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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CYBERLINK IS UNDISPUTABLY the leader in software DVD and Blu-ray playback software for Windows and the company has announced a new version of PowerDVD called PowerDVD 10 Mark II which if you have the Ultra 3D version of it, allows you to watch your movies in 3D. Well, that is if you have the required equipment to do so.
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It seems that Verizon’s rabid pet wolf was able to sink its teeth into Microsoft’s ‘Kin’ phone not even two months after Arlis traded in his prized horny toad, $49.99 and a home-cooked meal for the privilege of owning one. This unfortunate turn of events prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer to don his executioner’s mask and place a 12-gauge slug between the eyes of the hydrophobic phone series. When asked to comment on the sudden death sentence, we couldn’t quite make out his reply due to all the laughter and bad music coming from the Apple camp across the street, but it sounded something like, “developers, developers, developers, developers…”
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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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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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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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WITH THE INTRODUCTION of SATA 6Gbp, SSD drives got a much needed, faster interface, but it appears that we’ve hit another “wall” when it comes to performance of SSD drives, at least higher density drives. SSDs with more than 16 NAND Flash memory chips on them will have power issues in the near future which prevent them from reaching optimal write speeds. The good news is that Toshiba is already working to solve this problem with the help of a Japanese research group headed by Ken Takeuchi.
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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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THE NEXT BIG thing appears to be hybrid drives, although Seagate’s new Momentus XT failed to impress most reviewers, despite offering some clear advantages over a traditional hard drive. The downside here of course is that we’re talking about a 2.5-inch notebook drive, but what if you want a hybrid drive for your desktop PC? Well, Marvell might very well have the solution to this problem with its upcoming “free” HyperHDD solution.
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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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PIXEL QI HAD some of their screens on display at Computex, and a chat with some of their engineers shed a lot of light on not just what they do but how. The screens may be made on the same tools as mainstream LCDs, but they are far from ordinary.
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IT’S BEEN A LONG time coming, but Steve Jobs has announced the fourth generation iPhone at the WWDC 2010. Despite numerous leaks ahead of the launch, there seem to be very little that stopped Apple fans from cheering and clapping when the new handset was unveiled.
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YOU MIGHT REMEMBER the name Crestatech from last year’s IDF, they are making the first software defined radio. The big news from Computex is that they showed real silicon, real cards, and real software up and running on broadcast TV.
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