amtgman’s (3rd) blog (Find the rest...)

You can forgive AMD for stealing a line from Nvidia’s playbook. From the name and marketing materials, it’s not obvious that this card is a dual GPU card. One AMD chart even refers to the card as the “ATI Radeon HD 5970 GPU,” much like Nvidia’s 295 GTX is a dual GPU card that’s sold as if it were a normal graphics card.

5970_01_sm

Let’s take a quick look at the speeds and feeds of the new card, and then discuss additional features. We’ll compare them to the Radeon HD 5870 single GPU card; there are differences in core and memory clock speeds.

Nvidia, who?

AMD revealed new mobile and desktop platforms for the coming year, confirmed that it is launching a new dual GPU card next week codenamed “Hemlock,” and even gave the public a glimpse of its upcoming Fusion products that combines a traditional CPU and GPU in a monolithic die, at its annual briefing to financial analysts.

Amd_apu_teaser

Meet the APU

AMD is dubbing its upcoming Fusion products as the “APU” or Accelerated Processor Unit, the first of which will be codenamed “Llano.” Llano will combine a DX11, gigaflop-capable, graphics core with a quad core processor on a single die.  Interestingly, Llano will not be based on the company’s new Bulldozer core. AMD will instead use an improved 32nm version of the current Stars core which currently powers the Phenom II.

Llano will be used in upcoming desktop and mobile platforms. The bad news for Llano is that it will not see the light of day until 2011. Intel is expected to beat it to the punch with its CPU cum GPU late next year. AMD officials, however, pooh poohed Intel’s approach.

“Fusion is not a CPU with integrated graphics. The vision is to enable these new data parallel applications to be run on the most power efficient architecture available,” said AMD CEO Dirk Meyer. With the APU, code running on the graphics side is encouraged, Meyer said, whereas Intel continues to believe the parallel graphics core is an afterthought.

A whole medley of future AMD proccies...

Llano - Interesting. (But will it be better than Intel Integrated Graphics? *Not much of a stretch...)

Danube - Not relevant to my interests

Bobcat - Maybe if I had a server, I would be more interested...

Thuban (Phenom II x6?) - Now we're getting somewhere. It'll be interesting to see how this matches up to the Core i7 (4 extra virtual cores for the i7 versus two physical core for the P2) I know, I was unimpressed with it when I posted it before, but I've thought about it since then. When I originally posted it, I was comparing Thuban to the Core i9. (They're both hex-core processors, it's somewhat logical) However, this seems to be more of a response to the Core i7, which makes more sense, as the i7 is generally a better processor than the current P2s, and AMD will need something to combat it. (And about darn time, too)

Bulldozer - WANT. Very much. Maybe a Thuban would be a good processor to tide one over until whatever processor line that uses the Bulldozer core comes out.

Hemlock (ATI Radeon HD 5970) - Launched next week... *faint*

Also, I think AMD is going to find quite a bit of use for their little financial boost courtesy of Intel...

At ease, you wastes of skin. The Powers That Be have commanded me to write another short missive—I'm told it will be broadcast on some manner of punch-card tube machine and read by the thin, stupid youth of today, who evidently ignored my past instructions to stop wasting their lives and do more push-ups.

When I inquired what this missive should contain, I was instructed only that it had something to do with an upcoming pagan moon worship festival, and that it should be "terrifying". Evidently, the youth of today enjoy being scared. Why? Because you don't know what real fear is. Get out a pen and write this in your poem books: I have personally killed 6,078 men in cold blood while looking them in the eye; jumped on 1,455 live grenades; and stuffed fourteen feet of my own intestine back into my stomach. If that doesn't scare you out of your frilly pink leotards, guess what: You are an idiot and you hate America. The next time you visit your grandfather, take out your ipoot headbuds, pull up your g****** pants, and ask him what a war is. If you're not standing in a puddle of your own Jarate by the time he's finished talking, you should ask him to start over, because you weren't paying attention.

So listen up! An update will arrive later today. There will be ghosts! There will be exploding pumpkins! You will receive achievements and candy prizes! And by God you will be frightened by it or I will give you something to be frightened about!

The Soldier

Tf2

While Microsoft tries to figure out if it should take Tegra-powered Zune HD in a gaming direction or the Xbox in a portable direction, there are wild rumorings from the underground that claim Nintendo is planning on using Tegra to power a next generation DS handheld. The primary source on this comes from Bright Side of News (which doesn't have a big track record to judge by), who claims the debut is planned for late 2010 and conjectures that the device could either use the upcoming 40nm 2nd-gen Tegra tech, or the existing, tried-and-true 65nm chip. There were rumors from Yahoo! Games of a Tegra DS afoot at GamesCom in August, with higher resolution screens and full backwards compatibility, and PC Perspective also claims its own NVIDIA insiders are confirming this -- the evidence is certainly stacking up. If it turns out to be true it's going to mean a pretty dramatic jump forward in portable gaming power, but either way this generation of handhelds seems due for a refresh, and there's plenty of ultra compact silicon floating about to make a graphical leap possible.

