It’s 12:43AM and I just got back into my hotel room. I spent the past few hours in AMD’s suite a block from IDF trying to get to the bottom of an issue we discovered in our post on AMD’s Zacate GPU performance numbers earlier this week.

Let’s recap. Zacate is AMD’s 18W APU aimed at the mainstream notebook market (~$500 notebooks). The APU features a pair of Bobcat cores and a Cedar-class AMD DX11 GPU. Spending some time with the physical Zacate package, it seems to have a single 64-bit DDR3 memory interface ala Atom. Unlike Atom however, both the Bobcat cores and the DX11 GPU should be relatively high performance.

Earlier this week, AMD showed us the first public demonstration of Zacate. In its suite were two systems: a Zacate test platform and a Core i5-M 520 notebook from a major OEM. Both systems were configured with 4GB of memory and were running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Premium.

AMD's Zacate

The first demo we saw on Monday was the system running City of Heroes. In CoH Zacate managed to reach frame rates around 2x of what we saw on the Core i5-M 520. AMD also ran through a number of IE9 performance tests including the Psychadelic HTML5 benchmark and the Amazon Shelf test. In both of those tests, the Zacate platform was significantly faster than the Core i5-M 520. And it was those IE9 tests that seemed suspect.

The Zacate test platform

I didn’t think much of it at first, but Zacate managed a ~10x performance advantage in the IE9 Psychadelic benchmark. While Zacate should have a higher performance GPU, it shouldn’t be that much faster. Something was amiss.

I borrowed a Core i5 notebook from Intel (we are at IDF after all) and ran the same tests on it. The performance was much better than what I saw in AMD’s suite. I went back to AMD to find out exactly what was going on.

Update: We've spent more time with Zacate and have some more accurate performance comparisons here.

It's tradition for AMD to have an off-site meeting place during IDF week and this year is no exception. I headed over to AMD's suite to talk about servers, desktops and the imminent mobile Fusion launches. We've talked about AMD's three new microprocessors in great detail before. Bulldozer is targeted at the high end desktop and server markets, due out sometime in 2011 (sampling in Q4). Llano will arrive at the end of Q2 2011 and feature multiple 32nm Phenom II derived cores paired with a very beefy AMD DX11 GPU. What I'm most excited about however is the parts that will begin shipping in Q4 2010: Zacate for mainstream notebooks (18W TDP) and Ontario for netbooks (9W TDP).

Both APUs will have a pair of low-power Bobcat cores and an AMD DX11 GPU. AMD isn't publicly confirming how many cores the GPU side will have but both will share the same die manufactured on TSMC's 40nm process. The package is extremely compact:

AMD let us have some benchmarking time with an early Zacate platform. For a low end/mainstream notebook platform, the GPU performance looks very good. Read on.

Three totally different servers in one test: the dual Xeon X5670 HP DL380 G7, the quad Xeon X7560 SGI Altix UV10 and the Quad Opteron 6174 Dell R815. Three servers with a different platform and built from a different vision. Why place them in one comparitive article? Because they can all be used for the same tasks: virtualization building blocks, ERP server, or HPC number cruncher. Our focus is on the first task, as we went through a massive battery of performance and power consumption measurements.

Join us as we present you the first virtualized performance per watt comparison of real OEM server products.

After the ATI acquisition AMD announced it would be creating a new category of microprocessors that featured integrated ATI GPUs. AMD called these hybrid CPU/GPUs Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and it branded the entire APU strategy: Fusion.

The first Fusion project we heard about was Llano for mainstream notebooks/desktops. Llano will integrate a 32nm derivative of the current Phenom II architecture with a relatively capable DirectX 11 AMD GPU. Llano isn't due out until sometime in 2011 so details are still light. However, AMD just released some details on its lower end Fusion APUs that will begin shipping in Q4 2010 (OEM system availability in Q1 2011).

