The coming summer will bring second generation high performance Trinity APUs from AMD and along with this there’s another cool presentation from AMD around. The company has plans of expanding its A-series processor range by bringing up some new models that will be based on Llano architecture.

One of these to be released APUs from the series, named as A4-3420 is expected to be hitting the market sometimes in May or June this year. It will be next version of AMD’s A4-3400 APU made faster which was introduced sometimes back in 2011.

The major change that you’ll find in A4-3420 on comparing it with its earlier version include its faster core speed it will work at 2.8GHz in place of 2.7GHz which was A4-3400’s default clock.

To enhance your knowledge regarding AMD’s integrated GPUs, you must know that the 160 shader units that run at 600MHz are featured by the 6410D and Microsoft’s DirectX 11 API is also supported by it.

The updated 3420 will also be including dual channel memory controller quite similar to currently available A4-3400 and similar to this, the new version will also be supporting DDR3-1600 speeds.

You’ll get the TDP of the chip set at 65Watts with compatibility for motherboards that use FM1 socket.

As per the estimations, the A4-3420 will be priced at $65 (equivalent to 50EUR) by AMD which will be make it less expensive compared to A4-3400 and A4-3300 which are priced at $71 and $66 respectively.

A4-3420 is going to be one of the last know Llano APUs to hit the market as AMD will be introducing its latest  processor namely the Trinity accelerated processing units that will be based on Bulldozer architecture.

Just a fortnight back, AMD introduced two processors namely FX-4170 and FX-6200 right into its Bulldozer CPU range. It has now added the MSRPs of the chips in the company’s official price list. So, it is no more the business of the rumormongers to talk about the prices, instead the prices are the part of the latest breaking news.

FX-4170 and FX-6200 are much faster compared to the FX-4100 and FX-6100 that they have replaced, thus it appears somewhat reasonable that AMD has priced these chips $20 more that their earlier counterparts.

FX-4170 will have a MSRP of $135 which is around 102 EUR and FX-6200 is suggested to cost $165 or about 125 EUR.

FX-4170 is a quad core processor that has a starting speed of 4.2GHz and a maximum Turbo of 4.3GHz which makes it an egression from the original FX-4170 from AMD that works at 3.6/3.8GHz.

This chip consists of only two Bulldozer modules and its L2 cache is also limited at 4MB, however the Level 3 cache has been kept intact, as a result of which FX-4170 gets to pack up 8MB in its last level memory.

FX-6200 also comes packed up with 8MB of Level 3 cache, however its Level 2 cache size got increased to 6MB as it is a six core processor.

FX-6200 is set at 3.8GHz as its base level operating frequency, however this can be made as high as 4.1GHz when you don’t use all its cores. This is possible as a result of the AMD’s Turbo Core dynamic overclocking technology inclusion.

You get 125 Watts of TDP both in FX-4170 and FX-6100 and they have already been delivered as stock to many of the retailer across the US which includes Amazon, Provantage, and Newegg.

It is believed that FX-4100 and FX-6100 will be a part of the new AMD chips for sometime, however it is not sure how long it will be so.

It is just three months that AMD brought out its Opteron 6200 series “Interlagos” CPU range, and now the company is looking forward to add six new processors offering better specifications compared to their antecessors.

It is believed that the new models will be offering 200MHz clock and Turbo Core frequencies right at the power level which you get in the presently available Opteron 6200 chips.

AMD has plans of rolling out its Opteron 6208 featuring just four processing cores which will be working at 3.5GHz speed.

You’ll find this CPU fitted inside a thermal envelope of 115W and the another one will be the Opteron 6200 processor that will be available without any Turbo Core support.

The other chips on the line from AMD will be offering 115W TDP which is offered in Opteron 6208. Namely these are the 8 core 6224, 12 core 6242, and the 16 core 6280.

These processors will have clock speed ranging from 2.5GHz to 3.2GHz. However, with the help of Turbo Core technology, you’ll find frequencies of the select parts reaching pretty high with 3.8GHz when you aren’t using all their cores.

