On the up side, the 280 is the single fastest GPU on the market. On the down side people don't buy GPUs, they buy graphics cards, and the 280 is not the single fastest graphics card on the market. That honour goes to the ATI 4870X2 by a large margin. With the new-gen GT200 parts, Nvidia loses on all fronts, performance, performance per dollar, and performance per watt, they simply aren't competitive.

That brings us to the new parts, the 270 and 290. They popped up on a PNY price list a few weeks ago, and then were pulled off immediately. This part is what we were calling the GT200b in May, but the public code name is GT206. It is simply an optically shrunk GT200, so clock for clock, you won't get any speed boost out of it. It is meant to fatten up the margins by reducing cost. If the GT200 is a 576mm^2 die, and the 206 is around 460mm^2 (~21mm*21mm die), even with the more expensive 55nm process, NV should save some money.

When they're not hand-wringing over the recent drop in Apple's share price, Mac enthusiasts have been transfixed lately by the mystery product, code-named "brick," that's due for release later this month.

Some bloggers and pundits have suggested it might be a new iteration of Apple TV or an updated Mac Mini. But according to a report on 9to5Mac.com, "brick" refers not to what it is, but how it's made. The Web site, which cites an anonymous source, says the code name has to do with a manufacturing process for Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro lines of laptops. Apple (AAPL) will build the notebook out of a single piece of carved-out aluminum—a brick.

Well, after changing the name without changing the specs, Nvidia may now change the specs without changing the name. Expreview reports that an updated GeForce 9600 GSO based on the G94 graphics processor will come out at the end of this month.

The current 9600 GSO features a G92 graphics processor with 96 stream processors, a 550MHz core speed, a 1375MHz shader speed, and 384MB of 800MHz GDDR3 RAM tied to a 192-bit memory interface. Expreview says the "updated" GeForce 9600 GSO will feature a G94 GPU (the one that powers the GeForce 9600 GT) with 48 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM.

MSI has announced that people wishing to get their hands on an MSI Wind U100 Netbook can stroll into their nearest Best Buy starting today and pick up the 10" 3-cell version with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and Windows XP for $399. Before your rush out to get one though, keep in mind that the updated U120 version with HDSPA could hit before Christmas.

We want to see how today's new generation of video cards stack up in terms of gaming value. There exists a wide range of video cards you can purchase; from the $150 Radeon HD 4850 to the $1100 Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. How do figure out what will suit our needs? Also, is there such a thing as "GPU overkill" right now? We are here to answer these questions and find out what kind of gameplay experience and performance is delivered between $150 and $1100 using the newest generation GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA in single and multi-card configurations.

$150-$300 Price Range: Radeon HD 4850 - $150, GeForce GTX 260 - $215, Radeon HD 4870 - $250, Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire - $300

$390-$550 Price Range: GeForce GTX 280 - $390, GeForce GTX 260 SLI - $430, Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire - $500, Radeon HD 4870 X2 - $550

$780 - $1100 Price Range: GeForce GTX 280 SLI - $780, Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX - $1100

Industry sources told TG Daily that while the 8000 series is being phased out, all 55 nm 9000-series GPUs will carry a G100-series name. By the end of 2008, Nvidia will be offering today’s 9000 series as G100, GT120, GT130, GT140 and GT150 models.

When the 2009 45 nm GPUs arrive, which seems to be the case around Q1 or Q2, Nvidia will have fully transitioned to the new branding structure: Enthusiast GPUs will be integrated into the GTX200-series, performance GPUs into the GT200-series, mainstream GPUs into the GS200-series and entry-level products into the G200-series.

The new branding should clear up some of the confusion in Nvidia’s product lineup today.

Kuma is the first (or last) dual core 65nm CPU in “Stars� family. Early in 2007 Kuma showed up in AMD roadmap. But after September AMD had made their decision that they would launch Phenom 8000 series Triple core, Because of marketing, Kuma delayed to 2008 Q2.

It is interesting that AMD branded Kuma with “Athlon�, not Athlon64 X2 or Phenom X2. Initially Kuma have two SKU, they were 6050 and 6250. Both SKU would be positioned higher than Athlon64 X2.

