A Quick Look at the Last Month in Tech Part 1
09.19.07 - 11:06am
Think my fingers are finally charged up and ready to pound out some articles so place your bets now on how long it takes till I jump out for another break ;) In the last 20 days since I last wrote something here there has been a lot of product launches and juicy gossip and who doesn’t like new toys and gossip? This will be Part 1 of 2, there is just so much juicy hardware gossip to contain in one article.
IcanhasBarcelona?
Hah! I got you good there, thought there was going to be a lolcat huh? If you feel cheated and have to clue what Barcelona is then don’t worry, you really aren’t missing out on anything. AMD just released their highly awaited new processor architecture K10, codenamed Barcelona. Barcelona was meant to be a direct competitor with Intel’s quadcore Kentsfield processor by utilizing both a superior architecture and originally competitive clockspeeds. Unlike Intel’s approach of using an MCM featuring 2 dual-core dice, AMD decided to go with a monolithic core featuring 4 completely integrated cores. Because of this design, while technically more advanced, AMD has had trouble getting chips to achieve competitive speeds and therefore Barcelona has launched with sub 2GHz clockspeeds. Considering how it now has to compete with upper 2GHz and soon 3GHz Intel chips, it would have needed some serious grunt in the instructions-per-clockcycle category but sadly it just matches the Core 2 architecture clock for clock. I suppose this could be seen as an improvement over K8 which typically gets spanked by Core 2, but K10 was supposed to be “next generation” and much faster. So at the end of the day Intel is still beating up AMD and taking it’s lunch money.
Anandtech Comparison Between Barcelona and Harperton
Newegg 1.9GHz, NCIX 1.7GHz, NCIX 2.0GHz Sales Links
How To: Spin a Failure as a Feature
If AMD had advertised Barcelona before the launch as much as they’ve been defending it after the launch they might have been a bit more successful. We go from a few comments from AMD saying “Barcelona will be revolutionary, it will crunch numbers and even cook you breakfast!” prior to launch to “We are looking for performance to watt, not pure performance..2GHz launch speed *runs away*”. Well right before the launch there were a ton of rumors stating that Barcelona yields from the fabs were dismal at best with lots of defective or partially defective cores coming from their 65nm process. So with all these quad-core chips with a single defective core, what do you do? Well you could throw them away as they are defective OR you could disable the defective core and relabel it as a new product line, tri-core processors! So now AMD will be introducing another line of chips that will sit between their X2 and X4 Phenoms, can I say product confusion?
Wired.com Rumor Control: AMD Going Triple-Core?
Video Card Extravaganza
The DirectX10 range of video cards have notoriously had a huge performance gap between the budget cards and the performance cards. A good example of this would be the performance difference between the 8600GTS and the 8800GTS. For $150 you can get a terribly underpowered 8600GTS that will barely run DX10 games at 1280×1024 or you can pay double that for an 8800GTS that will run DX10 games at 1280×1024 with decent framerates. We really need a card that fits in the $180 to $250 price-range that actually offers some decent performance. Thankfully sometime soon AMD will be launching the 2900Pro, 2900GT, and in a bit the 2950GT and 2950XT cards. Of most importance is the 2900Pro which features a 2900XT core along with possibly a 512-bit memory interface and lower reference clocks AND the kicker, a $250 price bracket. This will be the 7900GTO of the current generation, expect this card to be an absolute performance/price beast. Nvidia will be releasing an 8700GTS which should be a direct competitor to the 2900Pro but I haven’t got any hard facts on the GTS’ stats.
AnandTech DX10 Roundup showing the dismal DX10 performance of all current cards
HIS Product Website listing the 2900Pro
Yes, I have gone crazy.
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