Build Your Own AMD Phenom II Machine - A HardwareZone DIY Special

While Intel is proudly boasting about the sheer performance that their new Core i7 processors delivers, AMD has gone down a different route, choosing instead to expound about the value of their offerings. For example, their current Dragon platform, consisting of a Phenom II processor, AMD 790GX motherboard and an ATI Radeon HD 4870, is touted as a competitive yet value for money alternative to Intel's pricey Core i7 offerings. Of course they both serve different needs of end-users.Additionally, AMD also carved out a niche for themselves amongst HTPC builders. Ask any HTPC enthusiast what is their motherboard chipset of choice and chances are he would be using an AMD 780G.

The main reason behind this is the board's integrated Radeon HD 3200 GPU. This integrated graphics processor (IGP) is actually based on the older Radeon HD 2400 GPU, which barely even qualifies as an entry-level GPU by today's standards. But as an IGP, however, it is one of the best, thanks to its ability to crunch high definition (HD) videos. It's kind of like being the smallest fish in the ocean, but the biggest fish in the pond.

Facebook knuckle-raps Intel, AMD

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices' latest server processors have come in for criticism from Facebook, the social networking company, for failing to deliver on promised performance.According to Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, the latest generations of server processors from companies like Intel and AMD have failed to deliver anticipated performance gains. "The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," he said at the GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco recently.

A massive consumer of servers, Facebook is constantly looking to upgrade its infrastructure as well as minimize power consumption to cut costs.The hardware industry, too, has failed to deliver servers that are highly power-efficient for companies such as Facebook and Amazon, Heiliger said. "To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient."According to Heilinger, Google, which has designed and built its own servers, has done a good job.In order to meet the needs of companies deploying large computing clusters, Heiliger said they should come together to develop common standards that vendors can design for.

AMD ATI Stream Technology Accelerates Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Workflows

What:

AMD (NYSE: AMD) announces the availability of a beta plug-in for the Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 software that continues to enhance the performance of a range of complex video editing tasks.1 The plug-in is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Adobe and AMD engineers to take advantage of ATI Stream technology to allocate processing between available system CPU and GPU resources to enable maximum application performance.

Why: The Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 plug-in draws on the computational power of both the CPU and GPU to add hardware-driven performance improvements to the already rapid processing power of Adobe Premiere Pro. ATI Stream technology allows the powerful GPU to be used for more than just graphics processing, resulting in enhanced general computing power.

Who: Consumers and professionals using AMD platform technology, such as the desktop PC platform technology codenamed "Dragon,” ATI Radeon™ or ATI FirePro™ graphics cards looking to improve the performance of compute-intensive applications like video encoding. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 provides a comprehensive solution for creative professionals who need to craft world-class video, audio and interactive media. ATI Stream Technology taps additional computing resources available to Adobe Premiere Pro users by taking advantage of both CPU and GPU processing power.

Benefits: The ATI Catalyst™ Driver enables millions of ATI Radeon™ and ATI FirePro™ users to unlock ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities on their graphics cards. Upon downloading http://links.amd.com/adobepremiere and installing the latest plug-in, Adobe users with the plug-in and the latest Catalyst driver may experience an encoding performance improvement of up to 8X.1

AMD Quietly Launches X4 905e Processor

AMD has quietly slid a new processor into the mix, this time around it's the Phenom II X4 905e CPU.

The 905e is a 2.5GHz processor with 6MB of L2 cache and 65W TDP. Several places already have the chip available online for about $190.
This isn't the only new chip that AMD has planned either. Several more low-power Phenom II X4 processors are coming including the the Phenom II X4 900e. Surprisingly AMD didn't announce these when Intel was beating them to death at Computex this year

AMD Demos Microsoft DirectX 11 Graphics Chip

As well as looking like being the operating system that Vista should always have been in terms of ease of use and desktop performance, Windows 7 will also bring with it a new version of, Microsoft's gaming API, DirectX and today we got our first brief glimpse of just what we can expect from this upgrade.
During its Computex press conference AMD showed a brief demo of a figure being rendered in realtime on DirectX11 (DX11) hardware. It was very short but revealing (no, not like that).

Essentially, the big things to look out for when DX11arrives are tesselation (the main aspect that was being demonstrated by the above demo), compute shaders, multithreading, and HDR compression.

IBM Expands Information on Demand Portfolio

IBM on Wednesday announced a slew of products and services in support of its sprawling Information on Demand portfolio, including a new "Information Applications" software unit.
The division will focus on developing industry-specific analytic applications in areas like human capital management and financial performance, according to IBM, which kicked off its Information on Demand conference in Berlin this week.
One new application announced Wednesday is InfoSphere Clinical Analytics for Healthcare Providers, which pulls together and analyzes information from various sources, such as lab and billing systems. The software could be used to spot trends, such as which drugs are working best for patients with similar conditions, according to IBM.
Big Blue is also planning to embed statistical analysis technology from SPSS into future editions of its Cognos BI (business intelligence) and performance management tools. The added capability will provide new analytics for government agencies, financial services and life sciences customers, IBM said.
In addition, IBM announced a new services division dedicated to analyzing unstructured text, such as that found in e-mail and call center documents.
IBM is also rolling out a number of new services meant to help customers reduce their use of paper. They include a free workshop by IBM content management specialists, which will result in an estimate of the business' paper costs, as well as more in-depth assessment and analysis service for a fee.
The new offerings join a considerable array of others falling under the Information on Demand initiative, which IBM launched several years ago and has since powered through a continuous stream of acquisitions, including Cognos and data archiving vendor Princeton Softech.
Rather than competing head-on with packaged business application giants like SAP and Oracle, through the IOD strategy IBM is focusing on data management, delivery and analysis products and services that make applications work more effectively.