Intel Larrabee to Support Both DirectX and OpenGL

Intel has been showing presentations on Larrabee for sometime now, but hasn’t openly talked about what instructions it will understand, clock speeds or even a hard launch date. For people who do not know, Larrabee is Intel’s attempt to integrate GPU with CPU and create GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) or computing through the use of graphics processing units. Intel today made it clear at Siggraph 2008 that Larrabee will support both DirectX and OpenGL for graphics processing.

Intel already has the highest market share in the GPU world, thanks to integrated graphics processors (IGP) in its chipset's sold with motherboards. But due to the dismal performance over the years of these IGP chipsets, no one ever considers these capable enough for mainstream gaming. Benchmarks have shown time and again that even the most basic discrete graphic cards can perform better than IGPs. With Larrabee, Intel has intentions to bring more computing/graphics power with lesser power requirements.

Larry Seiler, senior engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group said that, Larrabee's consists of cores derived from Pentium processors and have added multithreading and 64-bit instructions. Each core consists of 256kb L2 cache and the first release of Larrabee will have 8 to 48 cores depending on the market segment. Larrabee also has advanced multi-core capabilities and uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network for fast, low latency communication between the cores.

The programming paradigm doesn’t change with Larrabee because it uses the same x86 instructions used by Intel’s current generation microprocessors. Also with DirectX and OpenGL support inside Larrabee it confirms that current generation games will also work fine. But without any mention of the performance improvement in graphics capabilities over current generation IGPs, I still have doubts whether Intel is actually competing with its own processors or with the GPU vendors like ATI (now AMD) and  NVidia. Larrabee does look solid on paper, but as we know papers do create a lot more hype than they can perform and Intel marketing does know how to play that game.

AMD also has been working on Fusion processor which will integrate AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs into one chip. NVidia on the other hand has create a new programming paradigm with CuDA, which tries to enable normal computer processing to NVidia’s GPU. Whichever company wins this GPGPU battle, we would like to see all of them fight on the same grounds and support existing standards. Today’s Larrabee announcement confirms that both the DirectX and OpenGL standards are followed and will allow current breed of games to run on the Larrabee.

Processor Errata to be Next Big Virus Exploit

Writing cross-platform viruses were nearly impossible earlier and hence a virus would mostly affect only Windows or Linux or OSX, but not all of these together. Most Linux/*nix/Mac users felt viruses were only for Windows users, because of underlying OS protection in Unix user access model was good enough. But all of it could change if malware was written for common hardware platform such as Microprocessors or BIOS or Hardware Firmware. Well known author and security researcher, Kris Kaspersky is going to demonstrate how to create malware for processor bugs at the Hack-In-The-Box Security Conference (HITB) to be held from 27th-30th Oct, 2008 at Malaysia.

Processors from Intel and AMD often contain bugs known as errata and generally the way to fix these bugs is by updating the BIOS or Firmware in motherboards. Nearly every generation of processor has these bugs and if these aren’t any major bug, then no one even knows of them in normal computer functioning. But in some special cases these bugs affect some computers or software being used, and that’s when these bugs come into the light. Like the recent TLB Errata in 1st generation Opteron (Barcelona) processors from AMD would corrupt data in certain situations.

Currently, there isn’t a truly generalized way to exploit processor bugs and requires some detailed understanding of hardware and software combination. Most processor manufacturers don’t even mention deep details on the bugs and hence exploring them is a little more tough. Kris Kaspersky has claims to have found some way using JavaScript to exploit these bugs. Also, JIT compilers from Java Virtual Machines may be used to uncover and exploit the bugs, according to the Abstract of the Presentation at HITB.

If Kris Kaspersky’s “Hacker Disassembling Uncovered: Powerful Techniques To Safeguard Your Programming” book is anything to go by, we may have excellent and easy example by which he demonstrates the exploits. It could easily be replicated and understood by hackers and worked upon for other bugs. Stopping such exploits would be tough not just for anti-virus makers, but also for Operating system patches. And even if some fix is released on the motherboard BIOS, it is generally not implemented by all motherboard manufacturers... And user ignorance towards these BIOS updates is not even worth mentioning! This could easily be one of the tough and complex security problems to have come up!

