AMD Aims to Revolutionise Commercial PCs with New AMD PRO A-Series Line of APUs - Press Release

 

— AMD PRO A-Series APUs with HSA technology will power affordable, field ready and elegantly designed commercial PCs —

 

COMPUTEX TAIPEI — June 5, 2014 — AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced its new AMD PRO A-Series APUs, delivering rich computing experiences to commercial PCs. The innovative processor technology from AMD will enable a new class of powerful, sleek and sophisticated commercial Windows® PCs that integrate seamlessly into an existing IT environment. With impressive performance, the latest AMD PRO A-Series APUs with HSA features unlock true business computing performance and deliver outstanding reliability and manageability. The AMD PRO A-Series APU is one of the processors being offered in new HP Elite 700-Series notebooks.

“With the new AMD PRO A-Series APUs, AMD is looking to revolutionise commercial computing. Built around a solid offering of increased performance over our consumer products, increased product longevity and software image stability, AMD PRO processors give customers choice and affordability to meet their specific business needs,” said Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Products. “And since every AMD PRO processor packs the latest Radeon™ Graphics, we are raising the bar for visual performance in business PCs.”

AMD recognises that the new challenge for IT is how to deliver the latest in user experiences without compromising their ability to manage and maintain a secure, stable and reliable environment. The new AMD PRO A-Series is purpose-built for business, delivering long-term value commercial enterprises can depend on including a 24-month lifecycle, 18-month image stability, and manageability features built with open standards. Comprehensive IT security and management tools are standard on all AMD PRO A-Series APUs.  AMD also solves for today’s graphics-intensive workloads by including award-winning AMD Radeon™ graphics with the AMD PRO A-Series APUs.  And with support for AMD Eyefinity technology, the AMD PRO processers provide the ability to connect up to four displays, improving productivity in visually- or data-demanding applications.

The addition of revolutionary HSA technology helps to increase processing efficiency, enabling the CPU and GPU to work in perfect harmony to accelerate system tasks and application performance. HSA takes processing performance to new extremes by granting the GPU equal access to the entire system memory, allowing the CPU and GPU to seamlessly share data.

AMD’s processors deliver high-quality experiences for the latest commercial applications such as high-definition collaborative tools, advanced multitasking performance and next-generation compute innovations. The APU combines high-performance serial and parallel processing cores enabling breakthroughs in visual computing, security, performance-per-watt and device form factor.

Product Details
AMD A-Series Commercial ULV APUs

	Compute Cores* (CPU + GPU)	Max Turbo / CPU Base Frequency	L2 Cache	GPU Frequency (Max)	DirectX	UVD	Max DDR3 Speed	PCIe Lanes	TDP
A10 PRO-7350B w/ Radeon™ R6 Graphics	10 (4 CPU + 6 GPU)	3.3 GHz/2.1 GHz	4 MB	553 MHz	11.2	4.2	DDR3-1600	1x8 Gen2	19 W
A8 PRO-7150B w/ Radeon™ R5 Graphics	10 (4 CPU + 6 GPU)	3.2 GHz/1.9 GHz	4 MB	553 MHz	11.2	4.2	DDR3-1600	1x8 Gen2	19 W
A6 PRO-7050B w/ Radeon™ R4 Graphics	5 (2 CPU + 3 GPU)	3.0 GHz/2.2 GHz	1 MB	553 MHz	11.2	4.2	DDR3-1600	1x8 Gen2	17 W

       *See AMD.com/ComputeCores

Availability
The AMD PRO A-Series APUs are available today through online resellers and are currently offered on select HP Elite 700-Series products.

Supporting Resources
•    Learn more about the 2014 AMD PRO A-Series APUs
•    What is a Compute Core? Read our whitepaper
•    Follow all the news from AMD at Computex
•    Become a fan of AMD on Facebook
•    Engage with us on Twitter @AMD
•    Learn more about the HP Elite products powered by AMD

About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD) designs and integrates technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people everywhere to realise the full potential of their favourite devices and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information, visit www.amd.com.

How to reduce Gaming Mouse Sensitivity in Linux - Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Arch Linux or others

I've been using a Razer DeathAdder for a long time now. I just recently installed Elementary OS on my new Laptop and I got my DeathAdder working fine. However, the sensitivity is so much, that you have to acquaint and adapt to use it to perfection.

After some searching on Google, I found that there are a lot of very simple solutions to fix this problem. The following simple commands can be used to reduce parameters of ANY MOUSE!

