In the future, everyone will have their own Jeopardy-style video walls. Or at least that’s the future AMD envisions.
In addition to new notebook chipsets, AMD today introduced Eyefinity, a new technology that allows for up to six displays to be driven off of one video card.
Eyefinity will make its way into upcoming DirectX 11-based ATI Radeon graphics cards, the company has announced. With Eyefinity, you’ll be able to arrange up to six displays per graphics card in any configuration, using either landscape or portrait mode.
How insane can this get, you ask? At a media event aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA, AMD demonstrated 24 monitors hooked up to a single PC, driven by four Eyefinitiy-based cards. The four GPUs–each driving six 24-inch Dell LCD monitors–powered a 3D flight simulator across all 24 screens.
Archive
Tag: HardwareToday, NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX 275 mid-range video card, the latest addition to its performance GPU lineup. With the goal of being the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market, the GTX 275 offers a combination of performance, physics, and GPU computing power for budget conscious consumers. Interested? Check out a few highlights:
* 633 MHz GPU Clock
* 1404 MHz Shader Clock
* 1134 MHz Memory Clock
* 240 Processor Cores
* 80 Texture Processing Units
* 448-bit Memory Interface
* 896 MB GDDR3 memory
Palit releases the first and the only custom designed GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB
Palit Microsystems, leading graphics card manufacturer, announces the first own design GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB. Armed with NVIDIA PhysX® and NVIDIA CUDA® technology, the GeForce® GTX285 series are ready to enable a total new class of physical gaming interaction!
Palit GTX 285 2GB is the first and the only one graphics card available in the market. The Palit GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB feature a core speed of 648MHz and 2.5GHz on its GDDR3 memory with a 512bit interface. It supports the latest NVIDIA PhysX® technology providing real-time physics simulations in leading edge PC and console games. With up to 50% more performance than prior generation GPUs, GeForce® GTX 285’s GPUs tear through complex DirectX® 10 environments and cinematic effects at blazing frame rates in extreme HD resolution!
Palit innovative dual fan cooling system for the GTX 285 series comes with two PWM fans and four heat-pipes to provide high performance and trustworthy cooling solution. Conceived for two GPUs, the two PWM fans are able to provide sufficient air flow to cool GPU on the graphics quietly. The PWM fan created for both fans can adjust the fan speed depending on the GPU’s temperature. Palit’s GeForce® GTX285 also supports NVIDIA CUDA® technology, unlocking the power of the GPU’s processing cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks (such as video transcoding) to deliver up to 20x the performance over traditional CPUs.
This bad boy isn’t your daddy’s USB porn drive (but maybe it should be). It’s the real deal for keeping your data safe and secure.
The IronKey USB flash drive is one of the most secure devices I’ve ever worked with, but simultaneously tries to be–and achieves being–among the simplest to interact with in achieving that security. The product, from the eponymous company IronKey, comes in capacities from 1 GB to 8 GB that encrypts data five ways to Sunday while achieving government certification as tamper evident. A secured, anonymized version of Firefox is also onboard. Prices start at $79 including a one-year subscription for anonymous browsing; an 8 GB drive is $299…
For starters, there’s hardware AES encryption on board the sleek metal drive: there’s no software to install on a host computer, and all encryption happens within the drive. This dramatically improves the security profile. Encryption keys are stored only on the drive, and only unlocked when a password you create at the time you initialize the drive is entered. (IronKey lets you back that password up on their secure Web servers with additional layers of authentication in case you forget it; accessing your account requires a digital certificate stored on the IronKey.)
Enter the password incorrectly 10 times, and the hardware fries itself. Likewise, if an IronKey is physically tampered with in an attempt to access the on-board flash memory directly, the hardware wipes memory as well. Their tamper-resistance has led to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation by the U.S. and Canadian governments–physical tampering must be evident–and they’re working on Level 3, which requires countermeasures to attempts to disassemble the hardware…
A password manager that’s integrated into Firefox takes the oompf out of keylogging software by using a workaround to enter your Web data, making it possible to use a cafe or Kinko’s PC without worrying about having your details snarfed. IronKey’s version of Firefox also stores no temporary files on the host computer, and uses a secure proxy to tunnel browsing to its anonymized endpoints.
2 please!
There are more stories every other day about this HD DVD war and “who will win?” I loved 300 but… I knew who was winning and who wasn’t. Reality has to settle in at some point as this stand is nowhere near as sexy or meaningful. OK. OK. I know the Giants recently defied great odds and beat the Patriots (I picked them to win by 3 btw : ) ) but this format “war” is ridiculous at this point, IMHO. Today, there are a couple more giants jumping to Blu-ray over HD-DVD: Best Buy and Netflix. The momentum has been growing for a while now and looks to be too fast to stop.
Best Buy, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, said on Monday it will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp’s Blu-ray high-definition video format.
The decision gives Sony yet another victory in the battle with Toshiba Corp’s HD DVD to be the high-definition DVD format of choice.