Power 7 Will Be IBM’s Supercomputing King

This weekend I heard a few guys from IBM India getting really excited about the next-generation microprocessor called Power 7 which will be released in H1 2010. The Power 7 processor is still not a final design but nonetheless, it is turning out to be an awesome processor. IBM’s latest plans show that Power 7 will be a 8-core processor, clocked at anywhere between 3.6Ghz-4.0Ghz.

Power 7 is a completely new architecture and is being developed at Austin, Böblingen, Rochester Research Centers. There are rumors that Opteron and Power 7 may share a common socket, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the current design of the processor. But I got hints that things on the socket front could be changed during the final few weeks.

Power 7 is also a multi-thread per core CPU and current designs suggest it can execute about 4 threads per core. It still isn’t running optimally at the moment, but the target is to achieve full performance on all the 4 threads. This still makes Sun’s Rock the multi-threading king in the next-generation of processors. But IBM is high on the number crunching game. Each Power 7 core will be 32GFlops and that means on a 8-cores it going to output at 256GFlops. That’s no mean achievement!

Unlike the Power 6, which had its main aim towards improving single-core performance and max clocked at 6Ghz in prototypes, the Power 7 is working towards a multi-core, multi-threaded processor. From Intel to Sun, everyone has realized the potential efficiency of multi-core design and IBM hopes to lead the pack with Power 7. And to become the winner of the lot, Power 7 will compete against Sun’s Rock (UltraSPARC T2 Processors), Intel’s Itanium and Xeon (Nehelam-based) to some extent as well as its friendly technology partner AMD’s Opteron. IBM’s main goal with Power 7 is at the High-Performance Computing markets and supercomputers, where IBM already rules the roost.

If you look for stats at Top500 Supercomputers from around the world, you’ll realize what I mean by IBM ruling the roost. IBM has lots of BlueGene machines that use the old PowerPC processors, but not many newer generation processors. The reason to this is two-fold. IBM’s last generation processor Power 6 and to some extent Power 5 isn’t very power efficient. Power 6 heats up quite a bit and would require massive engineering skills to bring 1000s of these chips together inside a supercomputer. On the other hand, IBM has plans to mix-match Power 7 and Cell microprocessors in future supercomputers. Cell processors are known to be good specialized FP units and matching it with Power 7, IBM hopes to reach more than 10 petaflop from a supercomputer.

AMD Brings Back All-In-Wonder

AMD has released a press announcement that it Expands The Ultimate Visual Experience™ combining exceptional HD Graphics, HDTV, and HD Video for PCs. This   actually means that AMD is going to bring back the good ‘ol TV Tuner + graphics card that ATI used to sell under the All-In-Wonder line of products. The new ATI All-In-Wonder card is a PCI-Express 2.0, has the HD3650 GPU and Theater 650 Pro TV Tuner.

After AMD had stopped selling these products, with the last launch in Jan 2006, it does come as a surprise to a lot of people. The big advertisement with this launch is that AMD is making here is that it is full HD and can record in full HD. It can playback BlueRay and HD content at 1080p.

From the press release:

ATI All-in-Wonder HD prepares you for brilliant TV, sharp images and smooth playback on a wide variety of HDTVs and displays. With support for Microsoft DirectX® 10.1, gamers can play the top HD games with life-like 3D graphics, stunning realism, and great shading effects. Full support for PCI Express 2.0 technology allows for twice the throughput of current PCI Express 1.0 cards, which means gamers will be ready for demanding graphic applications.

The price of the product is going to be around $199 and sounds like a really good deal and value-for-money. The full spec-sheet can be found here. The plans are to hit the streets by July end.

