AMD today announced that it will hold its Premiere Event for the launch of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor at approximately 6:30 pm Pacific Time (9:30 pm ET) on Monday, Sept. 10, 2007. The event will be webcast live and can be accessed here. A replay of the webcast can be accessed at this site approximately one hour after the conclusion of the live event and will be available for 10 days after the event. The webcast will also be available at AMD.com.

Fudzilla claims AMD's Suzuka K11 CPU will use desktop socket AM3 and will be the last CPU to support DDR3. Both dual and quad core Suzuka-cored CPUs will be based on 45 nanometer process type with 1MB of L2 cache per core and 6MB of L3 cache.

Barcelona should be available next week and when compared with Intel's Clovertown, Barcelona is 30% faster than Clovertown at floating point instructions. However, at integer instructions, Clovertown is approximately 30% faster than Barcelona. Dell also says they will continue to use AMD processors in their line up to give their customers a variety of choices to choose from.

Today AMD has unleashed a brand new gaming microsite to provide a forum for gamers to communicate, collaborate and stay in tune with the latest developments in PC gaming. Gamers will have the ability to access exclusive game content and contests while customizing aspects of the site to fit every user's preferences. The site is now available on game.amd.com.

AMD plans to launch nine new quad-core processors later this month with clock speeds ranging from 1.7 GHz to 2.0 GHz. The initial launch will only have two thermal bins, 68-Watt and 98-Watt TDP. AMD's two-way capable quad-core Opteron 2300 series launch with five new models. Pricing for the two-way capable models start at around $206 and go up as high as $372. On the multi-way side of things, AMD has four quad-core Opteron 8300 models starting at a $688 entry price all the way up to $1,004. Desktop users will have to wait until Q4 of 2007 for AMD's Phenom to experience quad-core.

HEXUS can confirm that Rick Hegberg, AMD Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales, has resigned from AMD. This is the third time an AMD senior has left in less than two months. Hopefully, more suitable replacements can be found.

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AMD today announced further plans to innovate the x86 architecture by introducing SSE5, a new extension of the x86 instruction set that is designed to allow software developers to simplify code and achieve greater efficiency for the most performance-hungry applications. SSE5 will give developers additional capabilities to help maximize the performance of applications that have daily impact on consumers and enterprises, including high performance computing, multimedia and security applications.

The Inquirer is claiming that they have some benchmark scores to disclose with AMD's K10. They say that it was running on the RD790 chipset, with two HD 2900 XT cards, and some Corsair's Dominator PC2-9136C5D. They clocked it at 3.0 GHz with the video cards clocked at 830 MHz for the GPU and 900MHz for the memory. They ended up with a score of 30,031 in 3DMark06 a new world record if true. They didn't point out what kind of cooling was used, but if it was just your standard heatsink. Expect even higher scores to be reached after their release.

At this year's Games Convention ASUS is showing off their new RD780 M3A-MVP motherboard. It will feature the new Socket AM2+, but it will be able to handle any AM2 CPU along with the new Phenoms. It will also be able to run DDR2 up to 8500 (1066MHz) speeds, and it will feature two PCI-E 2.0 compliant x16 slots.

Henri Richard, AMD's head of sales and marketing, officially turned in his resignation. Henri Richard will stop working for AMD on September Eighth, just two days before the fashionably late Barcelona micro-architecture launches. The Wall Street Journal claims that Richard is leaving AMD to pursue a different career path.

AMD today silently launched its limited "Black Edition" Athlon 64 X2 6400+ with 90nm Windsor core. The product is on sale in Japan at a price of ¥32,000 YEN, equal to around USD $280. The latest Socket AM2 CPU runs at 3.2GHz, and has 2x1MB L2 cache. Manufactured using 90nm SOI technology it has TDP of 125W. All Black Edition labeled CPUs will come without the usual boxed heatsink.

While every hardcore AMD fan awaits the Barcelona and Phenom series of CPUs, AMD is busy making the best out of what it has already. In a Japanese presentation, AMD showed off the Athlon 64 6400+ "Black Edition". This CPU should hit retail markets on August 20th, and should cost anywhere between $220 and $240 USD. The CPU runs on a 90nm process, and is clocked at 3.2GHz.

At the same presentation, AMD demoed a Phenom X4 system at 3GHz in an AMD RD790 motherboard. AMD somehow managed to present this without anyone getting good performance numbers.

AMD today made available a new specification describing "Light-Weight Profiling" (LWP), a technology designed to increase the performance of software applications by providing a mechanism that allows software to more effectively leverage the benefits of multi-core processing. The LWP specification describes the first technology that supports a recently introduced initiative called "Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism," which will encompass a broad set of innovations designed to improve software parallelism, and thus application performance, through new hardware features in future versions of AMD processors.

With the passable launch date of September 10 there seems two be a couple of problems with the chip and compatibility. It seems that the Dual Dynamic Power Management will not work without a BIOS update, and with a supported motherboard. This is something to be expected from knowing that some features will not be supported on former socket types.

"It seems the CPU itself is capable of engaging in CoolCore operations, but not Dual Dynamic Power Management (formerly "Split Plane," which allowed each core to operate independently with different voltages and clock speeds). It won't be able to handle these power saving and performance enhancing aspects of operations from the core alone. The motherboard must be brought into the mix in an active way to help reduce power consumption and save energy when the many cores are not in high use."

