By Mark Long February 9, 2009
Advanced Micro Devices has added five Phenom II processors to its Dragon desktop PC platform, including the industry's first 45nm triple-core chips and three 45nm quad-core processors. AMD's new chips are designed to be dropped into either AM2+ motherboard sockets or new AM3 sockets that are compatible with the latest DDR3 memory chips. Though AM2+ sockets support only DDR2 memory, the new Phenom II processors will work equally well with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory, allowing customers to choose if and when they wish to upgrade their existing machines, according to Leslie Sobon, vice president of product marketing at AMD. "With the combination of the infrastructure compatibility and the introduction of the AMD Phenom II triple-core processors, AMD has made two very strategic design decisions that our competitors cannot duplicate at the component or platform level," Sobon said.
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Monday, February 9, 2009
Nvidia starts renaming chipsets
Spinning Jenny
By Charlie Demerjian Monday, 9 February 2009
WHEN SALES HIT a mild hiccough, and your partners are up to their eyeballs in parts you stuffed into the channel to make earlier numbers look good, what do you do? You rename the parts aging like a bucket of dead snails to create a new and shiny product. Fanbois fall for this every time, but sadly so do average consumers. Genius. Or not actually. Nvidia is doing it with chipsets - the G92, soon to be the GT250 et al, then the rest become GT1xx. The firm is telling OEMs that all they need to do is update the BIOS to milk the unknowing. Someday, people will catch on, but for now, it is working so well, or they are so desperate to clear inventory, that they are doing it to chipsets as well.
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By Charlie Demerjian Monday, 9 February 2009
WHEN SALES HIT a mild hiccough, and your partners are up to their eyeballs in parts you stuffed into the channel to make earlier numbers look good, what do you do? You rename the parts aging like a bucket of dead snails to create a new and shiny product. Fanbois fall for this every time, but sadly so do average consumers. Genius. Or not actually. Nvidia is doing it with chipsets - the G92, soon to be the GT250 et al, then the rest become GT1xx. The firm is telling OEMs that all they need to do is update the BIOS to milk the unknowing. Someday, people will catch on, but for now, it is working so well, or they are so desperate to clear inventory, that they are doing it to chipsets as well.
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Intel-Backed Chip Tech Deliberately Gets It Wrong
By Mark Hachman February 9, 2009
In 1994, a flaw in the lookup table used by Intel's Pentium floating-point unit produced seemingly random errors. Now, fifteen years later, computing errors are being used for a sort of "good-enough computing" that could promise dramatically reduced power consumption. At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference Monday morning on San Francisco, a team of Rice University researchers will unveil a type of chip called "probabilistic CMOS, or PCMOS, which promises to be about seven times faster than conventional CMOS. The team's research was funded by Intel as well as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to the team, conventional CMOS has been constantly improved by increasing the chip's operating voltage to reduce errors. The tradeoff is increased power. In certain environments, however, probabilistic logic assumes that some errors will be accepted by a user as a tradeoff for dramatically lower power: in mobile video, for example, users might accept some video artifacts caused by errors introduced in the calculation of the algorithm. Another application may be encryption, which embraces random errors to improve the complexity of the encryption algorithm.
Read more here -->Link
In 1994, a flaw in the lookup table used by Intel's Pentium floating-point unit produced seemingly random errors. Now, fifteen years later, computing errors are being used for a sort of "good-enough computing" that could promise dramatically reduced power consumption. At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference Monday morning on San Francisco, a team of Rice University researchers will unveil a type of chip called "probabilistic CMOS, or PCMOS, which promises to be about seven times faster than conventional CMOS. The team's research was funded by Intel as well as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to the team, conventional CMOS has been constantly improved by increasing the chip's operating voltage to reduce errors. The tradeoff is increased power. In certain environments, however, probabilistic logic assumes that some errors will be accepted by a user as a tradeoff for dramatically lower power: in mobile video, for example, users might accept some video artifacts caused by errors introduced in the calculation of the algorithm. Another application may be encryption, which embraces random errors to improve the complexity of the encryption algorithm.
Read more here -->Link
Microsoft, Google in rare technology pact
by Ina Fried February 9, 2009
Microsoft has licensed its technical know-how to nearly every company, including rivals such as Apple and Nokia. Now Redmond can add Google to the list. To help power the Google Sync product that was announced on Monday, the search giant has licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol for sharing information between a server and mobile phone. Google Sync allows users to synchronize their contacts, and in some cases calendar information, with Google's Web-based services. It works with a range of phones including Windows Mobile phones, Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Generally, companies have licensed the ActiveSync protocol to link data between a cell phone and a Microsoft Exchange server. In this case, though, Google is using ActiveSync to link Google data off of their servers to mobile phones. Although Google and Microsoft have cooperated in some areas in the past, the deal on Monday is the first announced example of one of those companies licensing the other's intellectual property, according to Microsoft.
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Microsoft has licensed its technical know-how to nearly every company, including rivals such as Apple and Nokia. Now Redmond can add Google to the list. To help power the Google Sync product that was announced on Monday, the search giant has licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol for sharing information between a server and mobile phone. Google Sync allows users to synchronize their contacts, and in some cases calendar information, with Google's Web-based services. It works with a range of phones including Windows Mobile phones, Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Generally, companies have licensed the ActiveSync protocol to link data between a cell phone and a Microsoft Exchange server. In this case, though, Google is using ActiveSync to link Google data off of their servers to mobile phones. Although Google and Microsoft have cooperated in some areas in the past, the deal on Monday is the first announced example of one of those companies licensing the other's intellectual property, according to Microsoft.
Read more here -->Link
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