AMD Working on Intel’s Physics Havok

AMD and Intel are rarely to be found in friendly talk. But this time, AMD is in talks with Intel to integrate “Havok FX” physics in its ATI graphics chips which is meant to improve realism in games and physics calculations in scientific applications. Intel last year acquired physics technology company Havok, and AMD plans to use its API inside GPUs.

AMD, like Intel has plans to have integrated CPU+GPU processors, but plans to use Havok physics in discrete graphics. The main competitor in the physics processing technology is Ageia, which was acquired by Nvidia. With two different technologies for physics, AMD decision to use Havok has important implications for game developers as well as scientific application developers. Nvidia has been pushing Ageia’s Physx technology to game developers and AMD was starting to feel lost. Today’s discussion about AMD using Havok gives AMD an advantage and its called Intel marketing. Intel will be using Havok inside its CPU+GPU Larabee and developers will be magically tilted towards using Havok because of Intel’s large market share.

The official announcement about how much AMD has to give Intel for the technology is still not out, but surely good money will change hand. Physics will definitely play an important role in the future of GPUs, either in games or general purpose computing. Along with ray-tracing, Intel is betting a lot on physics for the future of advanced computing and HPC. AMD has lots of room to maneuver, since it can switch between GPUs and CPUs with good ease. Lets wait and see how everything falls into place!!

NVidia Wishes It Could Live Like Intel

Nvidia has been kicking quite a lot of mud on Intel. Recently, it started with Nvidia claiming the GPU is more important than the CPU, then it was calling Larabee a powerpoint slide and then claiming that Intel is a monopoly that doesn't want anyone else in the market. But in reality, NVidia dreams to be at Intel's position and its been proved once again with NVidia buying Utah-based ray-tracing company RayScale.

If you've been following the discussion, or you read the above links, then you'll realize how pissed off the Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has got with Intel. The reason for this anger is that Intel has been researching on architectures that are supposed to replace GPU (graphic cards) from computers. If Intel succeeds, it means Nvidia are without a market. Intel calls these next-gen processors that will be able to process graphics along with normal CPU operations as Larabee. AMD is also working on something similar called Fusion. NVidia on the other than doesn't have much to bet on. Although CUDA is starting to make GPUs do the work of CPUs, its way more steeper upgrade curve. Imagine porting all your normal Apps to CUDA vs Optimizing your games for a CPU that can show graphics.

With all that trouble knocking on Nvidia's doors, obviously you can't blame Jen-Hsun Huang for his anger. But today's buy of RayScale could point to what NVidia could do in the future. Intel has been pursuing a lot of research on Ray-tracing as a replacement for the vector processing that we see on today's graphic cards. Ray-tracing can be done on CPUs or Larabee/Fusion and could render images on screen, with more realistic lighting and shadow effects. Currently it takes a lot of processing, but it isn't too far from becoming mainstream once we have optimized processors. NVidia may be preparing for such a product and RayScale could be its software partner to move in that direction.

Nvidia also does not have the great fabs that Intel owns. Intel's strength is its production and NVidia really can't manufacture its own designs. Thus, if Nvidia even manages to create a killer GPU+CPU, how can it create enough of these for the entire world?? AMD on the other hand with their ATI buy can switch anywhere between a CPU+GPU or GPU+CPU... But haven't you heard: If you've got one leg in one boat and the other leg in another boat, you end up catching your groin!!

Intel Steals AMD's Supercomputer Shopper

Cray and Intel announced today that they have established an R&D deal for research on next generation supercomputers. Cray Inc is one of the best supercomputer and high-performance computing manufacturer and mainly has been using AMD processors in its machines. Cray and Intel will be researching on the use of Larabee accelerators in supercomputers.

Larabee is Intel's next-generation GPGPU initiative, which is the cunning plan to use graphic cards to do other computing tasks than just showing graphics. GPU are known to have high-floating point processing capabilities and the industry has decided its time to use it for some math. AMD's ATI acquisition was on similar grounds and AMD today manufactures AMD Stream Processors that do the same thing. Nvidia with its CUDA is also doing a same thing.

