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Late yesterday AMD released their earnings report for Q4 2011 and the entirety of 2011. 2011 was an important year for AMD as they finally shipped their first APUs (integrated CPU/GPU), the TSMC-produced ultra-mobile Brazos APU earlier in the year, and the GlobalFoundries produced Llano desktop/mobile APU in the summer.  At the same time it was the second year that AMD has operated as a fabless company, and the first in which a new process node (32nm) was delivered by the now-independent GlobalFoundries. However it was also a year of turmoil, with long-time AMD staffer turned-CEO Dirk Meyer resigning at the start of the year, followed up by outsider Rory Read taking the helm of AMD in August.

For 2011, AMD brought in .57 billion in revenue, with a net income of 1 million, versus .49B in revenue and 1M in 2010; or in other words AMD was flat on the year. Meanwhile for the all-important Q4 and the holiday sales that go with it, AMD earned .69B, but took a net loss of 7M. This compares to .65B of revenue and a net income of 5M for Q4 2010, making Q4 effectively as flat as the year itself in revenue, but far less profitable.

AMD 2011 Financial Results

 

Q4'2011

Q4'2010

FY2011

FY2010

Revenue

.69B

.65B

.57B

.49B

Net Income

-7M

5M

1M

1M

So what drove AMD’s earnings? Starting with a focus on Q4, the single biggest factor here is that AMD has once again taken a substantial charge related to GloFo. Even though GloFo operates independently, AMD continues to own 8.8% of the company, which means the status of GloFo is reflected in AMD’s earnings in some cases. To that end, AMD took a 9M “impairment of investment” charge reflecting the loss of value of GloFo, making it the primary reason the company slipped into the red for the quarter. As this is a charge for recognizing the loss of value of an asset, AMD has not actually lost 9M, but it was booked as such. Meanwhile AMD also took a restructuring charge in Q4 related to their workforce reduction, which cost the company a further M. Altogether the company took 5M in one-time losses for Q4; their net income excluding those loses would have been 8M.

In terms of product shipments, Q4 marked the launch of AMD’s Bulldozer architecture. AMD technically began shipping Bulldozer products for revenue in Q3, but Q4 was the first complete quarter. For that reason server and chipset revenue grew by double-digits over Q3, while desktop Bulldozer sales went unmentioned in AMD’s report. Meanwhile compared to Q4 of 2010 AMD’s CPU & chipset revenue was up slightly, with the bulk of the difference due to higher mobile CPU (Brazos and Llano) and chipset sales. Unfortunately for AMD this didn’t do anything to help their ASP for the quarter, and a result it’s flat versus 2010.

In discussing Q4 2010, AMD mentioned that they have been impacted by the hard drive shortage that started late last year. As virtually all CPUs are sold with new systems, AMD can only ship as many CPUs as their partners have hard drives to equip those systems with, creating a hard drive bottleneck in PC product. As a result not only does AMD face a limit in sales, but because the remaining hard drives are more expensive, PC manufacturers are cutting corners to make up the difference. NVIDIA and Intel have also been impacted by this, and as we’ll see it’s not the CPU division that’s taking the largest hit from the shortage.

Meanwhile for the entire year AMD ended up shipping 30M APUs. Most of AMD’s APU sales for the year were Brazos (a specific breakdown was not provided), reflecting the fact that Brazos has been a significant hit for the company, getting them into nettops and other cheap small form factor designs. The company-wide gross margin was 46%, which was up a point from 2010.

GPUs

On the GPU side however things were less rosy. As we’ve noted before APU sales eat into GPU sales, not only because APUs displace the need for low-end GPUs in some cases, but because APU revenue is booked alongside CPU revenue instead of GPU revenue.

AMD 2011 Graphics Division Financial Results

 

Q4'2011

Q4'2010

FY2011

FY2010

Revenue

2M

4M

.56B

.66B

Operating Income

M

M

M

9M

For Q4 2011 AMD’s graphics division had 382M in revenue and M in operating income, versus 4M revenue and M operating income the year before. On a yearly basis AMD booked .56B in revenue and M in operating income, compared to .66B and 9M respectively for 2010.

