Gigabyte Debuts New Motherboards

Gigabyte just announced their new slate of motherboards that will support AMD’s A75 series chipsets and the latest AMD A-Series APUs or Llano. The new A75 based motherboards are said to offer DIY PC builders and developers a higher level of 3D and multimedia performance that is scalable and said to offer the best value upgrade path imaginable.

Gigabyte’s VP of Service and Marketing Henry Kao is quoted as saying that the new boards were new and exciting as AMD new APU’s were “ground breaking” APU technology. As well as bringing AMD A-Series technology to DIY users who demand excellent gaming and multimedia performance on a budget, these motherboards also offer a compelling upgrade path that includes Dual Graphics configurations.

The A75 motherboards from Gigabyte feature an AMD A75 ‘Hudson’ chipset supporting the latest 32 nanometer AMD A-Series APUs. That said, these chips are the first ever to combine a DX11-capable, high performance graphics processor with the option of a dual or quad core CPU on one silicon die, offering a 3D gaming and multimedia experience which is similar to a discrete graphics configuration.

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TI Chip Goes 1080p On Android Devices

Texas Instruments on Tuesday said its OMAP chip had been certified to unlock full 1080p movies from Netflix for Google’s Android 2.3 based devices, which includes smartphones and tablets.

TI’s on-chip security feature, called M-Shield, will be able to decode 1080p high-definition movie streaming from Netflix, stated Fred Cohen, director of the OMAP user experience team at TI. A security layer unlocks the encoded video, which can then be viewed on smartphones and tablets or TV sets connected through an HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port.

The purpose of having this technology is to provide end-to-end security for protected video content, Cohen said. Movie studios are making more high-definition 1080p content available and are adamant about protecting their product, which are considered premium content.

The on-chip feature minimizes the ability to copy content, as it is easy to take control of a rooted Android device, Cohen said. It’s easy for users to access memory where the stream is temporarily stored, and then write the movie to another device.

“You have to protect those devices,” Cohen said. “We have implemented a firewall.”

TI’s security technology is to provide a security layer so devices get access to high-definition movies, Cohen said.

Netflix provides different levels of security certification depending on features such as the video quality and resolution, Cohen said. Netflix did not return a request for comment on whether it was streaming 1080p video content to mobile devices, or whether chip makers required certification to unlock secure 1080p content.

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AMD’s Bulldozer Overclocked To 4.63 GHz

It appears that those techies toying around with samples of AMD’s FX-8130P were able to overclocked this processor to a remarkable 4.63GHz.

That said, Bulldozer appears be AMD’s fastest offering where the eight cores run at 3.8GHz, or up to 4.2GHz with AMD’s Turbo Core 2.0. The processor 8MB of L2 cache, 8MB of L3 cache, supports DDR3 1866MHz and is said to have a 125W  TDP.

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AMD’s Bulldozer Will Be Late

AMD has confirmed that their Bulldozer chip-set will be delayed until later in the summer.

The FX Series which is codenamed Zambezi is based on the Bulldozer architecture.  Unfortunately, AMD didn’t provide an official date they just said that the FX Series is coming in “late summer”, which means do not expect to the chip until probably late August.

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AMD Drops Prices On Certain Chips

As AMD casually outed their new processor pricing lists.  Over all AMD dropped the Athlon series between 2 and 25 percent based on the model. The highly sought after Athlon II X4 645 dropped from $112 to $102 and the eco-friendly 605e dropped from $122 to $98. Dual core and triple core Athlons were shown love as well with cuts between 3 and 12 percent, and 5 and 25 percent respectively.

There are many Phenom deals as well with the dual-core 560 dropping from $102 to $90 bucks.  The EE quad-core 905e processors got a price drop around $65.00 dollars bringing the price to $100.00.  AMD’s much touted 9xx Black Edition saw roughly a 10 percent price drop too with the flagship Phenom II X6 discounted from $239 to $205.

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Intel Developing Thunderbolt Technology

A new interconnect technology being developed by Intel could be ready for market by 2015 and will be able to move data between computers at up to five times the speed of its recently launched Thunderbolt technology, an Intel researcher said earlier this week.

The new technology uses silicon photonics, which combines silicon components with optical networking, to transfer data at up to 50 gigabits per second over distances of up to 100 meters, said Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.

Intel expects the technology to be ready for use in PCs, tablets, smartphones, televisions and other products by 2015, Demain said. As well as being faster than today’s interconnect technologies, it’s expected to lower costs because the components will be built using existing silicon manufacturing processes.

The technology could possibly be used in TVs and set-top boxes to carry video streams at much higher definition than those available today. Image resolution is likely to quadruple by the middle of the decade, when successors to 1080p have arrived, and that will mean more data has to be pushed to the TV.

It should also enable faster data transfers between smartphones, tablets, PCs and peripherals such as external storage drives.

The technology still has a way to go, but Intel showed its progress at the event in New York Wednesday. It showed what it said were working prototypes of the silicon chips used to transmit and receive the laser signals.

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Intel Z68 Chipset Coming

Sources in the tech industry are claiming that the Z68 chipset from Intel is scheduled to debut on May 8^th.

The Z68 is specifically designed for high-end Sandy Bridge processors since it is equipped with additional features that are apparently absent on current P67 and H67 boards.

The Z68 is said to have improved overclocking performance, in addition to support for RST SSD caching and a slew of extra enhancements geared towards the high-end markets.

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AMD Debuts GPU

AMD has just unveiled their smallest 6-series graphics card to date. The HD 6450 is based on the Caicos GPU, with a die of only 75mm square, 160 shaders and a 64-bit memory bus.

The graphics card comes in two models one with 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked up to 800MHz or 512MB of GDDR5 up to 900MHz.  Furthermore, the GPU runs at different clock speeds, 625MHz on DDR3 cards and 750MHz on the GDDR5 variant. Realistically, AMD should have used two different SKU with different clocks and memory to make life easier.

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Intel Outs New Processors

The new chips have a maximum capacity of 10 cores, with hyper-threading and they are expected to deliver a 40 percent performance increase over the previous Xeon 7500 series.

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Intel’s Next CPU Faster Than Sandy Bridge

We hear that Intel is already in discussion with its partners about the 22nm Ivy Bridge CPU, and the talks cover the chips performance.  The 22nm processor supposedly offers more performance with a similar thermal design.

Intel is informing its buddies to expect a 20 percent performance increase over Sandy Bridge, which is about the same gain that Sandy Bridge had over Nehalem based CPUs. Keep in mind this is an optical shrink of the existing 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture.  Intel traditionally takes a very safe process when it moves from one manufacturing process to another. The 22nm Ivy Bridge comes with the new architecture and will debut in time to take on Bulldozer and Llano from AMD.

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