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Will AMD’s HD 7950 Debut Next Month?
AMD has decided to delay the launch of its HD 7950 graphics card to early February.
This comes after news that the HD 7970, which AMD ‘launched’ on 22 December, will not be available until 9 January. This wasn’t received too well by the media and customers as it does help to have some stock to sell on launch day.
To avoid another bashing for a ‘paper launch’ the firm will launch the HD 7950 in February when it will actually be available. Guru 3D had confirmed this but the article has since been taken down.
AMD has told us that it won’t comment on rumour, speculation or any unannounced products.
The upcoming HD 7950 graphics card will use the same 28nm Southern Islands Tahiti GPU as the HD 7970, with the latter the first to do so. According to AMD it has 4.3bn transistors, more on-chip cache and greater overclocking potential than previous cards.
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Intel Gives Details On Their Xeon E5 Processors
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Intel finally gave more details at the supercomputing conference SC2011 about its upcoming Xeon E5 processors and been showing off its Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution.
We don’t expect to see the new Xeons until the first half of 2012, but Intel has has been shipping the new chips to “a small number of cloud and HPC customers” since September. The E5 family has the same core as the 3960X which Intel launched this week. So far though Intel does not seem to be keen to ramp up any mass production. Some of this might have something to do with problems in production which were rumoured earlier this year. However early benchmarks indicate that it could be a winner.
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China’s Supercomputer Uses Homegrown Chips
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China has built its latest supercomputer based entirely on homegrown microprocessors, a major move towards breaking the country’s reliance on Western technology for high-performance computing.
China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan debuted the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country’s state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 “Shenwei 1600″ microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center.
Details of the microprocessors and the design center were not immediately available.
The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world’s top 500 supercomputing list. Photos of the chips used and the supercomputer’s data center can be found here.
China’s Shandong Academy of Sciences built the computer. Officials of the academy could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday.
A report from The New York Times said the supercomputer’s name in English was the Sunway BlueLight MPP.
Lenovo Tablet Hits The Market
Lenovo’s business-oriented tablet, the ThinkPad Tablet, is now available for purchase and should start shipping within a week. The 10-inch Android device, which Lenovo officially announced a little more than a month ago, boasts an impressive mix of consumer and business-friendly features that might please both the user and their IT department.
Like other Android 3.1 Honeycomb tablets on the market, the ThinkPad Tablet has a 1280 x 800 multitouch display, 1GB of memory, front- and rear-facing cameras and a NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor. It comes in a 16GB model for $499, a 32GB version for $569 and a 64GB option for $669. Basic specs and price-wise, the ThinkPad Tablet is on par with the competition.
What sets the ThinkPad apart, however, are the enterprise-oriented tools like remote administration in case the tablet gets lost or stolen, support for Cisco VPN, and full device encryption. Free apps included like Documents to Go, PrinterShare, and Computrace underscore the tablets professional target audience.
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AMD Ships One Million Llano Processors
It appears that AMD has successfully managed to ship one million Llano chips in the second quarter, which is weeks ahead of the official launch.
AMD released the news during its earnings conference call. Where interim CEO Thomas Seifert said demand for Llano was strong. “We expect Llano ramp to outpace the Brazos ramp,” he noted.
If you look back at AMD’s Brazos launch, they managed to ship around one million units ahead of its scheduled launch, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Conversely, introducing Llano will be a bit more challenging, because AMD is planning to offer many varieties of mobile and desktop SKUs; including affordable dual- and triple-core processors. Therefore, Llano is expected to outpace Brazos very soon. AMD also made mention in their earnings call that total APU shipments for the quarter hit seven million. That said, so 6 million of them were Brazos processors.
It is believed that AMD Llano chip will take 50 percent of their total CPU shipments by the end of the year. In the first quarter of 2012, the Llano is expected to garner over 60 percent of their shipments.
AMD A75 Motherboards Economically Priced
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It appears that AMD’s A75 motherboards have finally started to hit the streets. Furthermore, we were truly shocked to see these MB’s economically priced for about $60.00.
Do not get too over excited in reference to the pricing because this gets you a decent A75 micro-ATX motherboard with up to four USB 3.0 ports and six SATA 6Gbps ports matched with a FM1 socket. It’s also worth pointing out that you will not get these same features like USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps on a comparable Intel platform in the same price range; you’d pay more.
We noticed that online retailer Newegg.com has an AMD motherboard selling for $59.99 after the rebate; otherwise it will cost $72.99. We expect the more serious computer geeks to opt for more muscle in regards to their motherboards; so they can whet their appetite for a good A75 for about $150.00.
Gigabyte Debuts New Motherboards
July 14, 2011 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
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Gigabyte just announced their new slate of motherboards that will support AMD’s A75 series chipsets and the latest AMD A-Series APUs or Llano. The new A75 based motherboards are said to offer DIY PC builders and developers a higher level of 3D and multimedia performance that is scalable and said to offer the best value upgrade path imaginable.
Gigabyte’s VP of Service and Marketing Henry Kao is quoted as saying that the new boards were new and exciting as AMD new APU’s were “ground breaking” APU technology. As well as bringing AMD A-Series technology to DIY users who demand excellent gaming and multimedia performance on a budget, these motherboards also offer a compelling upgrade path that includes Dual Graphics configurations.
The A75 motherboards from Gigabyte feature an AMD A75 ‘Hudson’ chipset supporting the latest 32 nanometer AMD A-Series APUs. That said, these chips are the first ever to combine a DX11-capable, high performance graphics processor with the option of a dual or quad core CPU on one silicon die, offering a 3D gaming and multimedia experience which is similar to a discrete graphics configuration.
Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet On Its Way
April 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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It appears that Lenovo is preparing to enter the tablet war over summer. Apparently, the tablet will focus on serious minded business professionals. It appears that the tablet will run Google’s popu;ar tablet OS called Honeycomb and will be equipped with Nvidia’s Tegra 2. To make sure consumers get their monies worth, the tablet will come with a keyboard to turn it into a useable notebook more or less. Sources are also claiming the screen size will be 10 inches and have a 1280×800 IPS and optical stylus.
AMD Debuts GPU
AMD has just unveiled their smallest 6-series graphics card to date. The HD 6450 is based on the Caicos GPU, with a die of only 75mm square, 160 shaders and a 64-bit memory bus.
The graphics card comes in two models one with 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked up to 800MHz or 512MB of GDDR5 up to 900MHz. Furthermore, the GPU runs at different clock speeds, 625MHz on DDR3 cards and 750MHz on the GDDR5 variant. Realistically, AMD should have used two different SKU with different clocks and memory to make life easier.
Intel Outs New Processors
Intel is not letting their Sandy Bridge design go to waste. They will soon release a series of Xeon server chips based on the 32nm Sandy Bridge core.The new chips have a maximum capacity of 10 cores, with hyper-threading and they are expected to deliver a 40 percent performance increase over the previous Xeon 7500 series.