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.
RUMOURS HAVE BEEN circulating for a while now that Apple is getting ready to refresh its range of Mac Pro computers and it looks like we're getting close. However, it seems like this Apple refresh will happen at the same time Intel is making its new six-core CPU's ready. Coincidence? We think not.
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.
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.
NORMALLY WE WOULDN'T bother posting news about a CPU cooler on its own, but this is pretty big news, as Intel appears to have gotten rid of its traditional round coolers that have shipped with its retail CPU's for quite a few years by now. Although this only applied to the upcoming Core i7 980XE, it's still a move in the right direction.
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.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
NOTEBOOKS HAVE ALWAYS involved a trade off between performance and battery life, but it looks like Intel will be getting close to finding a fine balance between the two later this month, when it's set to launch its ULV version of the Calpella mobile platform.
ALTHOUGH A BIT later than some of its competitors, Asus has announced its own AMD 890GX board, the M4A89GTD PRO. However, compared to just about everyone else, Asus claims to have one killer feature, CPU core unlocking.
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.
THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
THE MAKING OF computer chips is a complicated business, not only for the chip designers but also for the foundries. TSMC’s senior VP of R&D, Shang-Yi Chiang has announced that the company is getting ready for 22nm trial runs towards the end of 2012.
THANKS TO ONE of our forum members, we managed to dig out a lot more details on the upcoming Magny-Cours processors from AMD and it seems like yesterday’s source was somewhat off the target, in terms of both pricing and specifications.
ALTHOUGH WE’LL HAVE to wait a little while longer for AMD’s new Magny-Cours based Opteron 6100 series processors to turn up in servers and in retail, European pricing for these 8-core and 12 core processors has turned up ahead of the launch.
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.
INTEL JUST GOT some competition against its Light Peak interface, as NEC has just demoed a faster, yet to be named high-speed serial communications interface that can pull off speeds of up to 16Gbps. This puts Light Peak’s 10Gbps, er, in the shade.
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.
WE WERE EXPECTING a fair few ARM partner announcements during the Mobile World Congress and so far we haven’t been disappointed. Texas Instruments and ST-Ericsson have both announced dual core ARM CortexA9 MPCore based products with clock speeds in excess of 1GHz.
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.
DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING new from Intel this year in terms of desktop chipsets, at least not the way Intel’s current roadmap is planned. We’re going to have to make do with what’s on offer for the rest of 2010, despite some “missing features” in all three of Intel’s latest chipsets. What’s worse is that there’s not much to look forward to next year either, if our sources are correct.
IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.
IT SEEMS LIKE Biostar jumped the press release gun as the company posted details of its upcoming TA890GXE motherboard based on the AMD 890GX chipset on its website. The press release has since been taken down, but it has already spread all over the web. However, what makes it interesting is the fact that it includes the retail name for AMD’s upcoming hexa-core CPUs.
HERE WE GO again, Intel has come up with yet another nifty marketing name, Core vPro. These are not only Intel’s 'new' processors for businesses of all sizes that add a host of features, but they're also said to gain cost savings.
IT DOESN'T APPEAR as if ARM is getting ready to slow down its product development. Quite the contrary could be said as the company is readying 2GHz ARMv7 Cortex cores for 2011. It looks like Intel and its Atom processors might get a lot more competition.
IT’S ALWAYS GREAT having a choice when it comes to colours, as how boring would it be if everything we owned was the same colour? Sony seems to have taken this to the extreme with its Intel Core i3 and Core i5 based Vaio E series of notebooks, since not only can you have them in a selection of six colours but they’re also available with optional coloured keyboard skins.
IT SEEMS LIKE there has been some confusion as to AMD’s naming convention of its chipsets and what we thought was the 890G is actually the 890GX. There will also be an 880G model, but that is expected to launch a month or two after the 890GX, which is set to arrive the first week in March.
APPLE HAS JUST announced its latest addition, the iPad. We’re not sold on the name, but one of the big news items here is that Apple might be forced to change the name, as iPad was a registered trademark of Fujitsu Japan and there’s also a company called Magtek that sells a product called the IPAD. But that’s for another day; let’s take a closer look at what’s on offer.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.
Sabine and Brazos with fusion for the mobile space
AMD SPENT SOME time talking to the press in Singapore today and unveiled some details of its upcoming platform plans for 2011. What we’re looking at are more cores, fusion and improved notebook battery life.
IT'S NOT ALWAYS journalists or bloggers that get their hands on new gear first, as is evident in this case. A forum member at Bit-tech who goes under the handle of windwithme has run a good selection of benchmarks on the upcoming Gulftown CPU, which is expected to be the next Extreme Edition processor from Intel.
AMD HAS LAUNCHED five new processors, of which three are priced at $99 or less. Okay, so this might not be such a big deal, as AMD already has a number of CPUs selling for under $100, but it seems like AMD is set on owning the sub $100 CPU market.
TSMC HAS REPORTEDLY fixed its yield issues with its 40nm manufacturing process, you know the one that all the new GPUs from AMD and Nvidia rely on. This should hopefully mean that there won’t be any more shortages of GPUs, at least for the ones that are already in production.
ONE THING YOU hopefully learn very quickly in the IT business is that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV, or read on the Interweb these days. With Apple’s announcement that it’ll be announcing something on January 27th, the rumours about what Apple is up to haven’t stopped. The latest is that Apple is ready to unveil its own CPU, but the question you have to ask is if this makes any sense at all.
