products only in November, 2008.
(Full article ‘AMD to Discuss Rival for Intel Atom Towards Year End’)
Advanced Micro Devices has officially unveiled the first details about its forthcoming code-named Shrike mobile platform and code-named Swift processor that combines general purpose x86 core along with graphics processing engine. The company claims that its hybrid processors – with x86 and graphics cores – will help it to compete on the market of ultra-portable mobile systems.AMD Shrike mobile platform will be based on the code-name Swift processor, which features two x86 processing cores, ATI Radeon HD DirectX 10.1-class graphics processing core, dual-channel DDR3 memory controller as well as PCI Express controller, according to a slide published by GottaBeMobile web-site.
(Full article ‘AMD Hopes for 20% Performance Improvement Thanks to Hybrid Microprocessors’)
On this occasion, AMD is ready with a major product launch on schedule and is enjoying a bit of good fortune as well.
Notebook makers 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 on Wednesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. Notebooks with the chips will be arriving over the next several weeks from companies like Acer, Dell, HP, and Toshiba, said Bahr Mahony, director of AMD’s mobile business.
Assuming those notebooks ship without incident, Puma will arrive in far better shape than Barcelona, the quad-core server processor that arrived a year late after running into major technical glitches.
(Full article ‘AMD ready to unleash Puma’)
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday unveiled its first “highly-efficient” AMD Opteron processors with four processing engines. The new chips feature lowered power consumption, but may not necessarily offer unprecedented performance-per-watt ratio due to relatively low clock-speeds and disputable way of measuring power consumption. Still, they provide low-power quad-core AMD chip options to the company’s clients.
“Our new Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processors were designed to help datacenter managers who see power consumption and virtualization as the keys to solving their overall performance equation,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager, server and workstation division, AMD.
The new chips for dual processor (DP) machines from AMD are quad-core Opteron models 2344 HE (1.70GHz), 2346 HE (1.80GHz) and 2347 HE (1.90GHz), whereas for multi-processor (MP) machines AMD unveiled quad-core 2346 HE (1.80GHz) and 2347 HE (1.90GHz) chips.
(Full article ‘AMD Releases Its First Low-Power Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE Chips’)