Last year AMD was hemorrhaging talent. While we don't have a good indication of the extent of the talent exodus, Qualcomm seemed to benefit quite a bit from the tough times that had fallen on AMD. AMD PR mounted the beginnings of a turnaround with the announcement that Jim Keller, former K8 architect and chip-head at Apple had rejoined the company. Then came John Gustafson and last month, we got word that Raja Koduri rejoined as well - also after a multi-year stint at Apple.
Today I just got word from a couple of very accurate and trusted sources that my old friend Sean Pelletier will be joining AMD as well. Sean will abandon his role as Senior Technical Marketing Manager at NVIDIA to assume a similar role at AMD, initially focusing on GPUs. Reporting on individual hires doesn't actually tell you a lot about talent within a company, but it can give insight into whether or not a company is viable. Not too long ago, leaving Apple, NVIDIA or pretty much any other tech company to join AMD sounded like a career death sentence. The fact that smart folks from all paths are considering AMD as an option for long term employment tells us a lot about how things have changed.
Update: I just got word that Sean ended up back at NVIDIA. He sent me a message after making the decision saying that there wasn't anything wrong with AMD, but that the fit simply didn't feel right.
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wilmotsprings - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
The i7-4770 benchmarked has GT2 (HD 4600) graphics. The R SKU will have their GT3e.FITCamaro - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link
The labels on the charts are probably min and max frames per second.gamoniac - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link
For the synthetic benchmarks, the first bar is the total score, the second bar is the GPU score.For the gaming benchmarks, the first bar is the lowest FPS, the second bar is the average FPS.
medi02 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
AMDs APUs are better at games (without discrete card) than Intel's newest and fastest.Is that news?
eanazag - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
My interpretation of the graphs is that the new Haswell is dangerously close to going head to head with AMD's best on IGP. It would be beneficial to know what the two bars per item represent. I would guess turbo and no turbo. I don't read Chinese. Anyway, what is not there is the Haswell part is 84W TDP and AMD's is 100W. In all likelihood the Intel chip will run cooler. AMD will still hold the driver software advantage.axien86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
The review also shows that AMD's A10 Trinity was using older drivers against Intel's most recent and that it also hampered slow memory.
AMD's new Richland APU is 65w (versus Haswell's 84w) and anywhere from 20-40% faster and more power efficient than Trinity and will be selling in the market in June for around $75 to $125.
Gigaplex - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
Richland isn't much of a change over Trinity, it's still using VLIW based graphics (not GCN). The fast ones are still 100W, the low end ones are 65W, much like Llano and Trinity before it.Penti - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link
Richland is just a revision of Trinity and nothing else changes on clock-speed and how they do Turbo as they has added a sensor. It's exactly the same performance as before per MHz. Those 20-40% is just between two sets of two different SKU's that is clocked very differently in the 40% case.fteoath64 - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - link
While this is true for Richland being 65w part, the preliminary benchmarks actually showed between 15%-25% improvement over the existing Trinity chips. Just to average up tp 20% would be a significant improvement over the Intel part considering it is a top-end part at high cost. This actually means the AMD Richland part costing between 1/2 to half the price of the Intel part is a great deal for many. For many games, the frame-rates are more than enough on the APU.lmcd - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Seriously? Where'd they find all that performance? I thought Richland was just tweaks...