AMD has announced their newest mobile CPUs, the 1.2Ghz Athlon 4 and 950mhz Duron. As you can see, AMD still states the actual speed in the mobile market.

Here's some general stuff talking about AMD and their future plans with Laptops, servers and Hammer (64bit). They are going mostly mobile in 2002 and just hoping to hold their ground on desktops.

CNET is reporting that AMD will be using factories from other companies to produce its processors starting 2003. About a quarter of AMD processors might come from these factories by that time, according to CEO Jerry Sanders. AMD will still continue to build its own factories, but two new ones aren't due until 2005.

AnandTech has a review of the Athlon 1900+ CPU that's being released today. Of course, the 1800+ (1.53Ghz) was already beating the fastest P4 in most benchmarks, but now it's beating it even more at 1.6Ghz, even in the Quake 3 benchmark which until now was always the Pentium 4's saving grace.

I see on Tech-Report that a new AMD heat video has been released, showing that AMD's newest processors can run without a heatsink for a while before failing, and can also start just fine again after the heatsink is reattached. Tom's Hardware had recently released a video showing a Pentium4 running fine for a while without a heatsink, while the Athlon started smoking almost instantly without one.

If you're looking for an Athlon motherboard with VIA's latest chipset, the KT266A, but don't know which one to get, AnandTech helps out. They have posted an "initial roundup" of three KT266A motherboards that have been released. Those would be the EPoX EP-8KHA+, MSI K7T266 Pro2-R and the Shuttle AK31.

Anand Tech is the latest with an article about the AMD Hammer. The K7 architecture was AMD's most succesful architecture yet, and Anand looks if they can repeat that with their Hammer tech.

In order to stifle a few rumors we've been getting about AthlonXP recalls, HardOCP got a hold of an AMD rep who stated very clearly that no AthlonXP CPUs have been recalled anywhere and production is ramping up at all facilities.

Many people attributed the Intel 77% net earnings drop posting yesterday to AMD kicking their butts. Guess that isnt the only contributor though as AMD is suffering losses too. In fact AMD just reported their first losses in the last 5 quarters.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said it recorded a loss of $186.9 million, or 54 cents a share, compared with net income of $408.6 million, or $1.18 a share last year. Sales fell 37 percent to $765.9 million from $1.21 billion.

If you want to know about that AMD Hammer stuff (story), there is a PDF file of the presentation on the AMD website.

As was expected, AMD has made official the announcement of their new CPU line code named Hammer. The new CPU will be chugging along with that nifty 64bit CPU stuff. The CPU will also provide the ability to run older 32bit applications preserving backwards compatibility which was a great concern during the early stages of 64bit CPU conception.

``The 'Hammer' architecture innovations include a high bandwidth, high-performance integrated memory, input/output and multiprocessing controller, and a highly scalable system bus that uses HyperTransport(tm) technology with support for single- and multi-processor configurations,'' Weber said. ``Together, these innovations are designed to reduce bottlenecks in the data pathways and speed up the transfer of information, providing more performance and therefore, more productivity.'' [snip]

Woah cool, AMD is going to be announcing the new Hammer CPU technology. Their new next-gen stuff which should hopefully compete with the P4 as it keeps scaling to those higher speeds. More later today.

AMD has also put out a multi-processor version of the AthlonXP being called the AthlonMP. You can take a quick look at the Tech-Report , AMDMB , and SimHQ

AMD has unveiled the new AthlonXP CPU this morning with reviews galore showing up at all the regular hardware websites you'd expect. The AthlonXP 1800 is actually a 1.53GHz chip but AMD is calling it the 1800 since that's the equivalent speed they claim it would be if the chip was based off the old T-Bird core. (According to the HOCP article) Wacky marketing aside the chip is fast. Beating the Intel 2Ghz chips by a fair amount in most all benchmarks except Quake3. Here's some quick benchmark comparisons courtesy of that same HOCP article:

CPU	3DMark	3DWinbench
Athlon 1.4	7679	3.14
Pentium 2GHz	7701	3.14
AthlonXP 1800	8024	3.45

It's also interesting to note that in the AnandTech article the AthlonXP performed better than the P4 in the Return To Wolfenstein benchmark which Anand claims is more CPU bound then the typical Quake3 demos. (RTCW uses the Q3 engine) Well here's the rest of the articles: HardOCP , Tech-Report , AnandTech , OCPrices , Sourcemagazine , AMDMB

Bum deal for AMD, looks like they've recently had sales that were even worse than expected. They also recently got shafted by a major PC vendor not very long ago. Dig on that headline of the story. Heh

The big news sites are finally reporting on the new AMD processor releases that are coming up. CNet reports that AMD will release a 1.1Ghz Duron today, with those wacky XP Athlons following soon. And at the upcoming Microprocessor Forum (October 15) AMD will reveal the tech behind their upcoming 64-bit Hammer processors, which should be out sometime next year.

AMD has posted a new IDE driver that adds Windows XP support. Thanks Blues News.

The Register is reporting that AMD will be shipping the new Athlons on October 9. These are the ones using the new core and have the freaky XP name.

Everyone is hurting from the economic downturn and so is AMD. They have announced job cuts. Some 2300 people will lose their jobs, partly from restructing, and partly due to the closing of two factories in Austin.

ZDNet is reporting that Gateway is dropping AMD as a chip supplier and will go back to Intel as its sole chip supplier. AMD had been supplying chips for a low-cost consumer line, but Gateway says Intel can now match that low cost.