ONE OF THE most studied benchmarks of the DX11 era is Heaven from Unigine. At GDC, it was showing off version 2.0 of the benchmark with more assets and features.
IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, it has problems with the truth. The real story is found with the users, and they have interesting things to say about the upcoming card's upward bound TDP.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
ONE PART that Thermaltake has been getting a lot of press for is the new Fermi GTX480 certified case, a variant of its mainstream Element V case. Other than the day-glo green trim, how does it differ from the normal ElementV? Let's take a look.
TRENDNET HAD TWO neat devices at CeBIT, a travel router and a 3G to WiFi router. While neither one is unique, both had features to set them apart from the pack.
THERE ARE A lot of 'green' devices that pop up every day, most of which are about as green as an old coal power plant built on an environmentally sensitive wetland. At CeBIT, a small Korean company called HiSaver showed off a green power strip that actually makes a lot of sense.
GIGABYTE HAS BEEN on a tear lately, releasing tons of USB3 based mobos around CES, so the new AMD 890 chipset had to hold the line. On the GPU front, things were a bit more interesting.
CeBIT 2010 High end GPUs, netbooks and mini-projectors
SAPPHIRE HAS STARTED to branch out from GPUs, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a large selection of high end GPUs to show off. New to the boys in blue this year are micro-projectors, netbooks and micro-ITX boards.
GRAPHICS CARDS HAVE quickly become the most power hungry device inside a PC and we haven’t seen a drop in the power demand of high-end graphics cards despite improved manufacturing capabilities. However, Fermi appears to be taking this to the next level, although this was sort of expected.
ISSCC 2010 Fine details abound but overviews lacking
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.
COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN getting smaller and smaller over the years, although the x86 architecture hasn’t really changed much. However, VIA has been something of a pioneer when it comes to making it smaller and smaller and the company has just announced its first Mobile-ITX module which measures a mere 6 by 6 centimetres.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has been way ahead of the curve with process tech when compared to any other foundry on the market. Today, it somewhat accidentally cemented that lead by publicly displaying an unlabeled 28nm wafer.
YOU MAY KNOW about Eye-Fi, the company that makes SD cards with an 802.11 radio in them. It has a new generation of parts called the X2 line about to ship.
IT IS SO PRETTY we hardly have any words for it. Notice the business card being held behind the screen and how much is visible along with the bright colors.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES JUST announced a major win by signing Qualcomm to a fab contract. If anyone was waiting to see if Global Foundries had what it took to compete for the best, they now have their answer.
CompuLab has a winner. Yup, indeed a winner. It's not often that you find someone at a booth bragging about low power and is willing to let you test it.
IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.
WINDOWS MOBILE 6.5 has been getting a bad rap lately, mainly because it is an awful OS with bloated requirements and no upside for the pain. However at CES, Sony-Ericsson showed us why Windows Mobile 6.5 is best for mobile phones.
NVIDIA IS TRYING to make Ion2, its next generation 'chipset' seem like something it is not, but the specs say otherwise. It is just a warmed over G218 integrated graphics chip with a few ports added on.
REMEMBER THE TRIUMPHANT WIN for Fermi at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that Nvidia heavily touted at its GDC conference keynote? The supercomputer project was just killed for power reasons. Fermi power reasons. Whoops.
SISOFT SANDRA 2010 was just released, and the big news is that it now has OpenCL based GPGPU benchmarks. They look to be a fairly well rounded and test both compute capabilities and I/O.
THREE VERY INTERESTING tidbits snuck out in the Q&A session at the AMD analyst day today. It seems that Fusion and the new cores have taped out and are at the fabs.
AT ANALYST DAY, Chekib Akrout of AMD spilled the beans on the chip company's two new CPU cores, and Fusion. AMD's Bulldozer and Bobcat processors plus its memory controller that is called Fusion were all outed.
IT LOOKS LIKE TSMC's 32nm processes are not doing nearly as well as people think. We hear that things are delayed a bit, and performance is far less than optimal.
Ugly details revealed, it just keeps getting worse
IT LOOKS LIKE the brown stuff has hit the rotating blades in the ongoing Intel vs AMD antitrust lawsuits. New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just filed suit against Intel for all sorts of nasty things.
VIA ANNOUNCED its 3000 series x86 CPUs today, based on the older 1000 and 2000 series Nano cores. As you would expect, the new cores promise greater performance for less power than their predecessors.
WESTERN DIGITAL HAS finally thrown its hat into the SAS ring with the release of the S25 line. Most observers were not expecting this, thinking WD would go from SATA directly to SSDs.
TILERA IS CLAIMING to have the first commercial CPU to reach 100 cores, and while this is true, the real interesting technology is in the interconnects. The overall chip is quite a marvel, and it is unlike any mainstream CPU you have ever heard of.
