Friends at TechPowerUp! recently reported that Noctua, well-known firm in the cooling business decided to give a very pleasant present to the owners of their CPU coolers. With the arrival of Intel Core i7 processors, Noctua announced that the company is giving away free mounting kits for LGA1366 socket. Named SecuFirm2, this socket adapter is compatible with all Noctua coolers since the company arrived on the market, three years ago. As soon as Nehalem processors and motherboards reach the stores, you can go and visit Noctua’s website and file an online request. You have to give out proof of purchase of either Noctua cooler or
AMD wins big in GPU wars
In this industry, the rule of “second generation” is the one that always work. And if you’re lucky, you’ll continue the sales tradition for 2-3 generations, if your competitor does not make “1-2”. In case of ATI, the company struck gold with Radeon 9700 (R300 GPU), but the company sold 9800 and X800 like hotcakes. Nvidia came out with GeForce 6800 at X800 time and didn’t achieve the success the company expected, but 7800, 7900 and 8800 scored majorly. ATI came out with 3800 and did rather well, but GeForce 9000 outsold ATI parts. Now with Radeon 4000 series, AMD/ATI scored big with the “second
Intel starts to phase out 65nm CPUs
If anyone doubts Intel’s leadership in the world of CPUs and manufacturing, just think of the following: its nearest competitor is yet to ship its 45nm products in any volume, while Chipzilla started to phase out 65nm CPUs as 45nm ones took over. While the world is waiting on AMD’s Shanghai and Deneb, Intel’s 45nm Core and Xeon processors overtook 65nm ones and the company decided to phase out or EOL (End Of Life) no less than 31 different 65nm processors. Intel claims the company has achieved break point between 45nm and 65 and that majority (roughly 60%) of CPUs in Q4 will be manufactured
UPDATED: Elemental’s video transcoder rocks the world
Back in May 2008, Nvidia’s Editors Day hosted a presentation by young guys from Elemental Technologies Inc (ETI). The demonstrated software was Badaboom, CUDA-powered video transcoder that demolished Intel’s Core 2 Quad processor when used in conjuction with GeForce 8800GTS. Months have passed, and guys worked hard on developing Badaboom in order to be ready for August release. But, their second project, RapiHD encoder for Premiere CS4 Pro needed some engineering help. So, the guys pushed back the release of Badaboom and Badaboom Pro until after the launch of CS4. It was a tough call, but with the release of Adobe Creative Studio 4 over
UPDATE: EVGA to launch Intel X58 motherboards
When it comes to add-in board vendors, EVGA is probably the most faithful company in the business. Ever since the company launched, Nvidia was the only name EVGA wanted to hear about. But, things are about to change. Here are the facts: 1) EVGA does not want to miss the Core i7 train 2) Nvidia is not making a chipset for Intel Core i7 3) EVGA poached excellent engineering team from now-defunct EPoX and does not want that team to do nothing until MCP8-series show up Well, those facts end with a really simple result. EVGA is preparing to launch its first non-Nvidia based motherboard,
Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)
I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of
AMD reports $1.78B revenue, records first profit in years (non-GAAP)
On Thursday, AMD reported its Q3’2008 results and the company managed to “Experience Black” (marketing slogan behind 4870X2). When we look at overall (non-GAAP) numbers, AMD filed $1.776 billion revenue and a profit of 80 million dollars. This was the first filed profit in seven quarters, and in a way, Hector J. Ruiz kept its promise of AMD becoming profitable by Q3’08. However, the results that Wall Street calculates are GAAP ones, and without that one-time revenue of $191 million (selling equipment to JSC Angstrem, as I first reported here), the company filed a net loss of $67 million on a revenue of $1.56 billion.
Atom helps Intel to score a big one, beats expectations
In a stark contrast to conservative projections by analysts, Intel (stock: INTC) announced that the company achieved a revenue of $10.22 billion, beating the estimates. Chipzilla achieved clear two billion dollar profit in Q3’08, or 35 cents per share. The reason for this 12% jump in profits is no other than Intel Atom, chip that reportedly costs only $8 to make, giving Intel additional $200 million in its Q3 revenue. Without Atom and associated chipsets, their revenue would dip below 10 billion. This only goes to show that Intel executed properly and went for the segment of market that has just started to expand. Cheap
Time for earning season madness is here!
In the light of world economy going bonkers, we have entered two really interesting weeks. Intel will submit its Q3 results after the market closes on Tuesday, while AMD will follow suit on Thursday. I’ve received a preview for both companies from Wedbush Morgan Securities, and in this post you can read estimates researched by Patrick Wang and his assistant Michael Lucarelli. According to Wedbush Morgan, we can expect “weak 3Q results towards the lower end of guidance as the majority of semi companies have not pre-announced but were most likely impacted by the well-documented macro environment.” With global economy being in chaos, it is
