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  • Dustin Sklavos - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    I actually just spoke to him, couldn't believe it, but yeah. Blew my mind, I've been working with him at NVIDIA practically since I joined AT. :)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    Here's hoping he can help get Enduro where I want it to be. Sean seemed to be pretty heavily involved in helping NVIDIA focus on the right problems with Optimus, so Enduro would be a great task for him (managing, not coding, obviously).
  • HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link

    Looks like Enduro (or AMD?) is such a lost cause he went running back to nVidia as fast as he could after the tour of the (leased) HQ.

    "What's the deal with the people?" he asked as they rounded it up.

    "Oh? Yeah, today's a busy day. We got all hands on deck to really show you our strength..."

    "Wait. This is it? At nVidia, this is a team dedicated to something like Shield. This is all the people you have?"

    "We had layoffs. I mean, we got three or so people here and we gave 'em big photos to cover their door with, but single hires only go so far to make up for all the people we had to lay off..."

    "Yeah, dude. You know what? I forgot something in my car. Man. I'm so sorry. Is this an exit? It is? Oh, great! I'll be right back. I swear. I just... uhm, I forgot my... insulin shot."

    "You're diabetic?"

    "Weeell, no, not really, but hey I always... uh... carry it around just in case I become that way. Yeah. You wait here. I'll be... uh, right back."

    Raja waits. He looks around. He hears rapid footsteps. A car door open. It shuts. Then the car starts up and the engine roars as wheels squeal. The car crashes through the gate and Raja sighs. He walks up to the nearest window and watches the dust cloud from the car's track settle slowly back to the Earth.

    "Did he bolt, too?" One of the few non-name people walks up behind him. "I had high hopes he wouldn't..."

    "Yeah. Seems like once they always do that. What is it about us that makes them do that? That's the fifth gate this week!"
  • Spunjji - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    You really are a special kind of person.
  • krumme - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    That is great news. AMD is in dire need excactly at that spot. There seems to be lot of opportunities here :)
    - explaining, dialogue and developing relations is also good for tech development in the long run. So congrats to us.
  • jeffkibuule - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Hopefully the turnaround time from people to product will still give AMD enough time to have a fighting chance.
  • axien86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link


    Newest benchmarks already show AMD's APUs dominate over Intel's overpriced Haswells.

    Now waiting in the wings, is AMD's total fusion APU project called Kaveri.

    When that is released in the next few months, AMD will go thermonuclear on Intel and start a new age of computing.
  • Ewram - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    please link said benchmarks? please?
  • axien86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link


    CPU review site Itocp posted review on Sunday May 18.

    http://www.itocp.com/htmls/33/n-4533-4.html
  • jamyryals - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    The bars look nice for them. Unfortunately, I don't read Chinese very well so I guess I'll have to wait to draw meaningful conclusions.
  • wilmotsprings - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    The i7-4770 benchmarked has GT2 (HD 4600) graphics. The R SKU will have their GT3e.
  • FITCamaro - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    The labels on the charts are probably min and max frames per second.
  • gamoniac - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    For the synthetic benchmarks, the first bar is the total score, the second bar is the GPU score.
    For the gaming benchmarks, the first bar is the lowest FPS, the second bar is the average FPS.
  • medi02 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    AMDs APUs are better at games (without discrete card) than Intel's newest and fastest.
    Is that news?
  • eanazag - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    My interpretation of the graphs is that the new Haswell is dangerously close to going head to head with AMD's best on IGP. It would be beneficial to know what the two bars per item represent. I would guess turbo and no turbo. I don't read Chinese. Anyway, what is not there is the Haswell part is 84W TDP and AMD's is 100W. In all likelihood the Intel chip will run cooler. AMD will still hold the driver software advantage.
  • axien86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link


    The review also shows that AMD's A10 Trinity was using older drivers against Intel's most recent and that it also hampered slow memory.