AMD must be pretty sad that it hasn't been able to pull something similar with its Stream Processors. AMD Opteron has been pretty popular among supercomputer manufacturers due to scalability brought through HyperTransport architecture. Cray shares seem to have risen due to some excitement with AMD's chip availability, but I suspect its more to do with the Intel partnership.

Stream Processing are going to be the future of high-performance computing. Even on desktops, it'll be either be processors doing GPU work or GPU doing processors work sometime in the future.

AMD Launches New Processerr... GoHome'on

AMD has been struggling and much of it is because of bad execution and sitting on the laurels when it was winning in the CPU race. AMD's financial woes featuring huge debt after ATI buy continues and in this hard time they do like corporates always do. But in AMD style of bad names, they released a new processerr called GoHome'on and like 'Athlon and Duron', its not going to be met well by the markets. Its basically a product to ask employees to leave the job and "Go Home!!"

AMD expects revenues for the quarter ending March 29 to drop approximately 15 per cent drop from previous quarter but up 22 per cent over 1Q 2007. Generally Q1 is not the best time for microprocessor business, but this story is longer than that... AMD has been struggling with the performance and Intel has been executing better than ever.

AMD announced that it will layoff about 10% of its current workforce starting mid-April and finish the entire procedure by Q3. This means after the exercise finishes, 1,650 AMD employees will be doing something else. The markets haven't taken the news well and AMD is down by more than 4%. In the meanwhile, Hector is still on the hotseat trying to convince it'll be good someday and his expected successor Dirk Mayer is optimistic.

AMD just a week ago was saying that the layoffs are rumours. And today it confirms that there will be layoffs. The financial results will be out on the 17th of April and probably the layoffs are to promise some expenditure cuts on AMD's part... Hopefully, we aren't loosing some good chip designer who would have created something to fight Intel... Or else we will see AMD just limping around behind Intel!!

AMD Working With Intel

As odd it may seem, the story holds ground and is one of the useful steps for the Centrino 2 platform of notebooks. Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla claims that AMD is working hard with Intel to develop switchable graphics in future Centrino laptops. AMD is doing this in the notebooks with Puma and wants to have similar technology in notebooks with Intel chips and ATI/AMD graphic cards.

The thing about switchable graphics is that when your laptop is connected to the power unit or had good battery, it will use the graphics card. When the battery is low, it will switch to the onboard graphics. This will save power and make your battery life increase a little. Its generally close to 5-10% improvement, we heard the last time. But for the dying moments of laptop battery, I have experienced that you always remember the important work.

If you look at the image above, you'll see that the plus sign is red, just like red-cross... That's because it's one of the good things being done on the battlefield between Intel and AMD. This news makes you think how bitter rivals AMD and Intel are working together?? But actually its ATI which is working with Intel and I'm sure AMD has told its engineers not to look, talk, have lunch or discuss anything with Intel engineers. They just make faces when they meet and exchange some white documents with each other... Infact, news is that some even show the "middle-finger" to each other :))

nVidia To Buy Via To Make x86 Processors

Digitimes is reporting that nVidia may be in talks with Via for an acquisition, but no deal was made due to the high price named by Via. The war between nVidia, AMD and Intel is heating up and it seems the future holds a single chip for graphics and general purpose computing. It means very soon your computer will have a CPU or a GPU (graphics card), not both like we have in today's computers.

Intel recently talked about Larabee and its future platforms and made it clear that its moving through paces with its development of graphics in the CPU. AMD with ATI acquisition is also moving there and "Fusion", is AMD's plan for CPU+GPU processors. This leaves nVidia alone in its GPU world and it may well be the time when it wants to start making x86 processors as well. Via on the other hand, already has an x86 license and has been making processors for low-power devices. But Via isn't making enough money by selling these processors... This is what encouraged nVidia to make a bid for Via and sure is a good explanation for nVidia to buy Via.