There is again a processor with higher performance, 16 core Opteron 6286 SE offering 140W TDP which will be available clocked at 2.8GHz which will then be reaching to about 3.5GHz with Turbo support.

You again have Opteron 6266 HE packed up with 8 Bulldozer modules for 16 computing cores on the other end of the line up. This comes with base clock speed of 1.8GHz which can be maximized to 3.1GHz with Turbo support and manages to fit right inside a thermal envelope of 85W.

All these processors come consolidated with 16 MD L3 cache and quite comfortably fits into the socket G34 motherboards.

Well, no launch date has yet been declared for the all new Opteron 6200 series CPU, however, it predicted to be arriving sometimes at the time when Xeon E5 server products from Intel will be hitting the market.

Last week, AMD announced its new Radeon HD 7970, which happens to be its first ever 28nm based graphics card. This happens to be the first ever member of the ‘Southern Islands’ GPU family which is based on the “Tahiti” core and boasts about utilizing the latest architecture which AMD calls as “Graphics Core Next”.  It is expected that this new card will be available in the market on 9^th of January slightly ahead of CES at a price of $549.

Along with this brand new card there is another product that the company looks forward to roll out, the Radeon HD 7950, which is believed to have more attractive aspects of feature and pricing.

The Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT whereas the HD 7950 is found to be featuring reduced version of Tahiti Pro which is going to be the direct scion of the Cayman Pro silicon used inside the Radeon HD 6950.

AMD has not yet given out the detailed specifications of its upcoming card; however, some of the specification related details got leaked somehow. So, it has been made out that this brand new Radeon HD 7950 will have disabled 4 compute units compared to HD 7970, the number of stream processors has also been brought down to 1792 from 2048. Again, there are going to be 112 texture units and memory interface of 384 bit. The GDDR5 memory will be available for 3GB with no changes made but the memory has been found to be clocked at about 5,000MHZ. The display output configuration on the card will also be same and include 2 mini-DisplayPort 1.2 and 1 HDMI 1.4a.

Sadly, there is no information available regarding the core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and the possible pricing. Again, how much power it is going to consume is not known clearly, though it is expected to be featuring ZeroCore technology used by HD 7970, which has the power to shut off Tahiti and lower down the power consumption below 3W when left in idle state for long.

Intel has made a good hold on the microprocessor market, even when the netbook market is undergoing a real struggling phase with the decrease in the sales of its Atom chips.

Researchers have found that Intel has managed to get 83.7% share of the global microprocessor revenue in the third quarter of this year.

This is an increase by 1.2% points from what it made in the previous quarter and makes AMD its closest rival to have 73.5% points which has also gone up from its 72% points that it had in the second quarter.

From the year 2008 to 2010, netbook chips have got double digit growth; however, with the rise in the popularity of the tablets, netbooks have found a steep fall in its sales, and this is why the demand for Atom chip Intel has made it provide them service.

Now since most companies don’t get be where Intel has come up until they prepare themselves about the certain trends, Intel got a fabulous chance to improve its growth and enjoyed a great hold in the other popular areas to make up where it was losing because of the decline in Atoms’ demand.

“The boom in media tablet sales has packed both upsides and downsides for Intel – hurting its business in netbook microprocessors – but boosting its sales of chips used in data centres to support cloud computing,” said Matthew Wilkins, who is a major market analyst for the related platform from a research firm named, iSuppli.

Mr. Wilkins also explained that the one most important reason behind Intel’s growth is its commitment to its consumers as well as the business products that it is producing.

“Even with the company warning that its fourth-quarter revenue will fall short of expectations, the company still is expected to expand its lead in the global semiconductor market based on its strong performance in the third quarter and the rest of the year,” Mr. Wilkins further added.

At the same time, AMD is looking forward to make revenue through its latest A-Series range of dual and quad core processors of high capacity and power, launched this week itself.

Generally, AMD goes for a launch of new graphics products for desktop high end models and then it moves forward in developing them for laptops. But, this time, it is doing an entirely opposite thing by coming up with the launch of Radeon HD 7000 family for the mobile that comprises of entry-level and midrange 7400M-, 7500M-, and 760M- series. AMD is doing this because it is creating arrival time for real next-generation Radeons.