For AMD’s graphics division there were a few different driving factors for the quarter and for the year. From a product standpoint AMD launched the Radeon HD 6000 series early into the quarter last year, while the first true 7000 series part (Tahiti) did not launch until 2012 and only started shipping for revenue very late into 2011. Still, it was enough to have a significant impact on AMD’s GPU ASP, increasing it over 2010’s ASP even with the limited number of new products.

Meanwhile the biggest loser here was the desktop GPU segment, thanks both to a general decrease in desktop sales and the hard drive shortage. Compared to CPU sales desktop GPU sales in particular are being significantly impacted by the hard drive shortage as fewer desktop PCs are being sold and manufacturers cut back on or remove the discrete GPU entirely to offset higher hard drive prices. As a result AMD’s graphics revenue is down 10% year-over-year, with both dGPU sales to partners and direct board sales (FirePro) sliding versus 2010.

What’s Next

While AMD has officially closed the book on 2011, AMD expects to continue to be dogged by some 2011 issues for some time to come. The hard drive shortage in particular is going to extend through at least the first part of 2012 (no one seems to be quite sure when it will end), which is going to continue to hammer sales. At the same time AMD will be launching several new products in the next half year, including two new GCN GPUs (Pitcairn and Cape Verde), and of course their first Bulldozer APU, Trinity.

The bigger question though is what AMD’s long-term plans starting in 2012 will be. It’s widely expected that Rory Reed will announce a major new strategy for the company at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day 2012 next week, which would have a significant impact on the future of some product lines. As to what that might be, AMD’s own earnings report reiterated something the company said during last year’s workforce reduction: "the Company plans to reinvest a significant portion of the anticipated savings to fund initiatives designed to accelerate AMD's strategies for lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud". We’ll be at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day next week to find out just what AMD’s new strategy might be, so stay tuned.

Netbooks aren't dead, but they're not quite the hip topic of discussion they were a few years ago. The focus on cost conscious computing hasn't changed since the introduction of the first netbook, but the maturity of tablets has. Intel still sees the netbook segment as a profitable one (for itself) through 2012, although I'm fully expecting the line between netbook and convertible tablet to blur after the launch of Windows 8. 

Atom has been at the heart of nearly all netbooks since the segment's inception. We've seen only one major platform shift since then: from the original 2008 Atom platform to Pine Trail. Pine Trail integrated the GPU and memory controller without significantly changing the Atom architecture. Today Intel is officially announcing its next major netbook platform shift: Cedar Trail.

While the original Atom and Pineview (Pine Trail's Atom) were built on Intel's 45nm process, Cedar Trail moves to 32nm. Cedar Trail's SoC shrinks to 56mm2, finally making it smaller than AMD's Zacate APU. The underlying CPU architecture hasn't really changed, nor have cache sizes (512KB L2 per core) or clock speeds (1.66GHz and 1.86GHz parts available), so what this is really about is a reduction in power consumption. 

There are three Atom CPUs being offered as a part of Cedar Trail: the N2600, N2800 and D2700. Just as before, the N-series are for netbooks while the D-series are for desktops. All of the Cedar Trail Atoms are dual-core parts, but they all slot into the same power envelope as the old single-core Pine Trial platforms (5 – 8W). The only exception is the D2700 which is a 10W platform. Note that this is the total TDP for the Atom SoC + the NM10 Express chipset (providing USB, LAN, PCIe, etc…). 

The spec breakdown is below:

Given the same number of cores and the same clock speeds, CPU performance shouldn't go up compared to Pine Trail. Since everything is now dual-core we should see a boost at the low end, but I wouldn't expect to see CPU performance that's better than Zacate. 

