IT HAD TO happen sooner or later, Intel is starting to put out 25nm flash chips. At IDF last week, prototype chips were spotted on a prototype drive with a prototype Sandforce SSD controller.
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ONE SCARY THING about IDF is the RFID tracking, and how people tacitly accept it. The badges each have an RFID chip in them, and you can be tracked wherever you go, and wherever Intel wants to watch you.
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GIGABYTE WAS SHOWING off not one but two P67 based enthusiast mobos at IDF this week, and both looked really good. As soon as Sandy Bridge comes out, the enthusiast community is going to be well supplied with boards.
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MSI’s MOA offers up fun, challenge and the following outtake. We don’t know what to call it beyond an outtake and we’d like our readers to know that while we bring you such videos we don’t recommend trying this at home nor do we offer any comment upon such, erm, entertainment.
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THE SECOND KEYNOTE of IDF was given by Dadi Perlmutter, and it focused on Sandy Bridge, and the uses that it enables. There is a lot you can do with 2 256-bit AVX vector units for voice, video and other data intensive streams.
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HERE ARE SOME pics of a running AMD Bobcat platform, specifically a Zacate CPU running City of Heroes: Going Rogue. Also included are some cheesecake shots of the CPU itself. Enjoy.
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THIS WEEKEND MSI’S MOA or Master Overclocking Arena finals took place in Taipei, Taiwan with 20 teams from around the world competing against each other in what wasn’t exactly what we’d call an intense competition, but it turned out to be a fight to the end. MSI gambled and made a last minute change to the gear used by adding its N480GTX Lighting graphics card into the mix which threw a spanner in the wheel for most of the teams.
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AT IDF THIS morning, Paul Otellini gave a broad overview about the future of Intel, and how it is becoming a full stack provider. Everything was about what you would expect until about half way through when the caffeine induced hallucinations kicked in.
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INTEL HAD TWO video recognition demos at a pre-IDF event Sunday, one on low power remote facial recognition, the other called Oasis. Neither one did anything really new, it was just a matter of how things were done instead of the end result.
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INTEL WAS SHOWING off a few new research projects before IDF, one of which appeals a lot to gamers. If raytraced Quake Wars wasn’t enough for you, get ready for raytraced Return To Castle Wolfenstein, rendered remotely on a cloud.
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WHEN ARE YOU finally going to be able to buy a Sandy Bridge? The wait will be over with an introduction in the first week of 2011 and sales in the second week.
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WHAT DARK SECRET doth Sandy Bridge hold? How is it going to crush CUDA and make Nvidia’s fading hopes fade faster? Well, if you look at the right side of the die shot, you will see something odd, and that is the 10 ton weight whistling down on Nvidia.
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STILL WAITING FOR Cortex-A9 ARM based smartphones to arrive? Well, we’ve got bad news for you, ARM has announced its next generation of ARM based cores, namely the Cortex-A15 family and the company is expecting five times the performance increase compared to its current crop of Cortex cores. However, we suggest that you go out and spend your cash on whatever tickles your fancy now, as the Cortex-A15 core won’t turn up in products until 2012 at the earliest, which might be a bit too long to wait if you’ve been thinking about upgrading your handset.
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WHAT DO YOU get when you cross a Bulldozer and a t-shirt? A Bulldozer design team t-shirt. It may be a lame joke, but it is the SemiAccurate picture of the day.
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BY NOW WE expected to have seen at least some competition in the USB 3.0 host controller market, but it seems like making a host controller is trickier than many thought. The Taiwanese IC makers aren’t having much luck with getting their solutions approved by the USB-IF which controls the certification of all USB devices to make sure that they’re interoperable as well as meeting the standards of the various specifications.
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