The TR Podcast 136: A whole heap of AMD news

Date: June 23, 2013
Duration: 1:33:45

Hosted by: Jordan Drake

Co-Hosts:Scott Wasson, and Geoff Gasior

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Show notes
While Cyril is hard at work on our next system guide, the rest of the gang congregate for our latest episode of the TR Podcast. We kick things off with a couple of listener mail questions about next-gen consoles and the merits of overclocking. Then, before we dive into a long PC hardware journey, Jordan digresses to give us a cursory report on Man of Steel—and a glowing review of NYC's sensational new Cronut confection.

After discussing Nvidia's surprising new move to license Kepler, Scott leads us through four AMD stories about everything from coming server processors to the new Richland APUs. Finally, our gang discusses the new and intriguing Mac Pro, a series of gaming stories (including Microsoft's Xbox One backpedaling), and the PlayStation 4's potential for supremacy.

Send in listener mail, and we'll answer on the podcast. - jdrake@techreport.com

Follow us on Twitter - Scott - Jordan - Geoff - Cyril - The Tech Report

Listener mail/tweets:

Next-gen consoles vs, PCs? - from Mohi - (0:02:50):

"How do you think that system requirements for next-gen games on PC will look like? Do we need 2-3 times more powerful hardware in the PC just to keep up with consoles? Does this mean that because new consoles will use x86 architecture, porting the games to PC will be easier? Do you think that quality of ports will improve? Also, because of the market share current gen consoles own, do you (like me) feel that gaming marketplace will look like a mess? The reason for this I think is that because XBox 360 and PS3 will still be around by then, they will cause stagnation not only on PC gaming, but also next gen console gaming systems. How do you think these old boxes will affect gaming in 2014 and later?"

Unified memory and the merits of over clocking? - from Canageek - (0:09:49):

"This podcast you talked about Haswell chips having unified memory access. This reminds me of an Ars Technica article from a little while back: AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri Are these basically the same thing, or is AMD catching up to Intel? If they are not the same thing, is this the sort of thing that might help AMD regain some lost ground?

Secondly: I've gotten interested in building a gaming computer recently, and started reading your system building guides and such, and have a few newbie questions. The first is how imporant is overclocking? That seems to be mentioned in a lot of your reviews, and you've even got reviews on overclocked chips. Am I missing out on a lot if I decide to be careful and leave the settings at the defaults? The next is, if I leave the chip un-overclocked do I need fancy coolers and such, or is what the chip comes with enough? Do I need fancy RAM with coolers, or does normal RAM work well enough? How do I know how much case cooling I need?"

Tech discussion:

• Jordan talks Superman and Cronuts - (0:23:32) - Cronuts

  Nvidia to license Kepler GPU core to Android device makers - (0:31:14) - Read more

  AMD announces ARM-based Seattle chip for servers - (0:38:01) - Read more

  Berlin, Warsaw are the future of AMD's x86 server lineup - (0:43:20) - Read more

  AMD's A10-6800K and A10-6700 'Richland' APUs reviewed - (0:51:19) - Read more

  AMD intros FX-9590 processor with 5GHz peak Turbo speed - (1:01:18) - Read more - Base clock, power rating for FX-9000s - FX -8350

  Apple's new Mac Pro previewed - (1:10:16) - Read more

  XBox One's PR nightmare - the PS4 triumphant - and Mirror's Edge 2 - (1:15:11) - Read more - PS4 - Mirror's Edge 2 on its way

That's all, folks! We'll see you on the next episode.