Bobcat is the CPU core. Last month we went in depth on its architecture. In short, Bobcat is an out-of-order alternative to Intel's Atom that has the potential to offer significantly higher performance. But since we're talking about APUs, Bobcat is only a part of the equation.

AMD will be shipping two Bobcat based APUs in Q4: Ontario and Zacate. Both APUs implement two Bobcat cores and a DX11 AMD GPU with an undisclosed number of cores. Ontario is aimed at netbooks/nettops while Zacate can be used in ultra thins and value notebooks/desktops.

Today at IFA in Berlin AMD announced the Ontario and Zacate TDPs as well as shared a photo of a low power AMD Fusion APU (possibly Ontario?). The Ontario APU is rated at 9W, while Zacate is rated at 18W.

Read on for more analysis of AMD's announcement.

The pricetag of Lenovo's ThinkPad X100e has come down a couple of hundred dollars from its lofty perch when it entered the market more than six months ago, but it still remains a pricy alternative to CULV and Atom-based ultraportables. The X100e is saddled with AMD's outdated Congo platform, but is there more to a notebook than just the hardware under the hood? We think so, and we took the ThinkPad X100e for a spin to prove that the platform isn't always what counts.

Last week we published our preview of Intel's 2011 Core microarchitecture update, codenamed Sandy Bridge. In the preview we presented a conservative estimate of what shipping Sandy Bridge performance will look like in Q1 2011. I call it conservative because we were dealing with an early platform, with turbo disabled, compared to fairly well established competitors with their turbo modes enabled.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that this performance preview, ~5 months before launch, wasn't officially sanctioned or supported by Intel. All companies like to control the manner in which information about their products is released, regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad. We acquired the chip on our own, ran the benchmarks on our own and published the article, on our own. 

As a result a number of questions remained unanswered. I measured significantly lower L3 cache latencies on SB vs. Westmere/Nehalem, I just have no idea why they were lower. I suspect many of these questions will be answered at IDF, but the point is that we were flying blind on this one.

A big unknown was the state of Sandy Bridge graphics. As I mentioned in the preview, there will be two types of integrated graphics enabled on Sandy Bridge parts: 1 core and 2 core parts. Intel refers to them as GT1 and GT2, respectively. The GT1 parts have 6 execution units (EUs), while the GT2 parts have 12.

While some desktop parts will feature GT2, all notebook parts (at launch) will feature GT2. Based on the information I had while running our tests, it looked like the Sandy Bridge sample was a GT1 part. With no official support from Intel and no way to tell how many EUs the sample had, I had no way to confirm. Since publication I've received more information that points to our sample being a GT2 part. It's not enough for me to 100% confirm that it's GT2, but that's what it looks to be at this point.

If it is indeed a GT2 part, the integrated graphics performance in our preview is indicative of the upper end of what you can expect for desktops and in the range of what we'd expect from SB notebooks (graphics turbo may move numbers up a bit but it's tough to tell at this point since our sample didn't have turbo enabled). As soon as I got this information I made updates to the articles indicating our uncertainty. I never like publishing something I'm not 100% sure of and for that, I owe you an apology. We trusted that our sources on the GT1/6EU information were accurate and in this case they may not have been. We all strive to be as accurate as possible on AnandTech and when any of us fail to live up to that standard, regardless of reasoning, it hurts. Thankfully the CPU and GPU performance data are both accurate, although we're simply unsure if the GPU performance will apply to the i5 2400 or not (it should be indicative of notebook SB GPU performance and some desktop SB GPU performance).

The desktop Sandy Bridge GPU rollout is less clear. I've heard that the enthusiast K-SKUs will have GT2 graphics while the more mainstream parts will have GT1. I'm not sure this makes sense, but we'll have to wait and see.

