NVIDIA JUST HAD one of their most sleazy marketing tactics exposed, that PhysX is faster on a GPU than a CPU. As David Kanter at Real World Tech proves, the only reason that PhysX is faster on a GPU is because Nvidia purposely hobbles it on the CPU. If they didn’t, PhysX would run faster on a modern CPU.
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LAST WEEK, INTEL proved they were much smarter than Microsoft and IBM when they put out a widely ignored press release about an administrative motion with the FTC. While the text said next to nothing, the actions behind it had immense ramifications, especially if you are an Intel stockholder.
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THE SMUG ONES from Cupertino have finally done the right thing for iPhone 4 owners with reception problems, that would basically be everyone who owns one. No, they didn’t fix the design flaw, but they did issue a sickly self-congratulatory press release, publicly blame their customers, then deny that the problem is real. How typical.
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THE SECOND TO last part of the Epic debate/casual conversation between Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards gets a bit testy at times, to the point of making the camera man nervously pan to the provided weapons. The two also talk about tech as well, and in the end, no one dies, that has to wait for Part 6.
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TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
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IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.
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SUPERTALENT JUST RELEASED something that the server world has been waiting for since the dawn of SSDs, a SAS SSD. The 2.5″ ShuttleCraft SAS SSD is the first affordable drive that is going to change how servers use storage.
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TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
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HOW DO YOU follow an 8-core Nehalem-EX server chip? If you are Intel, you do it with more cores, and that is exactly what Westmere-EX does.
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THE HOT CHIPS 22 conference has released their lineup of talks this year, and it once again looks really good. If you haven’t been to one yet, it is one of the best conferences about chip architecture out there, and well worth attending.
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A LOT OF people are talking about Nvidia’s new GPUs, the GF104, GF106, and GF108, but very few people understand why the parts are going to underwhelm. The reason is simple, the architecture is broken, and hasn’t been changed much.
Updated
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PART THREE OF the ‘Epic’ debate follows our intrepid heroes, Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards, through the wilds of a GDC conference room, in the heart of the Moscone Center forest. The topic: Graphics hardware and it’s future, programmable or more fixed hardware?
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IN THIS PART of the GDC conversation/debate between Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards, they go into game consoles, divergence, convergence, and of course hardware vs software rendering. Can the game console makers afford to diverge in the next generation?
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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you get two very smart people, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, and Andrew Richards from Codeplay, with diametrically opposed views together in the same room to talk about the future of graphics hardware? Easy, a debate. At GDC this year, that is exactly what SemiAccurate did, and through the magic of video cameras, you too can enjoy the spectacle.
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SEAMICRO IS A STARTUP that is attacking data center power use through a novel idea, optimizing hardware for a specific workload. For web serving workloads, the idea is simple, cram 512 Atom servers into a box with a virtual ‘shared nothing’ configuration.
Updated: Fixed wrong CPU speeds
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