The netbook & nettop party (BEd: Or battle) has officially begun so Intel has now started to deliver two new Atom processors which are aimed at the tw

Computex Intel is to give free rein to overclockers to tweak the settings that can be applied to its 'Eaglelake' chipset, the P45, the chip maker has revealed.

Launched today at Computex in Taipei, the P45 will come with Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (ETU), an app that the company said would bring "overclocking to the mainstream". The tool uses Wizards to allow users to adjust a range of system speed parameters to try to boost performance. It'll also operate automatically.

Intel's P45: system schematic

Officially, the P45 supports frontside bus speeds of up to 1333MHz and DDR 3 memory clocked at up to 1066MHz, but both can be tweaked with ETU.

The chipset also supports PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 to host either a single x16 add-in card or a pair of x8 boards. The accompanying ICH10 or ICH10R southbridge chip adds six PCI slots to the picture, along with six 3Gb/s SATA ports and an eSATA connector, all of which can be disabled by corporations that don't want extra drives added to their PCs.

Likewise, any of the 12 USB ports can be blocked.

The ICH10R variant adds RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 to the user's drive configuration options. Both southbridges support HD audio and sport on-board Gigabit Ethernet. It'll also automatically adjust system cooling fans to reduce noise whenever possible.

Intel also launched the P43 today, which is almost entirely identical to the P45 - it simply lacks the ability to host two graphics cards, limiting the user to a single x16 PCIe slot.

© The Register

Intel starts shipping N-series Atom CPUs

The netbook & nettop party (BEd: Or battle) has officially begun so Intel has now started to deliver two new Atom processors which are aimed at the two types of products. Coming in a 22x22 mm package (the Z-series Atoms are 13x14mm), the Atom N230 and N270 processors (codename Diamondville) are both 45nm parts clocked at 1.6 GHz, with 512kB of L2 cache and FSBs set to 533 MHz.

The N270 features a TDP of just 2W and will be used in netbooks like Asus' Eee PC, MSI's Wind, Acer's Aspire one etc while the N230, with its 4W TDP will have to settle for the less mobile but still easy to carry nettops like the Asus Eee Box. The Atom N270 will be paired up with the 945GSE chipset while the N230's partner is the 945GC.

AMD Phenom X3 8750 CPU Reviewed

TrustedReviews has done a review on AMD’s new Phenom X3 8750 processor. Phenom X3 8750 is a tri-core processor running at a clock speed of 2.4GHz, and features a 64KB+64KB L1 cache, 512KB L2 cache per core, and 2MB of L3 cache

The processor is built with the 65nm DSL SOI technology. TrustedReviews says:

AMD’s triple-core X3 Phenom CPUs offer an interesting alternative to the traditional dual- and quad-core products. However, the price is just a little bit too high for us to recommend them right now. Once they hit £100-£110, though, then you’re looking at a great buy.

Performance: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Intel's Atom — First Benchmarks and a Full PC Review

PC Pro has received, benchmarked and discussed the first Intel Atom processor to be seen in the wild. A full analysis of the Atom processor itself is accompanied by a full review of the first PC — yes it's a PC, not a laptop — to use one. The benchmark results are pretty much as expected, but it's the power savings that really excite. And as a rep from the PC maker, Tranquil, joked — they could have left the Atom CPU uncooled if they'd really wanted to prove a point, as it's the old graphics chip that produces 70% of the heat coming from the motherboard. Exciting times ahead for the upcoming Atom-based Eee and friends.
MojoKid was one of several readers, too, to mention the upcoming Eee Box mini-desktop from Asus (also Atom-based), which is supposed to start from $299, writing "although the actual dimensions are listed, the image from ASUS' booth really gives a sense of scale. In the picture, the Eee Box is standing next to a paperback book.

Gigabyte offers Phenom 9950 support via new BIOS updates

Asus apologizing Taiwanese company, Gigabyte has released a few new BIOS versions to make its AMD 790FX boards, the GA-MA790FX-DQ6 and GA-MA790FX-DS5 ready for the release of the Phenom 9950. Although AMD has kept pretty quiet about the CPU and its release, the Phenom 9950, which will be clocked at 2.6 GHz, (or 2.66 GHz) is expected to arrive in Q3 and show people that a TDP of 140W is very doable.

Last month Asus has also announced a full line-up of boards supporting the Phenom 9950.

Two new Opteron-powered supercomputers go online

AMD has now proudly announced that two new T2K supercomputer systems equipped with K10 Opteron CPUs have been powered on in Japan.
Developed by the University of Tsukuba, the University of Tokyo, and Kyoto University, the new systems have been build by Hitachi and Fujitsu and delivered to the Tsukuba and Kyoto universities.

The new Tsukuba and Kyoto systems feature four Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors per node and offer a theoretical peak performance of about 95 tflops and 61 tflops respectively. The new Opteron-equipped T2K supercomputers are expected to help with large-scale scientific calculations for researching subatomic particles and nuclear energy, astronomy, climate modeling and weather forecasting, and genetics and biomedical advancements.

