The battle of the minis will soon be on ... Intel vs VIA. Just have to wait and see what VIA will come up with, once mass production starts.

Digitimes

"Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) recently held discussions with VIA Technologies over the mass production of the company's upcoming dual-core and 45nm Nano (Isaiah) CPUs in the first half of 2009, according to a Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) report.

VIA commented that the company is considering criteria including quotes, manufacturer's technological capability and service to decide where to place its orders. Meanwhile TSMC refused to comment regard specific clients, added the paper."

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Tweaktown

"Today we have an early market sample of MSI’s P45 Platinum which is their top of the range board, this designed to compete with both ASUS’ and GIGABYTE’s ultra high-end P45 offerings. While it doesn’t have the full retail packaging included, we’ve confirmed with MSI that it’s the final revision board in our labs.

MSI’s first P45 motherboard has impressed us; despite not having a full retail package with the board, the silicon used was retail quality, so we are testing what you will receive on the store shelves, and what we have found to be very impressive."

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CPU3D Preview: ASRock P45R2000-WiFi and ECS P45T-A

Yes, the battle of the mainstream P45 motherboards is upon us. We at CPU3D have two P45 motherboards, one from ASRock and one from ECS. Both have its own uniques selling points ... find out which one CPU3D review team thinks is a winner.

          

Watch out for our CPU3D review coming soon ... in the meantime, here's some photos to get your appetite going.

Looks like FireFox set to take the internet by storm ... I'll be giving it a go myself and see what benefits it has ove IE7.

BBC

Tweaktown

"I have to honestly say that I thought SLI would be the savior of these cards. While I was testing them I was extremely happy with the results and they looked extremely impressive, but once you put them into your graphs and begin to get a better perspective of how it compares to the other setups, you don’t realize just how disappointing the results are. For the most part the GTX 280 in SLI and GX2 in Quad SLI perform the same, bar WIC AA/AF 2560 tests and Vantage.

... As much as I would like to think NVIDIA have some magical driver around the corner that adds an extra 40% performance to the cards, the hard fact is it’s highly unlikely as it would be ready now. It’s been a while since NVIDIA has made a misstep in the graphics card world, but it looks like this could be one. It will be interesting to see what’s going on with the GTX 280 in a few more weeks time; we can’t see people embracing it like the 7800 and 8800 series of cards from yesteryear, though. "

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Digitimes

"AMD is planning to launch several low-power triple-core and quad-core CPUs during the second half of 2008 all featuring a TDP of 65W, according to sources at motherboard makers.

Two low-power triple-core Phenom CPUs – X3 8250e and 8450e – will feature core frequencies of 1.9GHz and 2.1GHz, respectively, and both include an L2 cache of 1.5MB and L3 cache of 2MB. The two CPUs will enter DVT in July and start mass production at the beginning of August. If the process goes smoothly, the two CPUs should appear in the channel by mid to late August, the sources said.

Meanwhile the company will launch the low-power quad-core Phenom X4 9350e in the third quarter and another model in the fourth quarter, the sources added, and in the first quarter of 2009, AMD will begin to roll out its 45nm quad-core CPUs (Propus) targeting core frequencies between 2.3-2.6GHz.

AMD also plans for the Phenom X4 9850 (2.5GHz) and 9950 (2.6GHz) to enter DVT in the third quarter, and ship in the fourth quarter, and is scheduling to launch two 45nm Phenom X4 CPUs by the end of the fourth quarter with core frequencies between 2.4-2.8GHz, the sources revealed.

In other news, AMD has given notice that final orders for the Phenom X4 9100e will be taken at the end of the second quarter, while the Phenom X3 8250e and X4 9150e will both enter final ordering around the end of the fourth quarter, the sources detailed. Orders for the dual-core Athlon X2 4050e are also scheduled to stop at the end of the third quarter. AMD declined the opportunity to respond to report saying it cannot comment on unannounced products."

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CPU3D Review: Gigabyte Geforce GTX280 (1Gb GDDR3) 

CPU3D is proud to give you our World's first look at the Gigabyte Geforce GTX280. It uses Nvidia's latest GPU (G200-300-A2) and features 1Gb of ram, comprised of 16 Hynix 0.8ns GDDR3 memory chips. Come join us and get yourself really excited, as we take this beast apart for some close up photo shots.

