IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 24/09/2009

AMD Radeon HD 5870 reviews

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Elite Bastards preview: AMD Radeon HD 5800 series technology

Today marks what is set to be quite a landmark for 3D graphics on the PC - After plenty of speculation and conjecture, today marks the launch of the first DirectX 11 capable graphics boards into the market.آ These parts come courtesy of AMD, or more specifically their ATI graphics division, and to celebrate this launch we delve into the brand-new Radeon HD 5800 series architecture to see what makes it tick under the hood.

Starting out with the basics, the Radeon HD 5800 series boasts a second-generation 40 nanometre GPU from AMD (with the Radeon HD 4770 their first 40 nanometre part) featuring a die size of 334 mmآ² against the 263 mmآ², 55 nanometre die used by RV770, a 1.27x size increase.آ This pales into comparison to the increase in transistor count however, with the Radeon HD 4870's 956 million transistors dwarfed by the 2.15 billion transistors employed by the Radeon HD 5800 series.

AMD Radeon HD 5800 series technology preview

As always, your thoughts and comments on this article are most welcome, and can be left in our forum.

Intel 32nm Clarkdale CPU-and-GPU chip benchmarked

Recent weeks may have seen Intel flesh out its product range via their Lynnfield-based Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, but that isn't where their ambitions end - Next on their roadmap is to take on the value segment via their 32 nanometre "Clarkdale" design - The first to integrate both a CPU and GPU onto a single die.آ With Intel's latest Developer Forum event kicking off in San Francisco today, the lid has been lifted on the potential performance of this particular design.

Westmere can be thought of as the present 45nm Nehalem architecture, shrunken-down to 32nm, and with a few extra bells and whistles on top - including seven new SSE instructions and built-in algorithms for hardware-based AES encryption and decryption.

Pragmatically, the main advantage for Intel of Westmere over incumbent Nehalem is cost: similar-performing 32nm-based chips will take up less die space, making them more attractive from an economic perspective.

It's no secret that Intel will debut Westmere on the desktop with 'Clarkdale' - a dual-core, four-threaded chip that also integrates DX10 graphics on the same package. The chip will, most likely, be productised as Core i3 when officially launched. Interestingly, going via Intel's roadmap, there will be no quad-core Westmere CPU for the client market. Rather, the recently-launched 45nm Lynnfield chips will continue to hold the fort in the mainstream space.

You can find all of the benchmarks of this early Clarkdale CPU and GPU over at HEXUS.

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AMD Confirms six-core "Thuban" CPU

Is four cores not enough for your processing needs?آ Do you wish for an AMD platform complete with six cores of processing goodness?آ If you can wait until next year, then AMD have now confirmed that's exactly what you'll be getting.

â€œWe are all about platform longevity and long-lived upgrade paths,â€‌ and AMD spokesman said in a sideways ding at its competitor Intel which has a penchant for requiring new sockets for its CPUs. Intel currently has three different socket infrastructures on its desktop computers â€“ all incompatible. The confirmation also comes one day before Intelâ€™s three-day IDF conference which usually blots out all news from competitors for days.

AMDâ€™s chip is codenamed Thuban and will feature all six cores on single 45nm die. Thuban will feature an integrated DDR3 controller. The company didnâ€™t confirm branding but the chip is expected to be labeled as the Phenom II X6. The chip is derivative of the six-core Opteron chip which made its earlier this summer.

You can find the full story at Maximum PC.

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 24/09/2009

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