AMD: 'Huge, monolithic' chips not our style

An interesting story on news.com today. I'll do the blunt copy/paste here as it's really interesting to see this article in it's entire original form. Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics chip unit doesn't want to build "huge" chips like rival Nvidia, an executive says.

But an Nvidia exec says smaller isn't always better or more efficient. Such statements will help define how the two chip giants do battle at the high end of the graphics chip market in the coming years.

One of the largest graphics chips yet will be Nvidia's upcoming high-end GTX 280. This is the kind of chip that high-end gaming enthusiasts crave. But great performance often means a large transistor count. And the GTX 280 is expected to have both.

AMD, of course, also intends to deliver extreme graphics technology with its upcoming X2, a follow-on to the current 3870 X2 series. And AMD wants to be clear: its strategy is fundamentally different than Nvidia's.

"We took two chips and put it on one board (X2). By doing that we have a smaller chip that is much more power efficient," said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing for the graphics products group at AMD.

"We believe this is a much stronger strategy than going for a huge, monolithic chip that is very expensive and eats a lot of power and really can only be used for a small portion of the market," he said. "Scaling that large chip down into the performance segment doesn't make sense--because of the power and because of the size."

Skynner said that AMD tries to design GPUs (graphics processing units) for the mainstream segment of the market, then ratchet up performance by adding GPUs rather than designing one large, very-high-performance chip.

Nvidia's "strategy is to design for the highest performance at all cost. And we believe designing for the sweet spot and then leveraging for the extreme enthusiast market with multiple GPUs is the preferred approach," Skynner said.

This applies to memory too. AMD thinks support for technologies like GDDR5 memory is another way to deliver good performance at a reasonable cost. "You don't need a huge chip with a huge data path to get the bandwodth. You can utilize a technology like GDDR5 to get that bandwidth," Skynner said.

Nvidia tends to favor very-fast, single-chip solutions. Nvidia, of course, has a different take on why it chooses to develop big, fast chips.

"If you take two chips and put them together, you then have to add a bridge chip that allows the two chips to talk to each other...And you can't gang the memory together," said Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce products at Nvidia.

"So when you add it all up, you now have the power of two GPUs, the power of the bridge chip, and the power that all of that additional memory consumes. That's why it's too simplistic of an argument to say that two smaller chips is always more efficient."

Desai takes this argument a bit further. "They don't have the money to invest in high-end GPUs anymore. At the high end, there is no prize for second place. If you're going to invest a half-billion dollars--which is what it takes to develop a new enthusiast-level GPU--you have to know you're going to win. You either do it to win, or you don't invest the money."

Radeon HD 4850

Ati Radeon HD 4850

What's better than press photos of the upcoming Radeon HD 4850 but not as good as actual performance results you ask? Since it's Saturday and we're feeling pretty lazy let's just say non-press photos. Not coincidentally that's exactly what you can see below, some real, up close and personal pictures of the cheapest RV770-powered card currently in plan, the Radeon HD 4850.

The new card is set to offer 480 Stream Processors, a 256-bit memory interface, 512 MB of GDDR3 memory and something that apparently Nvidia can only dream about, DirectX 10.1 support. From the looks of it, the HD 4850 is not very different from its predecessor, with the upcoming card's length, cooling solution and connectivity being strongly resembling the HD 3850. The Radeon HD 4850 is expected to be released around June 18.
Pictures courtesy of bit-tech.

Intel and Micron manufacture first sub-40nm NAND chip

AMD party trasher Intel and memory heavyweight Micron have now started bragging with the manufacturing of the first sub-40nm NAND chip. The record-braking chip is made using the 34nm process and is a 32 Gb multi-level cell part. The advancement in manufacturing technology has been made by Intel and Micron's NAND joint venture IM Flash Technologies and it will see the new 32 Gb chip being sampled as soon as next month with mass production being planned for later this year.

"This new 32 Gb device provides the best bit storage density available in the industry," said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's Memory Group. "Together with our partners at Intel, we're proud to have now taken the lead in production process technology."

The 34nm-build 32 Gb NAND chip is expected to help bring higher-capacity solid state drives while also lowering the costs of such solutions. It's a win-win situation.

Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor QX9650

Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9650
Processor Specifications:

sSpec Number:
CPU Speed:
PCG:
Bus Speed:
Bus/Core Ratio:
L2 Cache Size:
L2 Cache Speed:

SLAN3
3 GHz
05B
1333 MHz
9
12 MB
3 GHz

Package Type:
Manufacturing :
Core Stepping:
CPUID String:
Thermal Design Power:
Thermal Specification:
VID Voltage Range:

LGA775
45 nm
C0
10676h
130W
64.5°C
0.85V – 1.3625V