Cedar Trail now supports DDR3-800 and 1066 (up from 667MHz max data rates before). The bigger change is the GPU. The GMA 3150 used in Pine Trail was an Intel Gen graphics derivative (45nm GMA 3100), however Cedar Trail now features a PowerVR SGX 545 sourced from Imagination Technologies. At 640MHz in the N2800, we've never seen the SGX 545 run at anywhere near this clock speed before so it'll be interesting to see how well it performs. Intel is claiming a > 2x GPU performance improvement compared to the GMA 3150 in Pine Trail in 3DMark 06. The big question is Windows driver maturity, but we'll find out soon enough as systems based on Cedar Trail are in production now and are expected to ship in early 2012. Expect to see Cedar Trail netbooks from ASUS, Acer, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba for starters.

The new graphics block also includes support for H.264 video decode acceleration (we're still digging for specifics) as well as Intel Wireless Display technology. Note that WiDi support will vary depending on the system and price point:

Intel is expecting the vast majority of Cedar Trail netbooks to be sold in the 9 – 9 price point. At 9 is where you'll likely find features like WiDi as well as potentially fanless designs. Don't expect any of those new form factors at 9 until the later part of next year, likely coinciding with Windows 8's release.

Overall the addition of HD video decode support and lower power consumption are both nice features to have, but I'm skeptical as to whether this will be enough to carry Intel based netbooks throughout the majority of 2012. Atom is in dire need of an architecture update (something we'll get in 2013) and the netbook as a platform is in need of a refresh. I do hope to see some manufacturers taking risks with slim, fanless Cedar Trail based designs next year but we'll have to wait and see if they're any good.

In our original review of the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime I did the best I could do given limited testing opportunity with the platform before the NDA lifted on all reviews data. I made the commitment back then to come back with additional findings after I had spent more time with the platform. Today I'm back to make good on that promise.

Two more Eee Pad Transformer Prime samples later and here we are. Next week retailers and etailers should begin shipping the first orders of the Prime out to customers. There were a number of gaps I wasn't happy with in our original review of the Prime, I've spent the past couple of weeks trying to fill them. Even what I'm presenting today isn't perfect, but when combined with the original review it should paint a more complete picture of the Eee Pad Transformer Prime.

Gallery: ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime

And I've got video, something I had to cut out of the original review due to time constraints:

Read on for the follow-up!

Later today AMD will be releasing the first preview for their Catalyst 12.1 driver set. AMD has been going through preview/beta drivers at a rapid pace in the last couple of months – we’ve seen 3 different 11.11 preview drivers in as many weeks – and as 11.12 nears, AMD is preparing for what 2012 and the Catalyst 12.x series will bring. It may sound like hyperbole to say that 2012 will be the biggest year yet for AMD’s Catalyst driver team, but it’s the truth. Graphics Core Next will be the biggest GPU architecture change for the company since R600 (2900XT) nearly 5 years ago, bringing with it a great deal of backend driver work that needs to be done, while the frontend team has their own goals and aspirations.

At the same time it’s going to give AMD the chance to close the book on 2011. 2011 brought with it some great developments out of the Catalyst team such as significant performance boosts for both Cayman (6900 series) GPUs and CrossFire across the board, while other groups delivered on more consumer-facing features such as SteadyVideo to go along with the launch of the Llano APU.

But 2011 also brought with it some technical debt and some reputational debt, all of which needs to be paid in 2012. AMD outright blew the launch of Rage by posting a faulty driver, Battlefield 3 in CrossFire mode did not work out of the box (i.e. without microstutter) even with nearly a month-long public beta and AMD’s close relationship with DICE, and CrossFire support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim took the better part of a month to reach Radeon HD 5000 series owners. Not to kick the Catalyst team while they’re down, but for all that went well for them in 2011 they failed in other areas where they could least afford it. Thus 2012 becomes all the more important for AMD as they need to erase their debts from 2011.

Erasing those debts starts today for AMD, with the release of the Catalyst 12.1 preview driver. 12.1 won’t be the driver that buys AMD redemption – I think 11.11c is more important in that respect – but it is the driver that sets the pace for the year. And quite frankly it’s the driver that’s going to buy AMD a lot of goodwill, even if it only brings with it a few changes.