ONE OF THE more interesting conferences of the year is AMD's TFE, or Technical Forum and Exposition. If you have never heard of TFE, that is likely because this conference on near future thermal and power management technology is by invitation only.
PEOPLE WATCHING TSMC'S process development might have noticed a radical change in messaging a few months ago. The foundry not only changed its high-K/metal gate (HKMG) strategy, but it also pulled in the timetables at the same time.
BIRDIES CHIRPING IN the warm Cambridge sunshine just told SemiAccurate that ARM is about to launch the new Cortex A5 core. The smallest member of the A series will likely debut at ARM's Techcon3 next week.
WHAT DO YOU DO when you have nothing, and are facing quarters of buying markeshare and have no competitive products on the horizon? If you are Nvidia, you spin, and use the F, fear, U, uncertainty, and D, doubt, in FUD to pretend there are shortages.
LSI AND REDHAT were showing off the next step in hardware virtualization, IOV or I/O Virtualization, during IDF. The idea is simple, make SAS or SATA cards aware of virtual spaces, speeding up I/O for VMs many times.
DELL TAKES A STEP toward curbing emissions, even before the upcoming Copenhagen protocol that's likely to force everyone to reduce emissions. Foresight is a good thing if you want to stay in the game and with these improvements in efficiency, it looks like Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is trying to stay ahead of the curve, and competitors.
AMD OFFICIALLY BROKE SILENCE on the Fiorana and Kroner platforms, right on top of IDF. Most of the specifications are already known, but there are a few interesting things left to tell you about.
APPLE IS DOING something quite interesting with the upcoming round of MacBooks, differentiating between the aluminum and plastic ones on a level deeper than the case material. Yes, the reassuringly expensive models are finally going to have something worth spending money on.
IDF 2009: Fabric strategy leaves HP and IBM behind
WHEN CISCO JUMPED into the blade server market with its first Project California blades, that was big news, but the hardware was a yawner. The new 'Ventura' blades we were shown at IDF are going to change the game, radically.
INTEL'S LAST KEYNOTE of IDF focused on TVs and how PCs could integrate with them. All it managed to do is convince me that the future is darker than I had feared, the wrong forces are in control, and Intel doesn't understand this market.
IDF 2009: Flexible and international TV, radio and GPS
CRESTATECH IS SHOWING one of the most misunderstood devices in recent memory at IDF, a software defined radio. It went from pre-production silicon at CES to OEM shipments in a very short time.
WHEN I FIRST saw a Umid MBook M1 MID at CES, it stood out from a very crowded field of marginally differentiated devices. The M1, and the upcoming M2, are probably the best mobile PC or netbook out there.
INTEL'S TRADITIONAL KEYNOTE for day 2 of IDF is mobility, and that didn't change this year. Most of the interesting news had been outed by the time Dadi Perlmutter and Mooly Eden got to them, but there were some new details in the mix.
SEAN MALONEY GOT all the good toys to show off at IDF this year, with Larrabee, Jasper, Gulftown and much more. There is a lot of good silicon in the pipeline.
INTEL KICKED OFF IDF in the traditional way, a keynote by Paul Otellini. The topics were the usual, where they are going, new chips coming up, and all the ways Intel is making things better.
NEW IDEAS USUALLY don't just happen, most have years of work and tweaking behind them. One of these is called Punch, a new way to take and 'print' digital photos.
WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Braidwood, the Intel flash on mobo hard drive cache has been postponed. It won't be coming out with the upcoming Westmere based CPUs, but it may slide in before Sandy Bridge with a platform refresh.
WHEN I FIRST saw the product that Adaptec is calling MaxIQ at CeBIT in March, it looked interesting, but was overwhelmed by the 5Z ultracapacitor backed RAID card. Now that Adaptec has let out all the details, the MaxIQ SSD RAID accelerator is by far the more interesting product.
INTEL IS GOING to have a big day next Tuesday, launching three product families at once. Lynnfield, the attendant P55 chipset, and the category shaking CULV parts will all happen at the same time.
SUPER TALENT just announced a line of DIMMs it is calling 'green' because they use less raw materials and packaging. It's a good idea with an attractive marketing spin for the company, but the truly important ramifications are more subtle.
ONE OF THE most studied benchmarks of the DX11 era is Heaven from Unigine. At GDC, it was showing off version 2.0 of the benchmark with more assets and features.
IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, it has problems with the truth. The real story is found with the users, and they have interesting things to say about the upcoming card's upward bound TDP.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
ONE PART that Thermaltake has been getting a lot of press for is the new Fermi GTX480 certified case, a variant of its mainstream Element V case. Other than the day-glo green trim, how does it differ from the normal ElementV? Let's take a look.
TRENDNET HAD TWO neat devices at CeBIT, a travel router and a 3G to WiFi router. While neither one is unique, both had features to set them apart from the pack.
THERE ARE A lot of 'green' devices that pop up every day, most of which are about as green as an old coal power plant built on an environmentally sensitive wetland. At CeBIT, a small Korean company called HiSaver showed off a green power strip that actually makes a lot of sense.