Ds-tegra-1

Source

Over 10,000 Hotmail email accounts were leaked to the web earlier this week as the result of a massive phishing scam, which may not have taken a whole lot of effort. After all, if you're going to choose "123456" as your password, compromising your account is like shooting fish in a barrel.

In this case, there were 64 said fish in a barrel full of over 10,000 compromised Hotmail accounts, making it the most commonly used password of the bunch, according to a researcher who combed through all the posted accounts.

About 42 percent of the passwords consisted of lowercase letters from "a" to "z," and just 6 percent secured their email accounts by mixing alpha-numeric characters. And almost 2,000 passwords were only six characters long (the longest was 30 characters).

An interesting side note - a bunch of the top 20 passwords were Spanish names, which might suggest that the victims were of Spanish origin or lived in Spanish-speaking communities, Wired.com reports.

Facepalms

Klikk for sauce...

I think the picture says it all. No mention on how many people set their password as "password."

Earlier this year, Thermaltake wowed us all with the announcement of the Level 10, a concept case designed in conjunction with BMW DesignWorks. Rather than a standard aluminum box, the Thermaltake Level 10 would incorporate a central pillar, with individual compartments hanging from it for the motherboard, PSU, optical drives, and hard drives. Here's a press shot of the Level 10.

L10beauty_415

The Level 10. It's high-concept! (click to embiggen)

We haven't heard much about the Level 10 since Computex in June; we were even a bit skeptical that such an outré case would ever come to market. But Friday morning we strolled into our secret lair to find an enormous box on our doorstep. After a hasty unboxing (documented on Page 2), we found a Level 10 of our very own, which we promptly shipped upstairs to our in-house photographers.

Click for more info (MaximumPC)

Official page

Well, it is striking, to say the least. I have to admit that it's a very nice looking case. It has a certain PS3-type look to it, in my opinion. I can also see some cooling advantages with the separate box design, keeping various components, particularly high heat ones, like the processor/video card and the power supply insulated from each other. However, it is rather heavy (47 lbs!), and it is almost certainly not a case intended for internal water cooling systems, with only pair of fans (one 140mm intake and one 120mm exhaust.) It may fit a pair of single fan radiators, but fitting the pump(s) and reservoir(s) may be a challenge, especially giving the loop(s) enough slack to be able to open the drawer without ripping the tubing from the waterblocks (If the pumps are mounted to the door. But it is pretty...

Eat that Gulftown: AMD officials have not only confirmed that it will release a hexa-core processor next year – but it will be backwards compatible with existing AM3 and AM2+ motherboards.

Although heavily reported as a rumor that an AMD six-core was coming to consumer desktops, the company had not confirmed rumors. That is until Monday, when AMD officials told Maximum PC that the chip was a done deal.

“We are all about platform longevity and long-lived upgrade paths,” and AMD spokesman said in a sideways ding at its competitor Intel which has a penchant for requiring new sockets for its CPUs. Intel currently has three different socket infrastructures on its desktop computers – all incompatible. The confirmation also comes one day before Intel’s three-day IDF conference which usually blots out all news from competitors for days.

AMD’s chip is codenamed Thuban and will feature all six cores on single 45nm die. Thuban will feature an integrated DDR3 controller. The company didn’t confirm branding but the chip is expected to be labeled as the Phenom II X6. The chip is derivative of the six-core Opteron chip which made its earlier this summer.

Extrapolating from the hexa-core Opteron, Thuban is likely to be a 346mm2 chip and have a massive 904 million transistors. As a comparison, Intel’s Core i7-975 Extreme Editions have 731 million transistors on a 262mm2 die, the Core i5-750 has 774 million transistors with 296mm2 die and the Phenom  II X4 965 Black Edition 758 million transistors on a 258mm2 die.

The chip is expected to have 3MB of L2 and 6MB of L3 cache.  The company did not specific initial clock speeds but they are not expected to be as high as the quad-core parts. That’s likely due to added thermal output from the two additional cores.

Thuban is not due until sometime next year and is unlikely to beat Intel’s Gulftown to stores shelves. Intel’s Gulftown, likely to be called Core i9, when it is released, will slip into existing LGA1366 boards and will offer 12-threads to the OS with six of those coming from cores, and the other six from HyperThreading.

AMD Hex-core proc

AMD packs 2.15 billion transistors into a tiny chip, offering outstanding performance, DirectX 11 support, and triple-monitor (or better) capability. Nvidia’s response is nowhere to be seen

AMD’s graphics division, the former ATI Technologies, loves a good surprise. The company has been a perennial also-ran in the graphics performance arena, but every now and then, it one-ups the competition in a big way. That happened back in 2002, with the launch of the original Radeon 9700, which stole the performance lead from archrival Nvidia. It happened again last year, with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The 4850, 4870, and 4890 weren’t always faster than the competition, but they were small, efficient chips that forced Nvidia into a price war that was good for users but bad for Nvidia’s bottom line.