Via also has good processor designs in the form of Isaiah which holds good future in the UMPC world. nVidia might be interested in acquiring the CPU design labs, Centaur because of some good designs that have come from there.

From Digitimes:

Nvidia and VIA discussed three possible scenarios, including a strategic alliance, acquisition of only VIA's processor division, or the acquisition of the entire company, according to the sources. Though no deal was agreed upon, since VIA continues to see losses, the company is expected to open up negotiations again soon with a lower price, noted the sources.

It'll be an interesting time in the CPU/GPU world in the coming few months... By next year, we would know if "GPU killed the CPUstar or CPU killed the GPUstar"

Intel To Release Hex-Core Processors

According to Maureen O'Gara from sys-con.com, it seems that Intel is all set to release a processor with Six cores. Yes, you heard me right...six. I think Intel understands that if AMD can start making tri-cores then may be six cores isn't a very bad idea.

The six core or hexacore processor goes by the codename "Dunnington" and has been designed at the Intel Design Center at Bangalore. It is a successor to the Harpertown processors of the Xeon-line of server processors from Intel. It is again supposed to be a sandwich of 3-dies, but this time its 3 dual-core processors that have been stitched together. The cores are sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Like other Penryns, Dunnington still uses a front-side bus. Dunnington is supposed to come at different clock speeds, with a total power consumption of less than 120W.

Intel will be releasing these just before the Nehalem are out and should be an interesting development. AMD on the other hand is just struggling with speed of the processors as well as the manufacturing and releasing of its products. Intel seems to be double of whatever AMD wants to do. AMD Tricore Vs Intel HexaCore.

AMD Releases Browser & Media Player

AMD which is known for making processors has released a set of software tools for its Live platform. The AMD Live is the product package from AMD to sell multimedia computers with software that can enable you to bring the computer to the living room. Intel also has a similar product and is called the ViiV. Don't they rhyme well!!

Today, AMD released a new piece of software known as AMD Live Explorer which is a software package built over Vista components. AMD will be shipping it free of cost along with its CPUs and Live machines. AMD recommends Phenom processors, but I'm sure you just need an AMD Live PC.

The AMD Live Explorer is a software suite with Image gallery,  Web browsing (using IE7 engine), Audio player (using WMP 11) and TV viewing. AMD Live Explorer is actually a UI over the Vista software components. I liked the look of the interface overall, especially the 3D video (just like the NorthFace demo which Microsoft had shown before Vista launch) and the video rendering was pretty good. It is in the beta testing and hence AMD asks users to give feedback for the software.

Download the beta of AMD Live Explorer from here.

Download the demo video which AMD created.

AMD gives unreleased Opteron 2352 to Isohunt (P2P servers)

AMD is about to release its bug-free quad-core processors in a few days and has been providing these unreleased processors to a few people for testing. Among the people who received these is http://isohunt.com. Isohunt.com is thanking AMD for providing it with pre-released processors for testing and has "2 pre-production engineering samples" of the Opteron 2352.

Isohunt is supposed to have installed these processors on their primary database servers and have been running them without any problems. The TLB bug which affected the previous Opteron 2350 has been a major headache for AMD and thus has caused delays in production of these chips. The Opteron 2352 runs at 2.1Ghz and has an L2 cache of 2MB.

Isohunt has been on the target of a lot of piracy talk and MPAA and RIAA have already tried their FUD stunts with these guys. Isohunt is a very busy P2P site with a lot of traffic on its torrent trackers. Thus, it seems like a nice place to test your processors in the real-world applications. AMD has given its processors to a nice place and hopefully AMD will work faster in the future.

A yahoo store is selling it at $650 at the moment (but I'm wondering how??)

