new hardware

[Tawa]

Test of the new 30 inch monitors: Dell and Samsung
Dell renews the 3007WFP with an HC version. Like its predecessor it has an IPS panel but this time with extended gamut backlighting. Samsung meets the challenge with its 305T and a PVA panel. Here is a duel of 30" monitor, technologies, reaction time, color, ergonomics...

To really have a good look at the monitors we have decided this time to shoot a small video of each the two monitors.
> The new 30 inch monitors: Dell and Samsung





No SED? Don't worry here comes the FED!
End of October, the manager of the IT Peripherals division of Sony Europe, Mark Lufkin, made a very sad announcement: Sony would progressively leave the LCD monitor market. Today, Sony's computer displays are almost nowhere to be found.

So can you image how we felt when we heard the following press release of Sony Japan: they are back with a new technology for flat monitors named FED. If it rings a bell and sounds like SED, don't worry it is absolutely normal: the two technologies are apparently extremely close. The only difference is that FED will be only intended to computer monitors at first. The first prototype of the kind is a 19.2'' monitor with a resolution of 1280 x 960 pixels (4/3).The monitor brightness is 400 cd/m² and its contrast ratio 20 000:1 !


Like SED, the functioning principle of FED is closer to the CRT than LCD monitors but with the thinness of the latter. Hundreds of thousands of micro guns (in shape of cones instead of nano-slits for SED) emit electrons that will hit phosphorus and produce light and colors.


The improvements announced are multiple and really exciting:
<li nd="5">zero afterglow, or as much as the CRT (the picture unveiled shows a similar screening to the CRT, screening that helps getting rid of the retinal persistence that is problematic for LCD monitors)
<li nd="6">much nicer images with a record contrast ratio and extreme deep black,
exceptional brightness uniformity
<li nd="7">low power consumption.


The first monitors are scheduled to be released in 2009 – at best according to the manufacturer. Sony won't probably start the production with 19.2'' monitors like the one presented today at the Japanese Display 2007 show, but rather with 24 or 26''; full HD (1920x1080) displays. This technology will also probably enter their TVs later.

One last detail for those of you who fear that this technology might never be released: Sony said that their R&D department was working on it since 1999. This is one more reason to hope that the manufacture will not drop the technology at the last moment...

PS: as regard to the document published with the graphic, we are just like you and haven't understand everything that was written in it.

[ulias]

new cpu by intel the new quadcore check this out http://tomshardware.co.uk/2007/04/13..._uk/page2.html

[Kingroudy]

yup, the QX6800, this is the fastest CPU in the market.
a good reveiw is available at sharkyextreme.com, and i liked the fact that
the fastest quad core is officially faster than the fastest dual core.
but will you pay 1200$ for a cpu?

[Tawa]

Samsung to release 2''1/2, 200 GB, 7200 Rpm drive

Samsung releases today their first 2"1/2 hard drive running at 7200 Rpm with a storage capacity of 200 GB (Seagate is currently limited to 160 GB with the Momentus 7200.2).

Also available with a storage capacity of 80, 120 and 160 GB, the Samsung SpinPoint MP1 will have 8 to 16 MB of cache depending on the version and will use the SATA 3.0 Gbits/s interface. The first samples are scheduled to be released in May and the manufacturer will enter mass production at the end of the same month.

Interestingly, Samsung isn't planning on using these hard drives in laptops but rather in workstations and servers requiring high hard drive densities for RAID configurations and blade servers. For the latter, chances are that users will rather choose Seagate's Savvio SAS running at 10 or 15,000 Rpm.

This particular positioning will not stop some users from replacing their laptop hard drive running at 5400 Rpm or 42000 Rpm by this type of disc. For this type of operation though, the heat dissipation will be something to keep in mind.

[Tawa]

3d chips: almost functional?

IBM announced important improvements in the development of the "through-silicon vias" technology usually named "3D chips" by Big Blue. In short, this technology is about connecting the matrixes of several chips with vertical connections and not only horizontal ones. This is a little bit like chips mounted on printed circuits.

This allows the elimination of long connections currently used for traditional "2D" chips and would shorten by up to 1000 times the distance that data have sometime to cover. Also, the number of possible connections would be multiplied by 100. Even if there is still a lot of work before having a perfectly functional and profitable technology, the company is already working on a prototype of SRAM 65nm with a wafer of 300 mm. Some clients will receive prototypes during the second half and IBM announced to have scheduled the beginning of production as soon as 2008. Because of the important reductions of power consumption, this process will be initially employed in cell phones, small size multimedia devices and wireless circuits. We also heard about a possible utilization in the Power processors of the manufacturer and in high bandwidth memory.




