A LOT OF readers didn't like the quality of the last Llano wafer shot, so we got some better ones. Not much more to say, just much prettier pictures than last time. Enjoy. S|A
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES KICKED off their Global Technology Conference, aka GTC, with a bit about the company itself. While there were no big bangs, there were a lot of little things in the slides worth talking about.
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
LUCID'S HYDRA HAS yet to prove itself as a replacement for either CrossFire or SLI, but today Lucid announced a new solution which might see the company gaining some more ground. Lucid's new Unity graphics card design looks set to change the way that the Hydra chips have been used so far, as by moving the Hydra chips to the graphics card, the motherboard is no longer a limiting factor.
Clears up some of the confusion, wows in the graphics department
THE FIRST IN-DEPTH benchmarks of Sandy Bridge have appeared courtesy of Anandtech and it looks like Intel has done more than just a few tweaks to Clarkdale and has managed to come up with something quite impressive. Not only is the new CPU core a big improvement over Clarkdale, but Intel has really delivered on its promise to boost the graphics performance by two times that of Clarkdale. Some explanations as to how Sandy Bridge will overclock is also provided, but this is unlikely to make everyone happy.
AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.
ZOTAC HAS FINALLY launched its CULV powered mini-ITX motherboard that we spotted back in June at Computex. Alongside it Zotac also announced a pair of new ZBOX mini PCs which also use Intel's CULV processors paired up with Nvidia's ION chipset. We're still waiting for a few more products from Zotac that we were shown behind closed doors at Computex, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, instead let's take a closer look at today's announcements.
DESPITE ALL THE criticism Apple gets, the company has done one thing well, in fact so well that its computers are playing an entirely different game than the humble beige box we all know as the PC. When Apple moved to x86 it dropped hardware legacy support and started with a clean slate and we're now at a stage where the PC is desperately in need for the same treatment. You may ask why, well read on and I'll try to explain.
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about Bulldozer, the upcoming new desktop and server core. It is the largest architectural jump in standard x86 cores in a long long time.
INTEL'S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
Still wants you to pick up the bill at dinner though
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
INTEL'S NEXT GENERATION of consumer desktop chipsets will lack native support for the good old PCI bus which dates back to 1993. However, most of the motherboards, if not all, that we saw at Computex back in June still featured PCI slots and it only just dawned how this can be. It turns out that the bridge chip makers are going to be making some bucks here by selling PCI Express to PCI bridge chips.
BT junkies finding it hard to contain their excitement
The Association of People who Stockpile Digital Recordings of the Tasteful Expression of the Human Form, or APSDRTEHF (they are rumored to be voting on a new name in the near future), received word of an amazing feat of storage engineering today. Toshiba is presenting a paper at the 2010 Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego today outlining their research and successful implementation of a new technology that can cram a staggering 2.5 terabits of information into a single square inch of platter real estate. For the layman, that's about 300GB of information stored on a surface the size of a postage stamp.
MANY WERE DISAPPOINTED with MSI's 870A Fuzion board, as it wasn't the Hydra board many had expected from MSI. However, it appears that MSI is about to make amends as it's getting ready to unleash the 870A Fuzion Power Edition. This is the board everyone expected MSI to release and it looks much closer to the early board pictures that appeared on the net.
YESTERDAY AMD QUIETLY dropped the prices for many of its Phenom II and Athlon II processors, although the biggest price drop is a mere 18.9 percent. Some models had their price dropped by as little as 99 cents and one model even went up in price by $4. We've compiled the numbers to make life easier for you to see the price changes, although there really isn't much to get excited about.
IT LOOKS LIKE some people are finally starting to catch on to what we have been saying for almost four years now, Nvidia is building an x86 chip. The story is long, complex, and it is SemiAccurate's opinion that the CPU will never make it to market for technical and legal reasons.
Editors Note:From time to time, SemiAccurate will be republishing some older articles by its authors, some with additional commentary, updates and information. We are mainly reprinting some of the oft referenced articles that originally appeared on the Inquirer. Some will have added content, but all will be re-edited from the originals as per contractual obligations. You may see some slight differences between the two versions.
This article has had some of the original links removed, and was published onWednesday, March 4, 2009 at 7:58 AM.
