The real story behind Intel’s Sandy Bridge woes

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

In the space of 24 hours, Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors have lost some of their sheen, after the firm announced a recall of the Series 6 chipsets used by all Sandy Bridge processors.

The cause, it said, was a problem with the SATA controller which over time, if left unchecked, would “potentially impact the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices”.

Since Intel’s been proudly boasting that its new chipsets are its first to support SATA 6Gb/s, that’s a bit of an embarrassment – but what’s actually gone wrong? (more…)

Toshiba mini NB550D review: first look

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

The big news about the Toshiba mini NB550D netbook is the processor inside: no Intel Atom here, but AMD’s all new C-50 – a dual-core chip running at 1GHz.

And AMD is very enthusiastic about the platform as a whole, describing the combination of processor, chipset and graphics chip as an APU: accelerated processing unit.

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Is AMD about to put the boot into Nvidia?

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

It must be tough being Nvidia. A few short weeks after it looked like the green team was back on track thanks to the award-winning GeForce GTX 460, a slide of Radeon HD 6000-series specifications has been leaked – and it looks likely that AMD will kick Nvidia into touch before year’s end.

The leaked information concerns the Radeon HD 6750 and HD 6770 which, if the past two generations are to be believed, will sit in the middle of the upcoming range. There’s evidence to suggest that the new series is more evolution than revolution, with both cards still using the 40nm fabrication process that was introduced way back with the HD 4770 and the GDDR5 memory that’s been commonplace for the past year.

Nevertheless, the list of specifications hints at the increased power that AMD has been able to eke out of its new Northern Islands family, of which the Barts XT core is the first representative. The HD 6750 will allegedly have a 725MHz core accompanied by 1,120 stream processors, and its compute performance of 1.624TFlops sits between the HD 5770 and HD 5850 in the pecking order. (more…)

Are PC stickers really on their way out?

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Listeners of this week’s PC Pro podcast will know that we devoted a good few minutes to the seemingly trivial topic of PC stickers – those “Intel Inside” or “Powered by Windows” labels that are cemented to the wrist rest of the average laptop.

The conversation was triggered by my spontaneous thought that one of the reasons AMD might only now have decided to ditch the ATI brand was because it could suddenly get away with slapping AMD stickers on new laptops.

Let me explain: companies such as Intel and Microsoft pay PC manufacturers to have those stubborn little stickers welded to their machines. It struck me that the big, bad Intel of yesteryear – the one that was paying PC manufacturers to ignore AMD processors – wouldn’t have been too chuffed to see AMD stickers appearing alongside its own, and may have threatened to pull those payments if PC manufacturers sidled up to the enemy. (I stress this is merely a theory; I have no evidence that Intel ever threatened to do anything of the sort. But it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.)

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Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)

Will Nvidia PhysX ever be worthwhile?

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Nvidia has talked up its PhysX system incessantly since it bought Ageia Technologies, creator of the engine, in February 2008, but it’s struggled to make a significant impact on the PC gaming landscape. So, despite the impressive tech demos and endless optimism, is PhysX looking more like a white elephant with every passing GPU and game release?

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All the week’s reviews

Friday, February 13th, 2009

The big launch of the week was AMD’s move to its AM3 platform. Finally allowing the use of DDR3 with its CPUs, we received a motherboard and several new triple and quad-core processor models, which we promptly fired through our intensive benchmark suite with pretty impressive results.

At the more budget end of the scale we saw HP’s Compaq CQ2000, a beautifully designed small-form-factor PC with a 20in TFT for a mouth-watering price of just £286 exc VAT. We’ve seen cheap mini-PCs and nettops before, but this is the first we’d really want in our living room.

We also reviewed Toshiba’s latest business model, the Tecra R110-112, which came in bright white with a vast array of security features and reasonable power too. (more…)

Is Nvidia losing its grip?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Today sees a very telling announcement in the graphics world. Gainward, for years an exclusive producer of mainstream and overclocked GeForce cards, has launched its first Radeons to market – the HD 4850 and HD 4870.

You could look at it one of two ways. The simplest reason could be that Gainward (owned by non-exclusive card maker, Palit) simply wants to boost its profits by reaching a larger audience than it previously sold to. The other is that AMD’s current resurgence has Gainward looking upon Nvidia as less of a sure thing than before.

After all, each of Nvidia’s last few launches has seen the GeForces getting faster, but also bigger and hotter than ever before, while AMD is managing to keep up in the speed race while keeping its Radeons much more manageable, and vastly less expensive.

It’ll be interesting to see if any other manufacturers follow suit.

AMD shuffles its feet

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Over breakfast this morning, I was chatting to Ian McNaughton, AMD’s robust senior product manager. Now, before tongues start wagging, I should explain that, right now, I, along with a few other members of the British technology press, am down in the south of France for a first look at a new AMD technology. (I can’t tell you about it just yet, but rest assured you’ll know the very second the embargo lifts.) Since this event has seen both journos and hosts tumbled together in the same hotel, it’s fairly inevitable we’ll bump into one another from time to time.

It’s not every day one gets to chat with senior AMD staff – especially not while they’re in such an agreeably bleary and docile state – so I took the opportunity to voice a personal opinion. I observed (perhaps a little bluntly) that it was all well and good AMD announcing new technologies for the future, but perhaps it ought also to think about promoting one of the strongest bits of technology it already has in the marketplace, viz. its Phenom X3 and X4 processors.

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Three: Definitely a Crowd.

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that – and this may be something of a blessing – will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

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