During a press conference for financial analysts last Friday, AMD confirmed the release in 2006 of Athlon 64 processors including the new Presidio and Pacifica technologies.
These denominations correspond to new technologies, but not to new cores. The Presidio technology is the equivalent of the LaGrande for Intel. This function increases the security level, but could have unpleasant consequences as it’s based on the Palladium technology, already the subject of many articles about possible misuses.
Pacifica is the equivalent of the Virtual Technology (VT) for Intel also known as VanderPool. Pacifica permits the dissociation of the OS from the hardware and allows the operation of several OSs on a single computer.
In 2006, AMD’ Athlon 64 should work with dual DDR2 channels and the Sempron with dual DDR channels. These new information are in contradiction with the last rumours mentioning 2005.
Every month, ATI releases new Catalyst drivers for Windows 2000/XP. The new version, named 4.11, includes a few modifications. One of the bugs corrected used to reduce performances of AGP 256 MB graphic cards with software using intensively video memory…for example 3DMark05.