Gainward: 8600GT-LE 1024MB at 165€ LWP: the successor of the AMD64 revealed

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Gainward: 8600GT-LE 1024MB at 165€   Posted on 14/08/2007 at 21:20 by Nicolas

	A strange GeForce 8600 GT has recently been spotted on Gainward’s site. Equipped with 1 GB of DDR2 set at 500 MHz, it is indeed a second class GeForce 8600 GT, because according to official specifications a GeForce 8600 GT is normally equipped with GDDR3 memory set at 700 MHz. You may recall that these "GeForce 8600LE" were supposed to be reserved for the OEM market, which really isn’t Gainward’s domain, and it’s actually just the opposite. To be sure, the card’s GPU functions at 600MHz, which represents a light overclocking (+11% compared to the standard 540MHz), but there is little chance that this is enough to compensate for the losses caused by memory that is 30% slower. It’s also highly unlikely that the supplementary 768MB does the job or finds another use except misleading potential buyers. In short, nothing justifies its price which is around 165€ in Germany.

LWP: the successor of the AMD64 revealed   Posted on 14/08/2007 at 20:34 by Nicolas

	AMD has published the first specifications of Light-Weight Profiling in the context of its initiative aiming to offer hardware extensions to improve software parallelism. More specifically, this is a new set of instructions destined to extend those already present within the current AMD64 architecture. It will allow certain modules such as dynamic optimizers or managed runtime environments (Virtual Java Machine and Framework .NET amongst others) to oversee with much more precision the program being executed in order to examine performances in real time and to instantly improve them by using the data it has gathered. Multicore architectures which are equipped with it can therefore be better used by programs (mono or multi threads) taking into account these new extensions. However, it will still be some time before LWP is implemented into AMD’s CPUs and is used, because it will also need to be managed by the operating system. Documentation is already available on AMD’s site, named Lightweight Profiling Proposal, and it will most likely evolve.