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 just released two new ultra-high-end products: the G92-based GeForce 9800 GX2 and the nForce 790i [Ultra] SLI. The Tech Report has reviews for both online (see links), and while we won't be reviewing either ourself in the near future there remains a few things that are worth pointing out...
SlySoft, makers of optical media ripping software, announced today that the latest version of AnyDVD HD will include support for stripping Blu-ray discs of BD+ protection.
EETimes published a nice piece on what media coverage got wrong regarding Intel's new Atom platform (based on Silverthorne) earlier, it's well worth a read - but other points may also be worth discussing, from Intel's roadmap to others benefiting such as Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) and Icera.
The guys at SuSE (and other collaborators on the open project) have released a new RadeonHD drive revision in the last couple of weeks that adds better support for RV6xx variants and some other tweaks here and there.
Time to get back on the horse and sort this front page out, starting with a link to TR's analysis of Crossfire X, how it works, how it can scale and what platforms make for attractive Crossfire X systems.
This year’s Game Developer Conference (GDC), was the stage ARM chose to
roll out its latest 3D middleware solution, Mali-JSR297, for the mobile
platforms powered by its Mali series of embedded graphics processors.
In a surprising turn of events, Sir Sam McGrath - founder of Project Offset - announced yesterday on the official company website
that he and his team were now part of the Intel Kingdom.
As if NVIDIA's chipset roadmaps weren't confusing enough already, VR-Zone now claims that the firm's competitor to AMD's RS780M for notebooks sports 22xPCIe lanes and 15xUSB ports. And that it's coming in March. Errr, what?
Despite losing more than half of their GPU/IGP market share in the last year according to Jon Peddie Research, VIA/S3 is hoping to change that situation with a new family of 65nm/DirectX 10.1/PCI Express 2.0 GPUs. The Chrome 400 Series will become available in late February 2008.
AMD just announced several new handheld chips aimed at a variety of different markets, from music-oriented Portable Media Players to Mobile TV and passing by mainstream mobile phones. The company also made their 3D & OpenVG cores official, although little information on these were available at press time.
According to The Inquirer, AMD employees have been informed that 5% of the workforce is being cut across all segments of the company. Rumours seem to indicate an upcoming quarterly earnings miss is responsible for the move; AMD's fiscal Q1 ends on March 31st and results are announced in mid-April.
According to Digitimes, NVIDIA and VIA already discussed a potential merger (why am I not surprised?) but the two couldn't agree on a price (why am I even less surprised?) - although given VIA's deteriorating financial position, Digitimes expects the talks to eventually resume.
AMD displayed wafers of its 45nm Shanghai chip at CeBit, and Hans de Vries took the opportunity to create a comparison picture between Shanghai and Nehalem. Surprisingly, their die size is just about identical, so AMD doesn't have the previously expected die size advantage. Or do they? Fudzilla claims…
G94 broke cover a little while ago, showing up as pretty much a G92 with half the clusters. The 256-bit memory interface is the same, the video hardware is retained, PCIe 2.0 is there, and there are no per-cluster changes compared to G92 bar some tweaks to the scheduler and load balancer.
AMD have been busy on the graphics front, releasing not only Crossfire X and the 3870 X2 recently (review soon), but a new IGP for their processors, raising the bar on what can be expected from an integrated 3D part in terms of performance.
Havok, now part of Intel, announced yesterday at GDC08 that come May
2008 it will offer the PC version of its renowned physics and animation
middleware solution, Havok Complete, free of charge for non-commercial
use.
Following a string of devastating news for the HD DVD format, Toshiba announced today that they will officially cease all HD DVD-related development.
Retail giant Wal-Mart today made the bombshell announcement that
beginning in June, it will no longer stock HD DVD hardware or software,
backing Blu-ray exclusively as its pick for the next-generation
successor to DVD.
Never letting the beat drop, the red --and somehow at the same time
green-- team of mad MCs at AMD released yesterday the second version
(the .2) of their 2008 series (the 8) of catalyst drivers for
Radeon-family graphics cards.
Also at the Mobile World Congress, STMicroelectronics announced a new chip capable of 720p MPEG-4 SP video that sports AMD's next-generation OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU (the Z460), sometimes referred to as 'mini-Xenos' due to its Xbox360 heritage.