Via launches 3.5W mobile C7 processor
An Origami With a Via Processor
Via Technologies is a company that takes pride in bursting illusions, such as the idea the new ultramobile PCs would only come equipped with Intel microprocessors. Instead, it appears that any x86-based processor will do.
Via today announced a series of C7-M ULV processors, which are claimed to be the lowest power CPUs available on the market today. The processors will be aiming for handheld products and will be available with clock speeds ranging from 1 to 1.5 GHz.
Via today announced a total of five processors, with clock speeds of 1.5 GHz (model 775), 1.2 GHz (772), 1.1 GHz (771), and two 1.0 GHz versions (770 and 779). Besides clock speed the CPUs can be distinguished by their thermal design power, which is rated from 7.5W on the high end (775) to 5W (770) and 3.5W (779) on the low end. All processors come with a 400 MHz front side bus.
The SmartCaddie boasts all the same capabilities as previously announced Origami gadgets, including controls on the right and left side of the screen, wireless-LAN and Bluetooth capabilities, and touch-screen operations thanks to its OS, Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet Edition. PBJ's new device is the first of its kind to use the new Via C7-M ULV processor, but Via expects to see more design wins.
"The [C7-M] is for a range of mobile devices, ultramobile PCs, notebooks, and more," said Epan Wu, deputy director of CPU product marketing at Via.
Pharos Announces iGPS-500 Receiver
The new iGPS-500 adds modular GPS support to UMPC devices
The new iGPS-500 adds modular GPS support to UMPC devices
Intel and Microsoft are standing proudly behind their new Ultra Mobile PC platform and Pharos has a new GPS receiver that takes advantage of the new devices.
The new Pharos iGPS-500 has full Windows compatibility and features a modular design that allows users to quickly adapt the unit to function via USB, SDIO (Secure Digital), CompactFlash or Bluetooth.
The iGPS-500 features the highly sensitive SiRFstarIII GPS architecture. With its rapid time-to-first-fix and high sensitivity, the iGPS-500 is engineered to meet the rigorous demands of wireless and handheld LBS applications, and provides superior location performance, both indoors and out. The iGPS-500 works seamlessly with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006, AutoRoute 2006, and MapPoint software as does its predecessor, the iGPS-360.
The iGPS-500 is expected to ship in April of this year.
IPTV to Reach Critical Mass This Year
Microsoft executive predicts sharp jump in company's IPTV users by end of 2006
At least four major telecommunications carriers will be offering services on Microsoft's IPTV platform to hundreds of thousands of users by the end of the year, a Microsoft executive predicted on Friday.
IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, delivers digital television over broadband phone lines.
Microsoft demonstrated to the European market for the first time at CeBIT how services built on its IPTV software platform work. Graczyk said that there are key advantages IPTV services has over current cable TV services, and these will be a major draw for consumers.
Among the improvements to current cable services is the ability, demonstrated by Graczyk, to quickly change channels without the pause between them that is part of the current cable TV experience. IPTV users also will be able to watch and control several live video streams on one screen simultaneously.
He also demonstrated a feature in which IPTV service is connected to a user's telephone service, so the user can see on the TV monitor if a call is coming in and who it is. The user then can either decide to take the call, pausing the current program he or she is watching, or choose to ignore it.
Blu-ray Backer LG Prepares Competing HD-DVD Drive
Blu-ray Disc backer hedges bets on new optical-disc format
Blu-ray Disc backer hedges bets on new optical-disc format
LG Electronics, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray Disc format, is working on a player for the rival HD-DVD format, the company said on Friday.
The move makes LG the latest Blu-ray Disc supporter to shift its position. In late 2005 Hewlett-Packard said it would also support HD-DVD. LG stressed that its main support still lies with Blu-ray Disc, but that it's working on an HD-DVD player in case that format proves popular.
In terms of pricing, the HD-DVD format appears to have the edge among the first group of players. Toshiba plans to launch two HD-DVD players in the U.S. in March for $500 and $800, while the cheapest Blu-ray Disc players yet disclosed will cost $1000 when they hit shelves in May.
Who Supports What?
Blu-ray Disc is backed by a group headed by Sony that also includes Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, TDK, and Thomson.
The HD-DVD format is backed by a smaller number of major consumer electronics ms but has the backing of the DVD Forum, the group behind the DVD format. Its major backers include Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Intel, and Microsoft.
Nvidia's silicon shrink is small and non power-hungry
G71, Nvidia's silicon is almost half the size of ATI's R580
Nvidia's recent shrink to 90 nanometres made it a range of products that are cheaper to produce and less power hungry. The G71 is indeed smaller and Nvidia says it doesn’t have any production problems. Its partners are not the happiest about its performance but they will still buy and sell them. We ended up in a chat with someone from Nvidia and we learned that G71, 7900 GTX and GT are just the fragment of the size of a R580 chip. It is radically smaller and therefore cheaper to produce. G73, Geforce 7600 GT and the upcoming GS are indeed cheaper to produce than NV43, Geforce 6600 cards.
