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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 15 March 2007 |
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A Star Wars - like "The Return of the Intel" price war has been played by Intel and AMD for quite a while now. Just yesterday, Intel announced the Chinese approval of a 2.5 billion dollar 90nm FAB in China to meet the growing semiconductor needs of the Chinese sales region. Furthermore, AMD's stock price is already below its 52-week moving average, due to poor sales figures, loss of technology leadership in CPU and GPU segments, as well as Intel's relentless advertising campaigns and price cuts.
While AMD's K10 CPU architecture is in the pipeline to be released, with X4 cores to be finally named after the actual clock speed, Intel is already gearing up its Q6600, Q6700 and QX6800 line-up with a possible increase in FSB speeds at a reasonable price.
Although the quote for a Q6600 is $266, it will probably be for T1 resellers in 000s units only. However, considering that it was just recently introduced at $851, it is a definite contender for the price/performance crown when it gets overclocked.
Combining this new Quad Core CPU with a nForce 680i or 650i motherboard with the upcoming DX10 graphics cards in SLI, would be quite a good way to test out something new and realize the Multi GPU/CPU platform into something that's more what AMD's Quadfather was supposed to be.
Still, Intel has its hands deep in the dirt with Anti-trust allegations over unfair competition against its smaller rival AMD and fails to provide evidence in at least a dozen cases. Since AMD is already behind on the CPU shrinking cycle (as well as yields), it would be hard to expect AMD to come up with a C2D/C2Q outperforming chip while retaining reasonable margins. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 March 2007 )
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 15 March 2007 |
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With CeBit 2007 unfolding itself, NVIDIA board partners have already decided to put some sample DX10 mainstream cards onto display, with a line up of 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and 8500 GT cards just around the corner.
NVIDIA has not officially released any launch dates and specifications at this stage, but DailyTech has taken the liberty in this article to show that the launches are just around the corner.
Based on an unified shader architecture, the cards will replace the current line up of GeForce 7 budget cards, such as the GeForce 7600 GT, GS and 7300 GT and below, putting it in a position that will compete against AMD's RV610/630 cards.
Consumers will find it comforting to know that the cards will support the PureVideo HD technology for accelerating the decoding of H .264 HD streams up to 1080i that can be used in conjunction with Blu-ray or HD-DVD drives (such as Microsoft's XBOX HDDVD drive for just 199 Dollars) for a truly immersive and affordable HD experience.
Still, the preliminary reports on the web seem to suggest that an SLI'd 8600 GTS array will just be about as fast as an 8800 GTS, meaning that hardware enthusiasts would still have reason to buy the bigger brothers (unless R600 comes out of course).
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 March 2007 )
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 13 March 2007 |
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Xbitlabs reports that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has revealed to financial analysts that its GeForce 8800 Series GPUs have sold over 400,000 units since its introduction 11th Nov, 2006.
The focus of the GeForce 8, according to Jensen, was to leverage the technology leadership of GeForce 8 and apply it to the mainstream market. Reason for the large shipments can be partially accounted for the lack of a competiting product by rival ATI (which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of AMD), as well as the high performance in DX9 games in conjunction with Microsoft's Vista operating system.
In 2007, the GeForce 7 line-up will slowly phase out with the introduction of cheaper parts based on the GeForce 8 architecture, possibly by reducing the speed of the chip, amount of unified shaders and memory (as well as memory speed).
Essentially, the release of DX10 games that can deliver performance and visual quality will be a factor to watch out for this year. Another thing to watch out is the chipset business, with AMD trying to stage a come-back with the 690G chipset and integrated ATI graphics (although nForce 680i and 650i motherboards are an extremely popular alternative for those that want SLI multi-GPU support).
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