AMD Analyst Day tech rounded up

AMD HAD A bunch of interesting devices at their financial analyst day last week. Here are a few of the highlights.

The first one is Hybrid Crossfire, something we told you about a while ago. What you see below is a 780G based board with an RV620 based card. The RV620 will likely end up being called the HD3450/3470 depending on model, but the branding on the graphics part of the 780 was not decided upon yet.

Hybrid Crossfire box, note the second PCIe 16x slot

Next up, we have the Raon Everun UMPC. It is not a phone, as you can see from the Linksys router beside it, it is fairly hefty. There were no specs listed, but I am willing to bet it has a Geode of one sort or other in it, this form factor almost requires it.

Raon Everun UMPC

Two things to note here, it runs Wince so it is about as useless as tractor tires on an F1 car. No, much worse. The other bit is the name. When things are named Everun, you can be sure it is going to have a battery life measured in mayfly heartbeats. Like a sign above a dive restaurant saying 'best steak house', it is usually a warning sign. Caveat emptor.

Lenovo does Cartwheels

The next one is quite a bit more significant, the Lenovo Think Center SFF PC. This is what corporations drool over, to them, this is the holy land for PCs, small, fast and energy efficient. Pack in manageability features, and they will be eaten up.

Again, specs were not listed, but you can bet this is a Cartwheel PC. It may not seem like a big deal, and the specs are pretty dull, but AMD has about zero marketshare in this arena, so anything is a step up. The only negative is it comes with the malware infested MeII OS, unless they ship it with XP or Linux, avoid it and buy a Dell.

The next one simply looked like any other 1U chassis out there, it was a server with four front mounted drive bays from Appro. The full name appeared to be Appro XtremeServer Featuring AMD Torrenza, and guess what it featured?

If you said Torrenza, you win a big nothing. That said, it has an FPGA coupled across an HTX bus and Celoxica's tools to program it with. This rates as a very good idea in my book.

Huawei telcom quad-Opteron blade

Last we have this little puppy, a Huawei Advanced TCA Telecom Server Blade. It has a four dual core 55W Opterons in it, and is totally passive. Cooled that is. You man not think much of it if it won't run Quake, but this is a huge deal, a stable and long term market for AMD, in addition to being potentially quite lucrative. It also has some profound implications about what Huawei is.

Overall, there was enough interesting things at the Analyst Day. The most boring things there were the most profound, and the quad-GPU gaming rigs were shiny but dull. At least AMD appears to be putting the effort in to the points that pay, not just the toys. µ