Custom Application Profiles As Implemented By NVIDIA

Of those few features I’m going to immediately dive in with what I think is the headline feature: custom application profiles. Ever since NVIDIA introduced custom application profiles so many years ago I have been a firm believer in their importance for GPU enthusiasts. While most games have been good about implementing anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering controls, that’s about as much progress as they’ve made. With the introduction of driver enhancements like Adaptive/Transparancy anti-aliasing, coverage sample/EQ anti-aliasing, tessellation clamping, and the widespread use of multi-GPU, the idea that you can set & forget your drivers on a global level has become antiquated. These features deserve to be used, and custom application profiles are the most efficient way of using them.

For more than 4 years now I’ve asked AMD for this feature – in meetings and in articles – but it hasn’t been something where we’ve seen eye-to-eye. AMD made some progress in 2010 with the introduction of Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) to distribute out of band profile updates, and while CAP was a big step forward for AMD, the C I was looking for was custom. Tools like Radeon Pro have filled the gap in the meantime, but it’s never the same thing as having such functionality built into the driver itself, especially when 3rd party tools will never have the reach of 1st party tools.

With Catalyst 12.1 AMD is finally taking application profiles to their logical extension by allowing for custom application profiles, and I couldn’t be happier. As is the case with NVIDIA, AMD is allowing users to create new application profiles and to modify the application profiles distributed through drivers and CAP updates. This not only includes settings traditionally available through the driver, but for the first time AMD is opening up CrossFire – you can now force various CrossFire modes by using a custom profile.

Breaking things down a bit, if you have used NVIDIA’s custom profiles in the past then you should find the functionality nearly the same. All of AMD’s control panel settings can be saved to a custom profile which will then be used alongside the game the profile is for. For example this allows for forcing MSAA in Starcraft II or clamping tessellation factors in HAWX 2 without the need to set (and then unset) these features at a global level. If you’re an image quality purist, and particularly if you’ve spent a significant amount of money on GPUs to achieve this, then the value of custom profiles cannot be understated.

As for multi-GPU users, they will be the other significant group to benefit from custom profiles. Previously if you wished to force CrossFire on an unsupported application you needed to rename the executable to match a game AMD had a profile for, and then hope that specific CF mode worked. With custom profiles AMD is enabling several different CF modes: default (which uses whatever CF profile AMD has defined for the game), AFR Friendly (forced AFR), Optimize 1×1, and Use AMD Pre-define Profile, which allows a custom profile to have a CF mode from another game mapped to it (similar to NVIDIA’s SLI compatibility bits). Even disabling CF on a per-profile basis is an option here, though we found that it suffers from the same quirk that NVIDIA’s implementation does: the second GPU is decoupled but CF isn’t actually disabled, so games that can detect CF (such as Crysis) will follow their AFR friendly render paths as they still see CF enabled.

At this point all of the necessary functionality is present and accounted for, and in our tests we’ve found it to work without any hitches. AMD is finally at parity with NVIDIA in providing this small but crucial feature.

With that said, while AMD has done a great job implementing the functionality of custom application profiles the interface could use some further work. The whole implementation still feels like it’s been shoehorned into AMD’s existing 3D Applications Setting panel; AMD doesn’t sufficiently separate the concept of global and custom profile settings, as you use the same control panel to make changes to both types of settings. It’s possible (and likely) that you’ll accidentally set your global settings at least once when trying to save a custom profile.

Furthermore whereas NVIDIA uses application detection to pre-populate a list of profiles, AMD has no such detection. In order to create a profile you need to first select your settings in the 3D Application Settings panel and then save those settings to a new profile, a process that involves hunting down the executable of the game. Of course NVIDIA’s detection system isn’t perfect and you’ll have to follow a similar process at times, but if you have a large Steam library you’ll appreciate not having to drill down through several directories to find the right executable for each game.