The other issue while not truly being an issue is the 128-bit floating point. There simply isn't any software on the market to take advantage of it. Hearing something like this isn't new to the PC market at all. The 64Bit CPUs are just now starting to see the light after a few years of their release, and Dual core CPUs are also just now starting to be implemented into applications. It's safe to say that the 128-bit floating point technology may take some time before developers start using it.

A few weeks ago, a Digitimes report suggested that AMD had accidentally released a large quantity of broken HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards into the market. This created mass hysteria in the hardware world, and even sparked a mass recall from one manufacturer. However, after the dust settled, AMD and their partners did some investigating. What they found shows that the entire situation was overblown. ASUS representatives say that ASUS has not received a single broken HD 2400/ HD 2600 card. Gigabyte and MSI also have not received broken cards. Most engineers suspect that the idea of a defect/recall came from Acer, who ordered a large quantity of HD 2400 and HD 2600 graphics cards with UVD (Universal Video Decoder) disabled. When news of the UVD "problem" reached the market, the hardware world went hysterical, while Gigabyte, MSI, and ASUS all did internal testing to confirm no problems with the HD 2400 or HD 2600 series.

AMD engineers have a statement to cover the entire HD 2400/HD 2600 fiasco: "Any report claiming that defective HD 2600 and 2400 [cards] are recalled in the channel is completely untrue".

At SIGGRAPH 2007 today, AMD announced five new high-performance ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators for CAD, DCC and medical imaging professionals. The ATI FireGL V8650, FireGL V8600, FireGL V7600, FireGL V5600, and FireGL V3600 graphics boards are based on the next-generation ATI graphics processing unit (GPU) with an innovative unified shader architecture featuring up to 320 individual stream processing units. These new boards deliver acceleration of DirectX 10- and OpenGL 2.1-based professional applications resulting in increased performance of more than 300% as compared to the previous generation of product.

In an organized event to promote its ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics products in Taiwan AMD representatives stated that a recall request was not needed regarding the recently discovered issue which has lead to defective Radeon 2600 and 2400 graphics cards shipping to channels since everything was under control. AMD representatives also stated that the problem is not industry wide and that the issue can be solved by updating the BIOS. AMD pointed out that none of its partners had requested that it recall or replace the actual graphics chips used in the affected cards.

According to our friends over at Fudzilla (a site known for it's rumors), the new Barcelona / Phenom X4 Quad core can hit 3.24 GHz or more in it's B2 revision. If this is true, the Phenom processors could easily surpass the newest Intel Penryn core, which is clocked at 3.33 GHz.

AMD reinforced its position as a leader in PC video and display with the successful interoperability testing of a next-generation graphics processor with a native DisplayPort 1.1 transmitter. The testing was completed with a Genesis Microchip DisplayPort receiver. AMD is currently attending the Video and Electronics Standards Association (VESA) PlugTest in Milpitas, California to undergo further interoperability testing.

According to a roadmap released by Hardspell AMD is not only planning to switch graphics card development to DirectX 11 but also to release the third generation Opteron platform in 2009.
AMD also indicates that in 2009 the notebook platform will provide supports for DirectX 11 while the RD8XX symbol may indicate that AMD's new DX11 GPU will be called the R800.

A bug which has recently been known to exist in AMD's diagnostic and validation software is responsible for allowing defective ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 graphics cards to slip into the market.
The problem was an error in the BIOS application process and although it can be easily solved by reapplying the BIOS the defective cards need to be returned to the makers to be restored.
AMD responded that Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 chips are throughly inspected before being shipped to graphics card makers. This was an isolated incident and measures were taken to solve the issue as soon as it was detected, the company said. However more than 30.000 units have already been recalled from the market although it is believed that many more are still out there.

AMD plans to refresh one of its fastest dual-core CPUs, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+. The processor launched last February is based on the 90nm Windsor core clocked to 3.0GHz with a 125-watt TDP. The refreshed X2 6000+ will continue to use the Windsor core, instead of its 65nm Brisbane successor used in the 5200+, 5000+, 4800+, 4400+, 4000+, 3600+ processors and BE-series. The refreshed model will drop the thermal ratings down to 89-watts. Despite the impending launch of the Phenom X2 series, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ will remain the only mainstream AMD dual-core desktop processor with a 3.0GHz clock frequency, since the upcoming Phenom X2 series top out to around 2.8GHz. Expect AMD to release 89-watt Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processors next quarter.

AMD's latest roadmap reveals more details of its upcoming next-generation RS780 platform, designed to accommodate the new Socket AM2+ processors with HyperTransport 3.0. The RS780 north bridge sports a new graphics core with AMD's Universal Video Decoder, or UVD technology for hardware acceleration of H.264 and VC-1 video formats. The new chipset supports DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, TV-out, LVDS outputs and HDMI digital video output interfaces. Additionally, the chipset can work with external graphics card via a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. New to the RS780 platform is the SB700 south bridge. The SB700 does away with all PCIe lanes and only supports PCI, because all PCIe functionality has moved to the RS780 north bridge. AMD increases USB support to 12 USB 2.0 ports plus an additional 2 USB 1.1 ports. The new south bridge supports up to six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports with RAID 0, 1 and 10 configurations. IDE remains a supported feature of the SB700. There's also integrated audio controller. Expect AMD to unveil the RS780 platform sometime next year.

According to sources a while back AMD was planning to upgrade its Dresden fab 30 to 65nm and 300mm wafers thus becoming fab 38 in 2008. That was of course prior to losing more than $1 billion USD in two quarters thus pushing AMD to cancel its upgrade. However the plant has reached the 65nm stage but the wafers are still 200mm and will remain until 2009.