TRADITIONALLY APPLE HAS been pretty good at keeping a tight lid on things when it comes to leaks about upcoming products, with the odd slip here and there. That doesn’t stop its fans from coming up with some wild speculations as to what Apple is going to launch next as soon as Apple announces that it is about to host an event. The next such event is on January 27th and the interweb has been full of speculations about what Apple is going to announce.
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.
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.
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.
MARVELL SEEMS TO be set on becoming the leader in ARM based processors and its announcement of the world’s first quad core processor based on the ARMv7 architecture must be a major blow to its competitors.
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.
MARVELL’S PLUG COMPUTER has been given an overhaul just in time for CES and the new model looks set to be the greatest one yet. Marvell has moved away from its 1.2GHz Kirkwood SoC to the new 2GHz Armada 300 SoC. The Armada 300 is still based on Marvell’s Sheeva core, but Marvell hasn’t disclosed if the Armada 300 is based on the ARMv5 or ARMv7 architecture. Other new additions include WiFi, Bluetooth and an “internal hard drive”.
EVGA HAS MANAGED to gain a fair bit of fame for its unusual and often quite good motherboards, but its latest creation that was sneak previewed on Twitter a couple of days ago is a monster of a motherboard. Not only does it feature two LGA1366 CPU sockets, but it also has six memory slots and seven PCI Express x16 slots. However, there’s one slight problem with this board, it uses a proprietary form factor.
TODAY INTEL'S NDA for its Clarkdale and Arrandale CPUs finally ended and the web got plastered in reviews. Most of the reviews take a closer look at the Clarkdale, although a handful of Arrendale reviews have also made it, all of them based on a single Asus notebook model. What is a bit irksome is the fact that Intel has pretty much only seeded the Core i5 661 processor to reviewers and this is of course the model with the much faster IGP than the other Core i5 and Core i3 processors that are being launched later this week.
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.
SOME EARLY BENCHMARKS of Intel’s next generation integrated graphics processor have allegedly been posted by a “local paper” somewhere in Asia. It didn’t take long for them to appear online, but what is important to keep in mind is that these should be the worst case figures. Why? Well, simply because the CPU used is the Pentium G6950 which has its GPU running at a mere 533MHz and will most likely lack Intel’s Turbo feature for the IGP.
WE’RE ALL FOR tools that help people pick suitable parts for their next system build, especially these days as it can be hard to figure out what bits goes with what. Futuremark has just launched a new tool in partnership with Gigabyte called the Gigabyte System Builder. Okay, so you only have the choice of Gigabyte motherboards and graphics cards, but that’s fair enough, as this is a business partnership and monies have been exchanged at one time or another to get this up and running.
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.
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.
RUMOURS HAVE BEEN circulating for a while now that Apple is getting ready to refresh its range of Mac Pro computers and it looks like we're getting close. However, it seems like this Apple refresh will happen at the same time Intel is making its new six-core CPU's ready. Coincidence? We think not.
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.
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.
NORMALLY WE WOULDN'T bother posting news about a CPU cooler on its own, but this is pretty big news, as Intel appears to have gotten rid of its traditional round coolers that have shipped with its retail CPU's for quite a few years by now. Although this only applied to the upcoming Core i7 980XE, it's still a move in the right direction.
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.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
ALTHOUGH A BIT later than some of its competitors, Asus has announced its own AMD 890GX board, the M4A89GTD PRO. However, compared to just about everyone else, Asus claims to have one killer feature, CPU core unlocking.
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.
THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.
THANKS TO ONE of our forum members, we managed to dig out a lot more details on the upcoming Magny-Cours processors from AMD and it seems like yesterday’s source was somewhat off the target, in terms of both pricing and specifications.
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.
INTEL JUST GOT some competition against its Light Peak interface, as NEC has just demoed a faster, yet to be named high-speed serial communications interface that can pull off speeds of up to 16Gbps. This puts Light Peak’s 10Gbps, er, in the shade.
WE WERE EXPECTING a fair few ARM partner announcements during the Mobile World Congress and so far we haven’t been disappointed. Texas Instruments and ST-Ericsson have both announced dual core ARM CortexA9 MPCore based products with clock speeds in excess of 1GHz.
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.
IT SEEMS LIKE Biostar jumped the press release gun as the company posted details of its upcoming TA890GXE motherboard based on the AMD 890GX chipset on its website. The press release has since been taken down, but it has already spread all over the web. However, what makes it interesting is the fact that it includes the retail name for AMD’s upcoming hexa-core CPUs.
HERE WE GO again, Intel has come up with yet another nifty marketing name, Core vPro. These are not only Intel’s 'new' processors for businesses of all sizes that add a host of features, but they're also said to gain cost savings.
IT’S ALWAYS GREAT having a choice when it comes to colours, as how boring would it be if everything we owned was the same colour? Sony seems to have taken this to the extreme with its Intel Core i3 and Core i5 based Vaio E series of notebooks, since not only can you have them in a selection of six colours but they’re also available with optional coloured keyboard skins.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.
AMD SPENT SOME time talking to the press in Singapore today and unveiled some details of its upcoming platform plans for 2011. What we’re looking at are more cores, fusion and improved notebook battery life.
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.
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.
MARVELL SEEMS TO be set on becoming the leader in ARM based processors and its announcement of the world’s first quad core processor based on the ARMv7 architecture must be a major blow to its competitors.
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.
WE’RE ALL FOR tools that help people pick suitable parts for their next system build, especially these days as it can be hard to figure out what bits goes with what. Futuremark has just launched a new tool in partnership with Gigabyte called the Gigabyte System Builder. Okay, so you only have the choice of Gigabyte motherboards and graphics cards, but that’s fair enough, as this is a business partnership and monies have been exchanged at one time or another to get this up and running.
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.