TRIM with AMD & Marvell AHCI drivers! CES 2011: Intel motherboards from Sapphire CES 2011: the year of the Tegra for NVIDIA? Intel will pay USD 1.5 billion to NVIDIA AMD parts with its CEO

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TRIM with AMD & Marvell AHCI drivers!   Posted on 11/01/2011 at 14:34 by Marc

	As we’ve already explained on several occasions, the TRIM command is important because it prevents SSD performance deterioration over the course of use. Only this command allows the system to let the SSD know that it contains data which no longer corresponds to a file and allow the SSD to consider this space as free, therefore optimising future usage. Although Windows 7 supports the TRIM command natively, this also has to be the case for all other elements in the storage chain, inlcuding the SSD itself of course and the driver of the IDE or AHCI controller to which it's connected. This is of course the case for generic Microsoft IDE and AHCI drivers, which are installed automatically, but also Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers from version 9.6 up. Even just a few months ago however, AMD and Marvell AHCI drivers weren’t TRIM compatible, which was no big problem as the Microsoft drivers could still be used, but it did affect performance as the specific drivers generally give a small gain. We wanted to see if the latest versions of the AMD and Marvell drivers were now TRIM compatible, as the communication from AMD and Marvell on AHCI drivers has been very limited. We therefore tested the latest versions, namely: - The Marvell AHCI 1.0.0.1051s dated 22/11/2010 - The AMD AHCI 1.2.1.275s dated 11/11/2010 The Marvell drivers have been available for download from various sources since the end of December, such as here from ASRock for example, while you have to go to this page on the AMD site to find the AMD drivers which are officially called the 10.12s and which have been available since mid-December. So where are we with TRIM support in these drivers? Well, it works! We were able to check them out both with Indilinx and SandForce SSDs, whether using the SSD then checking if the original performance levels are restored after quick formating, or simply by checking to see if the data of a deleted file has also disappeared by analysing the content of the SSD directly using WinHEX.

CES 2011: Intel motherboards from Sapphire   Posted on 11/01/2011 at 08:42 by Damien

	Sapphire has been trying to join the little club of motherboard manufacturers for years now. Unfortunately, limited as it has been to the AMD platform (not an enormous market), it’s difficult for a newcomer to make a place for itself among the giants in the sector. Sapphire has however invested heavily, poached specialists from the competition and set up numerous projects. With the successive delays of numerous AMD platforms (Fusion, Bulldozer), Sapphire has found itself with unused resources and has therefore decided to allot part of the development to motherboards designed for the Intel platform, the competitor of its partner up to now. This is moreover why Sapphire placed an embargo on its new products until the end of CES, in this way rewarding AMD by only highlighting Fusion during the show. As things stand, Sapphire is getting ready to launch two models. Firstly the Pure Black X58, a motherboard for the LGA1366 platform which supports USB 3.0, Bluetooth and CrossFire X up to four cards, but without SLI support, relations with NVIDIA being distant to say the least and this has prevented Sapphire from obtaining a license (there are fairly simple get-arounds however): Next we have the Pure Black P67, designed for Sandy Bridge CPUs. In comparison to the X58, Sapphire has this time resolved the SLI license issue and used a Lucid chip which also allows you to connect up three graphics ports to the CPU: With an increasing range of motherboards and its already heavyweight presence on the graphics card market, Sapphire is bringing its influence to bear to obtain as wide an availability as possible for these new products.

CES 2011: the year of the Tegra for NVIDIA?   Posted on 11/01/2011 at 06:24 by Damien