With the bowl of punch nearly gone, miscellaneous party favors littering the floor, and S|A writers stumbling about in various states of sobriety, it is time to settle down and discuss the results of Nvidia's recently concluded Q2, FY 2011 earnings conference call. Much of the information we already knew or surmised after the lowered revenue guidance bombshell they dropped on us in late July, but half the fun of these kinds of calls are the molehills-turned-mountain that companies create to keep investor's wallets open. Let's start hiking.
ONE OF THE claims Gigabyte makes in the press release with regards to its new USAP USB 3.0 drivers is that the new drivers will boost the performance of USB 2.0 storage devices as well. We thought we'd put this to the test to see how much of a difference it really makes.
ASUS HAS ANNOUNCED its second board in the TUF series, the Sabertooth X58 which according to the press release is an extra reliable board that can handle heavy duty tasks. We won't read too much into that, but the previous TUF board, the Sabertooth 55i had some interesting features that have been rolled over to the Sabertooth X58.
A LOT OF readers didn't like the quality of the last Llano wafer shot, so we got some better ones. Not much more to say, just much prettier pictures than last time. Enjoy. S|A
NOT SATISFIED WITH showing off a Llano wafer, AMD showed off the next generation part, Orochi, at the GloFo GTC summit today. While there was no silicon to pass around, pictures are much better than test.
LUCID'S HYDRA HAS yet to prove itself as a replacement for either CrossFire or SLI, but today Lucid announced a new solution which might see the company gaining some more ground. Lucid's new Unity graphics card design looks set to change the way that the Hydra chips have been used so far, as by moving the Hydra chips to the graphics card, the motherboard is no longer a limiting factor.
THE FIRST IN-DEPTH benchmarks of Sandy Bridge have appeared courtesy of Anandtech and it looks like Intel has done more than just a few tweaks to Clarkdale and has managed to come up with something quite impressive. Not only is the new CPU core a big improvement over Clarkdale, but Intel has really delivered on its promise to boost the graphics performance by two times that of Clarkdale. Some explanations as to how Sandy Bridge will overclock is also provided, but this is unlikely to make everyone happy.
AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.
ZOTAC HAS FINALLY launched its CULV powered mini-ITX motherboard that we spotted back in June at Computex. Alongside it Zotac also announced a pair of new ZBOX mini PCs which also use Intel's CULV processors paired up with Nvidia's ION chipset. We're still waiting for a few more products from Zotac that we were shown behind closed doors at Computex, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, instead let's take a closer look at today's announcements.
DESPITE ALL THE criticism Apple gets, the company has done one thing well, in fact so well that its computers are playing an entirely different game than the humble beige box we all know as the PC. When Apple moved to x86 it dropped hardware legacy support and started with a clean slate and we're now at a stage where the PC is desperately in need for the same treatment. You may ask why, well read on and I'll try to explain.
HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it's all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
The Association of People who Stockpile Digital Recordings of the Tasteful Expression of the Human Form, or APSDRTEHF (they are rumored to be voting on a new name in the near future), received word of an amazing feat of storage engineering today. Toshiba is presenting a paper at the 2010 Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego today outlining their research and successful implementation of a new technology that can cram a staggering 2.5 terabits of information into a single square inch of platter real estate. For the layman, that's about 300GB of information stored on a surface the size of a postage stamp.
MANY WERE DISAPPOINTED with MSI's 870A Fuzion board, as it wasn't the Hydra board many had expected from MSI. However, it appears that MSI is about to make amends as it's getting ready to unleash the 870A Fuzion Power Edition. This is the board everyone expected MSI to release and it looks much closer to the early board pictures that appeared on the net.
IT LOOKS LIKE some people are finally starting to catch on to what we have been saying for almost four years now, Nvidia is building an x86 chip. The story is long, complex, and it is SemiAccurate's opinion that the CPU will never make it to market for technical and legal reasons.
ONE OF THE claims Gigabyte makes in the press release with regards to its new USAP USB 3.0 drivers is that the new drivers will boost the performance of USB 2.0 storage devices as well. We thought we'd put this to the test to see how much of a difference it really makes.
ASUS HAS ANNOUNCED its second board in the TUF series, the Sabertooth X58 which according to the press release is an extra reliable board that can handle heavy duty tasks. We won't read too much into that, but the previous TUF board, the Sabertooth 55i had some interesting features that have been rolled over to the Sabertooth X58.