AMD announces Radeon HD 7000M series with Enduro graphics-switching technology

AMD kicked off 2012 by refreshing its desktop graphics, and now it's back, giving its mobile GPUs the same treatment. The company just announced its third generation of DirectX 11 mobile chips, the Radeon HD 7000 family. All told, the collection includes three 28nm GPUs: the high-end 7900M, the mainstream 7800M and, last but not least, the 7700M, a darling little chip intended for AMD's thin and light Ultrabook competitors. Across the board, the series ushers in a new feature AMD is calling Enduro, a graphics-switching technology that takes direct aim at NVIDIA Optimus. Building on older AMD technologies like PowerXpress, it doesn't require you to close apps, reboot your system or manually specify which apps will trigger the GPU.
Additionally, it's designed to work with both Intel CPUs and AMD's own application processing units, so presumably you'll find this inside some Ivy Bridge machines too. With this generation, too, the two higher-end chips support the PCI Express 3.0 interface, and all three make use of AMD's existing ZeroCore Power and Power Gating battery-saving features. That's the abridged version, but we also have a full breakdown of the specs awaiting you past the break.

Via engadget.com

AMD reports net loss of $590 million for Q1 2012

We're not sure about you, but we wouldn't call losing over half a billion dollars, "solid results." Still, we're not 100 percent ready to rain on AMD's parade yet. The non-GAAP results (which disregard a pile of one-time charges and investments) turn the $590 million loss into a $92 million profit. Though, the GAAP results do make two straight quarters of losses and revenue clearly continued to decline -- falling to $1.59 billion. That's down six percent from last quarter and two percent from the same time period last year. Revenue from the graphics division held steady from last quarter, though, it's down seven percent year-over-year.


Via engadget.com

ARM reveals a new low-power quad-core Cortex-A15 variant

Chip design company ARM, famous for its Cortex A-series of processors, today introduced a new low-power design of its quad-core Cortex-A15 chip. Its main purpose is to help system-on-a-chip manufacturers design their products faster and with lower power use.
This will be achieved using the company's new hard macrocell implementations of the Cortex A-series of processors. Those versions will boast four cores clocked at 2GHz based on a 28nm design that have fixed specifications. This means that companies using those "hard macro" implementations will not be able to heavily customize ARM's design to their liking.
As a result, manufacturers will get the same power usage as earlier Cortex-A9 chips and faster turnaround times for their SoCs, since they won't be able to fiddle with them.
ARM says this will bring "balance of performance and power", which could eventually be used even in notebooks or fast network devices such as smart routers.
ARM is expected to reveal more details on their new work at tomorrow's IEEE symposium in Yokohama. Chips are expected to start shipping as early as the end of 2012.
It's not yet clear how this would reflect on various manufacturers, but it's certainly going to give them the option to quickly utilize the Cortex-A15 processor, without spending too much time on its development to suite their own needs.

Via  gsmarena.com