The Christams Graphics Fight

According to Fudzilla, Nvidia is working on a refresh for it high end chip.

I have always thought that the 480 is a big behemoth of a chip that runs hot and power hungry. Something that I personally do not want in my PC. 460 on the other hand was something that turned a leave for Nvidia. Considering that is the same architecture, then they should be able to apply all the benefits to the next refresh. While the outcome might not be that much more appealing to me in terms of power and termals I believe it could really push the performance envelope for Nvidia.

ATI has been doing good for now but it seems that they are about to do even better. The Christams time is heating up as mainstream perfomance specs of the new 6000 series have leaked so we can expect the top end single chip card from them to be even better. This really looks to be exciting time for cutomers because closer the perfomance will be cheaper the prices should be as well. Given the ATI chip history this might be something that they could win at. They tend to have smaller die size, and hence lower costs, so we will have to wait and see how this pans out. At the same time, they will try to milk it for as long as Nvidia hasen't launched the refresh.

Source (Nvidia)
Source (ATI specs)

External laptop graphics

Today I wanted to reflect a bit on not a new concept but a concept that soon should be come a real product and has working prototypes available. Product at hand is external graphics solutions for portable - laptop computers. As you should know, laptops are not know for their graphical capabilities and most outstanding gaming performance.
While there are gaming laptops out there they do not match the performance of todays higher end graphics cards for desktop PCs. While CPUs are also not on same performance they do seem to be closer to their desktop counterparts.
To solve this problem and bring more joy of gaming to laptop owners 2 solutions are expected to be on the shop floors by end of summer.

ASUS XG Station. The concept and the prototype has been around for some time, but it seems that is finally reached the point where it is ready to be launched soon. It is to use Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT card as the power behind it. While 8600 GT is not the beastliest of things out there ASUS had to work around the limitations of existing ports on laptops.

Other solution comes from AMD -> ATi XGP, which means that it should bring more power behind it. From what I can see they use a new port that offers PCIe 2.0 8x speed with it and therefore should allow more powerful solutions then 8600GT. Fujitsu already have a box out there which uses mobility Radeon HD3870. Since there have no benchmarks out there it is hard to say what is the performance. I can see this becoming the dominant solution, as long as the newly developed port is not AMD laptop only port. PCIe 2.0 8x port should be enough to bring really high end graphics to laptops in near future.

The biggest problems about these solutions (not usre about ASUS one) is that they will require an external screen. What this means is that if you wanted a LAN gaming system, then you should get a desktop or hold out for a while longer. As Fudzilla reports (including picture) ATi in their solution plans to have it some time next year.

I would say that what we need now is to wait and see how these things stack up with each other... I can see this being a future as long it will allow to use laptops screen for gaming :)

Nvidia and VIA joning forces

The rumors of Nvidia buying VIA are turning out to be false, however have some ground to them. It turns out that Nvidia is going to be producing chipsets for VIA chips. A move that should be beneficial to both sides and possibly bring a third condender in desktop CPU market... One can only hope! ;)

Soure - the Inquirer

Triple ATi HD3850 in one card setup!

Nordichardware is exclusively reporting that ASUS have prepared a custom design HD3850 card called: ASUS EAH3850 Trinity, which in fact as name suggest feature 3 graphics cores on a single card!
To see couple of pics and read more about it, head on over to Nordichardware.com

next year seems to be good year for portable gaming...

Seems that in coming year laptop gaming is gonna heat up!
And Things might come sooner than expected. While ATI says that they are working on some great cards that will see the light in near future - mostly next year, the Inquirer reports that Nvidia is planing to bring out 8800M GTX before December. Article says that it will launch when Clevo will have notebooks ready, and as it is MXM module I sort of fell the pain for all those who bought new Dell 1730...

is iPod killing music sales?

The Inquirer has an interesting article about iPod killing industry. Although I did own a Walkman back in a day I can not agree with with writers opinion that Walkmans were so much better devices, even though he raises some good points.
One of which is:
"Sure, you could store a zillion albums on it, but you never will. Firstly you only possess a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, The Best of Steps and James Blunt's Bluntastic! What are you going to store on the remaining 39.5GB of space?
Well. It's going to be stolen music, isn't it?"
Even though it has nothing to do with Walkman around which most of the article is based - this I believe is the best point he makes. Going by the estimates of my music collection an average album takes 75MB on my hard drive. so on an 80GB iPod or Zune you will be able to store round 1000 albums! That is very big number and if you bought 1 album a week it would take almost 20 years to get that kind of collection... legally at least.
Yes you might argue that large storage space can now be used for movies which have even less of a legal presence in digital market, or general storage or file transfers.
And even if you plan to use it as storage, what will you store on it? Sure it will be more media of some kind.
So in the end we have large amounts of storage on these devices with an urge to fill it up as soon as possible and for most people only way to do so is by illegal downloads that are easily available that legal options will have hard time catching up and competing with price.
On a little side note, iTunes Plus songs now going at same rate as normal ones should have come long time ago, not so much for DRM - free media but for being better quality and larger file sizes to help fill up those iPods with legal music and leave less room for P2P stuff...

