Corsair, Crucial, G,Skill & OCZ Announced Fastest DDR3 Memories

Corsair, Crucial, G.Skill and OCZ separately announced their fastest DDR3 memories today. Cosair announced DOMINATOR and XMS DHX 2GB kit pre-loaded with EPP2 while Crucial announced Ballistix PC3-16000 (DDR3-2000MHz) high-performance memory modules with EPP2 and latency timings of 9-9-9-28 at 1.9V, available in 1GB modules and 2GB kits. G.Skill announced their new DDR3-1800 CL7 equipped with the Antazone RamMod cooler to improve module stability and performance while operating under extreme overclocking conditions. Lastly, OCZ unveiled blistering fast PC3-16000 DDR3 modules with EPP2 at an aggressive timings of 9-8-8.

Intel Talks About Nehalem, Larrabee & Sandy Bridge

Intel discussed upcoming leading edge microprocessors and technologies. Nehalem is scalable with future versions having anywhere from 2 to 8 cores, with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability, 8 MB level-3 cache, 731 million transistors, Quickpath interconnects (up to 25.6GB per second), integrated memory controller and optional integrated graphics. The Larrabee architecture includes a high-performance, wide SIMD vector processing unit (VPU) along with a new set of vector instructions including integer and floating point arithmetic, vector memory operations and conditional instructions. In addition, Larrabee includes a major new hardware coherent cache design enabling the many-core architecture. Intel AVX when used by software programmers, will increase performance in floating point, media, and processor intensive software. The instructions will be implemented in the microarchitecture codenamed "Sandy Bridge" in the 2010 timeframe.

Intel to embrace overclocking

WHAT IS INTEL going to be talking about at IDF in Shanghai in a week or two's time? In addition to the usual slate of announcements, one big topic is going to be overclocking, officially sanctioned overclocking at that.

Intel has realized there is money in gaming and the lunatic fringe of overclockers, so they are going to encourage it. They took the gaming crown with Skulltrail, and now the attention turns to the weirdos with multi-phase cooling rigs. IDF will have plenty of talks about how to eke out the best from Intel CPUs.

There is a lot of irony here, Intel was the first CPU maker to lock enthusiasts out of OCing, and now they are selling that back to the same group as a feature. Oh how times change, or don't as the case may be.

Nvidia To Launch GeForce 9800 GTX On April Fool Day

Nvidia has informed their partners that the GeForce 9800 GTX launch has been pushed one week from March 25th to April 1st. No reason was provided for the delay but it is funny that Nvidia chose to launch a flagship product on April Fool day. GeForce 9800 GTX will be priced at US$349. On a side note, the industry is speculating that Nvidia might be forced to lower the price of the newly launched GeForce 9800 GX2 soon to better compete against Radeon HD 3870 X2 card which has a better price/performance ratio. Currently, 9800 GX2 is priced at ~US$599 while 3870 X2 is priced at ~US$410, nearly $200 difference. With that amount, you can get another HD 3870 card, set up a Hybrid Crossfire (3870X2+3870) and has a potential to achieve better performance than the GX2.

Intel Plans to Launch Six-Core Microprocessors

Intel Corp. may release six-core microprocessors as early as in the second half of this year, according to a number of media reports. However, if those claims are correct, then it may mean not only another powerful central processing unit for Intel and a threat to chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but also a further delay in unification of Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon platforms.

Intel needs a chip to update its multi-processor (MP) enterprise server platform this year as no Nehalem-based microprocessor for the MP market segment is planned for 2008, whereas quad-core AMD Opteron microprocessors for multi-chip servers are on the offensive, perhaps, without a lot of success so far. However, it seems like unified Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) platform that supports both Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon processors is not due in 2008, at least, based on reports about the processor code-named Dunnington

According to reports from PC Watch and Virtualization Journal web-sites, Intel intends to released six-core Intel Xeon MP microprocessors in the second half of this year in order to offer processing power not achievable by rivaling products. Different web-sites report different details about the new product: some claim that Intel Xeon MP “Dunnington” is a chip with three dual-core dice on a single-piece of substrate, whereas some other indicate that the forthcoming code-named Dunnington CPU is a monolith six-core product with 16MB of unified L2 cache.

It is interesting to note that code-named Dunnington chip emerged in Intel’s roadmap back in 2005 along with code-named Whitefield processor, however, both were shortly replaced with code-named Tigerton chip for MP servers. Both Dunnington and Whitefield were believed to feature Intel’s QPI bus. It is widely believed that QPI is the bus to be used for many of Intel’s incoming processors, including desktop- and server-oriented chips based on code-named Nehalem micro-architecture. In addition, servers powered by future Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon CPUs are officially set to utilize the same platform architecture as well as QPI bus.

Theoretically, Intel Corp. may released six-core CPUs for desktop enthusiast segment as well, however, probability of this situation may not be very high as Intel’s plans towards Nehalem desktop ramp-up remain unclear.

Intel did not comment on the news-story.

AMD Quietly Unveils Dual-Core Sempron Processors.

Perhaps, considerably later than expected, but Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s second largest maker of x86 microprocessors, has quietly released its first dual-core AMD Sempron central processing unit (CPU). The chips will be initially available only in China, but it will hardly take long before they emerge in other countries and regions.

The first AMD Sempron processor with two processing engines is made using 65nm process technology and operates at 1.80GHz, reports DigiTimes web-site. The chip retails for about $55, which is below the price of the fastest single-core AMD Sempron LE 1300 microprocessor that operates at 2.30GHz, has 256KB of L2 cache and is priced at $69 in business quantities.

Intel Corp. unveiled its first Intel Celeron central processing units with two cores back in January ’08, however, for quite some time the world’s largest maker of x86 CPUs has been shipping dual-core Intel Pentium D and Intel Core 2 Duo processors at truly affordable price-points. On the other hand, AMD has been offering its AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ processor for $68 for some time now.

It is a natural trend for desktop microprocessors to gain the number of cores as more and more software developers tend to optimize their applications to take advantage of multiple processing engines.

Officials from AMD did not comment on the news-story.