But because of TLB issue, AMD’s CPU product line turned out to be a mass. Kuma once again delayed. Until recently some words mentioned that AMD finally make up their mind, going to release Kuma with new SKU：6500(2.3GHz)/6400(2.2GHz)/6300(2.1GHz). The CPU in our hand is the highest one, Athlon 6500.

Sapphire HD4670 with 43 per cent more sword-bearing chick

What can you do? Add more pins, add more board layers, more memory width, pile on more expensive memory. That can work. See the 4870's crushing performance for what you can do with narrow and fast GDDR5, but that is really tough to do on an $80 card. This segment is all about price, so you do what you can and balance things out where you are able.

This market segment is delineated in about $20 chunks, an $80 card is a different category from a $60 and $100 card. Some people even differentiate on $10 or less while OEMs are more granular than that.

The 4670 doesn't change the game enough to say that spending more money isn't worth it, but the 4670 does lead at its price point and is good enough for anyone with a 1280x1024 monitor to have a good experience. We even see some advantages that would allow us to enable 4xAA at these low resolutions and enjoy playable performance. This card isn't going to change the world, but it fits a niche. Throw in the lower power requirements and smaller form factor and you have a great card for moderate gaming.

Unlike the 9500 GT, this card isn't an epic fail at its price point. We would still like more (we always do), but what we've got isn't bad. This is hardware based on a new architecture (meaning it has all the latest features and bug fixes like working AA hardware), unlike NVIDIA's competitive offerings. We can play most of the games we tested at 1280x1024 (a very cheap very widely used panel size) with high quality settings and some of them do well with 4xAA enabled as well.

Flexing its technology muscle into new territories – Intel has taken a huge step into the future of storage with today’s release of its first Solid-state Hard drive. While the technology behind these kinds of drives isn’t totally new, I do feel it represents the future direction of PC storage and I also know there are makers of conventional hard drives that are also hard at work at releasing their own SSD drives as well.

Although the capacities of Sold State drives is nowhere near that of the conventional, we see by today’s release of the X25-M that it offers unparalleled performance and power savings which the conventional drives can only dream of. Ultimately, the SSD drive movement will appeal to laptop users and power-users who have extra cash to throw around for the sake of extreme performance.

There are three new stages in the standard graphics pipeline: the Hull Shader, Tessellator, and Domain Shader. In addition, changes have been made to the pixel shader to enable compute shaders (for general purpose applications). In addition to the new pipeline stages, DirectX is being tweaked to fully support multithreading. So DirectX 11 DLLs will spawn threads as appropriate on multicore and SMT-enabled CPUs.

Another key new feature are several new texture compression formats, which enable better image quality, and will support high dynamic range. A host of lesser features are also being implemented; most don't require new hardware. They include upping the resource limit to 2GB, increasing texture limits to 16K and support for double-precision floating point (this last one is optional, and is aimed at compute shaders).

Now let's drill down on some of the features.

Dean Takahashi, one of the most respected tech journos around, spent years putting together this mind-blowing expose that reveals the truly epic scale of the problems that lead to millions of dead Xbox 360s. It really is one of the most stunning flustercucks in gaming history. According to his account, Microsoft willfully ignored deep, systemic problems in the console's production that reached from chipmakers—initially, only 16 out of every 100 of its IBM-made processors worked—to production lines, where just before launch, an unbelievable 68 percent of consoles made were clunkers.

...

Most of the problems pointed to as the cause of the epidemic of Red Rings of Death showed up way before launch, naturally.

Nintendo doesn't exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media center hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let's walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box.

To give you an idea of what you can do with a Wii/PC hook-up, here's a look at one neat example: Controlling Windows Media Center from a distance, without having to shell out for a separate remote control.

Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing.

Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techniques, doing one thing at a time. Smiley was a relatively simple robot, while Mona Lisa consisted out of "1100 massively parallel barrel processors", dwarfing the 240 shaders offered by a GeForce GTX 280 chip.

Since micro-stuttering is an issue for some people I thought it would be interesting to see if there's a way to solve it. Personally I'm not bothered by it and haven't actually been able to even see it, but I can prove it's happening with Fraps on my 3870x2. So I spent a couple of hours to implement a simple waiting mechanism to feed the GPUs at a more balanced rate. For best stability you want the second GPU to start working only once the first GPU is in mid-frame (assuming 2 GPUs).