If you are expecting the new GPUs to be based on TSMC developed 28nm production process, you’d disappointed as this isn’t so. The chips are rather using the 40nm Turks and Caicos GPUs which are currently used by the 6000M series. However, a little tweaking will be done here and there for improving the performance. And the users will get increased shader count, slightly improved clock speeds compared to what 6000M has in its stock.

The actual models are yet to be revealed but AMD has come up with some specification for each of the series. The Radeon HD 7400M series offer processing of 40nm, DDR3/GDDR5 memory type, 64-bit memory bus width, 160 stream processors and an eyefinity support up to 4 monitors. It is targeted to the value segment. Radeon HD 7500M series also offer a 40nm processing, a 64-bit memory bus width, DDR3/GDDR5 memory type and an eyefinity support for up to 4 monitors. However, this series is targeted to mainstream segment and use 480 stream processors. Then comes the Radeon HD 7600M series targeted to performance-thin segment, offering 40nm process, DDR3/GDDR5 memory type, 128-bit memory bus width, use 480 stream processors and provide support for up to 6 monitors.

Apart from these specifications, AMD has also given a slight insight of the features of these three GPU series which include DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a connectivity and support for DirectX11, AMD HD3D and Blu-ray 3D. HD 7500M series use 80 more stream processors compared to the HD 6000M series, but nothing further is known yet.

AMD will soon be launching the 28nm graphics as the reports suggest. Though the “Southern Islands” architecture of AMD was to be arriving by the end of the year, it got delayed to the early part of 2012 because of some issues with the production of 28nm.

Advanced Micro Devices (more popularly AMD) are soon to roll out company branded memory in US as they recently announced. Patriot Memory and VisionTek are two crucial launch partners of the brand.

It has been years now that Radeon graphics cards have been getting the memory supply and validation from AMD. And this is what has given them the confidence to get into the volatile system memory market as the company can see much opportunity in it.

AMD’s OverDrive performance optimization tool has been used by Radeon for testing and optimizing the DRAM in combination with their CPUs, APUs, GPUs and even the chipset platforms.  The acumen from their earlier associations gave them the enthusiasm for creating memory modules meant for other manufacturers other than their present associations.

AMD is going to introduce three different performance levels for selecting the memory. Buyers will be able to select all the modules in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB capacities. 1333MHz and 1600MHz speeds will be featured especially by the Entertainment level as it best suits the home theater PC applications.

The Performance category by AMD is going to support speed of about 1600MHz pairing well with the low latency. And finally, the topmost modules from Radeon are going to support 1866MHz speed and will be tested, tuned and certified to best suit the specific AMD platforms.

All the major retailers like Amazon.com, Fry’s, Bestbuy.ca, Micro Center, Newegg, Memory Express, Tiger Direct, NCIX, VIP computers (UK), and many others will be selling the AMD Memory once it gets introduced.

Not much has yet been told about the pricing of the module; however, it is believed that even if it makes any premium at all, it won’t be exceeding at what the existing kits are available, as it is notable that similar kits from AMD are already available in Japan which got rolled out sometimes in August though they were available under different performance categories.

It is believed that the AMD’s forthcoming “Trinity” APU is going to be landing out of the production house somewhere in January 2012 and become a part of actual products in between first quarter and second quarter.

Now how it is going to perform is hardly known but some leaked slides from AMD has made some comparisons between AMD’s second generation APUs meant for desktops and the ones meant for the Llano predecessors.

Essentially, Trinity seems to be about 20% faster in performing the general purpose tasks and when it comes to graphics processing applications it is about 30% faster as compared to the already existing chip from the company.

It is notable that in 3DMark Vantage, AMD‘s Trinity A8 and A6 got to score about 1000 points more than the Llano equivalents. Even the A4 series of Trinity showed some improvement though it wasn’t that impressive and made about 500 points.