Many of you have been drawing the comparison to Llano and how it will do vs. Sandy Bridge. Llano is supposed to be based on a modified version of the current generation Phenom II architecture. Clock for clock, I'd expect that to be slower than Sandy Bridge. But clock for clock isn't what matters, it's performance per dollar and performance per watt that are most important. AMD has already made it clear that it can compete in the former and it's too early to tell what Llano perf per watt will be. On the CPU side I feel it's probably easy to say that Intel will have the higher absolute performance, but AMD may be competitive at certain price points (similar to how it is today). Intel likes to maintain certain profit margins and AMD doesn't mind dropping below them to maintain competitive, it's why competition is good.

Llano's GPU performance is arguably the more interesting comparison. While Intel had to do a lot of work to get Sandy Bridge to where it is today, AMD has an easier time on the graphics side (given ATI's experience). The assumption is that Llano's GPU will be more powerful than what Intel has in Sandy Bridge. If that's the case, then we're really going to have an awesome set of entry level desktops/notebooks next year. 

We kick off our long overdue focus on AMD with an in-depth review of ASRock's 890FX Deluxe 4. Landing with an MSRP of $180, the Deluxe 4 slots in between the very best 890GX motherboards and the enthusiast 890FX based offerings. Have ASRock done enough to draw our attention away from the cheaper 890GX based ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 (circa $150)? It's a close call; the M4A89GTD Pro is the better clocker, while the Deluxe 4 proves to be the more versatile workhorse...

We've looked at AMD's slightly older Tigris platform in the form of their M300 and M600 processors. While performance of those parts was better than previous AMD designs, Intel still maintained a healthy lead in performance and battery life. That wasn't too surprising, and the far more pertinent question is what the new Danube and Nile parts bring to the table. Having taken Nile for a spin and come away impressed, courtesy of the Toshiba T235D, we're now moving up to Danube. AMD again shipped us a recently launched Toshiba A660D notebook, which aims squarely at the midrange performance notebook market.

Sporting the first quad-core mobile AMD processor we've ever tested in the form of the Phenom II P920, the A660D should offer quite a bit more performance in heavily threaded workloads—though the low 1.6GHz base clock speed means dual-core parts should still be faster in lightly threaded tasks. Coupled with the P920 processor are AMD's HD 4250 IGP and HD 5650 discrete graphics, with switching technology providing the optimal choice of performance or battery life depending on if you have the AC adapter connected. Beyond the above, the A660D also provides an update to Toshiba's Satellite design, with a thinner chassis and less gloss. Does the A660D join the T235D as an AMD laptop we can recommend? That's what we're here to investigate.

Four years ago AMD did the unthinkable: it announced the 5.4 billion dollar acquisition of ATI in a combination of cash and stock. What followed was a handful of very difficult years for AMD, an upward swing for ATI and the eventual spinoff of AMD’s manufacturing facilities to GlobalFoundries in order to remain profitable and competitive.

In the years post acquisition, many criticized AMD for blowing a lot of money on ATI and having little to show for it. Even I felt that for $5.4 billion AMD could’ve put together its own competent graphics and chipset teams.

Despite the protest and sideline evaluations, good has come from the acquisition. The most noticeable is the fact that AMD’s chipset business is the strongest it has ever been. AMD branded chipsets and integrated graphics are actually very good. And later this year, AMD will ship its first Fusion APUs (single die CPU/GPU): Ontario using Bobcat cores and an AMD GPU. Ontario will be the first tangible example of direct AMD/ATI collaboration since the acquisition.

Just as we’re about to see results from the acquisition AMD is announcing that it will retire the ATI brand later this year. Save those boxes guys, soon you won’t see an ATI logo on any product sold in the market.

With the recent rise in the number of triple-slot cards, we have a few different cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes an interesting direction with the triple-slot concept.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex Edition is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 5770 with a unique feature: an adjustable height fan. By default the fan sits flush against the heatsink of this double-slot card, but with a twist of the fan it can be raised roughly 9mm. PowerColor says that doing can improve the cooling beyond what a pure double-slot card can achieve by reducing backflow, and today we set to find out if that's the case.

