NVIDIA posted a demo video showing the tessellation performance of their upcoming monster and first Fermi card – the GTX480. It surely overtakes the HD5870 in this regard, but I don’t know if it will be able to do so in other scenarios.
One of the first things I wrote for this blog was a looong post about the current gen tech for watching 3D movies in the comfort of your home. I’ll quickly revisit the topic with two new 3D-ready projectors from Acer.
The two projectors – the Acer H5360 and the Acer X1261 – rely on NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology that uses LCD shutter glasses to view 3D content. If you don’t know what those are, check out the previous post.
Without any proper intro, NVIDIA launched the GeForce 300 family cards today. The series consists of five new models, which will be available only through OEM channels.
Intel is preparing a few new CPUs at the two extremes of their range – two new Atom CPUs and an Intel Core i7 with six cores. They have two things in common though – all three processors use DDR3 RAM and they are coming in Q3 of 2010.
I knew this will be happening eventually, but that kind of speed certainly exceeded my expectations. Apparently six-core CPUs will be flooding the market before the year has been halved. AMD and Intel both have plans of releasing those so regardless of your preferences it might be a good time to start saving.
According to DigiTimes Intel will hit first in march with its Core i7-980X. Read more »
As far as the current CPU trends go Intel is the company that provides top-notch performance for the ultimate configurations, while AMD aims at users on a tighter budget that are on the look for bargain prices. So the five new mid-range additions to the Athlon II and Phenom II lineups are hardly groundbreaking news.
The two highlights of today’s announcement are the AMD Phenom™ II X2 555 Black Edition processor and the AMD Athlon II X4 635 processor. The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition is the fastest dual-core AMD processor to date, clocking at 3.2 GHz, yet it still maintains an affordable price of 99 US dollars.
The TransferJet technology was introduced by Sony two years ago, but it’s finally picking up speed. It’s a wire-free data transfer technology, kind of like Bluetooth but going at the speed of 802.11n Wi-Fi – 530Mbps. However it only works over a distance of 3cm range.
After announcing a significant three-month delay, the new NVIDIA GF100 product line is finally scheduled for launch in March. The Fermi cores will offer native DirectX 11 support, lots of technology improvements and supposed superior performance.
After releasing the most powerful video card in the world (HD5970 live pics here), ATI seems to have concentrated their work on the low-budget segment. The first dirt cheap, but capable Radeon will be the HD5670, offering DirectX11 support, GDDR5 memory and Eyefinity multi-display technology.
Price you ask? Under $100, ATI will tell you. Read more »
Remember the post I wrote about the announcement of the world’s most powerful video card? Yes, I am talking for the ATI Radeon 5970, which is made of two HD5870 cores. Well, Santa dropped in for a beer sometime around Christmas and left it over.
You can bet he also brought some more PC goodies to match it. But here are some more live shots of the thing. Read more »
Google would-be hardware products are all over the place right now – after the Nexus One, the true Google phone, here comes word of the true Google netbook based on the new Chrome OS.
The guys from Mountain View are taking the popularizing of both their mobile and desktop OSes into their own hands… by selling devices themselves.
Just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Since yesterday not having a Google account is not going to stop your browsing history and web search behavior from getting recorded. But there’s hardly anything to worry about here, Google is only going to use that data to provide more relevant search results (and advertising, of course).
The last 180 days of your search are linked to an anonymous cookie and are taken into account when you make your next search. You can check out how much that improves the search engine accuracy by clicking the “View customizations” link on the top right of the search results page.
Netbooks are about to make a big step in their evolution by getting their very own AppStore. It is developed by no other than Intel, which is behind the most popular CPU used in netbooks, the Atom (you can almost say it’s the netbook CPU).
The new AppStore will be targeting both Windows and Moblin (Intel’s own Linux-based OS designed specifically for netbooks) with more platforms on the way (Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight for example). Intel has ensured themselves support from the major netbook manufacturers who will preinstall the AppStore client on every device they sell.
But make no mistake, this here AppStore is no imaginary thing, it’s already opened for app submission.
There’s very little we know about Internet Explorer 9 but certainly one the most interesting bits that is already publicly available is that it will support hardware graphics acceleration. And here come those bad guys from Mozilla Foundation to steal the limelight again.
Internet Explorer 9 will undoubtedly have other surprises in store for us, if we live long enough to see its release (it will probably be out in 2011). Nonetheless, getting beaten at its own game again surely hurts.
Of course we saw that coming at the moment Microsoft published the Windows 7 Direct2D API but it’s happening even sooner than we expected. Apparently Bas Schouten and his team already have at their hands a Firefox browser that can render everything using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU (including the browser UI elements themselves). And the load times it shows on some websites, compared to the regular version are impressively different. You can check them out after the break.
Four days ago Microsoft released the first public beta of their next Office 2010. It brings some new features for all apps in the package, along withal slightly upgraded UI but still keeping the Office 2007 feel.