Today we attended the AMD Desktop and Notebook press conference. Our group was very small which made for a pretty good environment; more personal. Bob Grim introduced to us a short video on K1ngping’s Liquid helium overclocking.

As many of you would have seen, AMD has launched the new Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition which will use two cores and 7MB total in cache.

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Also released was the AMD Athlon II X2 250 supporting DDR2/3 and running at 3GHz.

AMD’s K10 products support Windows 7’s Windows XP mode.

AMD soon moved onto notebooks. AMD has decided not to move into netbooks, but rather focus on “ultra-thin” products that will be somewhere between netbooks and full notebooks.

via. TweakTown.com

Some very early AMD G34 motherboards were spotted at Computex this year that will be filled with AMD’s upcomming six-core and twelve-core derivitives of Istanbul.

The two boards differ in application as the first from Inventec seems to be more server oriented with its 24 DIMM slots supporting quad-channel memory. Each socket on the G34 HPC motherboard has twelve DIMM slots of its own.

The second board is from Quanta it appears to be more oriented to the workstation market with only eight DIMM slots per socket but room for a few PCI-Express slots. Quanta’s G34 should also support quad-channel memory as well.

via. TweakTown.com

If you have read the latest Computex report here on Guru3D, you’d already seen it. But AMD released their new 785 chipset. Computex is a good place where you can run into some examples.

Basically what I’m seeing here’s is the AMD 880 chipset yet renamed to 785G. The only real new difference is that a new graphics core now is used in the 785 series. The new IGP is dubbed Radeon HD4200, while the 780G’s IGP was named Radeon HD3200. You should start seeing 785-equipped motherboards quite soon.

It is a pure AM3 board that supports dual channel DDR3 memory. It has integrated DX10.1 video support. The motherboard also comes with D-SUB/DVI/HDMI connector, 6 USB 2.0, on board 1394, GbE, 8 channel audio, 2 eSATA ports.

via. Guru3D.com

In a very rare occurance for AMD, they have launched the new six-core Instanbul Opteron an amazing five months ahead of schedule.

The new chips come just in time to give Intel’s Nehalem-EX Xeon processors a run for their money. According to AMD, Istanbul offers up to a 34% increase in performance per watt over previous Opterons and it is a simple drop-in upgrade utilizing existing hardware.

AMD hopes that the low cost of upgrading will be a huge selling point for Istanbul. It utilizes the same socket and memory as the previous generation of Opterons, meaning that the only cost in upgrading is in the new chip itself, rather than having to purchase a new server or motherboard and RAM combo to support it.

While Istanbul is expected to be available from major OEM’s sometime this month, it will be a while before other versions of the chip become available. AMD plans on bringing EE, SE, and HE version of Istanbul to the market, but they won’t be out until sometime in the second half of 2009.

“Based on close collaboration with our customers, we believe there is a clear value shift changing the economics of the server market,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “The new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor meets the increasing need for a combination of low total cost of ownership, superior performance-per-watt and scalability. Simply put, Six-Core AMD Opteron processors deliver top-line performance that’s bottom-line efficient.”

via. TweakTown.com

A while ago we already reported that on some AMD Phenom II 720BE processors the 4th core could be enabled. It seems that the very popular Dual Core AMD Athlon X2 7750BE has four cores as well as it is Phenom based, though with two of them disabled.

Yet all can be enabled

This new’ phenomenon’ works exactly the same as back then with the Phenom II 720BE processors. In some older BIOSes you can enable Advanced Clock Calibration on your AMD 790 motherboard and after a reboot … you might end up lucky with four active CPU cores.

Yeah it’s really that simple, your processors will come back as AMD Phenom FX-7750 Quad-Core. Mind you that the two active cores ‘might’ be damaged and that it only works with some AMD 790 motherboards from ASROCK and BIOSTAR.

It’s a bit of a luck of the draw really, can’t hurt to try though. If it doesn’t work, clear CMOS and yu are back to normal.