Now AMD’s doing it again, putting some serious hurt on the competition with the first GPU to support Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 API. AMD’s also been paying close attention to the emerging market for non-gaming apps accelerated by GPUs, such as video transcoding and digital photography, fully supporting DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL standards for general purpose computing on graphics cards.

This new chip is no shrinking violet in the numbers department. Every number associated with the new Radeon 5800 series is staggering: 2.15 billion transistors, 2.7 trillion floating-point operations a second, more than 20 gigapixels per second throughput, 1,600 shader units. Other numbers impress because of their smallness. One example: The idle power is a scant 27W— lower than many entry level GPUs. 

Given the sheer scale and ambition of this GPU, does it deliver in the performance realm? And will it deliver at a price normal humans can afford? Let’s find out.

ATI Radeon HD58X0 benchmarked...

 

I'll start with the Hex-core CPU: I'm not really sure this will be enough to get AMD out of the financial hole they are currently in. Obviously, six cores are nice, backwards compatibility with AM3/AM2+ motherboards is a plus, and it will certainly be relatively affordable. However, Intel's Core i9 will more than likely overshadow the AMD proc, as the Intel chip should use a 32nm architecture (compared to 45nm for the Thuban), HyperThreading for 12 threads (6 for Thuban), and, if the results of hunting around the Internet are to be believed, an onboard graphics processor. AMD's advantage, though, is price, as Core i9 is rumored to be a $1,000+ Extreme Edition, and even normal editions are likely to be pricey. The way I see it, it would be AMD for business-oriented applications, and Core i9 for things like 3D-rendering and gaming. Though a quad-core would serve both nearly as well, as a benchmarked preview showed gains in most applications, but not massive leaps.

The Radeon is a different story. In this case, there are substantial gains over the previous most-powerful single card GPU, the Nvidia GTX 285. In every score, the 5870 trounces the GTX and the old 4890. In addition, it does this while drawing LESS power than either card. All topped in a relatively cheap $380 price tag. I was expecting a $600 sticker. In this case, the AMD tech is drool-worthy. Until Nvidia reveals it's response, which will be faster still, yet far pricier. Even then, it will have to be a massive advantage to justify the price gap.

One minor issue I have, more of a personal niggle, is the size of the exhaust vent. ATI squeezes in four display ports, and to get the two DVI ports to fit, they are stacked. However, this cuts into the area the exhaust vent, and the vent has to be shrunk. It's probably not going to hurt the card, but given how hot modern graphics cards run, a choking vent is a bit of a worry to me.

Then again, there is the alternative: Wait for water cooling blocks.

TGDaily has found out that Super Talent plans to start shipping its first PCI Express RAIDDrive SSDs in early October, so you may want to hang on for a few more weeks if you're currently planning a dream machine build. Why is that? Because these purportedly stupid-fast drives are being designed to thrash the throughput bottleneck in your PC's storage subsystem and leave the SATA bus bandwidth limitation in the dust.

"The PCIe Gen. 2.0 x8 interface used by RAIDDrive SSDs supports 4GB/s bandwidth, more than ten times that of the SATA-II 3Gbps bus, and five times greater than the not yet available SATA-III bus," a Super Talent spokesperson told TGDaily. "Currently, there is no other way to achieve the same performance, except via Fusio-IO - but that costs approximately $10,000 for equivalent speeds."

Super Talent, meanwhile, is targeting a price point below $1,000 in hopes of appealing to both gamers and enterprise users, the spokesperson added. Three versions will be made available, including:

• RAIDDrive GS: Aimed at power users and gamers, supports RAID 0 or 5, uses MLC flash, and available in capacities up to 2TB
• RAIDDrive ES: For enterprise servers, supports RAID 0 or 5, fits in a 3U rack mount chassis, uses SLC flash, and available in capacities up to 1TB
• RAIDDrive WS: Geared towards workstation users, supports RAID 0 or 5, uses SLC flash, available in capacities up to 1TB

Assuming it lives up to the hype, would you drop upwards of $1,000 for a super-speedy SSD configuration?

What can computers do now that you never dreamed would be possible? What do you hope they’ll be able to do in the future?
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The big one for me is cloud computing. When I got into computers some years ago, it never occurred to me that it was possible to connect several computers to calculate the same data, or even offload the actual computing to another miles away. Now, we have the various ______@Home projects, and OnLive, assuming it actually works. As for what I hope they can do in the future, I mainly want to see programs like Folding@Home come to fruition. And play a Crytek game at 150+ frames reliably, at full detail, when it is first released.*

*Not a serious bit, but it would be nice.