May 07
Intel has been boasting of DirectX 10 support for its various integrated graphics options for some time now, but it’s only just recently gotten around to actually releasing a Vista driver that brings its GM965 and G35 Express chipsets up to speed. Of course, NVIDIA just couldn’t help itself from getting a few (more) digs in at Intel’s expense, and it’s now kindly provided a few benchmarks to show just how badly Intel’s integrated DirectX 10 solution stacks up against the bleeding-edge DirectX 10-ready games it now ostensibly supports. They couldn’t find a single game that was able to crank out more than 5 fps, even at a lowly 1280 x 1024 resolution and with the usual graphics intensive settings turned off. Then again, 4.4 fps in Crysis is pretty much par for the course.
Read - Crave, “Intel updates graphics with multimedia capabilities”
Read - Hardware Secrets, “Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?”
[source]
Apr 05
Intel officially took the wraps off its widely-discussed and readily-implemented Centrino Atom processor / system controller for MIDs last night, and while there aren’t a lot of surprises in spec land, it was nice to finally get an idea of what these suckers will cost:
- Z500 - 800MHz, 0.65W TDP power, 400MHz FSB, 512K L2 cache ($45)
- Z510 - 1.1GHz, 2W TDP power, 400MHz FSB, 512K L2 cache ($45)
- Z520 - 1.33GHz, 2W TDP power, 533MHz FSB, 512K L2 cache ($65)
- Z530 - 1.6GHz, 2W TDP power, 533MHz FSB, 512K L2 cache ($95)
- Z540 - 1.86GHz, 2.4W TDP power, 533MHz FSB, 512K L2 cache ($160)
That’s the pricing per 1,000 units, and is a little bit more than that $30 1.6GHz Atom 230 we were hearing about, but it does include the CPU plus the System Controller Hub with integrated graphics, HD video playback, HD audio and other nifty I/O things like support for WiFi, WiMAX and cellular radios.
[source]
Mar 30
Ever since Intel compared the criticality of its (still) forthcoming Silverthorne (which now goes by Atom, if you couldn’t guess) processor to the original Pentium last June, we’ve all wondered just how fantasmical our worlds would become when this thing finally dropped. Now, however, Tom’s Hardware has discovered that the release may actually do more for Intel than we geeks. After consulting a source it believes to be quite credible, it found that the CPU — which will likely sell for upwards of $30 at the low-end — will cost Intel just “$6 to $8, including production, packaging and shipping.” Without busting out the abacus, it’s still fairly easy to see how profitable said chips could be if Intel can move these at even a snail’s pace.
[source]
Mar 03
Intel Corp. has picked “Atom” as the new brand name for its latest microprocessor, the world’s largest semiconductor company said. The Intel Atom processor is the name for the new family of low-power processors, the brains of digital devices, that will power mobile Internet devices and ultra low-cost and small notebook and desktop personal computers.
Intel sees a big market for the Internet-connected devices that can fit in one’s pocket and for what it is calling the netbook, a low-cost PC costing around $250 (U.S.).
The Intel Atom processor is based on a new microarchitecture designed for small devices and low power consumption, Intel said. The chip is less than 25 square millimetres, and 11 of the chip’s dies – the slivers of silicon with 47 million transistors each – would fit in an area the size of a U.S. penny.
The new chips, previously code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville, are made on Intel’s 45 nanometer chip making technology and slated for introduction toward the middle of this year.
“Diamondville and Silverthorne both represent an attempt by Intel to sell chips profitably for a whole lot less,” said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at market research firm Insight 64. “This is the first new processor design coming out of Intel since the Pentium Pro in 1995.”
MORE…
Feb 22
For those craving more performance than can be delivered by four processing cores and a single graphics card, Intel has introduced the new Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Formerly codenamed “Skulltrail,” this platform supports two Intel quad-core processors, and offers a choice of multi-card graphics solutions.
First unveiled at the 2007 Intel Developer Forum, Skulltrail combines Intel Desktop Board D5400XS and Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors, and is mainly targeted at power-hungry gamers, who can use multiple graphics card solutions from either Nvidia or ATI. In addition to PC gamers, the new platform is also targeted at 3D animators, digital audio artists, and high-definition (HD) video editors who create video games for consoles and desktops.
As HD video becomes more prevalent than ever, encoding and editing is a task that more power users are looking to their PC to do for them. Intel believes that this eight-core platform is capable of handling such workloads with ease. Each QX9775 processor offers 12 MB of L2 cache, a 1600 MHz system bus, and four cores each running at a brisk 3.2 GHz.
According to Shervin Kheradpir, director of Intel performance benchmarking, this platform is the fastest desktop PC ever tested in their labs. It reached a score of 6481 on 3DMark06 CPU and 20,160 on Cinebench 10 — even while running at the standard 3.2 GHz.
To create a Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, users would need an Intel Desktop Board D5400XS (which can support two quad-core processors), and two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors. The QX9775 is available at a maximum street price of $1,499, while the D5400XS board comes for an estimated street price of $649.
That means- $1499+$649= $2148 = Rs.84000(approx)=O MY GOD!!!