Once a custom profile has been set however, AMD actually has a second panel that lists all of the custom profiles and their settings, and allows you to delete them. Note that this is just a listing of custom profiles, so pre-defined profiles continue to remain hidden. Custom and pre-defined profiles play well together for the most part, although if you create a custom profile for a game that already has a pre-defined profile AMD will warn you that the custom profile will override the pre-defined profile.

Gallery: AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview

Overall if you’re a previous NVIDIA user who has missed custom application profiles you should be quite content with AMD’s latest addition. Otherwise if you’ve never had the opportunity to use custom application profiles before then you’re in for a treat.

Rounding out the changes to the Catalyst Control Center, along with the addition of custom application profiles AMD has also made some minor tweaks to the Video Color and Video Quality control panels. There’s no new functionality to speak of, but they have been tweaked to simplify their use.

Finally, outside of the CCC AMD has also added a couple new features to their driver, along with some specific performance enhancements. 3D users will find that quad-buffer (gaming) 3D finally works in conjunction with CrossFire, while TV users will find that AMD now supports frame-packed 3D over HDMI at 1080p30, on top of their existing support for 1080p24 and 720p60. A quick check of the HDMI specification lists frame-packed 1080p30 as an optional (secondary) resolution, but it’s there for the TVs that support it. Meanwhile for performance AMD is still hard at work on Skyrim; 6900 series users can look forward to up to 10% better performance in Skyrim when using MSAA alongside CrossFire.

The road to Google's Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is finally nearing its destination. As of yesterday, the Samsung made Galaxy Nexus went on sale in the UK. Its arrival in the US on Verizon is imminent, but it'll still be another couple of weeks before we can get our hands on a CDMA/LTE sample.

The Galaxy Nexus hardware platform isn't a significant departure from what we've already seen on Android. TI was chosen as the launch silicon partner with its OMAP 4460. The SoC takes a pair of Cortex A9 CPUs running at 1.2GHz and gives them a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory interface to talk to. The GPU is Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX 540. The CPU side of things is comparable to Apple's A5, although the cores are clocked noticeably higher than the 800MHz we saw in the iPhone 4S. Until Tegra 3 and Krait show up, the CPU side of the 4460 is as good as it gets.

The real advantage the Galaxy Nexus has is on the software side. All of the goodness of Honeycomb makes its way to a handset along with even further optimization work. One of the early Galaxy Nexus owners ran the usual browser benchmarks on his phone and shared the results with us. Google has obviously done a lot of browser optimization in ICS as performance is now better than even Honeycomb:

The GPU in the Galaxy Nexus isn't bad by any means – the SGX 540 is competent, but it is outgunned by ARM's Mali 400 (Samsung Exynos 4210) and the SGX 543MP2 (Apple A5). As I mentioned earlier, the Galaxy Nexus wasn't about putting the fastest hardware in a phone but rather providing a stable vehicle for Ice Cream Sandwich. Results for the Galaxy Nexus have been in the GLBenchmark database for a while and show an overall improvement over previous SGX 540 implementations (the GPU clock in the 4460 is higher than in the 4430):

Performance is pretty much as expected in both areas: Google really pushed the performance of its software further with Ice Cream Sandwich, while GPU performance is limited by the SGX 540. The good news is that there's more than enough hardware at ICS' disposal to deliver a smooth experience. We'll be able to quantify that once we get our hands on a device.

Source: GLBenchmark, @SigThief

In a private media event this week Corsair unveiled its latest contribution to the PC industry: gaming keyboards, mice and headsets. All of these new peripherals fall under the Vengeance brand. The motivation behind this move is simple: starting with memory and eventually expanding into power supplies, SSDs and cases, Corsair wants to be your one-stop shop for nearly everything you need for your PC. The CPU, motherboard and video card markets are either impossible to get into or undesirable for a manufacturer that doesn't already play in those spaces, leaving peripherals as one of the only options for expansion.

Traditionally companies avoided getting into the peripheral space because you have to compete with very wealthy and experienced competitors: Logitech and Microsoft. With Logitech trying to expand into other areas beyond peripherals it appears that Corsair is hoping that its competitor will lose a bit of its focus. Whether or not this works out for Corsair remains to be seen, but let's look at the products.

