Keeping their mission to be the leading designer and integrator of innovative, tailored technology solutions that empower people to push the boundaries of what is possible alive, it has been constantly adapting to the changes that gaming industry has been going through – Consumers, Convergence and Cloud. AMD showcased the Richland APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) in the Bloggers Meet held at Bangalore on Thursday, 13th June. An APU shall accelerate the overall performance by putting the processor and graphics on the same chip.
This Elite A-series, codenamed ‘Richland’ is also said to have an easy upgrade infrastructure and should be “ideal for desktop PC builders and mainstream gamers wanting outstanding performance for their money” according to Bernd Lienhard, Corporate VP and GM, Client Products Divison at AMD. AMD also unleashed the first ever 5 GHz processor. The new AMD FX CPUs will be available from this Summer:
- FX-9590: Eight “Piledriver” cores, 5 GHz Max Turbo
- FX-9370: Eight “Piledriver” cores, 4.7 GHz Max Turbo
Another major win for the giant was the announcement that Apple Mac Pro will run an AMD dual firepro chipset. AMD shall also support Android Tablets; however its not disclosed how soon it shall be. On asking the strategy for mobiles, the board said the focus would be on price-point and refreshing Hondo line of products. We can also expect cheap (25-26k) quad-core powered laptops in the next two weeks. In terms of Gaming in 2020, Mr. Srinidhi, Director, Product Application Engineering said that technologies such as Computational Photography, Directional Audio, Natural User Interface, Context Computing, Tactile Feedback and Augmented Reality shall be enabled giving gaming a natural feel.
AMD’s largest R&D base is in Asia with Bangalore being one of the key centers with about 1,300 employees. The board at AMD also said “Innovation in India is driving business around the globe”. AMD has given the due importance to India and has named its HSA as “Kaveri” to be launched in 2014. The chip shall be able to handle 2.5x workload but not much details were given about the same.
AMD is already leading the console market with Xbox One, Nintendo Wii U and Sony PS4. With these announcements, the company has surely created enough buzz in the industry. It shall be interesting to see how Intel counters, hopefully something better than the Haswell GPU.
