"We're at an inflection point," said AMD spokesman Mike Silverman, according to a Mercury News report. "We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mindset, because it won't be about that anymore."

Speculations are that AMD simply might halt high-end processors and focus more on mobile parts like the current Llano processors.  We can already see processor prices rise ...

If anything, 2011, with more than half a year of lacking an actual CEO, was a clear symptom that Advanced Micro Devices had to do something, and soon. The company has a new leader now and, sure enough, the man took some fairly drastic measures, and that includes more than this latest change in direction, as well as a branded RAM project.

The workforce also suffered, especially the PR and marketing departments (AMD axed large portions of each as part of its plan to cut total worldwide employee count by 10%).

The complicated thing about the focus on mobile is that ARM already has that well enough in hand, and NVIDIA just launched the Kal-El too. AMD may just be exchanging one headache for another with this.

After the introduction of the first models with 750, 850 and 1200 Watt ratings in October of this year, Enermax now releases its Platimax series with five new PSU units that are also 80PLUS Platinum certified.

Enermax' Platimax series is now comprised from a total of seven models that are rated to provide between 500 and 1500 Watts of power, and all of these feature an advanced series of technologies meant to improve power delivery.

One of the most important innovations introduced in the Platimax series is the Copper-Bridge Array transmission technology which replaces conventional wires to provide up to 3% better power regulation.

Enermax states that this improvement enables its PSUs to deliver cleaner DC power and raises the system's stability.

The Platimax power supplies feature between three and six 12V rails rated at either 25A or 30A each, and their combined power output varies according to the model.

As it's usually the case with high-end power supply units, Enermax' Platimax series features a modular cable design and all the models come bundled together with a wide variety of PCI Express connectors (both 6 and 8-pin) as well as with various SATA and MOLEX plugs.

Outside of the 80PLUS Platinum certifications, which ensures that the PSUs are able to deliver at least 94% efficiency in any usage scenario, Platimax power supplies are also compatible with the ErP Lot 6 standard.

The rest of the PSU features include 105

Most clock speeds are similar to today's Sandy Bridge LGA1155 processor models, some have Turbo Boost speeds as high as 3.90 GHz. Since Ivy Bridge silicon is an optical shrink of Sandy Bridge LGA1155, from 32 nm to 22 nm, and since Intel is using a more energy-efficient transistor design, there are significant improvements in TDP ratings. Have a peek, click the thumbnail:

Now that Intel has launched its first desktop processors based on the high-performance Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the chip maker is racing to get out the Xeon version of these CPUs and the first benchmarks showing the performance of such an 8-core SKU have recently made their way to the Web as softpedia reported today:

The chip is question is actually an engineering sample processor based on the Sandy Bridge-EP core and its performance was put to the test in both 3DMark 11 and CineBench R11.5.

In both of these benchmarks, the Intel eight-core CPU managed to outperform its desktop counterpart by quite a large margin, as the graphs put together by HardwareLuxx go to show.

From what we can tell, the ES processor used for these tests has a base frequency of 3.11GHz and Hyper-Threading seems to be working, but we don

Previously, all we knew about the launch date of Ivy Bridge processors was that Intel wanted to go for the March/April timeframe, with some recent rumors claiming March is a more likely release date.

However, according to CPU-World, Intel will actually hold the launch event for these processors in April of 2012.

The initial release will cover the third-generation Core i5 and Core i7 desktop products, and Core i7 mobile chips, while the next CPU wave will include the Core i3s and Core i5 mobile microprocessors. This launch will also take place in the second quarter of 2012, while desktop Pentium processors will follow in Q3 2012.

This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance that current Core CPUs according to Intel.

In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.

Together with the Ivy Bridge processors, Intel will also release the Z77, Z75, and H77 consumer PCH controllers, but the CPUs will also be compatible with the current LGA 1155 chipsets used for Sandy Bridge.

Results of an Intel Ivy Bridge 2GHz quad-core engineering sample were published at the Coolaler forums. The CPU-Z 1.58 screenshot reveals this chip runs at a voltage of 1.056V, it has 6MB L3 and a 65W TDP rating.

CPU-z reports the processor at 2407.1MHz in turbo mode on a Gigabyte Z68X-UD7 motherboard with BIOS F9 and also on a Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard with BIOS F5e. Coolaler also shows the systems dual channel memory running at 2133MHz with impressive CL6 timings! The AIDA64 benchmark results on the memory was 16GB/s read and 13GB/s write. This is great news for all the Intel LGA1155 motherboard owners as this confirms that Ivy Bridge 22nm CPUs will work on existing motherboards. This is also the first time that we have seen a B3 revision Ivy Bridge processor, so we must be getting closer to the launch.

