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 The race for the highest performance DDR3 is oddly starting to look like the one we saw with DDR2. This is happening while the new memory standard is far from replacing its predecessor, which indeed isn’t the most profitable for memory manufacturers given current price levels.
This week, OCZ announced two new products. One of them is a 2x1GB PC3-12800/DDR3-1600 kit whose voltage is at 1.9V. Latencies were given at 7-7-7 (7-6-6-20 with ASUS motherboards). And more recently, 1GB DDR3 PC3-14400/DDR3-1800 modules have appeared on this manufacturer’s website certified for latencies of 8-8-8-27 and with an identical voltage. Here again, Asus motherboard "optimization" is more favorable. These well also be available in 2x1GB kits, however, we have no idea when and at what price. |
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 The European Commission gave the green light for a German government subsidy of €262 million for AMD’s €2.2 billion investment project in Dresden. This will represent 12% of the total amount. Neelie Kroes’ (European Commissioner for Competition) department, came to the conclusion that this aid was conform to EU law, notably due to the fact that market shares of the Texan giant are and should stay less than 25% even after the investment. The project aims to convert and enlarge the current wafer factory and create 565 additional jobs.
We will just have to see if this good news will not be rapidly overshadowed by AMD’s report of financial results for the second quarter, which should be known in the next few hours. |
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 Intel revealed its financial results for the second quarter of 2007. Revenue amounted to $8.7 billion, which represents an improvement of 8% compared to the same period last year and a 2% sequential decrease. Operational profits which reached $1.35 billion showed similar behavior, because they are 26% higher than last year and 19% less compared to the first three months of 2007. It’s the same for net income (which takes into account taxes and purely finance aspects) at $1.3 billion, which increased 47% compared to Q2 of 2006 and decreases 21% compared to Q1 of this year.
These numbers are more or less positive, however, the Santa Clara giant doesn’t hide the fact that its gross profits, which attained 46.9%, were affected by falling average sales prices and this wasn’t entirely compensated for by higher sales of CPUs in terms of units. As for chipsets, there were record sales, but here again in terms of units. This can be explained by the feeble results of VIA & SiS, AMD’s progressive withdrawal, and the fact that Nvidia is mainly courting the high end on this market. We can also note that the mixed performances of the flash division are still directly affecting Intel because the joint-venture with STwill only see the day in the fourth quarter. |
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 The AMD graphic division just published Catalyst 7.7 for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista destined for the entire line of this company’s DirectX 9 & 10 desktop GPUs as well as its IGPs of the same generation.
Besides performances, which can gain up to 13.2% in Far Cry with Radeon HD 2x00s, there are also notably some improvements in Avivo functionalities in the Catalyst Control Center and in support of Theater Mode in Windows Vista. More interesting is that these drivers will introduce Anti-Aliasing modes equivalent to 12X and 24X filtering for DirectX 10 GPUs. This will be done by combining new Anti-Aliasing "Edge Detect" with 4X or 8X filtering. The possibility of three times the quality of current modes looks promising, at least in theory, because the beta versions of these modes didn’t convince us in tests of the Radeon HD 2900.
Finally, a number of bugs was corrected, notably in the games Call of Juarez, Doom3, Lost Planet, Monsters.Inc, Pacific Fighters, Quake 3 & 4 in Windows Vista, as well as Call of Duty 2 and Neverwinter Nights with Windows XP. |
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