At a press event this morning, AMD overclocked engineering samples of the upcoming 45nm Phenom II processors using air, liquid, phase change, and liquid nitrogen cooling. On air, they didn’t hit 4GHz, but easily broke the barrier with liquid cooling and phase change. Liquid nitrogen netted speeds over 6GHz.
No photos were allowed at the event, but TechReport was present and took notes.
AMDZone reviews the ASRock K10N78-1394. It’s good, but loses to 780G-based offerings.
TweakTown benchmarks ATI’s Catalyst 8.11 drivers.
TechReport analyzes the AMD vs NVIDIA price battle with enough charts and graphs to make your mind spin. In short: AMD undercuts like it’s going out of style.
Lots of talk from the AMD camp today about three big items. Shanghai, the company’s first 45nm server processors are officially out today. It’s 20 - 30 percent faster than the ill-fated Barcelona it replaces, boasts increased clock speeds and the same power usage along with a host of tweaks and refinements. (more…)
While AMD is currently cranking up production of its 45nm chips, the big push at its German production centers is the shrink to 32nm. According to reports from EETimes.com, Dresden’s Fab 38 is seeing an influx of new production equipment (Thanks AMD’s wealthy investors!) that will allow production as small as 22nm. Full 32nm production at Fab 38 is expected to be underway by 4Q 2009.
Meanwhile at Fab 36 near by, 45nm production is increasing at an accelerated pace. The two facilities should output 50,000 wafers per month. AMD says both CPUs and graphics chips will be made at the Dresden plants by the end of 2009; a move they regard as competitive with Far East facilities due to automated processes and a strong engineering team keeping costs down.
It’s taken a few months but the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 dual-GPU graphics cards are finally out. Performance wise, it’s just slower than two HD 4850s in Crossfire, but it’ll cost less than two HD 4850s. The mantra of “you get what you pay for” will still hold true, unless you are in the UK. According to Hexus, the exchange rate hinders the bang-for-the-buckpound on the new card, making the Crossfire setup more attractive.
All early reviews are pointing to driver problems giving stability issues, at least with their early-release cards. Until the issues are resolved, it may be worthwhile to wait just a little longer before snatching one of these cards up.
TheInquirer, ever a hotbed of salacious tidbits, has run a story indicating that NVIDIA is accusing ATI of cheating in Far Cry 2 by speeding up rendering through the elimination of minute scene details.
NVIDIA alleges that ATI has cheated benchmarks by tinkering with the zbuffer, a rendering technique that assures certain objects appear in front of others moving towards the horizon. Big green says that ATI is swapping to a method called R32F which wouldn’t force ATI cards to render scads of detailed rocks scattered about the ground in Ubisoft’s newest title.
Meanwhile, followup with ATI driver development lead Terry Makedon indicated that the issue at hand is little more than the error of a driver engineer. Makedon said that a fix for the mistake was included in a hotfix for Stalker: Clear Sky, recently patched to support DirectX 10.1 , because it made sense to do so.
As can be expected, NVIDIA has suggested the idea that the hotfix is really a tacit admission of guilt because it was coincidentally released within 12 hours of the initial accusation.
AMD’s Shanghai, the 45nm revision to Phenom-based Opterons, has begun to appear at resellers and is demanding a tidy sum.
While the chip is not expected to be officially released until November 13, the appearance of the chip at retailers is a sign that AMD is delivering on its promised timetable. Long criticized for the protracted development period of the Phenom, AMD swore by a late-autumn release of the Shanghai and promised that it had learned from its mistakes with the maligned successor to the Athlon 64.
The new Opterons, appearing in 837X, 838X, and 238X flavors, weigh in at $814 for 2.5GHz Opteron 2380 to $2240 for the Opteron 8384. Additional models are expected through the official launch of the chip.
Servers with configurations based on AMD’s new solutions are currently undergoing validation and have been targeted at a 1Q09 release.
Phoronix explains how to use AMD’s X-Video Bitstream Acceleration in Linux.
In testing, bit-tech.net has discovered that some of the new ATI Radeon 4830 cards have 80 stream processors inadvertently disabled in the GPU BIOS.
The breaking information came to light when a 4830 was pitted against a 4850 and fell well short of its performance projections. Further comparing of the card alleged to be defective against a second 4830 revealed that something was indeed amiss. Upon polling the defective card in GPU-Z, it was revealed that the questionable 4830 had only 560 out of its 640 stream processors disabled.
Bit-tech then went to AMD and the board vendors with their discovery. After due persistence and a little bit of corroborative evidence, AMD was persuaded to issue a small announcement regarding the defective cards:
AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card’s performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.
Users purchasing ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards are advised to check GPU-Z to confirm that all 640 stream processors are active on the GPU. In the event that the card is operating with less than this amount, new BIOS revisions have been made available to remedy the issue.
Today AMD announced that former executive VP and CFO Bob Rivet has been elevated to the position of chief operational officer. The current senior VP and general manager of sales for AMD Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has also been picked to head AMD sales in the CSO position
Citing the recent advancement of AMD’s asset smart strategy, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer cited the need for rapid change to deliver product. “AMD is accelerating our transformation to capitalize on our proven expertise in both microprocessor and leading-edge graphics to deliver the innovations that matter most to our customers,” he said.
Further executive shuffles are also in the works for big green, as the existing CSO moves to a new position designed to strengthen AMD’s brand.
The ASRock A780GXE/128M is a simple, inexpensive AMD solution.
For the longest time, the business of reading a CPU’s temperature was one part science and another part voodoo. Inaccurate off-die temperature sensors, inaccurate diodes and a bevy of other annoying issues made retrieving a CPU’s real temperature a pain.
Fortunately for the enthusiasts, Arthur Liberman’s sensational CoreTemp has made it 100% science. CoreTemp reads directly from the on-chip temperature diodes using methods explicitly detailed by Intel and AMD. This means that the temperature CoreTemp reports is exactly what the temperature is.
SpeedFan is dead. Long live SpeedFan!
TechReport gets the Jolly Green Giant to respond to chip failure reports by getting AMD involved.
