Jump to content

Home

Tech News and Gossip thread...


Negative Sun

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 835
  • Created
  • Last Reply
The NDA on Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPU architecture has lifted a couple of days before the official launch. The skinny is that it boasts about a 15-17% IPC advantage over Nehalem, which is, incidentally, the same advantage Nehalem presently enjoys over Core 2, and that its 32nm process allows for monster overclocks (4.4GHz), even with the stock heatsink. Overclocking will only be possible by changing the multiplier, requiring an unlocked "K" model, which will carry a small price premium of ~$11-23, depending on the model.
WANT :thmbup1:
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anybody else surprised at the video transcoding performance Sandy Bridge offers with Quick Sync?

 

Lots of news coming out of CES this week. NVIDIA finally pulled the cat out of the bag and revealed they've been working on an ARM based System-On-Chip. Apparently NVIDIA has their sights on the desktop and server market segments. And then Microsoft announced that ARM processors will be supported on the next version of Windows. I've got to think Intel saw that coming but not much they could do about it. I never really thought the Wintel duopoly would be seriously challenged like this. :smirk2:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

I saw this interesting article on CNET this week.

 

Micron to reveal tech it says increases chip speed 20-fold

 

The 20x speed increase is for DRAM. I don't know about the rest of you but I love it when people find ways to significantly improve computing performance. I have to admit that I wasn't aware of this "memory wall" as I always thought the big bottleneck for PC performance was physical storage devices like HDD's and optical disc drives. Apparently this new tech will be initially aimed at routers and switches (so the Interwebz can run faster) but is expected to eventually trickle down to consumer-level memory products, maybe by 2015 or so.

 

EDIT: Did anyone get bitten by the Intel 6-series chipset bug? Some of you had expressed interest in making the move to Sandy Bridge so I was just wondering.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No moolah to make the move otherwise I'd have done it already!

 

Lots of cool news happening this week though, found an article that has a few rolled into one: Clicky

 

An iPhone Mini sounds very attractive for the Pay as You Go crowd (to which I now belong too thanks to redundancy), but if any HTC product out there is better at the same price level I'd still get it first [/fanboy]

 

Nokia and Windows isn't 2 things I would have put together a few months ago but there you have it, lets hope it can boost both Windows' competitiveness with Android and Nokia's with HTC/Samsung/Apple.

 

I'm a bit sceptical about the new HTC Desire leaks, but I'd love to see one as awesome as the original Desire (which I own and is inherently the best smartphone ever!), and a Super Amoled screen does sounds sweet, not keen on the touchscreen hardware buttons though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

EDIT: Did anyone get bitten by the Intel 6-series chipset bug? Some of you had expressed interest in making the move to Sandy Bridge so I was just wondering.

Wait, what bug? I didn't check the tech news yet. Linky? pleaase.

 

I have not yet purchased the new machine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's Anandtech's take on it. Luckily, ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte are offering replacement motherboards to those who purchased defective boards.

 

It's been reported that this bug is not present in the upcoming Z68 chipset, which is the first chipset that will allow both overclocking and Quick Sync, Intel's nifty new video transcoding utilizing Sandy Bridge's onboard GPU. I still find it baffling that Intel felt it necessary to launch three different mainstream chipsets instead of just one. :giveup:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had to make sure that I hadn't purchased one of these defective chipset MoBo's... Happily, the p55 boards are unaffected - I got lucky I guess, as the tech on that chipset was about as untested as the 6 series.

 

As to the bafflement you describe, Q, I share it. It seems that Intel and other manufacturers are doing anything they can to insure future profitability by increasingly speedy planned obsolescence. Aggravating.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So what's everybody's take on Intel's Light Peak launch, now officially branded as Thunderbolt?

 

Anandtech - Intel's Codename Light Peak Launches as Thunderbolt

 

From Anandtech's review it looks like the production version didn't end up with all the bells-and-whistles that Intel was showing off at IDF 2010. Apparently Thunderbolt only supports PCI-Express and DisplayPort whereas the Anandtech guys were under the distinct impression Light Peak technology was originally intended to serve as a unified transport technology for HDMI, DVI, USB, FireWire, SATA, et al. Additionally Thunderbolt is only launching with copper as supported physical transport medium. Thunderbolt support for fiber optic transport is supposed to come toward the end of this year. That being said, 10 Gbps bi-directional throughput over copper is nothing to sneeze at.

 

ThunderboltLayout_575px.png

Image file posted on Anandtech.com

 

So we'll see how Thunderbolt works out. OEM's like Western Digital, Seagate, and Promise have already announced their support for Thunderbolt. I guess this pretty much confirms my suspicions that Thunderbolt was the reason for Intel's slow adoption of USB 3.0 for its new chipsets since it's fairly obvious Thunderbolt is a competing in the same space.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...