We are shocked... shocked I tell you!
By Charlie Demerjian: Saturday, 29 November 2008
CONTRARY TO POPULAR belief, the Nvidia 9300/9400 chipset line has been fraught with problems, both logic bugs and heat. Late though it may be, it is still far from ready, and Apple is the latest victim. According to Apple Insider, the latest Macbooks have two distinct problems. The first is a lockup/black screen whoopsie when using the GPU to do such unusual things as gaming. Those darn 'customer use patterns', how could people think they could get away with gaming on their machines! The other one is distortions while scrolling. One has an easy fix, the other is much more problematic. The easy one is the distortions while scrolling. This is usually fixable with a software patch, most likely simply adding deeper buffering of frames. I expect this one to be taken care of in short order. The other one is a little more problematic. No, it is a lot more problematic, and it gets to the heart of Nvidia's greatest technical weakness, they can't keep heat and power usage under control. This chipset has a long history, and is internally code named MCP79.
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Monday, December 1, 2008
Windows 7 to offer DirectX acceleration without a GPU
By Parm Mann 1st December, 2008
What would happen if you created a software wrapper that allowed a system without a graphics card to render DirectX 10 visuals on a CPU? The folks at Microsoft decided to find out and development WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterisation Platform 10), a software component to be used in Windows 7. WARP10, a software rasteriser, allows for DirectX rendering to take place on the CPU, allowing users to take advantage of DirectX functionality when a GPU isn't present. The idea itself isn't anything new, and despite being able to achieve its goal, performance is severely limited. GPUs have the distinct advantage of dedicated graphics architecture, and features such as texturing units aren't available on today's CPUs. Similarly, a CPU's available bandwidth is far lower than that of a high-end graphics card.
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What would happen if you created a software wrapper that allowed a system without a graphics card to render DirectX 10 visuals on a CPU? The folks at Microsoft decided to find out and development WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterisation Platform 10), a software component to be used in Windows 7. WARP10, a software rasteriser, allows for DirectX rendering to take place on the CPU, allowing users to take advantage of DirectX functionality when a GPU isn't present. The idea itself isn't anything new, and despite being able to achieve its goal, performance is severely limited. GPUs have the distinct advantage of dedicated graphics architecture, and features such as texturing units aren't available on today's CPUs. Similarly, a CPU's available bandwidth is far lower than that of a high-end graphics card.
Read more here -->Link
More details of AMD 45nm desktop CPU schedule revealed
By Monica Chen, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, Monday 1 December 2008
After the launch of its 45nm AM2+ Phenom II X4 900 series CPUs on January 8 next year, AMD is expected to introduce six 45nm AM3 CPUs in February: the quad-core Phenom II X4 925 and 910 with 6MB L3 Cache, the quad-core Phenom II X4 810 and 805 with 4MB L3 Cache, and the triple-core Phenom II X3 720 and 710 with 6MB L3 Cache, according to sources at motherboard makers. In April next year, AMD will launch 45nm CPUs under its Athlon brand, which does not include the L3 Cache feature. The company will launch the quad-core Athlon X4 600 family and triple-core Athlon X3 400 family, the sources said.
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After the launch of its 45nm AM2+ Phenom II X4 900 series CPUs on January 8 next year, AMD is expected to introduce six 45nm AM3 CPUs in February: the quad-core Phenom II X4 925 and 910 with 6MB L3 Cache, the quad-core Phenom II X4 810 and 805 with 4MB L3 Cache, and the triple-core Phenom II X3 720 and 710 with 6MB L3 Cache, according to sources at motherboard makers. In April next year, AMD will launch 45nm CPUs under its Athlon brand, which does not include the L3 Cache feature. The company will launch the quad-core Athlon X4 600 family and triple-core Athlon X3 400 family, the sources said.
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Windows market share dives below 90% for first time
By Gregg Keizer Dec. 1, 2008
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the past two years, erasing gains made in two of the past three months and sending the operating system's share under 90% for the first time, an Internet measurement company reported today. In November, 89.6% of users who connected to the Web sites that Net Applications Inc. monitors did so from systems powered by Windows, a drop of 0.84 of a percentage point from October. The decrease was the largest slip by Windows in the past two years and easily bested other recent down months, including May 2008 and December 2007, when Windows lost 0.51 and 0.63 percentage points, respectively.
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Microsoft Corp.'s Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the past two years, erasing gains made in two of the past three months and sending the operating system's share under 90% for the first time, an Internet measurement company reported today. In November, 89.6% of users who connected to the Web sites that Net Applications Inc. monitors did so from systems powered by Windows, a drop of 0.84 of a percentage point from October. The decrease was the largest slip by Windows in the past two years and easily bested other recent down months, including May 2008 and December 2007, when Windows lost 0.51 and 0.63 percentage points, respectively.
Read more here -->Link
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