Vengeance Headsets

Corsair has dabbled in headsets already but with the Vengeance brand it expands the line considerably. Starting this October the company will offer three different Vengeance headsets priced from up to .

 

The Vengeance 1500 is the top end SKU with two 50mm drivers, simulated 7.1 surround sound and USB support (integrated audio codec). The 1300 is the same as the 1500 but substitutes in a 1/8" stereo plug instead of USB.

 

The 1100 is a lighter design that uses 40mm drivers but with USB support.

{gallery 1386}

Corsair Vengeance Headsets

 

Vengeance 1500

Vengeance 1300

Vengeance 1100

Price

 

Vengeance Keyboards & Mice

The entire Vengeance peripheral lineup is targeted at gamers. Start focused and expand beyond there seems to be the strategy. Corsair's initial keyboard & mice offerings are targeted at two genres of games: MMO/RTS and FPS. All of the Vengeance keyboards & mice feature an aluminum construction.

The MMO/RTS targeted products are called the Vengeance K90 and M90. The K-series are for keyboards while the M-series refer to mice. The K90 is backlit with over 90 individual LEDs (almost one behind every key). It uses Cherry MX mechanical red switches for each key which have a 2mm actuation travel (4mm total travel). There's no accompanying click sound with these keys, they have a nice linear but springy travel to them. The Cherry MX red switches apparently require the least amount of force to actuate out of their entire lineup of switches. Corsair claims the keyboard will recognize up to 20 simultaneous keystrokes.

The MMO/RTS focus comes in with the K90's 18 customizable macro keys. You can switch between three different sets of macros, for a total of 54 total macros. The macros are defined using Corsair's Vengeance gaming software.

{gallery 1387}

The corresponding mouse is the M90:

The M90 uses an Avago ADNS-9500 5700 DPI laser sensor. The mouse has 9 customizable side buttons.

On the FPS side there are the K60 and M60. Let's start with the K60:

The aluminum chassis and Cherry MX red mechanical switches are both present, but the individual key lights are gone as are the macro keys. The K60 instead ships with a removable wrist wrest (which is actually quite comfortable) and easily removable, textured WASD and 1-6 number keys. When not in use, the textured keys can be stored in the wrist wrest. The feel of each keypress remains the same as the K90, but the macro keys are gone and the styling of the K60 is a bit different.

{gallery 1388}

The M60 mouse includes a sniper button that allows you to quickly switch between high and low DPI modes (customizable in software).

Corsair Vengeance Headsets

 

Vengeance K90

Vengeance K60

Vengeance M90

Vengeance M60

Price

9

9

 

Final Words

I had some brief hands on time with all of the newly announced Vengeance peripherals, they all felt good but it'll take much longer than a short play session to really evaluate these things. I'm mostly curious to see how well these things do in the hands of hardcore gamers. Does Corsair have what it takes to pull customers away from the likes of Logitech, Microsoft and Razer?

Corsair's new Vengeance lineup will be available starting next month.

What’s in a Benchmark? This is a pertinent question that all users need to ask themselves, because if you don’t know what a benchmark actually tests and how that relates to the real world, the scores are meaningless. Today, AMD has announced that they are resigning from BAPCo over a long standing dispute over the weighting of scores within the SYSmark suite. AMD specifically references SYSmark 2012 (SM12), but there have been complaints in the past and the latest release is apparently the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

You can read more about the decision on Cheif Marketing Officer (CMO) Nigel Dessau’s blog, but this announcement comes at an interesting time since BAPCo just shipped us copies of the final SM12 release. We haven’t had a chance to run the suite yet, and we’ll still have a look at the results and see how AMD and Intel platforms compare at some point, but it looks like we have a foregone conclusion: Intel will come out ahead. What we really need to examine is why Intel gets a better score.