    AMD's new Richland APU is 65w (versus Haswell's 84w) and anywhere from 20-40% faster and more power efficient than Trinity and will be selling in the market in June for around $75 to $125.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Richland isn't much of a change over Trinity, it's still using VLIW based graphics (not GCN). The fast ones are still 100W, the low end ones are 65W, much like Llano and Trinity before it.
  • Penti - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    Richland is just a revision of Trinity and nothing else changes on clock-speed and how they do Turbo as they has added a sensor. It's exactly the same performance as before per MHz. Those 20-40% is just between two sets of two different SKU's that is clocked very differently in the 40% case.
  • fteoath64 - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    While this is true for Richland being 65w part, the preliminary benchmarks actually showed between 15%-25% improvement over the existing Trinity chips. Just to average up tp 20% would be a significant improvement over the Intel part considering it is a top-end part at high cost. This actually means the AMD Richland part costing between 1/2 to half the price of the Intel part is a great deal for many. For many games, the frame-rates are more than enough on the APU.
  • lmcd - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    Seriously? Where'd they find all that performance? I thought Richland was just tweaks...
  • wilmotsprings - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    The top bar (lighter blue) is combine test score. The bottom bar (darker blue) is graphics test score. You can peruse 3DMark technical guide for more details.
    http://s3.amazonaws.com/futuremark-static/download...
  • owlhuang - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    For 3DMark, they are "total score" and "GPU score".
    For Games, they are "minimum fps" and "average fps"
  • Hrel - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    Not even close to a reliable source.
  • eanazag - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Yeah, um. I am having a hard time swallowing this pill. The video card portion could be believable. I think you may be even surprising the folks at AMD.
  • cmdrdredd - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Um...no cause I still buy a dedicated GPU anyway. So until they have actual useful CPU performance on par with intel but cheaper or higher performing, then I don't even care what they do. Maybe I'll buy their graphics cards but that's cause their GPU side actually remains competitive at the task it is meant for. I am never going to buy a CPU because it has a GPU that can play 30fps at 1280x720. Give me a break.
  • hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Integrated GPU's are more the rule, gamers are the exception. Having much better integrated GPU solutions is a complete win for the industry.
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    If gamers are the exception, what do the other people need the GPU horsepower for? I'm pretty sure HD2000 is adequate for all non-gamers with sub 30" resolutions.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    I see we have another delusional fanboy in the house.
  • Donkey2008 - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    If I had a nickel for every AMD fanboy that said "AMD iz gonna crushez Intelz!!!" I would be playing bridge with Bill and Warren every week.
  • medi02 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    AMD didn't crush even when Intel when Athlon 64's were hands down the better CPUs in all regards (and that situation lasted for quite a while). Intel was still selling times more than AMD, even though it's CPUs were:
    1) Slower
    2) Consumed more power
    3) AND WHERE MORE EXPENSIVE (tadaa)

    So I'm not quite sure which virtual fanbois you are refering too.
  • Hector2 - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    It's always good to have a dream
  • tviceman - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Nvidia and AMD have swapped a few employees in the past year or so. Kinda strange if you ask me.
  • Tuvok86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Is he the guy who invented graphs that don't start at zero? : D
  • hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Hahah.. I love those graphs!

    nVIdia ********************
    AMD ******************
    0 10

    nVidia ********************
    AMD **********
    8 10

    As an fanboy/gullible consumer which graph suits you best? :)
  • hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Ouch.. formatting fail.. owell. :)
  • speculatrix - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    I'd consider buying an AMD GPU card if I knew they were serious about supporting linux, which is what I run on my laptop and desktop computers 97% of the time they are powered on*. No amount of slick marketing is going to persuade me to buy AMD/ATI over NVidia or Intel, because no matter how good the benchmarks might look, a card that turns into a brick after upgrading my OS and the drivers failing and there being no updates, is a waste of money.

    * windows is booted very rarely, for special utilities that aren't on linux. last time was yesterday for ODIN to reflash a Samsung phone.
  • hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    What apps are you using in Linux that utilize GPU? Not asking to be sarcastic I'm truly interested.
  • mrtg - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    cgminer -- churning away rock solid for months!
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    HD 7970M is about 300MHash/s so I wouldn't really think that's a viable way to go, except to supplement hashing power. You're far better off just buying inexpensive desktop GPUs, or FPGAs (or if you can find one for sale, ASICs).
  • Stuka87 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    AMD's drivers are actually Open Source, nVidia's are not. In my experience AMD's drivers for linux have worked better than nVidia's over the last year or so.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    AMD has an OSS driver but it's not feature complete (power management biggest omission) and doesn't perform as well as the proprietary one.
  • tecknurd - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    AMD's drivers are not open source. AMD just provided some documentation and let the open source community hack at it to make the graphics card come to life. There are two drivers a Linux user can use. One is fglrx which is a closed-source driver written by AMD. The other is radeon that created by the open source community and Xorg. Using the radeon driver in Linux has some support for 3D, so using AMD graphics for playing games on STEAM will be 50% chance of working and 50% of not working. Using fglrx driver may work often in STEAM, but it may also crash more often than the radeon driver.
  • lmcd - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    Wrong. AMD employees do significant work on the FOSS AMD drivers. Radeon does well on many Steam games (R600g and R300g both perform near their proprietary counterparts). 50% is skewed incorrectly -- games will work 90% on Steam games with FOSS. Framerates may not be quite sufficient but that isn't "not working."

    Proprietary drivers are buggy, but they are compliant *cough* Nvidia *cough*.
  • Calinou__ - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Suddenly: the HD7000s. If you get more than 4 FPS with them with radeon, you're lucky. 8)
  • mayankleoboy1 - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    Both AMD and Nvidia open source drivers suck terribly. They have piss poor perf and usually cant downclock/upclock .
    The only difference is AMD provides support for developing these opensource drivers, while Nvidia provides absolutely no support whatsoever.
  • alwayssts - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    I understand your viewpoint, but surely they must be planning to keep linux support, for what it is, up to date.