The CPU Specs as listed by isohunt.com is as below:

Processor:	0
Vendor_id:	AuthenticAMD
CPU family:	16
Model:	2
Model name:	Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2352
Stepping:	2
CPU Mhz:	2100.089
Cache size:	512 KB
Physical id:	0
Siblings:	4
Core id:	0
CPU Cores:	4
FPU:	yes
FPU_execution:	yes
CPUid level:	5
wp:	yes
Flags:	fpu, vme, de, pse, tsc, msr, pae, mce, cx8, apic, sep, mtrr, pge, mca, cmov, pat, pse36, clflush, mmx, fxsr, sse, sse2, ht, syscall, nx, mmxext, fxsr_opt, rdtscp, lm, 3dnowext, 3dnow, constant_tsc, pni, monitor, cx16, lahf_lm, cmp_legacy, svm, cr8_legacy
Bogomips:	4209.90
TLB size	1024 4K pages
Clflush size:	64
Cache_alignment:	64
Address sizes:	48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
Power management:	ts ttp tm stc [6] [7] [8]

Intel With Core 2 Duo At 3.3Ghz - Great Overclocker

Intel has won this round of the processor wars, but does not want to sit down and watch AMD. Instead, Intel has made up its mind that its going to continue to hammer (... pun intended) at AMD with better processors. Intel will be releasing a 45nm based Core 2 Duo working at 3.33Ghz on the codename-Wolfdale architecture in the next few weeks. Intel already has these in production and you can expect these sometime in Q2 2008.

The model number for these processors is E8600 and will have a total cache of 6MB. These processors will be manufactured on 45nm and are likely to have a TDP of 65W, which is something of an achievement considering these are 3.3Ghz processors. A 65W TDP ensures that there is enough potential for this processor to overclock and the processor won't mind a little more heat that overclocking causes.

By the looks of it, the E8600 is expected to be a good buy since Intel is pricing it lower than the quad-cores. Intel will also be releasing a few mainstream quad cores in March and hence the E8600 will have great price-performance ratio. AMD is going to struggle again to sell its Phenom Tri-Core and Quad-Core chips in Q2 with the E8600 around!!

Gateway Selling Phenoms Instead of Intel Quad Core

In what seems to an odd twist to the tale of processor wins, Gateway is offering its high-end desktops with AMD Phenom processors and not with Intel Quad-Cores. All the Intel Quad-Core Processors have been replaced by Phenom 9500 and Phenom 9600 processors. You can find these at the Best Buy shops and it seems a good win for AMD, although how much money AMD is making on these shipments to Gateway is unknown.

AMD's current Phenom, 9500 and 9600 aren't the fastest processors in the market and the Intel Quad-Cores are easily beating them in most applications, if not all. The only advantage that Gateway might be getting by selling these machines is the price advantage. AMD is selling the Phenom processors at good bargain prices and Gateway seems to have even better prices in comparison to Intel's processors.

Gateway is currently selling 3 different configurations with the Phenom processors. The FX7020 gaming PC is priced at $1100 and contains the Phenom 9600. The company is also shipping the first mainstream quad-core PC in retail, the GT5662 at a price of $750 (without monitor) and comes with Phenom 9500, 3 GB of memory, a 256 MB ATY 2400 XT graphics card and a 500 GB hard drive. The high-end multimedia version called the GM5664 is similar to the GT5662, but comes with the Phenom 9600, 1TB harddisk, a hybrid HD DVD/Blu-ray drive and a TV tuner.

The price of these machines is quite competitive and better than a lot of other branded machines. AMD's Phenom seems to enable Gateway to keep the lower prices and still offer customers quad-cores.

Phenom Black Edition For Christmas

AMD will be launching the Phenom Black Edition processors just in time for Christmas and these unlocked beasts will be on the shelves for the overclockers sometime next week. After the retail success of the Athlon Black Edition processors, AMD has realized that it can sell these processors and make some bucks on these not-so-fast processors. The Phenom Black Edition Processors will have a clock speed of 2.3Ghz and it'll be interesting to see how much they can be overclocked.

