CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 201

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.

There will probably be some grumbling about the DDR3 main memory used with the Nehalem EPs being hotter than DDR2 memory, but if the chips are priced correctly and the thermals work out to be about the same at a system level, then some customers will be ready to buy no matter how bad the economy looks. (More than two million servers did ship in the fourth quarter, after all, and that was not a great time to spend cash on anything). Toss in better support for virtualization and expanded main memory to support more virtual machines per physical server, and you might just have enough of a sales pitch as IT managers try to consolidate machines and reduce administration headaches and increase resiliency in their data centers by going virtual.

The board ultimately begins the generation of Intel's Nehalem-EP (Efficient Platform), which consists of dual Xeon 'Gainestown' CPUs and two QPI links per chip. One link communicates with the Tylersburg chipset while the other link communicates with the second processor, both at 25.6GB/s bidirectional bandwidth.

Because the Nehalem platform also consists of Simultaneous MultiThreading support, this desktop board is capable of running no less than 16 virtual cores on two of Intel's new Xeon 5500-series CPUs.

Additional specs of the board include 14 SATA ports, one PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI-E x8 slots, and six DDR3 memory slots capable of up to 24GB with unbuffered DIMMs and 48GB with registered DIMM modules. Moreover, power is drawn using a 24 + 8 pin connector supporting both desktop ATX and server SSI power supplies.

The pronouncement is at the end of the talk, you can hear it here. If anyone has a transcript, please post a link in the comments, we couldn't find one.

I wonder what the fanbois will say now? Who really cares? The important thing is what the Intel legal team will say when they get off the emergency 3am conference call they will be on in 3... 2... 1...

Given Nvidia's track record of compute correctness of late, I wouldn't want one of these to run my toaster much less a PC. That said, there is no truth to the rumor that they have the random number generator on it already up and running, unfortunately it is in the multiplier block. That is completely false, we are hearing it is triggered on divides, but can't 100 per cent confirm that.