Beyond3D Featured ContentNVIDIA Fermi GPU and Architecture Analysis
The timing could barely be better! ATI launch a new line of graphics processors and what do we do? We finally get round to looking at Fermi. Alex was at the controls again for this one, beating GF100 in GeForce GTX 470 form up with a new suite of software and a very deep, in-depth analysis of how the majority of the chip and architecture work. It's the de-facto public analysis and a must read.
NVIDIA has just announced the 65nm APX 2500, an application processor supporting 720p H.264 video, OpenGL ES 2.0, and HDMI output. On the processing side, it sports an ARM11 core at 750MHz. We had a quick chat with Mike Rayfield and touched on a variety of subjects and interesting design…
As the rest of the industry boasts about their superior integration skills, CSR's executives insist they'll beat that trend and keep 'connectivity' wireless discrete. Their announcement of a single-chip Bluetooth/FM/GPS solution is good evidence they might have what it takes to pull this off.
Terra Soft has finalized version 6.0 of its Yellow Dog Linux
distribution for Power platforms (Apple G4/G5; PS3), built upon the Red
Hat Enterprise-derived CentOS.
Jon Peddie Research released their Q4 market share report a few days ago, and many facts inside are certainly highlight-worthy. For example, after many quarters of discrete GPU strength, IGPs are now staging a comeback and the proportion of notebooks has increased substantially.
Futuremark, through its YouGamers publication, have announced that they have setup a games studio to develop, no prizes for guessing it, games.
Microsoft released second quarter earnings yesterday, beating analyst
expectations to come in at earnings of $0.50 per share on record revenues of $16.37
billion. Operating profits, also at a record for the quarter, came in
at $6.48 billion.
AMD released the 55nm HD3450, HD3470, and HD3650 yesterday. These releases are an evolutionary step, as they're simply shrinks of the HD2400 and HD2600 with support for D3D10.1, DisplayPort and Hybrid Crossfire. Performance has improved slightly through higher efficiency and slightly higher clock rates for some SKUs.
According to Japan-based Enterbrain, Nintendo's current home console Wii
has - as of January 20 - sold more than 5 million units in Japan alone.
Real World Tech just published a great new article on the upcoming process technologies from several companies including Intel, TSMC and Fujitsu. It is based on presentations given at IEDM 2007 in December, and also includes a very noteworthy comparison table with processes from days past.
The red team has made their monthly delivery of WHQL'ed Catalyst goodness, in this case version 8.1. Several recent games such as Bioshock, F.E.A.R., World in Conflict, and others are called out in the release notes for improvements.
Mark Osborne at Fabtech.org posted two interesting blog posts in the last couple of days, one on the apparent capacity expansion squeeze from foundries in an attempt to improve wafer prices and margins, and another on the current (awful) state of the memory markets. They're both definitely worth a read…
IBM introduced the 45nm version of the Cell B.E. processor at ISSCC
earlier this week, fabbed on IBM's 45nm SOI line at East Fishkill and
targeted primarily towards future revisions of the Playstation 3 gaming
console and Cell blade servers.
NVIDIA are set to acquire Ageia Technologies, creator of PhysX, bringing acceleration of the technology to their GPU product line.
Sony yesterday released earnings for the fiscal third quarter ended
December 31st, announcing net income of ~$1.76 billion (200 billion
yen) on revenues of ~$25 billion (2.86 trillion yen); an increase of
twenty-five percent in net compared to the year-ago period.
It might have felt as if VIA’s CPU designers were sleeping for the last 3 years and asked the package and PCB engineers to keep the company going for the next thousand years. But today, they prove nothing could be further away from the truth.
Earlier today Nintendo published its financial results for the third quarter in FY 2007. Due to exceptionally high demand for its current products, the Kyoto-based manufacturer raised its net income projections for the current year for the third time.
In the last few days, AMD has unveiled a number of products aimed at the embedded market, all of them offered through the AMD Longevity Program which offers components for up to five years.
When a rumour started spreading down the Internet tubes about Assassin's Creed requiring 2GB of system ram, seemingly everyone jeered. Well, now it's official. Move over Crysis, you don't look so tough anymore.
AMD's stock was up more than 5% in after-hours trading last night as the company beat expectations by reporting a non-GAAP operating loss of only $9M, versus $148M in Q3. The main upsides were quarterly seasonality and sales of 400K Barcelona units (2:1 desktop-server ratio).
When Doug Freedman asked Paul Otellini about Larrabee, we didn't think much would come out of it. But boy were we wrong: Otellini gave an incredibly to-the-point update on the project's timeframe. Rather than try to summarize, we'll just quote what Otellini had to say here.