It’s never too early to start thinking about that desktop that you really, really need under the tree by the third week in December, and rather than waiting until the last moment and getting stuck with some random configuration and a lofty overnight shipping fee, iBuyPower is encouraging you to have a gander at the five new liquid-cooled rigs that it just unveiled at NewEgg. The low-end is propped up by the Gamer Extreme 922 SLC at just $989, while the spec’d-out Gamer Supreme 979SLC will set Santa back just under four large. At the top, you’ll find luxuries such as Intel’s Core i7 975, a Blu-ray drive, 128GB SSD and 1.5TB of HDD space, while lower-end systems snag the likes of a Core i7 860, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD. Peek the via link below for a more robust look at the specifications, and feel free to get your order in now if you like resting easy.
ATI just announced its latest greatest polygon cruncher on the planet: the previously leaked Radeon HD 5970. The new card card is also one of the first to support Microsoft DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-display (driving up to three displays at once for a 7680×1600 maximum resolution) with ripe potential for overclocking thanks to the card’s Overdrive technology. Instead of relying upon a single GPU like the already scorching Radeon HD 5870, the 5970 brings a pair of Cypress GPUs linked on a single board by a PCI Express bridge for nearly 5 TeraFLOPS of computer power, or a mind boggling 10 TeraFLOPS when setup in CrossFireX. Naturally, the card’s already been put to the test by all the usual benchmarking nerds who praise the card as the undisputed performance leader regardless of game or application. It even manages to keep power consumption in check until you start rolling on the voltage to ramp those clock speeds. As you’d expect then, ATI isn’t going to offer any breaks on pricing so you can expect to pay the full $599 suggested retail price when these cards hit shelves today for retail or as part of your new gaming rig bundle.
We know you don’t actually care about 99 percent of the contents of the latest Flash Player update. What you really want to know is whether those new 1080p YouTube streams will run smoothly on your machine thanks to the newly implemented graphics card video acceleration. AnandTech has come to our collective aid on that one, with an extensive testing roundup of some of the more popular desktop and mobile GPU solutions. NVIDIA’s ION scored top marks, with “almost perfect” Hulu streaming (see table above), though Anand and crew encountered some issues with ATI’s chips and Intel’s integrated GMA 4500 MHD, which they attribute to the new Flash Player’s beta status. On the OS front, although Linux and Mac OS are not yet on the official hardware acceleration beneficiary list, the wily testers found marked improvements in performance under OS X. It seems, then, that Adobe has made good on its partnership with NVIDIA, and made ION netbooks all the more scrumptious in the process, while throwing a bone to the Mac crowd, but leaving the majority of users exercising the virtue of patience until the finalized non-beta Player starts making the rounds in a couple of months. Hit the read link for further edification.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Cray XT5 — aka ‘Jaguar’ — is a computing monster with the ability to clock 1.759 petaflops (1,759 trillion calculations per second).
So just what exactly is inside this machine?
About 37,376 AMD processors, to begin with. The Jaguar has 255,584 processing cores and is built using AMD six-core Istanbul Opteron chips running at 2.6 gigahertz.
That’s a step up from the four-core AMD chips that the computer used to have.
“The most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that they have actually upgraded an existing supercomputer,” says John Fruehe, director of Opteron product marketing for AMD. “And they have managed to double its speed.”
Engineers replaced quad-core AMD processors with six-core chips (see below for a video showing the upgrade process). The nearly $20 million upgrade has created a high-performance computing system that is now deployed by the Department of Energy and housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar beat IBM’s “Roadrunner” supercomputer to the top list, according to a ranking of the top 500 supercomputers in the world that will be unveiled Tuesday at a conference.
What will the world’s fastest supercomputer be used for?
The Jaguar has a system memory of 362 terabytes, which is almost three times that of the second largest system. It can read and write files at 284 gigabytes per second and uses a 10-petabyte shared file system. Most of those components remain unchanged from the earlier versions of Jaguar.
“That’s the beauty of Cray’s architecture,” says Fruehe. “Nothing else needs to be replaced.”
Upgrading the 37,376 processors inside the Jaguar took just about a week, explains Fruehe. Eight chips are housed on a board along with heat sinks. Once the heat sinks are removed, the processors are unclipped and the upgraded chips are fit in.
“It takes about five minutes to upgrade each board,” says Fruehe of the 4670 boards that the system has. “The boards are mounted in individual cabinets and they take sections offline to upgrade them.”
AMD shipped out the first batch of six-core processors in June.
To see the process up, close and personal, check out a video that shows a Cray technician upgrading the Kraken, another Cray XT5 system. The Kraken currently ranks third on the top 500 supercomputers list.
AMD says it will offer the first eight-core and 12-core x86 processors for high performance computers early next year.
