ONE OF THE most studied benchmarks of the DX11 era is Heaven from Unigine. At GDC, they were 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, they have 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.
AMD IS FINALLY doing what we have all been waiting for, promoting its developer relations program to the masses. With that in mind, it introduced three new logos to go along with the program.
ONE QUESTION THAT a lot of the financial set are asking has to do with Nvidia and mobile. While the company is effectively out of mobile for 2010, there was at least one GTX480 based laptop at CeBIT.
CEBIT IS THE PLACE where Thermaltake tends to drop its bombs, and this year it had the launch of a new venture for the company, gaming. There were also some interesting coolers and cases, but the Esports line was getting all the attention.
AMD WAS SHOWING OFF its 6-core Thuban CPU at CeBIT along with its 890 chipset. The good news is the showing, the bad news is that it wasn't saying anything about it.
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.
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.
WHAT DO YOU do when there is a major international trade show, and you can't even supply all your partners with upcoming parts? You threaten them, which is exactly what Nvidia did for its upcoming GTX480 at CeBIT.
NVIDIA HAS BEEN hinting about the performance of its upcoming GTX480 cards, and several of our moles got a lot of hands on time with a few cards recently. If you are waiting for killer results from the 'puppy', prepare for severe disappointment.
IT IS THAT TIME of year again, Nvidia's quarterly conference call for the financial set. Since the company gets pouty every time we try to ask it questions, we decided to publish an open list of questions for you, the people they have far less disdain for than SemiAccurate, to ask directly.
WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.
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.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.
NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.
IT LOOKS LIKE it's time for dueling product videos once again, with ATI and Nvidia both releasing their own 'viral' videos. ATI's is about upgrading to a DX11 card and Nvidia's is about the birth of Fermi GF10.
ONE OF THE worst kept secrets of the year, all 14 days of it, is that the ATI 56xx Redwood parts are coming out today. They are more than half of a Juniper 57xx series and have all the goodies that those chips do.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
NVIDIA FINALLY SHOWED off Fermi, or in this case, GF100 today, running Unigine without any numbers. It didn't show off cards with three display outs yet, that has to wait for tomorrow.
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.
IT LOOKS LIKE 3D glasses are going to make a big splash at CES, and one of the best pairs I have seen is by Bit Cauldron. Although they are still shutter glasses, they remove most of the glaring problems that current 'solutions' have.
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia's mighty mobile business is hitting the skids, and it is going back to competing on price again, begging for deals and renaming the G92 again. The problem is seen with the release of the renamed 3xxM mobile GPUs, and how these are messaged.
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.
NVIDIA'S RENAMING SCAM has another name to add to the list. The G215 is now called the GTS360M. Consumers aren't warned that they are getting old tech with a new name, but Nvidia will proudly tell you that it is 120 more of something than the GT240 that was in desktop form, and the S and M are added bonuses.
IT LOOKS LIKE we were right about Fermi being too big, too hot, and too late, Nvidia just castrated it to 448SPs. Even at that, it is a 225 Watt part, slipping into the future.
Industrial to continue on, consumers lose a great maker
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
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.
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia has put the A3 stepping of Fermi in the oven, it happened some time last week. That means that you may see cards as early as February, depending on two or three other factors.
INTEL HAS FINALLY done what we had all expected it to do, and pulled the plug on the consumer version of Larrabee. In a statement today, Intel said that the chip will be a development platform and an HPC part, but there will be no retail version, at least not any time soon.
WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.
NVIDIA IS RENAMING parts once again. Now the 200 series is the 300 series, just like we told you months ago. Nvidia has no new parts and no chance of coming up with any soon, so all it can do is unethically try to snow consumers.
G.SKILL'S LATEST AND GREATEST memory kit, the F3-17600CL7D-4GBPIS, comes specified at an impressive 2200Mhz CAS7, and even more impressive is that it only needs 1.65V to get there.
OFFICIAL WORD FROM NVIDIA is that gaming is now a footnote for the formerly leading graphics company, its latest and greatest Fermi chip won't see the light of day until at least Q1 of 2010, and Fermi's clock speeds so far are massively off what the firm had hoped for. Yup, it is a mess, just like we told you.
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 Fermi A2 silicon has finally taped out, so the timetables are a little firmer once again. There is no chance of a real launch in 2009, making the chip a shining example of Nvidia's engineering mire.
WHEN DIRECTX10 came along it wowed gamers with its features, but underwhelmed with the performance hit you took. So now, Windows 7 is just around the corner and Vista is pretty much toast. Now DirectX11 is stepping and some major gaming titles are about to get upgraded to benefit from the new API. Here's a preview.
NVIDIA IS ABOUT to unleash its latest 40nm GPUs on the world, and the best part is these are only 3 quarters late. Welcome the new and utterly forgettable G210 and GT220.
NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.
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.
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.
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.
ONE OF THE most studied benchmarks of the DX11 era is Heaven from Unigine. At GDC, they were showing off version 2.0 of the benchmark with more assets and features.
WHAT DO YOU get when you cross a human sized hamster ball with VR googles and a game engine? You have a Virtusphere, and it looks like a lot of fun.
IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, they have 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.
AMD IS FINALLY doing what we have all been waiting for, promoting its developer relations program to the masses. With that in mind, it introduced three new logos to go along with the program.
ONE QUESTION THAT a lot of the financial set are asking has to do with Nvidia and mobile. While the company is effectively out of mobile for 2010, there was at least one GTX480 based laptop at CeBIT.
CEBIT IS THE PLACE where Thermaltake tends to drop its bombs, and this year it had the launch of a new venture for the company, gaming. There were also some interesting coolers and cases, but the Esports line was getting all the attention.
AMD WAS SHOWING OFF its 6-core Thuban CPU at CeBIT along with its 890 chipset. The good news is the showing, the bad news is that it wasn't saying anything about it.
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.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.
IT LOOKS LIKE it's time for dueling product videos once again, with ATI and Nvidia both releasing their own 'viral' videos. ATI's is about upgrading to a DX11 card and Nvidia's is about the birth of Fermi GF10.
EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.
OSTENDO OFFERED CES something better than 3D. Easier on the eyes, and way more enjoyable. However, it has a price tag to match.
GUNNAR OPTIKS brought its toys to CES and offered some solutions to the shiny screen syndrome along with easy on the eyes 3D.
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.
IT IS OUR really sad duty to inform you about rumors that DFI will be leaving the consumer motherboard business in January. The company is not going away, and will be refocusing on the industrial PC business.
INTEL HAS FINALLY done what we had all expected it to do, and pulled the plug on the consumer version of Larrabee. In a statement today, Intel said that the chip will be a development platform and an HPC part, but there will be no retail version, at least not any time soon.
G.SKILL'S LATEST AND GREATEST memory kit, the F3-17600CL7D-4GBPIS, comes specified at an impressive 2200Mhz CAS7, and even more impressive is that it only needs 1.65V to get there.
IT LOOKS LIKE the wait for more Cypress/HD58xx cards just got a little longer, but not by much. One has to wonder how TSMC can be so bad for so long.
WHEN DIRECTX10 came along it wowed gamers with its features, but underwhelmed with the performance hit you took. So now, Windows 7 is just around the corner and Vista is pretty much toast. Now DirectX11 is stepping and some major gaming titles are about to get upgraded to benefit from the new API. Here's a preview.
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.
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.