Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang has never shied from being being blunt about where his company stands, having once promised to “open a can of whoop ass” on Intel. His latest comments aren’t quite as colorful, but they’re just as telling, and stil… [...]
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Advanced Micro Devices has said that it remains ahead of schedule with its Fusion chips – or APUs (accelerated processing unit) as it likes to call them. The low-power “Ontario” SoC (System-on-Chip), aimed at netbooks and low-end notebooks, will… [...]
AMD has had enough of sitting on the sidelines, at least when it comes to GPUs in the mainstream server market. So come 2012, the No. 2 chip maker says it plans to put a bigger focus on integrating graphics processor cores into this market segment. The idea of combining graphics processors and CPUs in servers is one that’s going to catch on in a big way, believes Gina Longoria, director of the product management and workstation division at AMD. According to Longoria, the company could end up providing CPUs and GPUs together in a server to run highly parallel applications. "As GPU becomes more relevant, that’s a better way of getting performance than [CPU] cores," Longoria said. Even with this recognition and goal to push CPU-GPU use in mainstream servers, at least one analyst thinks AMD could be doing more. "I’m glad they are addressing the market, but perhaps they should push ahead and develop the market more," said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. " Olds went on to point out how Nvidia aggressively pushes its software and hardware for heterogenous computing, while AMD has so far been content to remain more of a spectator.
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Intel’s graphics offerings have traditionally been a little lackluster, but that could be about to change. Intel has reportedly informed its corporate partners that the new Sandy Bridge CPUs will be available by year’s end, and will pack a significant graphics performance increase. Intel is claiming as much as a doubling of performance. A “doubling” compared to what is currently unclear, but one could assume Intel is referring to the current Nehalem architecture. The Sandy Bridge parts will be based on a 32nm manufacturing process and will have an on die graphics processor. The CPU core will be capable of clocks up to 4GHz and some models will have eight cores. ATI and Nvidia plan to move to 28nm graphics cores, which would leave Intel the only purveyor of 32nm cores. We’d all love to see a doubling of performance over the poor Intel HD graphics found in the current Nehalem line. Only time will tell if this is just more wild speculation.  [...]
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 [...] |
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