If you’ve been reading AnandTech for any length of time, you’ll know that we place a lot more weight on real-world benchmarks rather than synthetic tests, but certain tasks can be very difficult to test in a meaningful way. How do you measure every day tasks like surfing the web in a meaningful way when most CPUs are 95% idle performing that task? When we really look at the market right now, in many cases we can conclude that just about any current computer will be fast enough for 90% of users. If you want to surf the Internet, write email, work in Office applications, watch some movies, listen to music, etc. you can do that on anything from a lowly AMD Brazos netbook to a hex-core monster system. Yes, we did leave out Atom, because there are certain areas where it falls short—specifically, certain movie formats prove to be too much for the current Atom platform, particularly if you’re looking at HD H.264 content (e.g. YouTube and Hulu).

Reading through AMD’s announcement and Nigel’s blog, it’s pretty clear what AMD is after: they want the GPU to play a more prominent role in measurements of overall system performance. On the one hand, we could say that AMD is simply trying to get benchmarks to favor their APUs, since Brazos and Llano easily surpass the Intel competition when it comes to graphics and video prowess. This would certainly be true, but then we also have to consider what users are actually doing with their PCs. SYSmark has always included a variety of tests, and certainly knowing how fast your computer is in regards to Excel performance can be useful. However, AMD claims that a disproportionate weight is given to some tests, with mention of optical character recognition and file compression activities in particular.

We don’t have the full SM12 whitepaper yet, but we can look at the list of applications that are tested, and a few things immediately stand out. There are two web browsers in the list, but both versions are now outdated. Internet Explorer 8 has been replaced by Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox 3.6 is replaced by Firefox 4.0—with Firefox 5 just around the corner. Without newer browsers, HTML5 is basically untested by SM12, and while we understand that SM12 has been in development for a while, for something calling itself 2012 to include mostly 2010 applications feels out of place. Considering IE9 and FF4 both shift to GPU-accelerated engines, AMD would certainly have benefited from the use of the latest versions. The remaining applications look reasonable, but again we have no information on weighting of scores, so we’ll have to see how the results pan out.

Ultimately, the main thing to take away from all of this is that, just like the PCMark, 3DMark, Cinebench, SunSpider, etc. benchmarks we routinely refer to, SYSmark 2012 is merely one more tool to analyze system performance. It will be interesting to see how other elements—like the presence or lack of an SSD—impact the score. In our opinion most users would benefit far more from running something like Llano with an SSD as opposed to Sandy Bridge with an HDD, so the CPU/GPU/APU are not the only factors, but it still depends on your intended use. If you’re running a server, obviously the demands placed on the system will be far different from the average home computer. Multimedia professionals that spend a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop and/or Premiere likewise have different needs.

Is AMD right? Is heterogeneous (e.g. CPU and GPU working together) computing more important now than raw CPU performance, or is SYSmark12 merely proving what we already know: Sandy Bridge is really fast? Let us know what you think, but as always remember that when you’re looking at benchmark charts, take a minute to think about what the bars actually represent. The full news release is below, but again you can find substantially more detail in Dessau’s blog.

Update: It turns out AMD is not the only party to have left the BAPCo consortium recently. We've just confirmed with NVIDIA that they have also left the BAPCo consortium. No reason was given.

Update 2: BAPCo has released a statement in return. The consortium notes that AMD approved 80% of the development milestones and that AMD was never threatened with expulsion. The full statement is attached below.

Update 3: We've finally gotten official confirmation (as rumored earlier) that VIA has also left the consortium. They have sent a short statement to SemiAccurate which we have included below. The basis of their complaints are much the same as AMD's: they don't consider SYSMark 2012 to reflect real world usage.

AMD Will Not Endorse SYSmark 2012 Benchmark

— AMD Separates from Association with Industry Group BAPCo —

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — 21, 2011 — AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 Benchmark (SM2012), which is published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation). Along with the withdrawal of support, AMD has resigned from the BAPCo organization.

“Technology is evolving at an incredible pace, and customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems,” said Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD. “AMD does not believe SM2012 achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium.”

