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.
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.
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.
3D API'S MIGHT not be the most exciting thing in the world, but without them we wouldn't have any kind of 3D graphics which would make computers a lot less fun and a lot less useful for many users around the world. Khronos has announced its latest version of OpenGL which simply gets a version bump to 4.0.
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.
SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.
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.
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.
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.
AH, BLUETOOTH THAT ubiquitous standard that we all use, or do we? Well, either which way, Bluetooth 4.0 is on its way and should arrive just in time for that cheerful gift buying season of the year. Yup, that's right, another year, another Bluetooth standard.
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.
WHAT DO YOU get when you cross Apple, Siemens and Sisvel with the German police at CeBIT? Raids of course, with lots of police, lawyers, and people stripping booths clean of everything electronic.
IT DIDN'T TAKE long before pictures of the GTX470 card without a heatsink appeared, following the tantalizing pictures of the GTX480 that came out on Tuesday. However, what's even more interesting is that early benchmark figures have finally leaked and it's not looking good for Nvidia.
SOUTHERN TAIWAN was hit by a 6.4 earthquake this morning local time which led to all sorts of disruptions in the southern parts of the island. The good news is that no one was seriously hurt, but the quake cause a lot of damage to buildings and infrastructure.
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.
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.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
MOST PEOPLE were amazed by Nvidia's Q409 results. How could it reap that much profit when it doesn't have any competitive high-end GPU products on the market? The answer is right in Nvidia's statements and the key is to understand what supply constraint means.
IT DOESN'T APPEAR as if Nvidia's secret police managed to keep Fermi, or shall we say GTX480 away from the prying eyes of the press, as Tweakers.net has scored no less than three pictures of Nvidia's latest and greatest creation, all undressed.
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.
AMD'S LATEST IGP CHIPSET has been launched, and with CeBIT kicking off tomorrow we should be seeing a lot more announcements, but for now, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI have announced boards based on the 890GX chipset.
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.
SHUTTLE DIDN'T HAVE all too much to show at CES last month, but it seems like the company is getting ready to at least unleash something different at CeBIT next week where the company is set to unveil its new XS35 ultra-compact PC.
WHO WOULD’VE BELIEVED that Nvidia was willing create an exclusive card with one of its partners that would only go on sale in a single country. Well, it’s true and we have sourced proof from the exclusive online retailer that will be selling these very rare cards.
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.
FINNISH WEBSITE MUROPAKKETI has gotten its hands on a couple of pictures of Asus’ upcoming ROG Ares graphics card and to call this a monster card would be to put it lightly. Although it’s more or less an ATI Radeon HD 5970, Asus has tweaked the design and increased the clock speeds to be able to offer something out of the ordinary.
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.
IN THE BUILD up to CeBIT which kicks off next week, MSI has announced that it will start supplying two of its H55 motherboards with a bundled USB Wi-Fi dongle. This is something of a blast from the past, as MSI used to offer a special upgrade card that added both WiFi and Bluetooth to some of its motherboards.
ADOBE'S FLASH PLAYER might be one of the most controversial pieces of software at the moment, especially with the lack of love from Apple’s upcoming iPad and of course the iPhone and iPod Touch as well. The latest beta version of Flash 10.1 just landed and revision three adds hardware support for a few new Intel chipsets, as well as fixing a lot of bugs.
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.
DETAILS OF AMD’s soon to be launched ATI Radeon HD5830 have made their way onto the web via the Chinese website IT168.com. Parts of a PowerPoint presentation have turned up alongside several pictures of partner cards.
NVIDIA HAS REVEALED when it will unveil “The world’s fastest PC graphics gaming technology” and it’s all going to happen on the 26th of March 2010 from 6 to 7PM at PAX East. Indeed, Nvidia is launching Fermi, sorry, the GTX480 and GTX470 at a glorified LAN party in Boston.
WE DON'T KNOW how accurate these first listings of GeForce GTX480 and GTX470 cards are, but SabrePC has listed cards from both XFX and PNY on its website for pre-order. The total lack of details makes us wonder if this is just a drive to get people to its website, or if it’s indeed the real thing.
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.
YOU MIGHT ALREADY have read one of the many guides on the net about how to get your PC running OS X. We have come across an approach that makes the whole install process a lot easier and thought we’d share it with you. By a lot we mean that you don’t need a Mac for starters, which should be a huge help to those who own only a PC and want to have a go at building a Hackintosh.
AMD APPEARS TO BE getting ready to unveil a couple of additions to its range of ATI Radeon HD 5000-series cards over the next few weeks. Although the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 has already been demoed, the Radeon HD 5830 is likely to end up very high on a lot of people’s wish list if the price is right.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, S3 graphics is getting ready to show off its first dual GPU card. However, the venue at which the company will be launching this card might give away that it’s not for gamers, but rather for those that need something a little bit out of the ordinary.