Making names easy

Seems like both ATI and nVidia are being on same page in way that both have chosen to hopefully simplify their naming schemes...
While ATI has decided to to dedicate last two digits of name to signify performance, nVidia has gone different way by drastically changing it. If I got it correct than there won't be any 4digit codes any more but letter digit combination. will start of with D or NB - desktop/notebook - following by a digit to signify generation I suppose and one last letter at the end to signify segment - E for enthusiast, P for performance, M for mainstream and might be something for value as well..
Sources here and here

Some Intel stuff...

I will start of with sort of the boring bit....
here is a look at models Intel has planed for near future:

Nothing too surprising there... just to see that new socket is coming and that dual core seems to be no more aimed at enthusiast market as there are no Extreme dual cores... which I suppose makes sense as quad is the new thing...
Also as the new dual model is only E8500 I would say it is safe to say that there will be E8600 and E8700 at least, which could bring frequencies up to 3.4 to 3.5 Ghz area looking at trending in E8xxx series... sure would look forward to those as most of the games yet no fully profit of quad core.. while have to say that it still new tech!

And here come the sad new for me and many out there.
OK they are not that sad but not great either... rumor has it that now mobile processors on Penryn base will not be full Santa Rosa refresh - not really compatible with current socket. It seems that with some modifications it will be usable, but as I was looking into getting new lappy early next year.. seems I will have to wait at least until Q2 when the Cantiga chipset comes out, which will bring full support for Penryn!!
more here

keyboard cooling

It is no secret that one of the biggest things on laptops exterior is keyboard... and Intel has decided to use it size and relative openness to mod into a cooler.. and I really believe that it is a great idea.. Plus they have also made it water resistant so you can drink some while working on you lappy quite safe... While on the other hand there are enough hole near keyboard as it is to be relatively useless...
more at Fudzilla

graphics battle

It seems that lately ATI has been making some headlines and suggesting that ATI vs nVidia battle is again on the horizon..
As ATI has managed to shrink to 55nm it seems very promissing for new mobile GPU and that is something I am waiting for. It seems that with nVidia dominance nothing much has happened in mobile market in last year.. and I really need a new lappy.. :D
link

fall season...

Seems like the coming fall season will bring some nice hardware to us.. All four major brands are cooking something up... Intel got the 45nm processing where AMD got it's native quad processors on its new K10 architecture... sure lot of performers expected...
Also ATI and nVidia are bringing new stuff out... and it also seems that ATI might be coming out stronger in mid range.... this should be good fun...
Yet a thing I am looking forward most to is what will AMD will bring to mobile market... It seems that it has nothing there for performance... I would love to have some choice when I come to buy my new lappy...

Hard Drive in different direction...

Latest thing in Hard Driver market is switch to the SSD drives... However Slashgear reports stat company in Utah believes that SSD is not enough and there is need for more.... They propose to install HD via PCIe interface. This seems to make it really fast and I can see this really taking off as this eliminate lot of wiring that no one likes.... hope they do good and looking forward to see more of this concept!!!

Extreme Graphics

Nvidia is planing to introduce 3-way SLI configuration later this year. This configuration will only be available on high end cards, which brings me to wonder about why? I could see this beeing needed for designers or something but there are no games out there that are not maxed out already by Ultra in SLI... so why there is a need for a third one?
So here comes one of the possible reasons.. Ultra hi-res gaming and multiple monitor arrays. Not many people have these perks.. but for those select few these seems to be good news... as long as they do not get the same fate as quad SLI which is not supported in Vista!!
One would also would want to say that this high spec setup will also last longer but i realy doubt that. for a simple reason that tech is advancing too fast and also for a fact that in 5 years when dx 11 or even 12 comes... this will be out of date specs and will not support the games....

Intel's rebranding scheme

Some time ago Intel announced that starting next year they will rebrand all their processors. This is due to many different names that apparently can be confusing to the customer. They intended just to settle for Core / Core 2... and so on.
Now aparently do to many complaints particulary form OEM's they have abandoned that idea. In my opinion that is a good idea, otherwise how will I know if it dual or quad core? Even though Core branding will remain the same they have redisigned the Centrino stickers to have unified design and Viiv brand to be under Core branding with little Viiv under the Core logo...
Good for them IMO!! :P

Source

iPhone and clone mess....

