The German memory manufacturer Qimonda, chosen by AMD as a supplier of GDDR5 for the first Radeon HD 4870s, should start producing this high performance memory in 58nm versus the current 70nm next year enabling to reduce production costs. Moreover, 128 MB sized chips should soon be produced in volume in the second half of this year. For comparison, Hynix already offers 128 MB chips of GDDR5 engraved in 66nm and Samsung already aims for a frequency of 3 GHz for its GDDR5, which corresponds to a bandwidth of 192 GB /s with a 256 bit standard width memory controller. With an ambitious objective of a 30% GDDR market share, the memory division of the Infineon group indeed wants to keep up. They skipped over GDDR4, which it’s true did not have much success, in order to concentrate on the development of GDDR5.

	It was finally today that VIA has officially launched the first five Nano processors equipped with the Isaiah core. Their creator announces that they are now available for OEMs and motherboard vendors. Otherwise, systems that integrate it should arrive on the market in the third quarter. You may recall that this is the firstx86 64bit CPU from VIA. It comes after a two year delay and was conceived by Centaur Technology, the CPU subsidiary of this Taiwanese company. The processor still uses the FSB800, but some models support the FSB1333. Engraved in 65nm by Fujitsu, there is virtualization technology similar to that used by Intel. It has two L1 caches of 64 KB and L2 16-way type associative cache increases to 1 MB. Of course, it is pin-to-pin compatible with the C7 and as on this former model, the ex-chipset giant insists on the low level of power consumption which can be lowered to as little as 0.1W in idle. As for performances, the first benches, which appeared in early April, are generally encouraging even if the FPU is still rather weak. The very recent press release specifies that it is optimized for the heaviest applications, which includes Blu-ray Disc™ HD video playback and the latest PC games, such as Crysis. This may be the case for more powerful models (in the future there will be 2 GHz, dual cores in late 2009 and 45nm engraving), but it seem a bit too optimist for the U2300. Still this could be an alternative to the Intel Atom in certain segments as well as the fact that it will be at the center of the VN "nVIAdia" platform, which will have a DirectX 10 IGP and a price announced at less than $45. A PDF document with all of these details and benchmarks opposing it to the C7 is available here!

	Historically, the SouthBridge has (too) often been the Achille’s heel of ATI and AMD chipsets and without surprise as the buyout of the former by the latter has not resolved all problems on this level. The SB700, which accompanies recent AMD 7xx Northbridges, is moreover no exception as certain functions such as Raid 5 were curiously missing. The SB750 now supports this function according to Foxconn which has announced the A79A-S, an AMD 790FX motherboard equipped with this new SouthBridge. The Taiwanese company specifies moreover that it also enables support of OverDrive Extreme (which corresponds to the 3.0 version of AMD’s utility) and therefore to optimize the overclocking of Phenom processors.

	The new 3DMark, called Vantage, has just been released. What’s the interest of this new version designed for DirectX 10? Our analysis was quite critical... > Our opinion of 3DMark Vantage .