With AMD already struggling to get enough speeds on the Phenom processors, it'll be interesting to see if they can be overclocked to great extent. And if these processors are overclocked, it'll be a good indication of how AMD's next-year Phenoms will perform. AMD already has talked a lot to its investors and people at the Wall Street and has promised it'll be doing good in 2008. All those promises will be on display if we can overclock and determine the performance of upcoming faster clocked Phenoms

Lets see how it goes with these Black Phenoms... and will they be an indicator of when AMD gets back from red to black!!

AMD's Overclocking App: Overdrive Demo (VIDEOS)

Found these exciting videos on YouTube about demo of the Overdrive, AMD's upcoming overclocking and performance monitoring utility. Overdrive brings the same technology of overclocking and performance enhancing using drivers, that have been in use by ATI and nVidia graphics cards.

Overdrive seems to be a very exciting application and will be released with the "Spider Platform", consisting of PhenomFX / Phenom (CPU), AMD 790FX/790X (Chipset) and the RV670 (GPU-graphics). The entire Spider Platform is expected to be released tomorrow (19th Nov, 2007), and hopefully will be available in quantities before the shopping season starts this year.

The videos have exciting presentation and editing, with nice before and after performance preview. Watch the videos and get excited for the release...

AMD OverDrive - Performance Tuning Utility

AMD OverDrive Utility - Before and After Demo

Supercomputer On A Graphics Card (1 TFlops)

Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...

Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.

But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??

Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.

Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!

All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??

Gamers should be less selfish: Buy the 3xxx series

DirectX 10 Cards That Will Be Cooler

Finally I think we will have DirectX 10 cards worth your money... DirectX 10 is widely publicized to be the best thing that happened to gaming since "PacMan". I really don't see many games on the shelf that use only Dx10. Nor did we want the cards!! Yet it's been months that ATI & Nvidia have been selling Dx10 cards with the 2xxx series and 8xxx series respectively.

Coming on 14th Nov (Apparently Children's Day in India), we have the next-gen Dx10 cards launched by ATI also known as the 3xxx series (RV670). The first cards will be called the 3850 & 3870. These cards aren't apparently any faster compared to previous Dx10 cards. But what's special about these cards is that it'll be cooler and taking less power compared to both the 8800 and the 2900.

When the 8800 and the 2900 were released, I didn't buy them because of the high power required by these cards. Even when not under heavy usage these cards easily suck in close to 200W power and close to 300W on load. That much power requirement is just plain insane and should have been banned by government agencies considering the Global Warming Issue..

The 3xxx series doesn't make the power requirement lower by much, but it still promises atleast 50W lower than the current cards. I hope gamers realize they are being overly selfish by buying these power sucking monsters and buy something less power hungry. We are going less power hungry in processors, but when do we expect such a trend with graphic cards?? [Fusion?? Larabee??]

2 Million Quad Core CPUs sold by Intel in Q3 '07

I'm wondering if AMD is even in the CPU competition these days? Intel just annaounced at its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) in Taiwan that it has sold 2 million chips with 4 cores!! AMD just launched Barcelona, its 4-core CPU and AMD is having problems producing enough of them. The channel does not have enough of these CPUs and only the tier I manufacturer have some of these.

2 million of these quad-cores does mean a lot of money and margin for Intel. This all goes to show that even if the quad-cores aren't native (as AMD says not real quad cores), people are buying them in numbers and Intel is earning quite a lot of profit. Infact, Intel is so confident that it says in 2008 its going to increase the cost of Core 2 Extreme processors by as much as 50%.

The 2 Million CPUs are not just desktop ones, but includes Xeon, Core 2 Quad and Extreme CPUs. Intel actually has 20 different versions of quad-core CPUs in the market at the moment. But it's still quite an achievement and we need to look at the dollar figures in the Q3 earnings. which is at a 43% increase...

AMD currently doesn't seem to be in the race and as Intel's earning all the bucks, I'm sure its preparing itself to hit the final nail on the AMD's coffin with Nehelam. Good luck AMD, coz it seems you really do need a lot of luck!!