	2011 is set to be a very significant year for NVIDIA with the arrival, at last, of numerous products based on the Tegra 2 chip, which includes an NVIDIA GPU and two ARM Cortex A9 cores clocked at 1 GHz. Since the purchase of PortalPlayer in 2006 and the announcement of the Apex 2500 in 2008 (which became Tegra 1), NVIDIA hasn’t slowed its efforts to break into the world of MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), without great success however. You have to say, the competition is tough with Qualcomm and Texas Instruments for example, and smartphone development cycles relatively long. Smartphones also require perfect energy consumption management, which may have posed a problem before Tegra was entirely optimised for this. Hesitant manufactuters and the long gestation times for tablets hasn’t helped either of course. Announced just a year ago, at CES 2010, Tegra 2 was taking up most of the NVIDIA stand, in various forms. The first significant markets won by NVIDIA were with car manufacturers such as Audi, BMW and Tesla, who are bulding their multimedia systems, and even entire virtual dashboards around SoC Tegra 2. Next in line, many Tegra 2 tablet projects are now underway. It’s difficult to say if they’ll all result in finished products as the industry is still testing the market, however most current projects based on Honeycomb (Android 3.0), optimised for tablets, are based on Tegra 2 because it’s the stock platform chosen by Google. Inversely, most Tegra 2 tablets are also based on Honeycomb and must therefore wait for it come out. The Asus EeePad Transformer. All kinds of stuff was on display at CES, some of it nicely finished (EeePad Transformer, Motorola Xoom) but some with very slow interfaces and very poor quality screens. And the screen is obviously determinant in the success of any tablet! Many manufacturers however seem to be struggling to get their hands on decent quality (contrast, brightness, viewing angles), which condemns many designs to failure. With an HDMI out, Tegra 2 smartphones can serve as pretty effective media centres with support for most video formats. Tegra 2 smartphones are starting to emerge from manufacturers such as LG (Optimus 2x) and Motorola (Atrix 4x and Droid Bionic). We had a brief chance to give these models a go and Tegra 2 looks as if it’s going to be one of the SoCs to take things forward and close the gap between smartphones and PCs. These smartphones also benefit from NVIDIA’s expertise in video gaming, whether in technological terms or relationships with developers, helping to transform these phones into relatively high-performance games consoles. It remains to be seen if high-end smartphones will manage to attract users interested in being able to game on their mobile devices and, of course, if Tegra 2 will be energy efficient enough. NVIDIA has so far avoided this question, falling back on the argument that the question of battery life depends on manufacturer choices with respect to battery, screen and so on.

Intel will pay USD 1.5 billion to NVIDIA   Posted on 11/01/2011 at 01:41 by Damien

	Intel and NVIDIA have just announced that they have reached an agreement in their cross-licensing dispute. After having improved AMD’s financial situation somewhat with a payment of USD 1.25 billion, now USD 1.5 billion will be paid in 6 annual installments to NVIDIA! In return NVIDIA has of course abandoned all legal actions against Intel. To recap, NVIDIA was charging Intel, among other things, with having broken a cross-licensing agreement by refusing it access to the DMI bus on its most recent CPUs, which resulted in ending its chipset activities prematurely. NVIDIA doesn’t however intend to relaunch these activities, even though a new cross-licensing deal was signed at the same time, prolonging the current deal until 2017. This new agreement still doesn’t give NVIDIA a license allowing it to develop an x86 CPU, but NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, recently declared very clearly that this wasn’t one of his objectives. At CES, NVIDIA said that they were developing a new ARM CPU architecture aimed at high performance solutions… a project that can now be viewed as being sponsored by Intel!

AMD parts with its CEO   Posted on 11/01/2011 at 01:13 by Damien

	AMD has announced that its CEO, Dirk Meyer, has offered his resignation and that it has been accepted by the board. In other words, results haven’t been convincing and the board of directors has taken the decision to review its top management. Dirk Meyer had the difficult task of stabilising AMD, bringing the legal actions against Intel to fruition and managing the separation of AMD from the factories that now belong to GlobalFoundries. He didn’t however manage to make AMD profitable and the board has decided that it needs new blood to make this happen. Dirk Meyer at CES. The decision was probably taken in the course of the final quarter of 2010 but the announcement was pushed to the closing of CES so as not to cast a shadow over the launch of its Fusion APUs. Dirk Meyer was moreover at CES and showed no sign of his imminent resignation, choosing rather to congratulate himself on the realisation of the long APU development process. AMD has set up a committee with the task of finding a CEO for the company as quickly as possible. For now, Thomas Seifert, the current CFO will take temporary charge. Let’s hope for AMD’s sake that the period of uncertainty will be short and won’t have a negative impact on the execution of projects that are underway and which are very important for the future of the company.