The guys over at TPU published some slides that reveal AMD's estimated performance of their Trinity APUs.
To begin with, AMD is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current "Llano" APU.

It spread its benchmarks across three categories: visual performance (using 3DMark Vantage), general performance (using PCMark Vantage), and parallel compute (GPGPU) performance (calculated CTP SP GFLOPs). With 3DMark Vantage, Trinity A8 (quad-core), A6 (triple-core), and A4 (dual-core) APUs are seeing a roughly 32% improvement over their respective Llano-based counterparts; with general performance, the improvement is a candid 13.8% on average; but with GPGPU performance, the improvement is a massive 56.3% on average. This could be attributed to the VLIW4 architecture. Lastly, there are notable CrossFire dual-graphics performance improvements. The slides got onto the web via donim haber btw.

The new X79 chipset is expected to be compatible with the chip maker's 2012 high-performance CPUs based on the Ivy Bridge-E architecture.

This information was provided by a user from a Chinese forum, who posted what appears to be an Intel slide which details the socket compatibility of the company's X79 chipset for LGA 2011 motherboards.

According to this slide, users who buy an X79 Express powered board will still have a use for this after the release of the Ivy Bridge-E processors, which is expected to take place next year.

While the slide doesn't go into details, it does list the current Intel DX79SI motherboard, which leads us to believe that the changes between the two platforms will be kept to a minimum enabling board makers to support Ivy Bridge-E via a simple BIOS update.

Little is known at this point in time about Ivy Bridge-E processors apart from the fact that these will be built on Intel's advanced 22nm process node, and that they will presumably use the LGA 2011 socket.

According to the same Chinese website cited above, the first Ivy Bridge-E processors are expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2012. The Intel X79 Express PCH was designed to support LGA 2011 processors and it includes native support for a pair of SATA 6Gbps ports, four SATA 3Gbps ports and also carries an additional 8 lane PCI Express controller.

Intel demonstrated Knights Corner, an upcoming 22nm "compute accelerator" that promises the deliver a double precision floating point performance of 1 teraFLOPS. The chip will be Intel's first commercially available many integrated cores (MIC) architecture product, it features 50 cores and will compete with GPUs like NVIDIA's Tesla. The launch date of this Larrabee on steroids is still unknown.

Knights Corner, the first commercial Intel MIC architecture product, will be manufactured using Intel

The A4-3300 and A4-3400 see a price change as well as the A6-3500 and the FX-6100.

The six-core FX-6100 socket AM3+ processor saw a $10 price-cut, sending its price down from $165 to $155. Lastly, AMD introduced a new Athlon II processor in the FM1 package, the Athlon II X4 651, AMD's second, after Athlon II X4 631. This quad-core chip has 1 MB L2 cache per core, and is clocked at 3.00 GHz, 400 MHz higher than the Athlon II X4 631.

AMD is expected to unveil its first APUs based on the Bulldozer architecture, code named Trinity, more information about these chips making its way just recently to the Web as soft-pedia reports today:

The new Trinity pictures and slides confirm a series of other leaks that made their appearance in the last couple of weeks, but also bring a series of new details about the AMD chips.

Some of the most important of these come from a table showing the specifications of AMD's engineering sample Trinity APUs, which include either two or four Piledriver processing cores and have TDPs of 65, 100 or 125 Watts. The operating frequencies seem to vary from 2.2GHz to 3.8GHz, and with the help of Turbo Core 3.0 technology some of these APUs can even reach or go beyond the 4GHz mark.

As far as the integrated graphics is concerned, this seems to be clocked between 563MHz and 711MHz, and Turbo Core should also be able to increase these frequencies to higher values. AMD's next-generation APU combines processing cores based on the Bulldozer architecture with a VLIW4 GPU derived from the Cayman graphics used inside the Radeon HD 6900 series.

These cores will go by the name of Piledriver and, much like the current Llano APUs, lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU.

Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processors reared their heads in more than one online stores by now, but recently the chips were also listed in the US where a store offers its customers the chance to pre-order the upcoming Core i7-3930K and i7-3960X.

The chips were spotted by CPU-World in the online store of one e-tailer which has listed the Core i7-3930K at $609.99 (441 EUR), while its older brother, the Core i7-3960X, can be pre-ordered for $1099.99 (796 EUR).

Just as its name implies, the Core i7-3960X is the fastest of the two CPUs Intel will launch in mid-November, the X at the end of its designation informing us that it belongs in the company's Extreme Edition line.

The Core i7-3820, which Intel was expected to release together with the two SKUs detailed above, wasn't listed by the retailer which seems to confirm the rumors that state this won't actually arrive until February of 2012. All the processors are compatible with motherboards using the LGA 2011 socket and feature support for quad-channel memory.