The biggest challenge however will be finding a 7750 BE to purchase. Currently I can’t find it anywhere in the price lists.

via. Guru3D

It won’t be very long anymore before AMD’s six-core Istanbul server processors will become available in high volume, and you know what ? That’s the start of a new multi-core race. AMD unveiled it aims to release a 12-core part in 2010 already, and a model with 16 cores in 2011.

The 6000 series processors will see the 45nm 8-core to 12-core Magny-Cours next year, while the 32nm 12- to 16-core Interlagos will arrive one year later. The 4000 series platform on the other hand will see the 45nm 4- to 6-core Lisbon in 2010, and the 32nm 6- to 8-core Valencia in 2011.

Fun fact, the new DCA 2.0 architecture will allow quad-channel memory configurations as is has a four channel integrated controller.

AMD is brewing up some new processors. The first is to be released next week and is the Phenom II X4 955 processor (April 23rd). This part should be a 125W TDP processor with a frequency of 3.2GHz, it will be the fastest chip in AMD’s lineup.

From what we heard is that the processor will be a Black Edition CPU which means unlocked. Pricing wise in the US expect roughly $300 for the CPU and in the EU €250.

On a second note, and it has been rumored a couple of times already yet, AMD’s upcoming 45nm Athlon X2 processors (Athlon X2 250) with a clockspeed of 3GHz will likely see the light in June. This Regor (asic name) based chip will have a TDP of 65W.

via. Guru3D

According to leaked reports, it looks as though AMD finally released the specs of the Radeon HD 4770, the upcoming graphics card based on the 40nm RV740 chip.

Next month will supposedly be a hot one for both Nvidia and AMD if all goes according to plan, as both companies will unleash highly anticipated graphics cards unto the market: AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 275. However, AMD has a few additional aces up its sleeve, including the forthcoming Radeon HD 4700 series based on the 40nm RV740 GPU.

Presentation screens have surfaced over on IT168.com, taken from a recent AMD presentation. One slide in particular compares the Radeon HD 4770 with Nvidia’s GeForce 9800 GT, showing superiority in both features and performance. According to AMD, the Radeon HD 4770 will provide 9.7 GFLOPS per dollar, and 12.0 GFLOPS per watt. By comparison, the 9800 GT only provides 5.1 GFLOPS per dollar and 4.8 GFLOPS per watt. Additionally, the 40nm Radeon HD 4770 utilizes GDDR5 memory (512 MB, 128-bit) and provides 1960 GFLOPs of processing power; the 65nm/55nm 9800 GT uses GDDR3 (256-bit) memory and provides 504 GFLOPs of processing power.

Additionally, the Radeon HD 4770 will offer a core clock of 750 MHz, 640 stream processes, a memory clock of 800 MHz, and a memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s. The card is estimated to use around 80W thanks to the 40nm manufacturing process, somewhat smaller in power consumption when compared to the 55nm Radeon HD 4850 and 55nm 4830. However, the Radeon HD 4770 will come with 826 million transistors, meaning it contains 130 million less than the 4830 and the 4850 (both with 956 million).

Although the Radeon HD 4770 looks to be that last card to ship within this half of 2009, the card is expected to retail around $99 USD. Out of the nine AMD cards set to ship within Q1 and Q2 2009, the Radeon HD 4830 is the only other card offering a $99 USD pricetag. According to the slide taken from AMD’s presentation, the HD 4870 X2 (2 GB) will retail for $399, the HD 4870 (512 MB) for $169, and the HD 4890 (1 GB) for around $260.

With nine cards hitting retail shelves during this half of the year, it’s definitely a great time to upgrade the existing graphics card. AMD offers a great selection, with cards not only addressing both the enthusiast and the performance-seekers, but consumers wanting to maintain a tight budget. Look for the affordable Radeon HD 4770 to hit retail shelves on May 4.

via. Tom’s Hardware