Another Nvidian claimed that SLI with two 7900 GTX cards is not that power hungry after all. It consumes a lot less than a really power-hungry Crossfire with two X1900 XTX cards.
So, even though the performance is rather close, Nvidia can still play the game and it will probably earn much more money per chip than ATI will. It is cheaper for it to produce it. And, if you can remember, it doesn't offer any kind of price protection.
Partners hate it but Nvidia's stock exchange numbers are constantly growing. Quad SLI? Don’t even go there.
Samsung shows off latest LCDs
Samsung are showing off six new LCD monitors, with purposes from gaming to professional (and maybe even professional gaming.) Here's a little look at the line-up.
731BF and 931BF gaming monitors
These two monitors both feature a 2ms response time (speedy) and are, as the model names might have given away, 19" and 17" (top and bottom images respectively.) The resolution of both is 1280x1024, with a contrast ratio of 700:1 and brightness of 300cd/m2.
245T business panel
The 245T is a widescreen panel with a response time which, although not quite as good as the above gaming panels, is still pretty nippy at 6ms. It has a 1900x1200 resolution, 500 cd/m2 brightness and 1000:1 contrast ratio. Most significantly, however, is the list of supported inputs, which include S-Video, Composite, and Component video.
940BW
Here we have a widescreen monitor that should handle movies and other multimedia nicely, with a 4ms response time. It's 19" panel has a resolution of 1440x900, 300 cd/m2 brightness and 500:1 contrast ratio.
215TW
This'un is a 21" widescreen model with 1680x1050 resolution, 300 cd/m brightness and 1000:1 contrast ratio. The 8ms panel has the same range of video inputs as the 245T
940MG
Finally we have the 940MG, which has an anti-glare coating over its 19", 1440x900 panel. It's a widescreen LCD TV, with an in-built TV and radio tuner. Figure time: 300 cd/m2 brightness and 600:1 contrast ratio, with 8ms response time.
G4 Apple Macs set to be accelerated by XFX GeForce graphics
XFX to power Apple Mac G4s
XFX Graphics has revealed that it has signed a licensing agreement to develop and bring to market a range of NVIDIA GeForce-based Shader Model 3.0 graphics accelerators to upgrade Apple G4 Mac PCs.
Apparently XFX and Apple have been engaged in negotiation for some 18 months and the first fruits of their agreement are set to be available around June of this year.
The initial offerings will be XFX GeForce 6600 GT AGP products, though other, even more powerful and higher-end, variants should follow soon after.
For the present it seems these XFX graphics cards will be available from Apple's own on-line store, from specialist Apple Mac resellers and Apple's distribution chain.
The NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT GPU engine clocks for the G4 Apple Mac's are still being finalised by XFX, though HEXUS has been told that it seems likely these will be set to at least 500MHz.
Testing of the XFX GeForce 6600 GT for Apple G4's in still ongoing, with NVIDIA actively providing device-driver support.
EPoX demo Socket AMD with NVIDIA, ATI and ULi
EPoX's stand at CeBIT and you'll see an array of mainboards most notable in their use of AMD's upcoming AM2 socket with three different sets of core logic. The first board you'll see below (top-left, MNF55P-SLI2) uses NVIDIA core logic to create an SLI system with decent layout (although the main power connector placement is suspect) and support for up to DDR2-800.
Top-right you have the MNF55P-SLI using the slightly cheaper nForce 50 SLI. Bottom left is RD580 and SB460, supporting Socket AM2 and ATI's latest Crossfire revision (masterless), while bottom right is a ULi board sporting a pair of PCI Express x16 slots.
No word on whether it supports any multi-GPU solution from ATI, NVIDIA or S3, but if we find anything out we'll let you know. Again, Computex is the rough launch time for AM2 and all the boards you can see at CeBIT, if not slightly before.
eVGA show off watercooled 7900 GTX SLI too
Ex-Gainward man Hans Wolfram Tismer was on eVGA's stand this morning discussing his new company's watercooling solution for SLI 7900 GTX. The demo system to show it off is a multi-tier custom chassis that looks very impressive, and cools the brand new boards in silence at over their rated clocks.
Dual core Athlon 64 X2 powers the system and you can see a couple of pictures below.
Geforce 7900 GTX and GT chips sold out
Second batch to come soon, 7600 GT available
NVIDIA is happy with its 7900 GTX and GT sales. We learned that some of the top etailers in the USA and Europe sold all the cards in the matter of hours. We are talking about thousands of cards.
