Thursday, July 31, 2008

technology

Flash technology
While less visible to the general public than its CPU business, AMD is also a global leader in flash memory. In 1993, AMD established a 50-50 partnership with Fujitsu called FASL, and merged into a new company called FASL LLC in 2003. The joint venture firm went public under ticker symbol SPSN in December 2005, with AMD shares drop to 37%.
AMD no longer directly participates in the Flash memory devices market now as AMD entered into a non-competition agreement, as of December 21, 2005, with Fujitsu and Spansion, pursuant to which it agreed not to directly or indirectly engage in a business that manufactures or supplies standalone semiconductor devices (including single chip, multiple chip or system devices) containing only Flash memory.[21]
Mobile platforms

AMD started a platform in 2003 aimed at mobile computing, but, with fewer advertisements and promotional schemes, very little was known about the platform. The platform used mobile Athlon 64 or mobile Sempron processors.
As part of the "Better by design" initiative, the open mobile platform, announced February 2007 with announcement of general availability in May 2007, comes together with 65 nm fabrication process Turion 64 X2, and consists of three major components: an AMD processor, graphics from either Nvidia or ATI Technologies which also includes integrated graphics (IGP), and wireless connectivity solutions from Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Qualcomm or Realtek.
The Puma platform and Turion Ultra processor was released on June 4, 2008. In the future, AMD plans quad-core processors with 3D graphics capabilities (Fusion) to be launched in 2009 as the Eagle platform.
Other initiatives
• 50x15, digital inclusion, with targeted 50% of world population to be connected through Internet via affordable computers by the year of 2015.
• The Green Grid,[22] founded by AMD together with other founders, such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft, to seek lower power consumption for grids. Intel was notably absent from the consortium when it was founded, and finally joined in early 2007.[23]
• Codenamed SIMFIRE interoperability testing tool for the Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) open architecture.
Software
• Extensions for software parallelism (xSP), aimed at speeding up programs to enable multi-threaded and multi-core processing, announced in Technology Analyst Day 2007. One of the initiative being discussed since August 2007 is the Light Weight Profiling (LWP), providing internal hardware monitor with runtimes, to observe information about executing process and help the re-design of software to be optimized with multi-core and even multi-threaded programs. Another one is the extension of Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) instruction set, the SSE5.
Technologies from ATI
After the takeover of ATI, AMD restructured some of the product lineups from both companies. Some products were being rebranded under the AMD brand, including the Imageon for mobile phones and handheld devices, the Xilleon for consumer electronics (digital TV sets), ATI Xpress chipsets (to AMD chipsets) for AMD processors platform and GPGPU computing line-up FireStream, previously known as AMD Stream Processor. Some others retained the use of ATI branding, including the Radeon line of graphics, and chipsets for Intel processors.

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