Toshiba delivers the first few SpursEngine SE1000s AMD: CPUs with more than 8 cores? Product review: NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Product review : The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 AMD: layoffs & a slight improvement

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Toshiba delivers the first few SpursEngine SE1000s   Posted on 08/04/2008 at 23:25 by Nicolas - source: Toshiba

	Toshiba has announced the delivery of the first samples of a card in PCI-Express x1 format, the SpursEngine SE1000, which is accompanied by a kit destined for développeurs. It has 128 MB of XDR DRAM and a processeur (with 4 cores) derived from the Cell that equips the Sony PS3 set at 1.5 GHz. This enables hardware support of the encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 in Full HD as the calculation of the card attains 48 GFlops. Because the support of developers and partners is crucial in attaining the ambitious goal of 6 million cards sold in the next 3 years, the Japanese manufacturer has announced that it is now working with big names like Corel, CyberLink and Leadtek.

AMD: CPUs with more than 8 cores?   Posted on 08/04/2008 at 22:57 by Nicolas

	Corporate vice president of server & workstation division at AMD. Not only is the arrival of the Montreal (up to 8 cores and 12 MB of L3 cache) still planned for 2009 but also there may be several other CPUs with more than 8 cores thanks to AMD architecture. According to rare information which has been gathered up until now, it’s not excluded that the Montreal will in fact consist of 2 dies each with 4 cores. In these conditions, it’s indeed foreseeable that AMD can outdo the Montreal because they will "simply" have to increase the number of dies in the processor. Will this be a way to fully take advantage of the G3MX? Moreover, he mentioned that these CPUs based on Shanghai architecture will have a higher IPC (instruction per clock cycle) than those based on the Barcelona. With an L3 cache which can be as high as 6 MB and 45nm engraving that will facilitate frequency increases, we could hope that AMD will have something to challenge the Penryn at the end of the year. The only thing is that Intel’s first Nehalems are expected out in the third quarter…

Product review: NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI   Posted on 08/04/2008 at 16:13 by Marc

	After a lukewarm nForce 780i, NVIDIA comes back with the 790i. In addition to native PCI-Express 2.0 support, it is the first DDR3 nForce. Can it stand up to the X38? > Product review: NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI

Product review : The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2   Posted on 08/04/2008 at 13:46 by Damien

	Nvidia follows AMD in the realm of dual GPU cards enabling the creation of a new high end product without a new GPU. So is the GeForce 9800 GX2 of interest to gamers? > Product review : The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2

AMD: layoffs & a slight improvement   Posted on 08/04/2008 at 13:44 by Nicolas - source: InformationWeek

	Yesterday, AMD confirmed that a 10% reduction in its workforce is planned between now and the end of September representing around 1600 employees. Apparently, the Austin, Texas site will be the most affected. It’s evidently a direct consequence of AMD’s poor results that have plagued it for some time now. Even if the trend is slowly improving, the company has no other choice other than economizing a little in all areas if it wants to eventually come back to the high end. While complete financial results for the first quarter of 2008 which ended March 29th will be known April 17th, the creator of the Athlon has already estimated revenue at $1.5 billion or 22% better than the same period last year and a 15% reduction from last quarter.