If you want to order more 7900 GTX and GT chips you will have to wait a week or two before Nvidia manages to ship a second batch of the cards. 7900 GTX looks much more attractive than the 7800 GTX 512 as it draws less power and it runs much cooler.
Not to mention the fact that you can overlock it to 700 MHz easily. We also learned that you can order how many 7600 GT you want as Nvidia has a real volumes ready for its partners. It literally shipped thousands of chips and it has more.
X1900 XTX and XT will continue to coexist as ATI dropped the prices and made its cards even more attractive. The fight is going on and no one from sparing partners is planning to give up. ATI do have an advantage as it doesn’t have any chip shortages and is happily ship its 90 nanometre part. The performance is very close but Nvidia runs cooler, quieter but it also sells for more money.
ATI's RV570 disclosed
Crossfire bridge in the RV570 and R600 chips
Crossfire bridge in the RV570 and R600 chips
ATI is working on a new chip. It codename is RV570 and it is set to replace the RV530, Radeon X1600 generation of cards. We heard that ATI has a RV560 chip as well but we don't know what is going on with this one.
RV570 should feature the 256-bit memory bus and it will feature the Crossfire bridge chip inside the core.
This will let the manufactures to make bridgeless and connector-less Crossfire systems. You won't need a master card and all the dull cables any more. It will also cut the production cost and will finally make the Crossfire upgrade path easier. Time will erase the necessity for the master and slave design. Even next generation R600 comes with a Crossfire bridge inside of the chip
Two cards based on RV570 chip will work together and, if you want to make a dual chip RV570 card, you won't need a bridge chip on the PCB. It will simply work and it is the way to let the manufactures make Quad Crossfire systems as well. Two cards with two chips on and we know that super tiling can support as much cards as you can plug.
Samsung's trio of burners
Burn baby, burn, Samsung inferno
Burn baby, burn, Samsung inferno
First is is a shot of the SH-W163A. It's a SATA burner, of which there aren't enough at the moment, we feel. We couldn't find any specs for the drive on the stand. However, it would be logical to assume that the specs are very similar (bar the interface) to the SH-W163 which is an 8x DVD+R dual layer burner (4x DVD-R dual-layer.)
Second we have Samsung's internal blu-ray burner. It can write BD and BD-RE discs at 2x and DVD+/-R at 12x.
Finally we have an external blu-ray burner. The SE-B206B has the same writing and speed capabilities as Samsung's internal blu-ray burner, but uses USB2 or Firewire 400 to interface with the host machine.
Samsung will no doubt add to their blu-ray line-up as they engineer drives that can burn at higher speeds (media permitting) and of course other manufacturers are hot on the tail of Samsung with their own blu-ray products.
ATI agrees to let its partners overclock
NVIDIA has been leting its partners overclock its graphics cards. Gainward won that fight a few years back and now all the companies are doing it. It is cool to be faster than the reference design.
ATI's partners have now finally managed to persuade big red to let them overclock. We are finally going to be able to get the faster-than-the-reference-design cards.
ATI will provide a warranty for such chips and there will be some kind of validation process where ATI will be able to control the overclocking frequency. After you sell your chips you kind of have to give the warranty for them.
The first attempt with overclocking was X1800 XT TOP edition and we can remember that a few companies did such a card clocked at 700 MHz, a 50 MHz faster than the reference X1800XT design. Partners and ATI decided to cancel those cards as the X1900 was just around the corner.
We still don’t know who will be the first to overclock and which card will be the first but we are looking forward to seeing who comes up with what. The X1800 GTO sounds like a solid start to me.
ATI X1800 GTO claims top performance but is expensive to make
R520 "Fudo" chip costs $120
R520 "Fudo" chip costs $120
ATI's X1800 GTO will be an expensive card to make. The initial cost of the R520 chip can be as high as $120 a piece. This is a lot for the mainstream card but we are sure that ATI can cut a few bucks here and there to make some better money from it.
The X1800 GTO has a lead over Nvidia's Geforce 7600 GT due to its 256-bit memory marchitecture but we are unsure how many of these cards can ATI supply. Sources close to Nvidia think that ATI won't be able to fulfil the demand and that it won't earn that much money of the X1800 GTO cards. They might be just right.
We know that ATI wants to undermine Nvidia's mainstream dominance but it plays a dangerous game, as its production costs are relatively high. Nvidia's 7600 GT move to 90 nanometre shoud cut its costs per chip, if the yields are good. Performance is there but it is still limited with the 128-bit memory bus.
Still, ATI has something called RV570 that might just make Nvidia run for its money, sometime before the summer, we reckon.
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