TechEye claims AMD's new CEO Rory Read hopes to turn the tide via a total restructuring and making some of the most substantial cuts to staff that the firm has seen.

Determined to make his mark on the outfit Read has been sharpening his axe and looking for necks to try it out on.

There have been rumours floating around that AMD is gearing up to give a load of executives the boot. However, TechEye deep throats have told us that the extent of cuts is likely to be more far ranging than a few of yesterday's CEO's pets. Read has his eye on a total restructuring, which is fairly likely to ruin a lot of people's Christmas, our source said.

There is no word on a time scale for this.

Not a bad idea actually, there's this rumor that Intel may be working on an eight-core Atom for servers. The chip is reportedly based on the 22nm Silvermont Atom core, which is rumored to offer 20-25 percent better clock-for-clock performance than the current Atom. The codename of this eight-core Atom is said to be "Avadon" or "Abadon". Expected availability is 2013.

Silvermont is slated to be built using 22-nm process technology

The latest x86 marketshare data from research firm Mercury Research indicates that Intel is at the first spot with 80.6 percent, 0.3 percent more than the same period the year before, while AMD held 18.8 percent, a gain of 0.5 percent.

Mercury Research calculated that CPU shipments went up 5% year-over-year in the third quarter. The market research firm also said that the average selling price for PC CPUs was $107

AMD introduced its first desktop processors based on the Bulldozer architecture on October 12, but by the end of this year the chip maker is expected to release a few other chips based on this architecture, including the FX-8100 which was just spotted in HP's Pavillion systems.

The new AMD processor is expected to be released later this quarter according to CPU World, and it include four Bulldozer modules for a total of eight computing cores.

These are coupled with a massive 8MB of L2 cache as well a with 8MB of Level 3 cache memory, while its base clock speed is set at 2.8GHz.

Like the rest of AMD's FX-Series processors, the FX-8100 also includes support for the Turbo Core technology that can automatically increase the the CPU frequency to 3.1GHz when all cores are in use or to 3.7GHz when four or fewer cores are loaded.

Support for the SSE4, AES-NI and AVX instruction sets is also featured, but the chip comes with a lower TDP that the rest of its eight-core Bulldozer siblings since it fits inside a 95W TDP.

On the HP Pavilion HPE h8z order page, the AMD FX-8100 is $80 (58 EUR) cheaper than the 8150 and the processor is also available in the Pavillion h8m desktop PC.

AMD has confirmed that the first APUs based on the next-generation Trinity core will get launched in early 2012. Thomas Seifert, senior vice president and chief financial officer of AMD, said:

That got them into the Guinness Records

Overclocker Andre Yang now breaks the record with 8461.51 MHz. According to the validation page, 8461.51 MHz was achieved using a base clock speed of 272.95 MHz, with 31.0X multiplier, and a brutal core voltage of 1.992V (almost 2 volts!). As with AMD's record feat, an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard was used. A single 2 GB Corsair-made memory module was used doing 909.8 MHz (1818.16 MHz DDR) with timings of 9-9-9-24T. Like with AMD's feat, only two out of the FX-8150's eight cores were enabled.

AMD is working on a B3 stepping for its Bulldozer processors as anand found out. Perhaps the new stepping will somewhat improve the performance of the chip, but the site adds that if the past has any meaning, a new stepping won't arrive anytime soon. For instance, the C3 stepping came about 9 months after the release of the Phenom II X4 with C2 stepping.

The initial CPUs use B2 stepping, but an AMD BIOS and kernel document already shows reference to unreleased B3 stepping. A stepping update should bring improvements (usually minor) to performance and power consumption, as well as possible bug fixes. Stepping updates are a normal way to provide small upgrades in between bigger ones, such as die shrinks and microarchitecture changes. While B3 stepping may help Bulldozer a little bit, it's very unlikely that a stepping update would provide huge benefits and thus make Bulldozer significantly better than Intel's equivalent CPUs - so waiting for this update is not exactly a good idea.

The initial processor lineup will be comprised of both dual and quad-core parts for various markets, including desktop and notebooks computers.

Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips and features basically the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements.

This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance that current Core CPUs according to Intel.

In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.

In the mobile version of Ivy Bridge, all these improvements are paired with a configurable TDP design, which enables the CPU to greatly surpass its maximum thermal design power when additional cooling is provided (like when placed on a notebook cooling stand).

Together with the Ivy Bridge processors, Intel will also release the Z77, Z75, and H77 consumer PCH controllers, but the CPUs will also be compatible with the current LGA 1155 chipsets used for Sandy Bridge.