Again, in the PCMark Vantage Suite based “general performance” benchmarks, Trinity APUs were found to be ahead of their precursors by around 10% to 20% margins and at the same time in the “compute capacity” benchmark Trinity A85 series came up with an increase of about 72% compared to its counterparts from Llano.  However, you need to note that all this information is from the company itself so don’t try believing on them blindly.

There’s another claim from AMD that when the A8, A7 and A4 Trinity series are paired together with the discrete Turks Pro GPU properly known as Radeon HD 6570, there is a noticeable improvement in the dual graphics configuration.

AMD is to be using 32nm SOI HKMG process technology at GlobalFoundries for the second generation APU especially made for the mainstream personal computers which offers Comal in the case of notebooks and Virgo in the case of desktops.

Four “Piledriver” cores which happen to be the improved versions of the Bulldozer core that are being used by the FX series processors will be offered by Trinity and along with this, you’ll get AMD Radeon HD 7000 series “Southern Islands” graphics core including DirectX 11 class graphic support, DDR3 memory controller and some other enhancements are also offered. You’ll find the chip to be showing compatibility for the latest FM2 sockets.

AMD has just come up with its first dual core Llano APUs. With the addition of these APUs namely A4-3300 and A4-3400, their line has got extended by more than five models which are available right now and have even got the price of the entry-level desktop reduced to mere $70. Both the chips use a Radeon HD 6410D GPU integrating it with 160 shaders and 1 MB L2 cache, maintaining a 65W TDP at the same time.

It is only their CPU and GPU frequencies on the basis of which you can differentiate between these chips. Checking out A4-3300, it’s found workable at 2.5GHz with its GPU clocked at 443 MHz, where as the CPU core of A4-3400 runs at 2.7 GHz and has a GPU frequency of 600 MHz.

While in its features, an integrated USB 3.0 controller, AMD Steady Video support in order to remove the jitters and shakes at the time of video watching, and AMD Dual Graphics that lets you pair the integrated GPU with a discrete Radeon HD 6000 Series graphics card for performance enhancement are expected. However, none of the A4 models support Turbo Core.

Both the chips are expected to be working well in all existing Socket-FM1 motherboards. The official prices declared for 1K quantities for A4- 3300 and 3400 happen to be $64 and $69, so the retail price at which they’ll be available by the later part of the month will be slightly higher.

AMD has not yet announced any release date for its forthcoming Bulldozer processors, it is reported that the company is kind of keen about talking about these CPUs at the Hot Chips 2011 Symposium, and this is where it will be publicly telling about the upcoming architecture with more added details.

As the conference program has informed, the presentation will be titled as “Perf Power-Efficient Bulldozer-Core X86-64 Server, WS & Desktop Procs” and is to be held next Friday, on August, 19.

But the sad part is that nothing else is yet known about what AMD is going to present during the conference.

Bulldozer is the next-generation high performance CPU architecture from AMD that it designed from the ground up especially to curb some of the repetitions that occur in the case of the traditional multi-core designs.

Because of this architecture, the chip goes for a modular construction and each of the module comprises of two floating point units of 128-bit FMA, which have the ability of being combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores each of which has 4 pipelines, and about 2048 KB of L2 cache.

Similar to the 8MB of L3 cache, it will also have the Level 2 memory shared between the modules.

Turbo Core technology of AMD will be supported by all the consumer chips. They’ll also have the support for native DDR3-1866 memory. It will also be offering one or more Hyper Transport 3.1 links. However, a quad-channel memory controller will be offered by the Opteron 6200 series.

Server processors will be available in two product types, namely Valencia and Interlagos. Out of which the first one will be offering 6 or 8 core design whereas the second one may be featuring 12 or 16 processing cores.

Till now, only this much is know that the initial Opteron server processor lineup form AMD will be including no less than 4 processors, 2 of which will be featuring 16 cores, and the next one will be coming up with 12 computing cores, and the final one will be an 8-core chip.

The speed of these will be between 2.1 and 2.8 GHz, and at the same time the maximum Turbo Core frequencies can go as high as 3.9 GHz which will surely depend on the chip.

Even though the actual launch date of the first Bulldozer processors is yet to be known, but if you are to believe the rumors, it may be out sometimes in September or October of 2011.