Now, since I'm not able to see the micro-stuttering in the first place I can't really say if it's any smoother in practice, but at least the Fraps graph looks good.

What I did was first to create a GPU limited test case using my InteriorMapping demo and slowing it down a bit by adding work to the shader until it ran at about 120fps. Micro-stuttering happens when you get GPU limited since you're feeding commands to the GPU faster than it can accept them. The more GPU limited you are the worse the problem is because the GPUs will start working on their frames shortly after each other and then after crunching through the frames both finish almost at the same time too, which makes one frame appear for 1ms and the next 15ms instead of both 8ms, as shown in the graph.

We spoke to Raj Suman, Euro product marketing director at distributor Avnet, to get confirmation of approximate street pricing and for his take. "This is a strong price move, indicating AMD's commitment to the channel, especially smaller system integrators," said Suman. "The market is soft right now but this has repositioned AMD well. The main battleground between AMD and Intel is the $135-$180 band."

There's said to be two chips in the pipeline, the FX-80 at 4Ghz and the FX-82 at 4.4GHz. The FX-80 at stock out performs a 5.0GHz Kentsfield. The Deneb core apparently has a multiplier of up to 25x!

Members of Custom PC’s Folding@home team may have noticed a major increase in our production rate recentlys, and there’s little doubt that much of this can be attributed to Stanford’s new GPU2 client for Nvidia and ATI GPUs. However, it looks as though Nvidia GPUs are the king of the folding castle at the moment, as they’re currently responsible for a whopping 42 per cent of the project’s total output.

This is despite the fact that over three times as many active PlayStation 3s as there are Nvidia GPUs contributing to the project, not to mention 16 times as many CPUs folding under Windows. There are currently 12,982 Nvidia GPUs actively folding, out of a total of 323,424 active processors in total. As such, the fact that Nvidia GPUs make up such a colossal percentage of the total output is pretty incredible.

You can see the current statistics on the next page, showing that Nvidia GPUs are currently churning out 1,428 TFLOPS out of a total of 3,372 TFLOPS for the whole project. Meanwhile, ATI GPUs are responsible for 404 TFLOPS, but even this is double the output from Windows CPU clients, and is an impressive figure considering that there are only 3,677 ATI GPUs actively folding at the moment.

Wie man der obigen Tabelle entnehmen kann, besitzt "Kuma" zwei Kerne und wird wie bisher alle Vertreter der Phenom-Reihe im 65 nm-Verfahren produziert. Ähnlichkeiten zu den Topmodellen ergeben sich auch bei der Cache-Ausstattung. So sorgen an dieser Stelle ebenfalls 512 KiB L2-Cache pro Kern sowie ein gemeinsamer, 2 MiB großer L3-Cache für die schnelle Zwischenspeicherung von im Umlauf befindlichen Daten.

Des Weiteren lassen sich bereits die Kern- sowie HTT-Taktfrequenzen ablesen. Ist die HTT-Taktfrequenz bei allen drei Chips mit 1600 MHz festgesetzt, so beträgt der Kerntakt 2,3 (GE-6600), 2,1 (GE-6500) und 1,9 GHz (GE-6400). Aufgrund der relativ humanen Taktfrequenzen kann AMD bei allen Modellen eine TDP von gerade einmal 45 Watt fahren.
Wann und zu welchem Preis die Phenom Dual-Cores kommen werden, muss noch abgewartet werden. Der Eintrag macht jedoch Hoffnung, dass es allzu lange nicht mehr dauern wird.

Other updates to the P45 Express technology, such as the ability to support a total of 16GB RAM rather than the 8GB of the P35 Express, are far less significant to the majority of its mainstream/performance market. In fact, those who would never even consider using Crossfire technology might prefer to save some money by purchasing a less-expensive P35 motherboard, as implied in our earlier P45 Express technology overview

Given that the P45 Express’ major features target gaming enthusiasts, it comes as no surprise that many manufacturers have chosen this mainstream part as the basis for reduced-cost, high-end products. Others have chosen to use only a minimum number of high-end features to bring added value to the budget/performance market. Today’s eleven motherboards represent that range of products bound by these philosophies.