The end of AMD's P-Rating The GeForce 8400GS on June the 19th TSMC to progress on 45, 40, 32 and 22nm Corsair releases the DDR3 Dominator Intel Pentium E & Celeron 4xx

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The end of AMD's P-Rating   Posted on 04/06/2007 at 22:49 by Nicolas - source: DailyTech

	Unsurprisingly, AMD will also abandon the antic P-Rating for the future processors of the Phenom line. If we don't know what the Phenom FX numbers will be, we now know that first Phenom X4 and X2 names will be GP-7xxx and GS-6xxx. The first letter designates the position in the product line and the second the level of dissipation (the P is for a TDP superior to 65 Watts, the S for a TDP close to this thermal envelope and the E for an inferior level to this value). Two different type of Athlon will be sold: the BE-2xxx, which will be announced tomorrow, and the LS-2xxx. The latter curiously share the letter "L" with the future Sempron LE-1xxx. This let us believe that the segmentation of AMD's products will probably change if the Athlon BE-2xxx were to disappear first. On second thoughts, was the P-Rating that bad?

The GeForce 8400GS on June the 19th   Posted on 04/06/2007 at 22:18 by Nicolas - source: VR-Zone

	Nvidia will release the GeForce 8400GS the 19th of June. If the US target price of $45 for a graphic card supporting DirectX 10 might sound attractive, the memory bus of 64bit is two times smaller than the GeForce 8500GS's that features the same G86 and runs at the same GPU/memory frequencies: 450/400MHz. According to the figures communicated by the Californian manufacturer, the performances of this card would be slightly inferior to the GeForce 7300GT. We remind you that this card is, from our point of view, the bare minimum to play while accepting serious compromises. It is also important to point out that the latter has a memory bus of 128bit and that the performance gap might be in practice (much) more important. Under those circumstances, the points of the support of DirectX 10 or the performances announced as being much higher than the Radeon HD 2400 Pro are almost inexistent. This is all the more true that the Aero interface of Windows Vista works with DirectX 9 and perfectly runs with the latest entry level GPUs of this generation. In short, this graphic card is mostly for OEMs who want to attract customers with advanced but unusable functionalities in practice and small prices.

TSMC to progress on 45, 40, 32 and 22nm   Posted on 04/06/2007 at 21:41 by Nicolas - source: Digitimes

	According to Jack Sun, VP of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company essentially known from the general public thanks to some of its clients like Nvidia, ATI or VIA, seems to be taking some giant steps on 32 nm. The latter indicates that a team of more than 200 engineers are working on this manufacturing process and that the first 32nm circuits will be out in Q4, 2009. Closer to us, if we already knew that the production of 45nm circuits was about to start in September, we now know that the company is moving quickly for an even more advanced version than this one. Various tests are scheduled for May 2008 to test the fabrication process with as many circuits as possible and this with higher density and higher frequencies while maintaining the leakage current at the same level. This period of the year will also be the time of the official release of the 40nm process. Finally, Jack Sun declared that a pilot study for 22nm as currently going on. This announcement is very cautious and pragmatic because TSMC won't probably negotiate this step alone.

Corsair releases the DDR3 Dominator   Posted on 04/06/2007 at 14:23 by Marc

	Corsair released at Computex the first DDR3 « Dominator » memory. Up until today, the product line featured rather standard DDR3-1067 7-7-7 and DDR3-1333 9-9-9 memory modules. The TWIN3X2048-1600C10D is certified to work in DDR3-1600 with timings of 10-8-8-24. The price is announced as being slightly inferior to $600! On the short term, in Q3, Corsair is also planning on releasing DDR3-1600 CL9, but also DDR3-1866 and DDR3-2000 memory modules in 2 and 4GB versions. If the price for 2 GB of DDR3-1866 is close to $1000, we can be worried about the price of 4 GB of DDR3-2000. Compared to the DDR2-800, this will be really expensive compared to the performance improvement in practice…

Intel Pentium E & Celeron 4xx   Posted on 04/06/2007 at 09:06 by Marc

	Intel releases today new more affordable versions of the Core architecture used for the Core 2 Duo through two new product lines, the Pentium E 21x0 and Celeron 4x0. The first one are dual cores but have 1MB of L2 instead of 2 to 4 MB for the Core 2, and the second ones are single cores featuring 512 KB of L2 cache. The fastest of these CPU, the Pentium E 2160, is clocked at 1.8 GHz like the Core 2 E4300. The price of these new processors depends on the cache and falls from $113 to $84. This is similar to the X2 3800+and Intel now has a product to compete with it. The Pentium E 2140, priced $74 and clocked at 1.6 GHz, will compete with the 3600+. As usual, the influence of the L2 cache size will depend on the applications. Having "only" 1MB of L2 cache will have a much greater impact for compression or games, 5 to 10% higher performance like with 2 or 4MB, than for encoding or 3D rendering. Logically, the Pentium E will be faster than the equivalent Athlon 64 X2 when the cache size isn't too important and when it will be the case, performances will be more or less similar. For overclocking, results seem to depend on the products. Some of the Pentium E 21x0s are apparently stuck to 2.8 GHz and others reach up to 3.4 GHz. We will finish with one word about the Celeron 4xx: if they are even more affordable than the Pentium E, $49 for the version 430 at 1.8 GHz, but we have to keep in mind that the presence of only one core will become more and more of an handicap for applications optimized for multithreading. Considering the current dual core entry ticket, whether if it is for AMD or Intel, it would be a shame not to take advantage of it.