Photos of the RV635: the DisplayPort is there Phenom perfs after the patch : -11% ! STEC: high density and affordable SSDs

Décembre 2007 L M M J V S D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 You can read previous news using our archives. [ Print all news of this day ]

<< Previous day's news December 5, 2007

Next day of news >> December 7, 2007

Photos of the RV635: the DisplayPort is there   Posted on 06/12/2007 at 23:37 by Nicolas

	HotHardware has published some photos of a card equipped with an RV635. You may recall that this GPU engraved in 55 nm should replace the RV630 which equips the Radeon HD 2600 Pro and XT. While it’s pretty much given that we shouldn’t expect significant performance gains, its main interest (besides its low production cost) is native DisplayPort support. DisplayPort, HDMI & DVI-D This interface is proposed by the VESA group which is comprised of most industry leaders in the world of display and video on PCs such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Sony, NEC and even IIyama. Furthermore, it aims to replace the current standards of DVI, LVDS, and in the long term, VGA. The characteristics of the 1.1 revision include: HDCP 1.3 norm compatibility, its size is comparable to a USB connector, it allows design simplification, and there is optional audio support and a bandwidth of 10.8 gigabits/sec.

Phenom perfs after the patch : -11% !   Posted on 06/12/2007 at 15:44 by Marc

	The Tech Report was able to test a Phenom with a motherboard that has the bios with the patch that deactivates the problematic part of the processor mentioned in this news item. The impact is quite significant as bandwidth decreases from 5.4 to 3.65 GB /s after the patch, while memory latency goes from 59 to 99ns. Besides a rather bizarre result in Firefox in which the pre-patch version is 80% faster (!), performance differences are between 4.8% and 29.9% with an average of 11% in application tests. Firefox results were excluded. Given that performances of the Phenom already didn’t match up to the Core 2 Q6600’s despite similar pricing, it goes without saying that the Phenom is of no interest in its current state. We are impatiently awaiting the B3 revision of this processor which should correct the TLB bug without impacting performances as well as allow higher increases in frequency.

STEC: high density and affordable SSDs   Posted on 06/12/2007 at 13:11 by Nicolas - source: STEC

	STEC has unveiled the MACH8-MLC, an SSD equipped with multi-level NAND flash memory. By turning to this memory which is less expensive than simple level NAND flash but at the same time slower, this California memory manufacturer hopes to offer SSD at half the price in 2008. Thanks to a new and elaborated controller, speeds in reading/writing will attain 90 and 60 MB /s. This is lower than Samsung’s SSD SATA-II (100 and 80 MB /s) but should nevertheless be amply enough. On the other hand, power consumption takes a blow as it is multiplied by a factor of between 4 and 5. In load it will be at 2.1W and in stand-by 0.5W while the SSD of its South Korean rival is at 0.5W and 0.1W, respectively. Better yet, the MACH8-MLC is planned in 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512 GB versions when this is currently most often limited to 64 GB in best case scenarios. In terms of the interface, there will be SATA-II or PATA. Finally, they are planned in 1.8" and 2" 1/2 formats. For availability, we only know that the first few samples are being shipped. These SSDs are destined for laptops and the price is about $5 per GB. This is interesting but still a bit high.