By Michael Larabel March 19, 2008
In the next step towards open-source 3D support for the R500 and R600 GPUs (Radeon X1000 and Radeon HD 2000/3000), AMD has just pushed its production microcode into the Mesa/DRM git tree. This is the microcode found in the fglrx driver and it covers the Radeon R100 to R600 product families. This microcode dump can be found in the Mesa/DRM git tree in shared-core/radeon_cp.c. This file is made up of the microcode (arrays made up of hex) for the R100, R200, R300, R420, RS600, RS690, R520, R600, RV610, and RV620. In providing this microcode AMD had looked at what is available in tcore and what's in use by their proprietary drivers. The microcode in their drivers was newer, so they decided to push that copy out into the open as their next step towards open-source 3D graphics. For a simple description, microcode is low-level instructions for the graphics processor. In a second commit today, Alex Deucher has switched the Radeon DRM to taking advantage of this new microcode for the existing Radeon products supported and adding in the code to load this production microcode for the latest ATI graphics products
Read more here -->Link
Friday, March 21, 2008
Why buy an Add-on Sound Card?
Onboard or Add-On?
By Artiom Bell 2008.03.19 repost here 3.21.08
It's no wonder that the introduction of integrated audio into the market, caused a significant downfall in the sale of add-on sound cards. In fact, why shouldn't it? The average user doesn't need to spend an extra $20 - $40 to hear the windows "beep" better. The newer motherboard models feature the 7.1 surround sound in 3.5 mm jacks, High Definition Audio (HDA) cable, and feature a decent Signal to Noise Ration (SNR) at a decent sampling rate. First, lets find out what exactly the technical terms mean. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is a ratio of signal strength over noise strength and is measured in decibels (dB). A decibel is a measurement of power of intensity. In other words dB is a measure of a power of 10. When saying signal A is 10 dB stronger than signal B, in actuality that means that signal A is 10 times stronger than signal B. If signal A is 20 dB stronger than B the A is B times 100, 30 dB would be B times 1000 and so on. The general idea is that add-on sound cards produce better sound. The first question that comes to mind is what does "better" mean?
Read more here -->Link
By Artiom Bell 2008.03.19 repost here 3.21.08
It's no wonder that the introduction of integrated audio into the market, caused a significant downfall in the sale of add-on sound cards. In fact, why shouldn't it? The average user doesn't need to spend an extra $20 - $40 to hear the windows "beep" better. The newer motherboard models feature the 7.1 surround sound in 3.5 mm jacks, High Definition Audio (HDA) cable, and feature a decent Signal to Noise Ration (SNR) at a decent sampling rate. First, lets find out what exactly the technical terms mean. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is a ratio of signal strength over noise strength and is measured in decibels (dB). A decibel is a measurement of power of intensity. In other words dB is a measure of a power of 10. When saying signal A is 10 dB stronger than signal B, in actuality that means that signal A is 10 times stronger than signal B. If signal A is 20 dB stronger than B the A is B times 100, 30 dB would be B times 1000 and so on. The general idea is that add-on sound cards produce better sound. The first question that comes to mind is what does "better" mean?
Read more here -->Link
AMD to Add IOMMU Support to Chipsets in 2009
By Gabriel Ikram - March 21, 2008
AMD's latest roadmap details much of its next-generation chipset architecture, codenamed RD890 and RD880. The pinnacle feature of this new architecture is the inclusion of an input/output memory management unit, or IOMMU.An IOMMU is a device that supports mapping memory addresses. Since an IOMMU holds many benefits in server applications, it can sometimes be found in high end server hardware, but at the moment no desktop chipsets support IOMMU. The IOMMU connects a DMA-capable I/O bus to the primary storage memory of a PC. The memory management unit maps virtual addresses to physical addresses, similar to what a CPU memory management performs. Although presently there are few desktop applications that can benefit from IOMMU setups, the technology can greatly benefit virtualization applications.
Read more here -->Link
AMD's latest roadmap details much of its next-generation chipset architecture, codenamed RD890 and RD880. The pinnacle feature of this new architecture is the inclusion of an input/output memory management unit, or IOMMU.An IOMMU is a device that supports mapping memory addresses. Since an IOMMU holds many benefits in server applications, it can sometimes be found in high end server hardware, but at the moment no desktop chipsets support IOMMU. The IOMMU connects a DMA-capable I/O bus to the primary storage memory of a PC. The memory management unit maps virtual addresses to physical addresses, similar to what a CPU memory management performs. Although presently there are few desktop applications that can benefit from IOMMU setups, the technology can greatly benefit virtualization applications.
Read more here -->Link
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)