CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 215

We spoke with an AMD rep earlier this week and he told us that we would get our first Phenom B3 processors in for review this week.

The B3 revision processors fix the nasty TLB L3 cache bug, which hurt AMD at a time, when it really didn't need it to happen.

As rumored recently, AMD has begun volume shipping of its triple-core Phenom processors, which is excellent news for the struggling chip firm who has not seen much success of late.

OCZ Technology has just released its newest CPU cooler, the Vendetta 2.

The Vendetta 2 is designed for all current Intel and AMD processors and uses heat pipe direct touch (HDT) design technology, which is said to dissipate heat more efficiently. It includes three pure copper heat pipes and includes two year warranty.

Intel Corp. the proverbial Chipzilla has released news of the latest marketing name for its new family of ultra-small CPU's.

The brand name "Atom" for the ultra small chips which are designed to give end-users an entirely new design, built for low power and designed specifically for a new wave of Mobile Internet Devices and simple, low-cost PC's.

Scott Wasson from The Tech Report is on the ball - he benchmarked an AMD Phenom processor affected by the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) and L3 cache bug which is said to be rare but could cause system crashed under virtualization mode.

Information has recently surfaced about Intel's plans for its new 4 series chipsets to be released in Q2 of 2008. These include the onboard graphics supporting G45 and G43, which are to be paired with the ICH10/R southbridge.

Both are DX10 compatible and carry the Vista premium logo certification. Each also will have embedded support to output HDMI, DVI, Display-Port and SDVO video up to 1080p. There is no info currently available about clock speeds and the only disguising feature between both is that the G43 lacks hardware AC1 and H.264 decoding.

During IDF Taipei this year we did manage to speak to an Intel chap about these parts and he mentioned this is the time you can expect to see Intel make a better showing in game performance but of course judging on history, that would seem a big call. Only time will tell.

It appears that Sony did indeed change the CPU in the new 40GB version of the PS3 to a 65nm chip after all, despite what you might've read earlier. It took a while for Sony to admit to doing so, but Kazuo Hirai, the president of SCEI came clean and said that the Cell Broadband Engine in the 40GB model is indeed produced using a 65nm process.

The story started in Japan with some journalists noticing a much lower power usage of the 40GB model, although Sony did initially deny that there were any new chips in the latest revision of the console. However, now the company has come clean and although the Cell processor has had its die shrunk, the RSX graphics chip remains at 90nm.

The Japanese website Impress PC Watch has stripped one of the new consoles and they've also done some power testing. The old model draws 170W at boot, while the new model only draws 117W. During DVD playback we're looking at 198 versus 140W and playing Ridge Racer 7 the old model draws 191W while the new model only draws 136W. It seems strange that the PS3 draws more power during DVD playback than when you're playing games though.

The Inquirer have some startling info for us about the performance of AMD's upcoming Phenom 3GHz parts in conjunction with a pair of Radeon 2900 XTs in Crossfire.

They are claiming that they have had the chance to tinker with an early K10 system present at the Games Convention in Leipzig last week, and provide us with some (apparent) legitimate benchmarking scores which are quite crushing!

How's 30,031 points in 3DMark06 sound? Certainly a new world record right off the bat if it pertains to be true. Further information about the system benched is that the platform was running on the RD790 chipset along with Corsair's Dominator PC2-9136C5D memory modules, and the Crossfire setup was overclocked to GPU/MEM speeds of 830MHz/900 MHz respectively.

This all too clearly to be taken with a grain of salt though, it would be nice to think these results are legit but we're lacking something very important here... EVIDENCE!

SiS is going to have a new chipset with integrated graphics for the 1,333MHz FSB Core 2 Duo processors from Intel, the SiS 680SCE. The specifications are pretty basic, as this new chipset only supports single channel memory. It will feature SiS' new Mirage 4 graphics engine which is meant to have DX10 support, but with a single channel memory controller, we have to wonder how well this new graphics engine will perform.

The Mirage 4 does support HDMI with HDCP, which might make this an interesting platform for media center type applications. The chipset also supports a x16 PCI Express slot and four x4 PCI Express slots. Additionally it also supports up to three PCI slots, HD audio, SATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and up to 10 USB 2.0 ports.