Recently Meizu have unveiled the screenshots of its upcoming M8's GUI. They can be found on Meizu forums and a fair comparison can be found on Engadget. Here is what it comes down to... Since the iPhone has such a hype around it... every touch screen phone will pretty much be compared to it. I mean off course there are and will be knockoffs...
The phone making some headways is Meizu M8 and it looks very similar to the the iPhone... both from design and GUI perspective... As it was stated before somewhere (sorry don't remeber where) that all the touch screen phones will be very similar to the iPhone as it was arguably the first in class. by first in class I mean that all other touch screen phones have at least few buttons and most have also stylos for input, which I find useful if you want to cram more info on the screen. And here on a random off thought I can see another reason why I don't seems so fond of iPhone... Although it has big screen it is not efficient... well maybe for pensioners it is....
Anyhow... I wanted to take a look how come M8 user interface so much resemble iPhone... I mean they have had enough time to make it better or do they really believe that iPhone is such an awesome device that it can not be improved??
If you look at the post on Engadget you can see that there are big resemblances to the iPhone but at the same time I there is the question ... are there that many different choices for GUI at this kind of phone? If you think about it .. the are icons and as they need to be easy to understand they will look similar across different products if not for all else then for at least consistency... and then there are the message list in which you also can't be much different.... And what is up with the keyboard layout with M8?? where is the consistency... should have been qwerty or something?? I really hope they change that for the Western market...
And where does that leave us? Chat screen... they do look awfully similar and it might be just me but i still would prefer the Skype type of chat screen rather than it being on the sides.. and I must say that for some strange reason I find that to be only real similarity with the phones... But who am I to stop dull iPhone admirer from seeing the obvious...

Pretty things...

Looks are starting to become more and more important for everything that we use. At this time I want to look at different computer hardware and see how much does it really matter... well in my opinion at least!

Most visible part of any system is the case .. it goes for desktops and laptops... and it seems that HP is going all in.. releasing new - great looking cases for both markets.. And I bet this will benefit them a lot as for sales go, because many people out there that are not that tech savvy will go for the better looking one and this is where early models will win big. If we look at Dell... it can offer good quality, great performance at a good price, but this is what it lacks... the image of being cool... good looking.. and that one extra thing - tangibility before purchase. I know few people that have bought their laptops on how they look rather then what is inside them...
Although ascetics are important I somehow feel that people are just being blindsided here... look at my similar article about marketing bluff.. If for laptops I can see a relative need good looks, especially if one travels a lot, then for power houses and desktops I hardly see the need for it... I might be terribly wrong here but I believe that majority of us that have desktops keep them under the table and therefore they are not visible... so what is the point of having a groovy looking one if no one will really see it... and well of those of us who keep it actually on the desk or whatever... I suppose it will bring some fun once in a while... maybe sometimes you can even show it off to your friend or two.. :D
So at some point it is nice to have a good looking case, but what about the insides of it?
laptops are not meant to be opened so there is not much good looks there... but when it comes to graphics cards for desktops... well that is whole different story... most of us will never open the case and if you are a moder... well my guess is that you will keep the case closed most of the time and let the cooling system work its magic... so why do we need shiny looking gfx cards? I mean, hell, if you end up shelling out 600+ bucks for one of the top end cards.... you are clearly into how it performs rather that what is on it... and the vendors could save some money on it..
But I suppose it is also the first impression that counts and when you get a great looking shiny new card out of the box... u might not care any more how it performs - U are sold on the looks... maybe


Just on a footnote - HP seems to be the one diving in this most heavily with different models and all but it is not the only vendor doing so as Sony cases look pretty good as well as LG's.I believe others will follow soon and Apple will no longer be the only kool kid on bloc!!!

USB 3.0 comming

This is going to be so good..
They are planing to have speeds 10x those of today where you would bet 4.8GBit/s which sound to be just awesome...
I mean 2.0 is not that bad, but at the same time when I found out that my external HD have to be reformatted in ntfs ... backing that bitch up was a pain... 250 GB ... backed up on my friends external... well lets just say that we had enough time to go watch a movie and it still wasn't done... I mean there is default Windows function to go from fat32 to ntfs without loosing data... but just in case backup took so bloody long so i really hope that this new 3.0 come soon... before i get my new laptop... it was stated that it will be finalized by mid 2008 and devices in '09 but i hope the devices start appear earlier.. I do not want to wait that long.. :D
Here is just another problem right here... so it is said that speed is 480MBit/s on current one... but a 700MB movie more then 40 sec to copy so there is some discrepancies in the speeds and I am concerned that it might be due to read/write speeds on both ends of the storage... so this brings me to the ultimate question - what is the point? I can see it being used in some type of arrays but at the end of the day how will this benefit regular user in near future??