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.
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.
AMD HAS ANNOUNCED its latest Catalyst 10.2 drivers, which in itself isn’t really big news as AMD has been releasing graphics drivers on a monthly basis for quite some time now. However, what is the new is that AMD is aiming to offer monthly driver updates for those with a Radeon Mobility card in their notebook, which is a huge step forward.
WE’RE NOT SURE if hell just froze over or not, but Verizon Wireless has announced that it has teamed up with Skype to deliver unlimited free Skype-to-Skype calls for its customers. There’s a catch of course, although it’s a rather small one.
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.
MICROSOFT WASN’T JOKING when it said that Windows Phone 7 was redesigned from the bottom up, well, at least not as far as we could tell from today unveiling at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
OUT OF THE BLUE, Intel and Nokia announced that they’re working on a new open source Linux based operating system called MeeGo that builds on Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms. This was the only joint announcement at the Mobile World Congress and we’re slightly disappointed that it wasn’t a new x86 based CPU.
ARM LOOKS SET to have field day at the Mobile World Congress next week as its licensees show off new products. Today Marvell released details of upcoming products that looks set to draw a lot of attention for different reasons. On top of that, both NEC and Texas Instruments are set to show off new products at the show.
A SOLUTION IS at hand for those that find it complicated to set up their 3G data connection on their notebook or netbook, as Sagem Orga had developed a SIM card with a built in WiFi hotspot in cooperation with Telefonica.
WHAT DO YOU DO when your company does not have a competitive product in the most profitable market segment, your competitors are developing products that will kill your share in the high volume segments and the puppy in the pipeline is not looking that promising?
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.
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.
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.
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.
3D API'S MIGHT not be the most exciting thing in the world, but without them we wouldn't have any kind of 3D graphics which would make computers a lot less fun and a lot less useful for many users around the world. Khronos has 
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.
SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.
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.
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.
AH, BLUETOOTH THAT ubiquitous standard that we all use, or do we? Well, either which way, Bluetooth 4.0 is on its way and should arrive just in time for that cheerful gift buying season of the year. Yup, that's right, another year, another Bluetooth standard.
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.
SOUTHERN TAIWAN was hit by a 6.4 earthquake this morning local time which led to all sorts of disruptions in the southern parts of the island. The good news is that no one was seriously hurt, but the quake cause a lot of damage to buildings and infrastructure.
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.
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.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
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'S LATEST IGP CHIPSET has been launched, and with CeBIT kicking off tomorrow we should be seeing a lot more announcements, but for now, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI have announced boards based on the 890GX chipset.
SHUTTLE DIDN'T HAVE all too much to show at CES last month, but it seems like the company is getting ready to at least unleash something different at CeBIT next week where the company is set to unveil its new XS35 ultra-compact PC.
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.
IN THE BUILD up to CeBIT which kicks off next week, MSI has announced that it will start supplying two of its H55 motherboards with a bundled USB Wi-Fi dongle. This is something of a blast from the past, as MSI used to offer a special upgrade card that added both WiFi and Bluetooth to some of its motherboards.
ADOBE'S FLASH PLAYER might be one of the most controversial pieces of software at the moment, especially with the lack of love from Apple’s upcoming iPad and of course the iPhone and iPod Touch as well. The latest beta version of Flash 10.1 just landed and revision three adds hardware support for a few new Intel chipsets, as well as fixing a lot of bugs.
DETAILS OF AMD’s soon to be launched ATI Radeon HD5830 have made their way onto the web via the Chinese website IT168.com. Parts of a PowerPoint presentation have turned up alongside several pictures of partner cards.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, S3 graphics is getting ready to show off its first dual GPU card. However, the venue at which the company will be launching this card might give away that it’s not for gamers, but rather for those that need something a little bit out of the ordinary.
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’RE NOT SURE if hell just froze over or not, but Verizon Wireless has announced that it has teamed up with Skype to deliver unlimited free Skype-to-Skype calls for its customers. There’s a catch of course, although it’s a rather small one.
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.
MICROSOFT WASN’T JOKING when it said that Windows Phone 7 was redesigned from the bottom up, well, at least not as far as we could tell from today unveiling at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
A SOLUTION IS at hand for those that find it complicated to set up their 3G data connection on their notebook or netbook, as Sagem Orga had developed a SIM card with a built in WiFi hotspot in cooperation with Telefonica.
WHAT DO YOU DO when your company does not have a competitive product in the most profitable market segment, your competitors are developing products that will kill your share in the high volume segments and the puppy in the pipeline is not looking that promising?