Intel sure sells a lot of chips, but man — it sure blows a lot of that profit on lawyers. Just months after it got nailed with a $1.45 billion fine from the EU in an AMD antitrust case, nearly two years after AMD hit Intel with another antitrust probe and nearly 1.5 years after the FTC sparked up an investigation of its own, Intel has finally decided to pony up in order to rid itself of one of those back-riding monkeys. In an admittedly brief joint announcement released simultaneously by both firms today, Intel has agreed to cough up a whopping $1.25 billion in order to settle “all antitrust and IP disputes” with AMD. In fact, the pair went so far as to say the following:
“While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”
Aside from AMD’s coffers filling up with cash, the agreement also gives both firms patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement. Of course, we’re betting that this isn’t the end of this exceptionally bitter rivalry, and we highly doubt Intel wrote a check this large while grinning from ear-to-ear. That said, we’re eager to see what AMD does with its newfound cheddar, and if we had our druthers, we’d sit back and watch it invest heavily into beating Intel to the punch with its next few platforms.
Believe it or not, it’s just about time for AMD to start thinking about its future. We know — you’re still doing your best to wrap that noodle around Congos and Thubans, but now it’s time to wonder how exactly Leo, Llano and Zambezi (to name a few) can fit into your already hectic schedule. At an Analyst Day event this week, the chipmaker removed the wraps on its goals for 2010 and 2011, and while it’s still focusing intently on Fusion (better described as heterogeneous computing, where “workloads are divided between the CPU and GPU”), it’s the forthcoming platforms that really have us worked up. For starters, AMD is looking into Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) configurations, which “represent the combined capabilities of [practically any] two separate processors.” We’re also told that the firm may actually introduce its Bulldozer (architecture for mainstream machines) and Bobcat (architecture for low-power, ultrathin PCs) platforms more hastily than similar ones have been rolled out in the past, which demonstrates an effort to really target the consumer market where Intel currently reigns. Frankly, we’re jazzed about the possibilities, so hit the links below for a deep dive into what just might be powering your next (or next-next) PC.
Dell has taken its sweet time in bringing the 7.75- x 7.75- x 3.5-inch Inspiron Zino HD to market, but just 24 hours after it made its market debut across the pond, this little zinger is finally available to the Yanks in attendance. Starting at just $229, the mini PC is far more exhilarating than most ho hum nettops. Oh sure, the base configuration is fairly unexciting, but thankfully Dell enables you to add up to 8GB of memory, a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e CPU, up to 1TB of HDD space, an optional Blu-ray drive, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4330 discrete GPU and WiFi to the mix. ‘Course, speccing it out will obviously raise the price substantially, but it’s always nice to see more power than anticipated within such a minuscule box. Of note, Dell also mentions that an optional TV tuner, wireless keyboard and mouse are available, but at least for now, the TV tuner is nowhere to be found in the configuration pages. Other inclusions are a 4-in-1 card reader, four USB 2.0 sockets and a pair of eSATA ports. Who says HTPCs have to breathe fire?
Update: We’ve just heard that the TV tuner won’t be available at launch (sounds a lot like what happened with the Mini 10), so there goes those dreams of immediately gratifying your urge for a new HTPC of the smallest scale.
Worldwide PC micro-processor shipments jumped a record 23 percent in the third quarter, according to Monday data from IDC.
That represents an all-time high for a single quarter, driven largely by mobile PC processors for Atom-based netbooks, and particularly those made and sold in China.
“Compared to where the market was at the beginning of 2009, PC processors have come back remarkably strong,” said Shane Rau, director of semiconductor and personal computing research at IDC.
Unit sales were up 23 percent, but revenue was up only 14 percent, due to the low average selling price of netbooks. However, “since PC processor shipments overall just slightly exceeded shipments in 3Q08 – which was itself a record quarter at the time – we know that the processor market is recovering,” Rau said.
Unit sales for mobile PC processors, including Intel’s Atom processors for netbooks, grew 35.7 percent compared to the second quarter. Desktop processor sales grew 11.4 percent, while x86 server processors jumped 12.2 percent quarter over quarter.
No matter how it tries, Intel just can’t shake those pesky antitrust monkeys off its back: the attorney general of New York today filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the chipmaker, saying it unfairly prevented AMD from competing under state and federal law. That’s pretty much what the EU just fined Intel $1.45b for in May and exactly what AMD itself is suing Intel for in Delaware, so we’re guessing things are a little busy for Chipzilla’s lawyers right now — and it’s just going to get worse, as the smart money says this is all just a precursor to the Federal Trade Commission dropping the hammer sometime soon. Hey, maybe this would be a good time to for Intel to distract everyone with some USB 3.0 chipsets?
Don’t call it a netbook. MSI’s latest sits just out of the low-end category with its 12.1-inch, 1,366 x 768 resolution screen, roomy “ergonomic de-stress” keyboard, and 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo X2, a chip that should best Intel’s Atom offerings of the same spec — at least slightly. A mere four hours of battery life is also decidedlynon-netbooky, but beyond that the usual suspects are here, including a 1.3-megapixel webcam and 160GB hard drive. It weighs in at 2.9lbs and will be running Windows 7 Home Premium (a genuine copy, MSI seems proud to point out) whenever it ships. We’d guess soon.
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