If you are running Ubuntu 10.04 - 14.04 OR Fedora 12-20

Step 1: Open a Terminal
Step 2: Run this command to find how Linux recognizes our mouse

xinput --list --short

It will output something like this,
Now we know what name Linux uses to refer to our mouse. In my case it is a "Razer Razer DeathAdder."

Step 3: Set the constant deceleration for the Mouse. Run the command to do so,

xinput --set-prop "Razer Razer DeathAdder" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 5

This command reduced my mouse sensitivity considerably. You can play around with the value to get the setting you're comfortable with.

Step 4: To make this setting remain, we need to add this to Gnome's list of startup applications.
Use the following script, save it with <anyfilename>.sh

 #!/bin/sh
xinput --set-prop "Razer Razer DeathAdder" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 5

Run chmod + x on the file above to give it permissions to execute.
Now, go to your System Settings -> Startup Applications and add this to your startup applications.

If you are on Arch Linux or other derivatives of Arch

Arch Linux has a wonderful Wiki page that tells you how to do it using razercfg if you own a Razer mouse.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/razer

Japanese Scientists believe Universe is a Giant Hologram - Evidence Provided

A group of Japanese scientists have concluded that the Universe is a Giant Hologram. They have also presented evidence to suggest that the Universe is nothing but a projection and a big hologram.

They’ve managed to come to this conclusion after analyzing the hypothesis of the theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena.
Juan was credited for finding the connection between the string theory and the gauge theory. According to the model published by Juan Maldacena, gravity in the universe arises because of the finest vibrating strings.

At the University of Ibraki, the team headed by Yoshifumi Hyakutake, calculated the the internal energy of the black hole, the position of its event horizon, which is a space-time boundary that separates it from the rest of the universe, and entropy. Corresponding calculations of the energy were made for open space. As a result, the calculations coincided. They’ve also published in their articles that Juan Maldacena’s assumptions are true.

Tesla Motors redefine Electric Cars - Model S Best Selling Car

Tesla Motors’ Model S is currently the first electric car to top sales rankings in any country. The Model S has also won numerous awards and recognition such as the 2013 World Green Car of the Year, 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year, Automobile Magazine’s 2013 Car of the Year, Time Magazine Best 25 Inventions of the Year 2012 award, Consumer Reports’ top-scoring car ever!

The official Environmental Protection Agency (EPA-USA) range for the Performance Model S equipped with a 85kWh Lithium-Ion battery pack is a whopping 426km making Tesla Motors’ Model S the electric car with the the greatest range available in the market. (Also topping the Tesla Roadster).

The Model S has sold over 18,200 units globally that includes over a 1,000 cars sold in Europe, and over 4,900 cars sold in North America alone, ahead of the Chevrolet Volt (4,421) and the Nissan Leaf (3,695). The Model S was also the top selling car in Norway with a market share of 5.1% of all new cars sold in the country in September 2013, becoming the first electric car to top sales rankings in any country.

To check out the full features and specifications of the car, head to the official Tesla Motors website.

Make Useable Pencils with this Awesome Waste Paper Processor

The P&P Waste Paper Processor is one of it’s kind. A sexy looking gadget with one simple objective – Convert your waste paper into usable pencils.

This waste paper processor takes any paper of prescribed size and produces pencils on the other side. All it needs to work is your regular power source, pencil lead and glue. You just have to refill it with lead/ graphite powder and glue when it’s running out. Also included is a slot for sharpening pencils when you need it! There are also two modes of operation – Auto and Manual.

This waste paper processor is so revolutionary that it also went on to win the Liteon Award.

Designers: Chengzhu Ruan, Yuanyuan Liu, Xinwei Yuan & Chao Chen

Have you seen the Jolla Phone yet?

Say hello to the Jolla Phone – A smartphone that runs on the all new Sailfish OS. The phone’s making has one thing right in the core – The Smartphone Community. The 90 man team that developed Jolla has offices in Helsinki and Tampere, Finland and Hong Kong, the SAR of China.

 

Phone Specs

AMD's hUMA and how it can change Parallel Computing forever

Background — High Performance Attached Processors, Handicapped By Architecture

The application of high-performance accelerators, notably GPUs, GPGPUs (APUs in AMD terminology) to a variety of computing problems has blossomed over the last decade, resulting in ever more affordable compute power for both horizon and mundane problems, along with growing revenue streams for a growing industry ecosystem, most recently joined by Intel’s Xeon Phi accelerators which have to potential to speed adoption even further due to hoped-for synergies generated by the immense universe of x86 code that could potentially run on the Xeon Phi cores.
However, despite any potential synergies, GPUs (I will use this term generically to refer to all forms of these attached accelerators as they currently exist on the market) suffer from a fundamental architectural problem — they are very distant, in terms of latency, from the main scalar system memory and are not part of the coherent memory domain. This in turn has major impacts on performance, cost, design of the GPUs, and the structure of the algorithms:

• Performance — The latency for memory accesses generally dictated by PCIe latencies, which while much improved over previous generations, are a factor of 100 or more longer than latency from coherent cache or local scalar CPU memory. While clever design and programming, such as overlapping and buffering multiple transfers can hide the latency in a series of transfers, it is difficult to hide the latency for an initial block of data. Even AMD’s integrated APUs, in which the GPU elements are on a common die, do not share a common memory space, and explicit transfers are made in and out of the APU memory.
• Cost  — The necessity for additional buffer memory in the GPU to store the working and prefetched data blocks adds cost to the GPU. In addition, the logic to support high-speed data transfer adds costs.
• GPU design  — GPU designs have been tending toward increased core count due to the need to operate on ever larger blocks of prefetched data to improve the performance of current algorithms.
• Algorithms — In a reinforcing cycle with current designs, algorithms for GPUs are written based on the assumptions that there will be a large transfer latency and that they cannot have coherent memory access to the main system memory, reinforcing current design practices.

What’s New

Over the last few months, AMD has been quietly rolling out a new technology, heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA), to be implemented on future unannounced AMD products. hUMA will fundamentally alter the relationship of the GPU to the main system CPU by providing the GPU with peer access to the main system memory space along with the scalar processor. The key technical features of hUMA will include:

• Unified memory with bidirectional coherency and uniform access — This is the truly transformational feature of hUMA if it works as planned. The GPU and the scalar CPU will now share the same uniform memory space, and both can now allocate and operate on common memory with no need for redundant buffering on the GPU, and no need for explicit transfers.
• Shared coherency domain — hUMA implements a common coherency mechanism, which will open up the potential for multiple GPUs operating on the same shared data and combinations of GPU and CPU in new algorithms, since each will automatically have the latest version of memory served either from cache or through a common cache-miss process. This will certainly change the way GPU-based algorithms are implemented, since developers can now be more flexible in where they perform processing with no penalty for moving data blocks.
• GPU can take page faults and allocate memory — The GPU can take page faults, allowing it to work out of non-locked memory.

The potential impact on CPU/GPU integration is immense. As an embryonic developer I developed significant code on real-memory systems where a considerable amount of my time was spent juggling overlays of data and code that were locked to physical memory, and the transition to a uniform virtualized memory model transformed programming. While hUMA will still require explicitly exposing parallelism in algorithms, it will remove an unnecessary and inconvenient barrier to its proper exploitation.

Where Are The Products?
Today there are no hUMA products, but with the pacing of AMD’s communications and the expectation of new processor generations from both AMD and Intel, my guess is that we will hear from AMD on the subject of hUMA products before the year is out. Because there is currently also little or no hUMA software IP, we can probably expect that the initial products will be in the server space targeted at lab and HPC users, along with a push to promote hUMA software IP. Since AMD’s server market has fallen to less than 5% according to some observers, AMD has little to lose by trying to shake up the server market again. Consider also that AMD has an architecture license for ARM, so there is also the potential to cook up some interesting mixes of very low power scalar ARM cores hUMA-coupled with GPUs in addition to hUMA-based variations of current AMD APU designs.

What Are The Risks?
As always, with new technologies, there are risks. For hUMA as a catalyst for increasing AMD’s market share, the risks are pretty straightforward:

• Performance risks — Unified memory architectures took a long time to shake out on PCs and still suffer performance limitations compared to dedicated architectures for some applications. Developers persisted due to potential cost advantages, and they now work well enough to be mainstream. hUMA could suffer from performance teething problems, delaying its acceptance. THre are also likely to be upper limits on the number of GPU cores that can participate in the cache coherency scheme, and while it is hard to predict, this number will probably be well below the current 500 - 1000 cores of the highest end GPUs.
• Capturing developer mindshare — As I noted above, having gone through a similar technology transformation, it is hard to see that developers will not be all over this one. But, and this is a very big but, when I was developing, nobody paid any attention to the relative market shares of the mainframes we were working on. AMD faces a classic chicken and egg problem — how to attract attention to a transformational technology that will only pay off for some developers if AMD gains market share, and AMD cannot gain market share without the developers in the first place. The likely outcome is incremental acceptance after an early demonstration phase where leading users demonstrate hUMA advantages, and others follow.
• Intel duplicates hUMA — The advantages of hUMA are not a secret, nor are the difficulties engendered by today’s GPU architectures. If Intel is working on a hUMA equivalent project, even the threat of it could stall acceptance of AMD’s alternative. Currently, Intel is not generating a lot of revenue from its Xeon Phi products, so a change in product architecture might be more embarrassing than expensive if they were to do so quickly. However, regardless of timing, what is certain is that Intel will be forced to react to this move by AMD in some fashion — the potential advantages for hUMA-based computers is too significant to ignore.