Earlier on Monday, online video rental company Netflix Inc (NFLX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it would exclusively stock Blu-ray DVDs after some of the world’s biggest movie studios decided in favor of that format.
Best Buy said it believes consumers will benefit from the choice of one HD DVD format.
“Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products,” Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.
Flash drives, or SSD drives, might be the wave of the future, but they’re still much to expensive to really be practical in today’s computers. Even though they save energy and are faster than their platter-based cousins, we just aren’t ready for the switch. They don’t have big enough capacities and their pricetags are astronomical.
Seagate knows that total acceptance of flash-based drives is still a few years off, but that isn’t stopping them from using the tech to improve their current hard drives. Their new hybrid drives are large platter hard drives that have an additional 256MB of flash memory built-in. This helps the computer boot up 25% faster and cut the power consumption of the drives by 50%. Pretty awesome, right? Well, in theory, yes. The problem is, Microsoft’s Vista doesn’t quite know how to handle the new drives despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary. Until an update gets Vista’s act together, these drives can’t fulfill their true potential. Hopefully everything will be worked out soon and we can look forward to using these drives in the near future.
Much of the focus was on Harpertown, a 45nm quad-core version of Xeon with 12MB of cache, running in conjunction with Stokley, which support a 1600 MHz front side bus. Intel will also be releasing Wolfdale, a dual-core version with 6MB of cache. Although Penryn is primary a shrink of the existing architecture, rather than a complete new architecture, the new chips do s have some new features, notably including more cache and support for the faster bus; as well as a new divider that is supposed to be faster, and new SSE4 instructions…
The Tech Report compared a 3GHz Harpertown Xeon E5472 (expected to be released Nov. 12) against a 2.5GHz AMD “Barcelona” Opteron 2360SE (expected by the end of the year) and found that the Xeon pretty much won all the tests. The Xeon beat the Operton by 4% at Specjbb (a server business logic benchmark), the new Xeon beat an older 3GHz Clovertown Xeon by about 10%; and the 2.5GHz AMD part by about 4%. On almost all the other tests, Harpertown does even better, ahead of Barcelona by 20 to 34% in real world applications (and more in some synthetic benchmarks I’m more skeptical about).
Anandtech has even more benchmarks, most showing Intel ahead by 27% to as much as 60% (though I’m skeptical of the later tests). But it shows AMD ahead on performance/watt (with a larger improvement the less work is being done), almost certainly because of the more efficient memory scheme.
Both Barcelona and Harpertown seem to have some headroom in clock speeds. AMD is only shipping 2GHz now, but has promised 2.5GHz for December; let’s hope it can eventually match the 3GHz clock that Harpertown will start with. Intel is promising a 3.16GHz Harpertown; and on the desktop side showed a a demo of a 5.5GHz quad-core desktop with a ridiculous amount of cooling.
Looks like AMD has not yet caught back up but we’ll keep an eye out for more quad-core news and comparisons. I certainly hope AMD catches up and not necessarily because I am a fan. AMD has been good to me for quite a while but I don’t hold any loyalties between the two. I like competition. It’s always better for the consumer as, with healthy competition, it pushes the competitors to outdo each other in performance as well as price – two nice things as a consumer I appreciate. Competition can typically make a product better, faster, as well.
System builders who received samples a week or two ahead of today’s worldwide launch say they aren’t ready to issue benchmarks just yet. Nevertheless, sources tell ChannelWeb that the processor AMD calls “the first native quad-core” is faster than they had anticipated. They say three key advances are testing out as advertised — a tri-level memory cache hierarchy with fully shared L3 cache for all four cores, a floating point unit with 2×128-bit loads/cycle, and independent power supplies for each of the processor’s four cores and to the memory controller. The last feature distinguishes AMD’s quad-core product from Intel’s, in that it’s possible to idle one, two or three CPU cores for a workload to better manage power consumption.
CMP Channel’s Test Center last week received an engineering sample server equipped with dual Barcelona CPUs. After putting it through its paces, Frank Ohlhorst reports, “Those who have waited for the arrival of AMD’s next generation CPU won’t be disappointed.”
As far as pricing, AMD is remaining tight-lipped about how it plans to scale its new quad-cores against Intel’s or its own dual-core chips. Partners in the know say Barcelona will be “competitively priced.” Market watchers say it will have to be, given Intel’s recent slashing of its own quad-core prices down to levels nearly in line with its Core 2 Duo products.
If you have set aside a cool US$1100 for your processor alone at the time of this review release, then you should take a look at the QX6850 I will be reviewing today.
With four 8MB cache supported independent processing on-die units blistering along at 3.0Ghz, this latest Core 2 Extreme processor release from Intel at 1333Mhz front side bus sets the bar of what a consumer available processor can reach at this time. The QX6850 is currently holding the performance belt and by what is seen developing in the market from the competition, the only thing that will be beating it will be the next quad-core release from Intel (which will be within about 6 months).