The best semiconductor professionals know how important it is to be on top of what's happening in the industry. For you to be the best at what you do, you want to be aware of the work your colleagues are performing as well.
With that in mind, we'll be helping to cover company news and product updates for businesses making a splash in the semiconductor industry, starting today with AMD's new performance mobile Accelerated Processing Units (APU).
Advanced Micro Devices, a leading provider of core and graphics processing technology, announced the release of their new performance mobile APUs earlier this month. The new product is designed for ultrathin and high performance mobile PCs. It continues the trend for electronics to provide ever better support for stronger computing power, higher-quality graphics, and longer lasting battery life.
Among their many uses, the APUs enable high performance gaming with hooks for AMD's proprietary API and a power boost to its Raedon dual graphics card. The product also comes with new graphics architecture within AMD's Raedon R7 series (similar to what's used in PS4 and Xbox one), as well as support for ultraHD resolutions. The various audio/visual features included help enhance the gaming experience for players.
QuickStream and SteadyVideo, two of the product's patented features, help improve the quality of video streaming and home video playback on the PC. With the growing popularity of streaming video sites and the ease of making home videos with new technologies, the APUs address some of the priorities taking precedence for many mobile PC owners.
The underlying technology powering the chip is the presence of 12 computing cores split into central processing (CPU) cores and graphics (GPU) cores. The improved HSA architecture synchronizes these cores for improved performance and efficiency.
Showing faith in these high performance mobile APUs, industry players like Dell, HP, Samsung and Toshiba all displayed supporting systems at Computex Tapei 2014. Additionally, HP also launched the Elite series of commercial designs featuring AMD's PRO series. By launching a professional series, AMD demonstrates its plans to put more focus on the commercial PC segment.
To further highlight the launch of their new product, AMD physically launched an air balloon containing AMD A-series APU for notebooks that rose to about 36,000 meters before coming back to earth couple of hours later. The event was organized in Moosburg, Germany.
AMD has its eyes on outperforming their closest chipset solution competitor, Intel's Haswell. Currently Intel holds a major share in the mobile PC processor segment. AMD hopes this new product can help them outperform Haswell and compete with Intel's i5 and i7, increasing their market share in this segment.
