ATI Catalyst 8.4 AMD 790GX: photos & specs 4/20 reduction: -50% on the Q6700 Intel results for Q1

Avril 2008 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 You can read previous news using our archives. [ Print all news of this day ]

<< Previous day's news April 15, 2008

Next day of news >> April 17, 2008

ATI Catalyst 8.4   Posted on 16/04/2008 at 22:58 by Nicolas

	ATI has just put the Catalyst 8.4 online for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista. As usual, it is destined for all of this firm’s GPUs which have DirectX 9 support or higher. This means from the Radeon 9500 to the HD 3800 X2 including the Xpress 200. A number of bugs are remedied in Windows Vista, notably in Company of Heroes, Crysis, Doom 3, Hellgate : London, Lost Planet and Tabula Rasa. Performance gains in Tomb Raider Anniversary with CrossFire configurations are also to be expected. In Windows XP, there are major fixes for 3DMark05, 3DMark06 and Lost Planet.

AMD 790GX: photos & specs   Posted on 16/04/2008 at 16:31 by Nicolas

	PConline has published photos of a Unika motherboard equipped with an AMD 790GX chipset. Quite similar to the 780G, it enables management of two PCI-E 2.0 x16 ports (cabled in x8) and integrates a Radeon HD 3300. This last component can notably utilize a Local Frame Buffer when the manufacturer decides to include one as is the case here with a 64 MB DDR2-800 Hynix chip. The first cards should be available starting next month.

4/20 reduction: -50% on the Q6700   Posted on 16/04/2008 at 13:24 by Nicolas

	Fudzilla has published what will be Intel’s price reductions planned for the 20th of April; however, there are some discrepancies with the current price list of the Santa Clara giant. According to some rumors that have come to our attention and adding certain details already published, here is a preview based on general information: The Core 2 Quad Q6700, which has been unattractive for some time now given its high price, will now be a good deal although the Q6600 will remain a must for those looking for a very affordable quad core processor. The Core 2 Duo E8300 and E7200, both based on the Woldfdale core and therefore engraved in 45nm, should also be rather popular.

Intel results for Q1   Posted on 16/04/2008 at 11:16 by Nicolas

	Intel has published its financial results for the first quarter of 2008 which ended March 29th. The below figures are in billions of dollars. The decrease compared to last quarter can be easily explained by seasonal factors as end of the year sales are generally excellent. Unsurprisingly, the figures are due to sales of lower volumes as average prices have remained stable. Compared to the same period last year, the company even did 9% better. In terms of profits, the 12% decrease may seem surprising because gross profits were good at 53.8% and operating profits increased 23% over the same period last year. Intel attributes this to an exceptional restructuring costing $329 million and related to the creation of Numonyx, the flash branch that was created with STMicroelectronics and Francisco Partners. However, there were especially tax provisions that more than tripled attaining $728. Note that the geographical distribution of sales was very stable. The Asia-Pacific zone represented 50% of revenue, North America 21%, Europe 19% and Japan 10%. One interesting detail was that while CPU sales in the desktop and mobile segments rose, those of chipsets in the mobile segment followed the same trend while sales on the desktop in this area decreased. Given that AMD and VIA are now out of the game (or almost) for this type of product, we can see that competition from Nvidia is starting to have an impact.