Stories about: ATI

By splitting off its manufacturing operations into a separate company, Advanced Micro Devices could be on track to become the nimble, innovative company that once had Intel on the run.

Advanced Micro Devices has thrown down the gauntlet to graphics rival Nvidia, unveiling a graphics card that runs two graphics chips.

Despite an often tenuous relationship with the Linux community regarding the driver quality for its graphics products, the AMD-owned ATI will offer release parity with Windows for its latest Radeon HD 4870 X2 card.

Although Intel offered up few details about its upcoming Larrabee chip on Monday, analysts say the move puts rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia on notice that the competition is taking a new -- and maybe even more contentious -- turn.

Advanced Micro Devices Monday unveiled a new graphics chip designed to be less power hungry than its predecessors by allowing it to be doubled up on high-end graphics cards.

The chips that make up the inside of an x86-based computer are changing. The traditional roles of the processor, chipset and graphics chip are blurring as functions change and new roles are created.

At the logic level, MacBook, the benchmark for success in mainstream notebooks, is unremarkable -- indistinguishable from every PC notebook built on Intel Core 2 and its chipset-integrated graphics. Why, then, can't anyone with the same parts list emulate Apple's growth in an otherwise stagnant notebook market? Because Apple painstakingly hand-optimized its OS for a tiny variety of hardware architectures, presently Intel Core 2, while Microsoft wrote Vista to run on absolutely everything. No PC notebook maker can take the proprietary route that Apple plays to such advantage.

Advanced Micro Devices Wednesday ramped up its competition with rival Intel by unveiling its first processor platform designed specifically for laptops.

Over the past decade, Linux has emerged from a herd of obscure and nerdy operating systems to warrant a place in even the most technologically unsophisticated business environments. And in the past three years, a few distributions have made stupendous leaps in performance and usability, winning the affection of millions of mainstream desktop users.

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said it plans to lay off 10 percent of its work force by the third quarter of 2008 in an effort to cut costs.

Penryn. Nehalem. Phenom. Fusion. Inside these four cryptic code names lies the future of computer desktop processing for 2008. Ultimately, however, it's all about the epic, age-old battle between chip giant Intel and underdog Advanced Micro Devices for desktop dominance.