This card is an absolute beast, and preliminary tests show that it's by far one of the fastest card we've tested in our labs. Our test rig consists of a Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 motherboard, Intel Q6600 processor, 2Gb of DDR2-1066 ram, PC Power & Cooling 860W PSU, WD 250Gb SATAII hard drive, and for our OS ... we used Windows Vista with native DX10 support.

Read the rest of the review ... HERE.

Hexus

"NVIDIA changed the face of graphics hardware with the introduction of the GeForce 8800 (G80) GPU in November 2006.

G80 brought to the table an array of disarming technologies married to brute rendering strength. At the time, we surmised that it was a 'monstrous D3D9 performer and quite able to outrun absolutely anything else available in any modern game you throw at it'

A fully DX10-compliant GPU, G80 catered for next-generation effect, too. Since then, NVIDIA has leveraged G80 for all its worth, releasing SKU after SKU, numbering 10 8-series and six 9-series GPUs.

GeForce 9800 GX2 is the current culmination of 18-month-old G80 goodness, and whilst the twin-GPU card is undeniably fast, it's nothing new, really.

ATI's fought back in the mid-range space with the DX10.1-supporting Radeon HD 3870, and then twinned it with the Radeon HD 3870 X2, but on-paper specification promise petered out in real-world benchmarks.

The current state of play is that NVIDIA controls the high-end hardware market but ATI, we feel, does better in the sub-£100 sector, thanks to a healthy dose of price-chopping on the Radeon HD 3000-series.

We've been waiting for both companies to launch their next-generation architectures - from which future mid-range and low-end cards will be derived from - for a while now.

NVIDIA's the first to step up to the plate and launch the successor to the epoch-making GeForce 8800 GTX

Enter the GeForce GTX 280: NVIDIA's second-generation DX10 GPU. It needs to something entirely special to distance itself from G80."

Digitimes

"At the International Supercomputing Conference, AMD introduced its next-generation stream processor, the AMD FireStream 9250, specifically designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC), mainstream and consumer applications. Leveraging the GPU design expertise of AMD's Graphics Product Group, AMD FireStream 9250 breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance. It occupies a single PCI slot, for unmatched density and with power consumption of less than 150W, the AMD FireStream 9250 delivers an unprecedented rate of performance per watt efficiency with up to eight gigaflops per watt, according to AMD.

Customers can leverage AMD's latest FireStream offering to run critical workloads such as financial analysis or seismic processing dramatically faster than with CPU alone, helping them to address more complex problems and achieve faster results. For example, developers are reporting up to a 55 times performance increase on financial analysis codes as compared to processing on the CPU alone, which supports their efforts to make better and faster decisions. Additionally, the use of flexible GPU technology rather than custom accelerators assists those creating application-specific systems to enhance and maintain their solutions easily, said AMD.

The AMD FireStream 9250 stream processor includes a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation delivering more than 200 gigaflops, building on the capabilities of the earlier AMD FireStream 9170, the industry's first GPGPU with double-precision floating point support. The AMD FireStream 9250's compact size makes it ideal for small 1U servers as well as most desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers and it features 1GB of GDDR3 memory, enabling developers to handle large, complex problems. "

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Tweaktown

"As it is, AMD are really struggling to attract much interest in their underwhelming lineup of Phenom desktop processors. The only good thing they have going for them is the pricetag, making it easier for people on a budget to become a part of the quad-core crowd.

If they think that's what's going to keep them afloat though, they'd better re-think their strategy, and very soon. Intel are planning to close the gap entirely next quarter by releasing new entry-level Core 2 Duo and Quad processors that will be as cheap as chips!

Talk of a Core 2 Quad Q8000 lineup is getting stronger, with a Q8200 offering to kick it off which sits at 2.33GHz and contains 4MB of shared L2 cache on a 1333MHz FSB. The most hurtful aspect of this as far as AMD's Phenom range go, is the price. Several asian websites are reporting that the Q8200 will come in at a mere $203, just slightly above what AMD charge at the moment for its 2.2GHz X4s/2.4GHz X3s. "

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