Performances of the Celeron Conroe-L

HKEPC has got hold of a Celeron 400. These mono core processors are based on the Core architecture with FSB800 and 512 KB of L2 cache. The 440 (2 GHz) and 430 (1.8 GHz) are scheduled to be released in June at $59 and $49.
The figures published are rather encouraging since the Celeron 440 would be comparable to the Athlon 64 3500+. The Athlon is a bit better or games and the Celeron takes the lead for other applications. This processor is considerably faster than the Celeron D 360 and Sempron 3800+ two processors currently sold $69.

We have to keep in mind, however, that if today they provide great performances, the fact that they only have one core will be a handicap for future applications optimized for multithreading. Also, as the Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is priced today $73 and as Intel will release a Pentium E 2140 in June at $74, it would be regrettable not to buy a processor with two cores.




R600, RV630, RV610: the last infos
Since our last news published during the CeBIT and regarding ATI's future GPUs, things haven't really changed for the Radeon X2900 also known as R600. We have, however, obtained some new information from a reliable source.

The product release would apparently be postponed. If it was scheduled in May, it would have been postponed mid-May. Also, the release of the XTX with 1 GB of GDDR4 would still be uncertain. Pictures of the beta OEM version, are available from this page. These pictures show nothing more than photos already published except for the presence of GDDR4 Samsung 0.9ns (1.1 GHz) chips like the X1950 XTX. As the date of the chip is January (this version isn't exactly recent), we can't say if the final product will look like this one.


As regard to the X2900 XT 512 MB, we noted that the product price has already been reduced from $499 to $399. This is closer to a GeForce 8800 GTS than a GeForce 8800 GTX. We have to hope that this new position isn't due to lower performances but rather to an aggressive price policy compared to Nvidia's offer.

The RV630 and RV610 are also delayed. Indeed, mass availability won't happen before June despite the initial same release date as the R600.

We remind you that when the R600 had officially been postponed in March being scheduled for this month, AMD explained that this was only a strategic decision to release a whole line of products compatible with DirectX 10. This hasn't worked out too well...

[Tawa]

GPU: hign end and middle line dominate
Jon Peddie Research has published a report regarding the segmentation of graphic card market shares for the fourth quarter 2006.



These figures (the incomes are expressed in million) show that the segment of graphic cards priced $150 to $249 represents the majority of sales with 63.70% units sold and 72.75% incomes. The average price of a card, $245.15 is quite high. Unsurprisingly, it is followed by the Mainstream card segment ($80 to $149). However, if the latter represents 22.5% of discrete card sales, the incomes of this segment are only of 13.63%. Finally, we have noted the counter performance of the value segment a 3.16%.

Some might be surprised by the very small gap ($3.85) between the average prices of the performance segment compared to the above one. We know that this company is specialized in financial studies but these reports would most probably gain in interest if the segmentation was modified to take into consideration the evolutions of the market during the past few years.




X-Fi Auzentech daughterboards

Apparently concerned about the inexorable erosion of soundcard sales because of the growing competition of integrated circuits, Creative has authorized the production and commercialization by a tierce company, Auzentech, of soundcards featuring an X-Fi chip. Up until today, Creative controlled the entire production chain from the conception of the chip to the commercialization of the card except for the occasional arrangements for a few high end motherboards.

This more open strategy has been a success for other markets such as the graphic cards even if recently the tendency has been slightly reversed mostly because of technical rather than commercial reasons. Today, the reasons of this choice aren't always that clear.

The release of the Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 is scheduled for May. The support of the EAX 5.0 is of course included and the manufacturer announced that real time Dolby Digital Live encoding will be added during the fourth quarter 2007. If the change in the attitude of the father of the Sound Blaster is a good thing, we hope that it will go along with an extended support of existing products and better prices.




Preview of the after Bearlake
The successors of the future X38, P35 and G33 and their principal characteristics are already available. Scheduled to be released during the second quarter 2008, the whole family of Eaglelake chipsets will support the DDR3-1333 and PCI-Express 2.0 (this year, the exclusivity of this support will be for the X38). The support of the DDR2-800 will be maintained, the FSB frequency will stagnate at 1333 MHz and they will be coupled to an ICH 10.



