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