Those ever talkative “sources from motherboard makers” are again flapping their gums to Digitimes, this time involving Nvidia. As the latest rumor goes, Nvidia’s engineers are busy developing a chipset that combines the function of both a southbridge a… [...]
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It looks like the elves in Intel’s workshop have been working overtime this holiday season, enough so that the chip maker today officially announced its next generation Atom platform, which includes the first Intel chips to integrate graphics and a memory controller in the CPU. On the netbook side of things, the new Atom platform consists of an Atom N450 processor. It’s a single-core part clocked at 1.66GHz with 512KB of L2 cache and a 7-watt total TDP. For entry-level desktops, there’s the single-core D410 (1.66GHz, 512KB L2 cache, 12-watt TDP) and dual-core D510 (1.66GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 15-watt TDP). Intel says both processors were designed from the ground up for small devices and low power usage, and both come built on the company’s 45nm high-k metal gate manufacturing process. These chips will run in Intel’s NM10 Express Chipset. An industry first on x86 processors, the new Atom chips integrate both the memory controller and graphics into the CPU. By going this route, Intel reduces the number of chips from three (CPU, chipset, I/O controller hub) to two (CPU, chipset), which the company claims results in a lower TDP, and "substantial reductions in cost, overall footprint, and power." Intel said it will announce pricing information when the platform ships in the first week of January.
Image Credit: Intel [...]
VIA this week announced its new VN1000 digital media chipset, which the company claims is the "world’s most power efficient DX10.1 chipset" on the planet. Providing the DirectX 10.1 graphics is VIA’s Chrome 520 IGP, which boasts the same traits as the Chrome 500-series, such as a 500MHz GPU and 32 stream processors. It also supports Shader Model 4, OpenGL 3.0, and OpenCL 1.0. VIA says its high-performance ChromotionHD 2.0 video processor also offers advanced filter and "ultra smooth decoding" of MPEG-4/AVC, H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV-HD, and AVS video for Blu-ray content. "The VIA VN1000 leverages our optimized VIA Nano 3000 Series processors, creating the most balanced, power-efficient, multimedia-focused desktop platform on the market today," said Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA. "Supporting the latest system memory, graphics, and entertainment standards, the VIA VN1000 takes the VIA processor platform to new heights of power-efficient visual sophistication." Other features include support for DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1066MHz, a single x8 and four x1 PCI-E lanes, up to ficve PCI slots, and 8-channel audio.
Image Credit: VIA [...]
Expect to see quite a few netbook and nettop deals this holiday shopping season, especially if Intel forges ahead with plans to fast track the introduction of its upcoming Pine Trail platform. "Intel is planning for a fast transition to Pine Trail. To generate excitement for the platform ahead of launch, Intel is planning a press release in late December publicly disclosing the details of the platform," X-bit Labs claims to have read in an Intel document. Should Intel aggressively push Pine Trail ahead of its launch, consumers could see a fair number of pre- and post-Christmas day sales on older Atom platform-based netbooks and nettops. And look for plenty of coverage at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Intel’s Pine Trail platform will include a bunch of next-gen Atom Pineview processors, which will come with an integrated graphics core, a built-in DDR2 memory controller, a new core-logic set, and other goodies.
Image Credit: laptoping.com [...] |
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