Two versions are currently scheduled: the EagleLake-P and EagleLake-G. The latter integrates a graphic circuit and if its predecessor, the G35, won't probably support the HDMI interface, it will be the case of the EagleLake-G. The Display Port will also apparently be supported. Another possible improvement is Clear Video. This technology will improve the reading of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies. Now, we have hope that Intel won't reduce the specification of these IGP just before their official announcement as it recently did with other products.





Core 2E QX6850: FSB 1333MHz & 3GHz

To accompany the release of the X38 Express (Bearlake-X) chipsets, Intel is currently working on the Core2 Extreme QX6850, a processor scheduled to be released in Q3. Also based on the Kentsfield core (quad cores), it mostly singles out from the QX6800 because of the FSB of 1333MHz and the cores clocked at 3 GHZ. The TDP and price are unchanged at 130 Watts and $999. The reason of the similar price is probably the small foreseeable performance gap.

[Tawa]

Official ForceWare 158

Nvidia has published the ForceWare 158.19 beta for Windows 2000/XP and the ForceWare 158.18 for Windows Vista. If they work with the GeForce7 if you have a modified inf file, these drivers are officially only limited to the GeForce 8.

This new version supports cards based on G84/G86 (8400, 8500 and 8600) and features a long list of issues corrected. Nvidia also announced higher 3D performances, an improved user interface and the support of PureVideo HD which is unfortunately currently limited to Vista.

[Tawa]

Update: Playing for less than 150€

We have updated our article about entry level graphic cards and integrated chipsets. We have added the performances of the Radeon X1950 GT, Radeon X1250 integrated to the AMD 690 chipset and GeForce 6150 integrated to the Nvidia nForce 430 chipset.

We have also added the performances for HD video hardware decoding.






Benchmark of the Penryn

Intel has officially unveiled at IDF the performances of the future Penryn processor using the 45 nm fabrication process. The figures published correspond to the dual core and quad core at 3.33 GHz with FSB1333 and they are compared to the QX6800 at 2.93 GHz with FSB1066. Here are the performance improvements announced by Intel for the Quad Core:

- 3DMark06 CPU: +21.8%
- Mainconcept H.264 Encoder: +21.9%
- Cinebench R9.5: +24.9%
- Cinebench R10 Beta: +25.5%
- Half Life 2 Lost Coast: +37.3%
- DiVX 6.6 Alpha / Vdub 1.7.1: +22.2%

Even if these figures are to be taken with a pinch of salt, considering that the frequency increase is of 13.5%, improvements are interesting. They are due to the L2 cache size increase but also to other optimizations. The table published by Intel probably contains an inversion since the encoding of a DiVX with the QX6800, the dual core at 3.3 GHz and the quad core at 3.3 GHz took 38 seconds, 22 seconds and 18 seconds. We believe that the correct order should rather be 22, 38 and 18 and these are the figures we have taken for the performance improvements calculations.

The test configuration was: Bad Axe2 motherboards with i975X (pre-production for the 45nm), 8800 GTX, 2x1 GB of DDR2-800 5-5-5-15. Mass production of Core 2 « Penryn » will begin at the end of the year and the entire product line release will take place end of 2007 / early 2008. The release of a few units in « Extreme Edition » in October is also something we could expect.

[Tawa]

18-4-2007


ATI Catalyst 7.4

AMD has released the ATI Catalyst 7.4 drivers for Windows Vista, XP and Linux. If users of windows XP will only notice a couple of issues corrected, users of windows Vista will be pleased to see significant performance improvements in OpenGL.

The performance improvements of the Radeon X1000, with mono card or CrossFire configurations are generally of 15% with Doom3, Quake 4 and Prey, with peaks of up to 30%. In fact, these performance improvements fill the gaps between XP and Vista. The Avivo Video Converter is now available for Vista 32 bit edition

[Tawa]

April 19, 2007


Heavy financial loss for AMD

AMD announced sales of $1.233 billion, operating loss of $504 million and a net loss of $611 million for Q1 2007. We remind you that for the previous quarter AMD announced sales of $1.773 billion, net loss of $529 but operating profits of $49 million.

If the drop in sales is the principal problem of AMD, because of the 38% reduction of the computing division including CPU and chipset, raw margin is also a problem since it is of 28% instead of 36% in the previous quarter and 58% one year ago. If we take a deeper look at the figures, we see that when AMD sells a processor $100, the company loses $35 and $17.7 for a GPU of the same price.

Knowing that the competition is the starting point of evolutions and price reductions, we have to hope that AMD will quickly find a solution to this problem.