Armwood Technology Blog: Advanced Micro Devices

Showing posts with label Advanced Micro Devices. Show all posts

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Laptops Look Like Racecars -- and Not in a Good Way - NYTimes.com

Laptops Look Like Racecars — and Not in a Good Way

Tony Avelar/Bloomberg Customers may hate stickers on laptops, but it doesn’t seem like they’re going away anytime soon.

At a meeting with Advanced Micro Devices the other day, representatives talked to me about chip sets and clock speeds, of discrete graphics and die sizes. But in passing, they mentioned an additional company initiative that really perked me up: laptop stickers.

When you buy a new Windows PC, as you probably know, it comes festooned with little (or not so little) stickers on the palm rests. There’s one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on.

As A.M.D. points out, it’s like buying a new, luxury car — and discovering that it comes with nonremovable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using.

Never mind that all of this promotional garbage already appears on the box. Do you really need it physically affixed to the actual computer?

Physically — and semi-permanently? I tried to fingernail some of the stickers off that H.P. laptop, and it was a disaster. You can peel them up, but they shred, and they leave adhesive crud behind. When you’ve just spent big bucks on a laptop, should you really be obligated to spend the first 20 minutes trying to dissolve away the sticker goop with WD40? (There’s a missed promotional opportunity for H.P.)

A.M.D.’s research shows that consumers hate the stickers (duh). But they’re not going away, for one simple reason: There’s big money involved. Intel, Microsoft, Skype and whoever else is represented by the stickers actually pay the computer companies for the billboard space. That’s why H.P., for example, would tolerate gumming up its laptops’ good looks with crass ads. (Apple refuses to put Intel stickers on its computers, even though there’s Intel inside. In doing so, it leaves millions of dollars a year on the table.)

I’m not even sure it’s money well spent. If you buy a Windows laptop, it’s pretty obvious you’re going to get Windows on it. If the computer box says “Intel inside,” you pretty much already know that when you open the box.

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Another reason among many to buy a Mac instead of a P.C.

John H. Armwood

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Apple's Refreshed iMacs Tout Newest Intel CPUs

Apple today refreshed its iMac line for the first time since October 2009 by adopting Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 processors across the board and abandoning NVidia's integrated graphics chipset for ATI-branded graphics processors.

The revamp should boost desktops sales, which have been lagging of late.

"The last few refreshes, the iMac has done surprisingly well, and has driven some decent growth numbers for Apple," said Stephen Baker, a retail analyst with the NPD Group. "Apple usually gets some really nice [sales] bumps when they do this."

In the second quarter of 2010, Apple sold 1 million desktops worldwide, down from 1.15 million the quarter before, and also off from the 1.23 million it sold in the final three months of 2009, the quarter when it last revised the iMac.

During a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week to discuss its second-quarter earnings, Apple said that the slower desktop sales were due to the long interval since the last refresh, as well as the continued move toward laptops.

As is Apple's custom, the company did not lower prices for any of today's new iMac models.

Unlike in October 2009, when it bumped up the iMac screens to 21.5-in. and 27-in. -- Apple did not revamp the exterior design today. Instead, it swapped faster, beefier components for slower and less capable parts.

Among the most significant moves was Apple's dropping of Intel's Core Duo dual-core architecture.

The Core Duo, and the follow-on Core Duo 2, have been the foundation of the iMac since Apple introduced the Intel platform to the line in 2006 . Today, however, the company dumped the Core 2 Duo for Intel's Core i3 on the three-lowest priced models, with speed bumps on two of the three new configurations. The higher-priced of the two 21.5-in. iMacs, for instance, now sports a 3.2GHz i3 rather than a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo.

Both the higher-priced 21.5-in. and the lower-priced 27-in. iMac can be upgraded to a 3.6GHz i5 dual-core processor for $200.

The top-end 27-in. comes with a 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, a slightly faster version of last year's chip; a $200 upgrade to a 2.93GHz i7 quad-core is also available. The highest priced iMac remains the only model that can be equipped with a quad-core processor.

Apple also tossed the last Nvidia graphics chipset from the iMac line, replacing it on the lower-priced 21.5-in. model with an ATI-labeled discrete graphics processor from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

All four iMac models now boast ATI graphics processors, running from an HD 4760 with 256MB of memory on the low end to the HD 5750 with 1GB of graphics RAM on the high.

Nvidia remains an Apple supplier, however: All the company's laptops, as well as its compact Mac Mini, sport graphics chipsets from the Santa Clara, Calif. company.

Storage space has remained static in the new models. The $1,199 iMac comes with a 500GB hard drive, while the other three models come with a 1TB drive as standard. Options on the 27-in. iMac include a bump to a 2TB drive or a swap for a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). The former runs an extra $150, while the latter adds $600 to the price, well within the $400 to $700 cost of a 256GB SSD at retail.

All iMacs include 4GB of RAM, with options to increase that to 8GB -- and on the 27-in. models, to a maximum of 16GB.

Prices start at $1,199 for the low-end 21.5-inch iMac, progressing to $1,499 for the upper-end 21.5-inch, and $1,699 and $1,999 for the two configurations of the 27-inch system.