CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 142

Courtesy of my friend and boss, Wallace Santos - check out his MAINGEAR blog! (and don't forget to check out our killer gaming computers while you're at it)

A Phenom II X4 processor without a model number? TWKR? What does it all mean? Well, AMD culled these parts from their Phenom II X4 line that are supposed to overclock beyond the capabilities of the Phenom II X4 955. They hand delivered these parts to us and we're going to put them through the ringer. Will they come out the other side as something truly special? Should Dirk Meyer sign these before we put them in a system? We'll let you know as soon as we put them through our brutal Redline validation process...

Core unlocking, on the other hand, is seen by AMD as something that's relatively benign, enabled in BIOS through ACC and giving users a shot at adding a bit of performance on the side. Anyone would be "lucky" if they managed to unlock all the cores on, say, a Phenom II X2, said Antal Tungler, Technical PR Manager for AMD in Euroland.

Ther real trick to core unlocking is in BIOS and using AMD Overdrive (AOD) 3.0. With AMD Overdrive you can tweak core performance individually, setting affinities and overclocking individual cores, or downclocking the unlocked ones to get a stable unlock.

Apple's being pretty cagey with the hard specs of the iPhone 3G S, but apparently T-Mobile Netherlands didn't get the message -- it's just posted up a specs page listing 256MB of RAM and a 600MHz CPU. That's up from 128MB and 412MHz in the first-gen and the 3G, and it's basically exactly what was rumored.

AMD 780G has a DirectX 10 based IGP core and its GPU is branded as Radeon HD 3200, while AMD 785G will get a Radeon HD 4200 brand which definitely confirms DirectX 10.1 capable graphics from the HD 4000 generation.

We believe that the IGP is based on some sort of RV710 version clocked at 500MHz, but probably crippled to meet the 15W TDP requirement of this chipset segment. The chipset interconnects with SB710 and comes in early Q3 2009.