    Heck, they released the strings for Hainan to the open-source stack and we still have no idea when that will be actual products..the official driver still refers to it as the vague 'R503' last time I checked. While one can absolutely argue gpu performance and feature disparity in Linux (across all brands, not just AMD), I fail to see how their cards will brick with an update. Support, again for what it is, seems to be consistent if not proactive.
  • medi02 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    So, nVidia is somehow better at supporting Linux eh?
    Wouldn't have thought so after this:
    http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/06/linus-torvald-say...
  • HisDivineOrder - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    First, why not giant-sized image of the man's face? I mean, the fanboy article about Raja was like an obituary on the man's every accomplishment, his awesomeness, the fact that he enjoyed long walks on the beach, etc.

    This one seems rather brief. Shouldn't Sean get equal amounts of fanboyism? He is... Sean Pelletier after all. This is Sean Pelletier we're talking about here!

    Haha, anyways, the thing that amuses me about this is how the article ignores the very real possibility that AMD could hire all these people for the short term gain of hiring a single high profile individual to convince investors of a company's longterm viability. Certainly, getting rid of teams of engineers, marketeters, etc while hiring four people seems like they're NOT equal in terms of how much it helps or hurts a company.

    But hiring high profile names that are years away from any meaningful difference in the company's day to day and by every account they don't have years... well, that suggests to me they're hiring people to prop their reputation up in the hopes of investment... or buyout.

    And one of those two happens (or bankruptcy), these guys are free to leave with a lot more money and join Qualcomm.
  • Dustin Sklavos - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    Actually, for what Sean does, his presence in the company could be felt much, *much* more immediately, and essentially solves a serious problem that AMD has had for years. Understand that he's been one of our primary contacts over at NVIDIA for a long time and has been able to answer product questions and get us help extremely quickly. This isn't something we've (or at least I've) had as readily available from AMD.

    So while the end user may not immediately feel the difference, the press absolutely will.
  • Peanutsrevenge - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    I doubt that these guys would be jumping aboard a sinking ship!
    If you had a healthy choice of successful companies to sign up to, would you pick one that was sick and dying with the chance it would infect your career?

    I do hope AMD turn around their CPU division (not APUs as they're fine, I mean high performance, halo CPUs). I've also had a soft spot for them and I've put them in all the SoHo Linux servers I've built and they've been rock solid. Just finished first mITX/APU server 30 mins ago.
  • AmdInside - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link

    This is silicon valley. I know a lot of people who jump ship just because they get bored. It is normal for people in silicon valley to change jobs all the time.
  • fteoath64 - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    I think you might be on to something. I agree they are certainly not joining a sinking ship but on the contrary, might be shown a golden ship with the proposed new architecture that they are trying with Xbox720 and PS4. That huma tech which if done in totality for the discrete card market and even on their APU will be "leaps and bounds" compared to the competition. Here are the benchmarks, Intel's IGP used to be 1/3 the speed of AMD. Now it is getting to 90% of AMD's speed. So AMD needed a 3X leap-frog to stay competitively ahead. You cannot get such improvements without dramatic architectural changes, so they found a golden goose somewhere and convinced their people it is so. We shall see ..
  • jasonelmore - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    Cant believe there wasnt a anti competition clause in his contract.
  • Dustin Sklavos - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link

    I don't know about other states, but California's pretty anti-"anti-competition" clauses. There may not be a whole hell of a lot NVIDIA can really do. I can't imagine they're remotely happy about this, though.
  • Silma - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link

    The Dream Team will have to find a vision for AMD and solutions really fast.
    AMD is financially super weak, it's product pipeline isn't exciting and I highly doubt their foray into ARM will save them as I see very little value-added here in comparison to Qualcomm and others.
  • jonjonjonj - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    funny a marketer is part of the dream team. poor amd. how about someone who can make decent drivers or a cpu that has good single threaded performance.
  • HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link

    Not a terribly good sign. AMD must be pretty bad off for a guy to leave and then go back to nVidia within a month. Especially when AMD trumpets the move and then--whoops!--the guy changed his mind.

    Things must be worse than I thought.
  • krumme - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    Just looks like bad work from amd. Surely nv marketing know that also.
  • Spunjji - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    I didn't see AMD trumpet the move.
  • soydeedo - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    Maybe he just wanted in on their secrets? =P
  • medi02 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    Marketing is a legalized evil.
    What made this guy worth "Dream team" title?
    Does he buzz too effectively?
    Was he the one behind brilliant idea of re-branding old chips?
    /puke

    Hire real guys please. Engineers. Not BS/FUD spreaders...

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