Recommendations
From a developer's perspective, hUMA resonates with overtones of Victor Hugo’s “nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come” (this is actually a popular paraphrasing, not a literal translation). If you are even peripherally involved in high-performance computing, this is a development that you should be tracking very closely, and when the products become available, get one and start developing — you could be on the forefront of a major sea change in parallel application development.

Please note: This post was originally written by Technology Blogger - Richard Fichera on the Forrester Blog.
This post has been re-blogged for sharing. All credits go to Richard Fichera and Forrester Blog.

Fix Missing Security Signatures OR Cannot install applications on Fedora 18 (F18)

Problem: PackageKit cannot install unsigned packages.

If you've just installed Fedora 18 or upgraded to Fedora 18, you may have noticed that you are unable to install 3rd party applications like Dropbox, Opera, Google Chrome, Skype and many others on your computer.

The installation exits with a message "Missing Security Signatures" whether it's installed directly or via a Terminal.

Why is this happening?

I was seeing the same issue on my fresh install of Fedora 18. Ideally, PackageKit-based tools allowed the installation of 3rd-party software by requesting root authentication.

After some searching and reading on the Internet, I found that this issue was caused by a bug that didn't allow PackageKit-based tools on Fedora 18 to install unsigned third-party packages anymore.

This bug did not affect the installation of official packages as they were signed with a trusted key anyway.

How to fix this?

The PackageKit maintainer released an update (PackageKit-0.8.7-1.fc18)

Update your computer as you would normally do to fix the problem.

New to Linux? - Read below

On a fresh install
Option 1: Just type "Software" in the Gnome search, open the tool and run an update. Let the update go through it's process.
Option 2: Open a terminal and type

su

yum update

This should run an update on your computer which will automatically update PackageKit.


Now that your Fedora 18 is updated, try installing anything, it should work fine :)

NVIDIA brings Cloud GPU Technology to the World, Re-Defines Gaming and Graphics Industry

NVIDIA, Graphics Technology Manufacturer kicked off the 2012 GPU Conference by unveiling an all new ground breaking “Cloud GPU” technology. The Cloud GPU features technology that allows accelerating cloud-based applications by utilizing the enormous computational power of the Graphics Processing Unit or GPU in short.

After having spent five years in the making, NVIDIA showcased the power of the new tech based on their new Kepler GPU Architecture designed for use in large data centers. The Virtualization capabilities of the new architecture allow multiple users to share GPUs. NVIDIA has developed a system that allows cloud services to be powered by these GPUs that allows anyone to play games on just about any device without having to bother downloading games or worrying about performance capabilities of the device they are on.

“Kepler cloud GPU technologies shifts cloud computing into a new gear,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA president and chief executive officer. “The GPU has become indispensable. It is central to the experience of gamers. It is vital to digital artists realizing their imagination. It is essential for touch devices to deliver silky smooth and beautiful graphics. And now, the cloud GPU will deliver amazing experiences to those who work remotely and gamers looking to play untethered from a PC or console.”

The Enterprise Implementation of the Cloud GPU Tech allows providing seamless remote computing capabilities allowing even the most demanding applications to be streamed to a notebook or a mobile device via the NVIDIA VGX Platform.

The Gaming Implementation of the Cloud GPU Tech features the all new NVIDIA GeForce GRID technology that enables anyone to play just about any game on any device on any display without having to worry about the graphical or performance capabilities of the device. Cloud Game service providers like Gaikai or OnLive can use this technology to remotely deliver magical gaming experiences, with the potential to surpass those on a console.

Check out this video below showcasing the power of the GRID technology powering Cloud-based gaming service providers. Video courtesy, The Verge.

It'll be really interesting to see what AMD is going to do with the 8-series cards. Apparently, AMD is to release their 8000 series cards in 2013. AMD has been at the forefront of Cloud computing and I personally believe that they've contributed more than just processing power to Cloud Computing. There could be a chance that AMD may lose out on the share that it built for itself with cloud computing contributions due to NVIDIA's entry into Cloud GPU tech.


Although there is not much that is known about AMD's thought process with the 8000 series cards, I hope they make something nice! Anyway, Check out this image talking about the upcoming Tenerife 8000 series GPU.

Please Note: This is a cross-post from ikoGamer.com where I write.