Yesterday we published our coverage of AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer architecture disclosures. If you haven't had a chance to read the piece or haven't been following AMD for the past few years: Bobcat is AMD's new low power architecture, while Bulldozer is targeted at high end desktops and servers. Both are due out sometime in 2011 and both promise a lot.

Now that AMD has completed its presentation at Hot Chips 22 we're allowed to share with you the contents of those presentations. There's not much in here that we haven't already covered in yesterday's article, but if you'd like the full slide deck head over to the AnandTech Galleries.

We've been waiting years for AMD to deliver another knockout microprocessor architecture rather than continue to play the value game. While we've been waiting for its next generation Bobcat and Bulldozer architectures since we first heard of them in 2007, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Bobcat, AMD's mobile architecture for netbooks, nettops and ultra mobile notebooks is due to begin production at the end of this year with systems on sale in Q1 2011. Bulldozer is in testing now, sampling to partners the end of this year and shipping sometime in 2011. And both are ground up redesigns.

Later today at Hot Chips, AMD will reveal more details about the architectures of both cores. And we've got the scoop here now - read on.

We've been looking forward to testing AMD's Nile Ultrathin platform since the first press releases went out. It's no secret that AMD's mobile offerings have trailed in performance and battery life for quite a while; in fact, pricing has been just about the only area where AMD could compete with Intel's mobile juggernaut. Nile—as well as the higher performing Danube platform—are supposed to increase performance by up to 38% in some cases while also boosting battery life. AMD claims some models will offer as much as 7.5 hours of mobility, which is a far cry from the sub-5 hour mark set by the old Congo platform. Does the Nile platform live up to the hype? Is there finally a reasonable alternative to Intel's CULV and ULV offerings?

AMD sent us a Toshiba T235D to let us see for ourselves, and frankly this is the first AMD laptop that I can recommend without a whole bunch of caveats. It's not going to be everything to everyone, but for the intended market there's plenty to like. The HD 4225 IGP is significantly better than Intel's old CULV with GMA 4500MHD, and roughly on the same level as the newer Intel HD Graphics found in Arrandale ULV. While Intel still has the outright CPU performance crown, there's also pricing to consider. So join us as we show how AMD's mobile offerings just got a much-needed kick in the pants.

Reviewing the Dell Studio XPS 7100 recently seemed like a reasonable enough move: we felt it was competitive with rolling your own machine at that price, or at least an excellent alternative to building one for friends or family and fielding their tech support questions. But what can you get at a much lower price? Acer has certainly produced solid bargains in the notebook space, but how do they fare in the desktop space? We review their M3400 tower to find out.

Just shy of 9 months after the FTC’s lawsuit began, Intel’s conflicts are starting to come to an end. Intel and the FTC have reached a settlement ahead of what would have been next month’s court hearing. With this settlement the FTC is agreeing to drop the case in return for a series of prohibitions and requirements placed upon Intel to maintain and enhance the competitive environment in the CPU and GPU markets. Today we'll be taking a look at just what the terms of the settlement are, what the FTC did and didn't get, and how - if at all - this settlement affects the average computer buyer.

AMD's Athlon II Neo and Turion II Neo processors are starting to trickle into the marketplace, but that doesn't mean the old school Athlon Neo and Turion Neo are magically turning into pumpkins. If the Atom's anemic performance and mediocre integrated graphics aren't cutting it for you, MSI has an inexpensive alternative that can fit the bill in the form of their 12.1" Wind U230 subnotebook.

The tricked-out Dell Studio XPS 7100 is an interesting beast. It lacks any overclocking extras and exotic cooling, but it comes priced to move. Packing AMD's latest hex-core Phenom II X6 1055T and an HD 5870, it's no slouch in the performance department either. If you're not fond of DIY PCs, the 7100 definitely warrants a look, but even enthusiasts may find plenty to like with this factory system. It's attractive and well built, and the price is less than what you'd spend building an equivalent system on your own. There are some drawbacks, but overall there's a lot to like with Dell's AMD-based XPS 7100.