AMD Reports Another Loss

With revenues down 13 percent from this time last year, AMD netted a $330 million loss in the second quarter of 2009 on earnings of $1.184 billion. The company has traversed a rocky road in the past few months, reorganizing top management and merging its graphics and microprocessor businesses in recent weeks as it struggles to find its way in a challenging market.

Meanwhile, Intel surprised the market by blowing through Wall Street forecasts and setting ambitious outlooks that suggest the worst may be over for the sagging computer business—for some companies, anyway. Given the softness in the market, AMD president and chief executive Dirk Meyer argued that "we think it makes sense to evaluate things in a slightly longer window than usual."

"The AMD Product Company successfully executed its product and technology roadmaps in the first half of the year, including introducing the six-core AMD Opteron processor months ahead of schedule," Meyer said in a statement. "While we increased cash, exceeded our revenue plan and reduced operating expenses in the second quarter, gross margin was disappointing. New platform, microprocessor and graphics introductions planned for the second half of 2009 position us well to improve margins and meet our financial goals for the year."For more details, read my full news story on PCMag.com.

Why We Need 6-Gbps Networking

Start with this simple fact: On a rotating drive, the optimum location for storing data is on the outside tracks, where the throughput is at its highest as the disk spins. That data rate may reach 250 megabytes per second (MBps), or 2,000 megabits per second (Mbps), in 2011, more or less saturating the current 3Gbps limit of the SATA 2.0 specification. But that won't be a problem for another year and a half, right?

Right—for rotational media. But the ever-increasing speed and popularity of flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) throws a wicked-fast monkey wrench into the equation, and underscores the need for SATA 3.0. Today.

But the real benefactors of the 6-Gbps interface are SSDs, which stream data instantly from flash memory at tremendous throughputs. Take, for example, the new Corsair Extreme Series of high-performance SSDs. The press release touts the speed of the drives: "Built using the renowned Indilinx Barefoot controller and Samsung MLC NAND flash memory, the Extreme Series has been designed to offer the highest performance currently available on the market, with read speeds of up to 240 MBps and write speeds of up to 170 MBps." 240 MBps is 1,920 Mbps, or 1.9Gbps—dangerously close to that theoretical limit of SATA 2.0. And that's just one drive. String two or more into a striped RAID 0 array (Corsair notes that these drive are ideal for enthusiasts looking to do just that) and you can expect performance to increase still further. RAID Level 0 doesn't simply double your bandwidth, of course—there's overhead as the RAID controller plays traffic cop, and that cuts into things. But an improvement of 30 or even 20 percent would dangerously tax SATA 2.0. For more, read my full column on Extremetech.

Tomorrow's Netbooks: ARM Cortex Chips and the Google Chrome OS?

With 14 billion processors shipped to date, a whopping 4 billion of them in 2008, ARM is a silent giant in the computer industry. When a company that ships 90 processors a second wants to talk, I'm willing to at least hear them out. ARM has traditionally focused on the low-power mobile arena, but the company has come to realize that the same chips that decode Flash videos for cell phones can also do so on netbooks, set-top boxes, HDTVs, UMPCs, and so on. But ARM cores can't run Windows…or can they? And Linux-based OSes can't succeed on netbooks, right? Where will ARM chips play in the future of mobile computing?

I had a lengthy conversation with company executives earlier this week, who made a strong case for a transformation of the netbook market. They pointed out that processors like the Intel Atom have overshot the needs of the average consumer—that the rest of the system needs to catch up. And that's arguably true; in terms of performance, a Pentium CPU can surf the Web just fine, thank you very much. And in spite of efforts towards efficiency and battery life, most Atom-based netbooks just don't last that long, while ARM claims Cortex-A8 silicon can last through playback of three 2-hour movies or more than 9 hours of web browsing. That's impressive.

ARM argues that a 65-nm, 600-MHz Cortex-A8—that's the brains behind chips in the Palm Pre (a TI OMAP 3430) and the Amazon Kindle (a Freescale IMX31LVKN5C)—can render pages in less than 5 seconds, comparable to a 45-nm, 800-MHz Intel Atom. "In 2009/2010, the 45-nm Cortex-A9 will render pages in less than 3 seconds, faster than an Intel Atom at 1.6 GHz," claimed company documents.For more on this subject, read my full column on ExtremeTech.