AMD will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information. AMD believes benchmarks should be constructed to provide unbiased results and be transparent to customers making decisions based on those results. Currently, AMD is evaluating other benchmarking alternatives, including encouraging the creation of an industry consortium to establish an open benchmark to measure overall system performance.

AMD encourages anyone wanting more details about the construction and scoring methodology of the SM2012 benchmark to contact BAPCo. For more details on AMD’s decision to exit BAPCo, please read AMD’s Executive Blog authored by Nigel Dessau.

BAPCo® Reaffirms Open Development Process For SYSmark® 2012

SAN MATEO, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo®) is a non-profit consortium made up of many of the leaders in the high tech field, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and ARCintuition. For nearly 20 years BAPCo has provided real world application based benchmarks which are used by organizations worldwide. SYSmark® 2012 is the latest release of the premiere application based performance benchmark. Applications used in SYSmark 2012 were selected based on market research and include Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was, until recently, a long standing member of BAPCo. We welcomed AMD’s full participation in the two year development cycle of SYSmark 2012, AMD’s leadership role in creating the development process that BAPCo uses today and in providing expert resources for developing the workload contents. Each member in BAPCo gets one vote on any proposals made by member companies. AMD voted in support of over 80% of the SYSmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by BAPCo in 100% of the SYSmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium.

BAPCo also notes for the record that, contrary to the false assertion by AMD, BAPCo never threatened AMD with expulsion from the consortium, despite previous violations of its obligations to BAPCo under the consortium member agreement.

BAPCo is disappointed that a former member of the consortium has chosen once more to violate the confidentiality agreement they signed, in an attempt to dissuade customers from using SYSmark to assess the performance of their systems. BAPCo believes the performance measured in each of the six scenarios in SYSmark 2012, which is based on the research of its membership, fairly reflects the performance that users will see when fully utilizing the included applications.

VIA's Statement About Leaving The BAPCo Consortium

VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization.

We hope that the industry can adopt a much more open and transparent process for developing fair and objective benchmarks that accurately measure real world PC performance and are committed to working with companies that share our vision.

Not wanting to be completely married to Intel NAND production, OCZ wanted to introduce a version of the Vertex 3 that used 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND – similar to what was used in the beta Vertex 3 Pro we previewed a few months ago. Rather than call the new drive a Vertex 3 with a slightly different model number, OCZ opted for a more pronounced suffix: MAX IOPS. By using 32nm NAND OCZ gets more die per channel and thus can get better performance through interleaving.

Not wanting to be outdone, Patriot's first SF-2281 SSD uses the same 32nm Toshiba NAND as the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS. These two drives are the new face for high performance SandForce SSDs. Read on for our full review!

In 2009 AMD launched the highly successful Radeon HD 5800 series to great fanfare and even greater shortages. With a 6 month lead on NVIDIA, AMD had the high-end market locked up tight, and in spite of recurring GPU shortages was able to make the best of the situation. Ultimately their one-sided dominance did come to an end with NVIDIA's GTX 400 series launch, but it's not until the past month with the GTX 500 series that NVIDIA gained a clear upper-hand over AMD's long-lived 5800 series.

Hot on the heels of the Radeon HD 6800 series launch and NVIDIA's GTX 500 series launch, AMD is making a truly fresh start in the high-end market. Launching today is the Radeon HD 6900 series, marking the launch of not just AMD's competitor for the GTX 500 series, but also the start of the company's future. With the launch of a new GPU architecture premiering with the Cayman GPU, this is anything but a typical GPU launch.

This morning NVIDIA is announcing the rest of its Fermi-based Quadro family: the Quadro 2000 and the Quadro 600. Based on the GF106 and GF108 GPUs respectively, the 2000 and the 600 flesh out NVIDIA’s Quadro line for the mid-range and entry markets, focusing on Quadro’s traditional strengths in the professional graphics & CAD markets, and more recently on CUDA-accelerated professional applications. For these applications the new Fermi based Quadros should provide significantly more compute and geometry capabilities than the FX-series Quadros they replace.