GIGABYTE HAS BEEN on a tear lately, releasing tons of USB3 based mobos around CES, so the new AMD 890 chipset had to hold the line. On the GPU front, things were a bit more interesting.
SAPPHIRE HAS STARTED to branch out from GPUs, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a large selection of high end GPUs to show off. New to the boys in blue this year are micro-projectors, netbooks and micro-ITX boards.
AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.
REMEMBER WHEN INTEL talked about opening Atom CPUs to other companies? I'll bet you didn't think one of the first customers would be Nokia.
COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN getting smaller and smaller over the years, although the x86 architecture hasn’t really changed much. However, VIA has been something of a pioneer when it comes to making it smaller and smaller and the company has just announced its first Mobile-ITX module which measures a mere 6 by 6 centimetres.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has been way ahead of the curve with process tech when compared to any other foundry on the market. Today, it somewhat accidentally cemented that lead by publicly displaying an unlabeled 28nm wafer.
YOU MAY KNOW about Eye-Fi, the company that makes SD cards with an 802.11 radio in them. It has a new generation of parts called the X2 line about to ship.
IT IS SO PRETTY we hardly have any words for it. Notice the business card being held behind the screen and how much is visible along with the bright colors.
IF YOU ARE sick and tired of slogging along with your wimpy 4-core Nehalem laptop, Ace Computer has a solution for you, the 8-core Xeon 5500 (Beckton) based Ace Raptor 5 Server Workstation AC-Raptor55V. Yes, some insane company just put an Intel 8-core Becton server chip in a laptop, let's hear it for wretched excess.
SISOFT SANDRA 2010 was just released, and the big news is that it now has OpenCL based GPGPU benchmarks. They look to be a fairly well rounded and test both compute capabilities and I/O.
IT LOOKS LIKE TSMC's 32nm processes are not doing nearly as well as people think. We hear that things are delayed a bit, and performance is far less than optimal.
IT LOOKS LIKE the brown stuff has hit the rotating blades in the ongoing Intel vs AMD antitrust lawsuits. New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just filed suit against Intel for all sorts of nasty things.
VIA ANNOUNCED its 3000 series x86 CPUs today, based on the older 1000 and 2000 series Nano cores. As you would expect, the new cores promise greater performance for less power than their predecessors.
WESTERN DIGITAL HAS finally thrown its hat into the SAS ring with the release of the S25 line. Most observers were not expecting this, thinking WD would go from SATA directly to SSDs.
TILERA IS CLAIMING to have the first commercial CPU to reach 100 cores, and while this is true, the real interesting technology is in the interconnects. The overall chip is quite a marvel, and it is unlike any mainstream CPU you have ever heard of.
BIRDIES CHIRPING IN the warm Cambridge sunshine just told SemiAccurate that ARM is about to launch the new Cortex A5 core. The smallest member of the A series will likely debut at ARM's Techcon3 next week.
LSI AND REDHAT were showing off the next step in hardware virtualization, IOV or I/O Virtualization, during IDF. The idea is simple, make SAS or SATA cards aware of virtual spaces, speeding up I/O for VMs many times.
DELL TAKES A STEP toward curbing emissions, even before the upcoming Copenhagen protocol that's likely to force everyone to reduce emissions. Foresight is a good thing if you want to stay in the game and with these improvements in efficiency, it looks like Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is trying to stay ahead of the curve, and competitors.
AMD OFFICIALLY BROKE SILENCE on the Fiorana and Kroner platforms, right on top of IDF. Most of the specifications are already known, but there are a few interesting things left to tell you about.
APPLE IS DOING something quite interesting with the upcoming round of MacBooks, differentiating between the aluminum and plastic ones on a level deeper than the case material. Yes, the reassuringly expensive models are finally going to have something worth spending money on.
CRESTATECH IS SHOWING one of the most misunderstood devices in recent memory at IDF, a software defined radio. It went from pre-production silicon at CES to OEM shipments in a very short time.
WHEN I FIRST saw a Umid MBook M1 MID at CES, it stood out from a very crowded field of marginally differentiated devices. The M1, and the upcoming M2, are probably the best mobile PC or netbook out there.
WHEN I FIRST saw the product that Adaptec is calling MaxIQ at CeBIT in March, it looked interesting, but was overwhelmed by the 5Z ultracapacitor backed RAID card. Now that Adaptec has let out all the details, the MaxIQ SSD RAID accelerator is by far the more interesting product.
SUPER TALENT just announced a line of DIMMs it is calling 'green' because they use less raw materials and packaging. It's a good idea with an attractive marketing spin for the company, but the truly important ramifications are more subtle.
AMD FINALLY CAME out with their dual core Neo CPU line. The new models are the BGA packaged Athlon Neo X2 L325 and Turion Neo X2 625.