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Bleeding Edge TV 158: AMD Press Conference: 690 Series, R600, 1 Teraflop
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Full Episodes, Gizmatic, Corporate News, Design, Features, PC / Laptop, Video Games, Videocasts, Wireless / WiFi,
We were on hand when AMD announced the 690 chipset, and also showed off the new R600 graphics technology, showing how it is able to hit the 1 teraflop mark. The video features the entire press conference presentation, including an update on the status of ATI R600, why it was delayed, and when it will launch. If you want the text version, we took minutes of the conference, which you can read below (also, be sure to check out the AMD press conference Q&A session video):
We are sitting here live at AMD’s press conference this morning, where there should be a few interesting announcements being made. Let’s jump right in, as we are live-blogging it.
10:11: AMD has been too quiet, and they know that. They will no longer allow their competitor to have the talking floor. They will no longer be pushed around by a competitor who doesn’t respect the rules of fair competition. AMD is proud that they are approaching the real issues that the industry is facing. High definition is becoming a reality more and more, and AMD plans to continue to lead that in the PC market. They will be focusing on energy-efficient processing from handhelds to datacenters, the ultimate visual experience, and empowering the world population with affordable Internet access platforms.
10:14: The OLPC initiative started four years ago, but we are now near-launch. There is an almost-final unit here at the conference. The merger of AMD and ATI was a necessary step to take AMD excellence to the next level. AMD says their hope is that their competitors go to the drawing board and beat their chips to spark competition, because AMD is confident that, in the end, their products will beat whatever their competitors respond with. Competition is a good thing.
10:18: Barcelona is more of a killer product than Opteron was when it was launched. Today we are going to get a look at Barcelona. Today AMD will be showing us a lot more than they have in the past. “The new AMD is coming together.”
10:21: Dave Orton hits the stage. This is more than a launch, it’s a campaign for 2007. AMD 690 is the foundation for a compelling PC. The combo here is WIndows Vista, ATI for the visual experience, AMD 690 chipset for stability, AMD Athlon for wide availability and choice. The end result here is great system value. At a platform level, the 690 chipset is the basis for innovation.
10:24: AMD 690 is architected to provide a premium Windows Vista experience. Right now, half the systems tested for Vista compatibility don’t even hit the good level. 75% don’t hit better, and 90% don’t hit best. The goal of the 690 chipset is to put out affordable systems that will be stable and capable enough to provide that Vista experience that Microsoft wants consumers to have, including full high definition capabilities. This includes fully supported Vista drivers.
10:27: The AMD platform strategy happens in phases. In 2007 we are seeing unprecedented support for AMD 690 chipset and boosted performance and power characteristics. In 2008 we will see significant performance enhancement and power-saving improvements, as well as optimized gaming, multimedia, and productivity platforms. Finally, in 2009, that is where we see the real end-goal of the fusion between ATI and AMD. On one chip, CPU, GPU, etc.
10:30: AMD shows off a slide that talks about gaming in Vista and how the AMD 690G Chipset compares with the Intel G965. AMD blows it away in 3DMark05, Aquamark, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry v1.4. Even further, they show a large list of 12 popular games that have vast problems, or that just flat out don’t work, on the Intel G965.
10:33: They are about to do a demo that takes an hour to do on the fastest PC in the world. AMD just did it in about 20 seconds, and that just resulted in 1019 gigaflops, or 1 teraflop. Very impressive. This tech would speed up Folding@Home by about 40 times.
10:39: Addressing Torrenza. AMD is looking to Accelerated Computing. The goal again is to blend CPUs and co-processors together. Eventually, at the silicon level, you will have CPU, GPU, accelerators, etc. With multiple cores, you can integrate everything into a heterogeneous core.
10:41: Mario Rivas takes the stage to talk about the outlook on the CPUs. He starts by talking about the evolution of AMD CPUs, from 1999 to this year when Barcelona launches. Up next is a Quad-Core AMD Opteron. This is a native quad-core with significant CPU core enhancements as well as cache enhancements. Also, dedicated technology for virtual environments.
10:45: It’s not good enough to have four cores in the same architecture. Those cores need to be able to communicate, and that will give AMD a 42% performance gain over Intel.
10:47: Turion CPU is up next, followed by Griffin. We now move to innovation on the desktop. The Agena quad core chip will hit the desktop, which is based on Barcelona. Will eventually allow for 8 cores.
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Extremetech Dissects Vista Gaming Performance
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Hardware, PC,
It has already been reported that there are some games that have problems under Microsoft Windows Vista, some due to compatibility problems with the OS, others with driver issues. Even for games that run correctly under Vista, often there is a performance hit taken by the OS. Extremetech has looked at a suite of game titles with some of the highest hardware requirements and run them all under Windows XP and Windows Vista across three high-end video cards to see what the performance hit actually is. Overall, Extremetech’s findings show that both nVidia have some room for improvement in their driver sets. Generally, the ATI card took a bigger performance hit in testing, but generally across the board, the cards dropped framerates by as much as 40%, but generally more in the range of 5 – 20%. The lack of maturity on Windows Vista video card drivers and the lack of DirectX 10 games on the platform suggests that the best option for gamers at this point is to wait for the software situation to firm up a bit more before upgrading.
Read More 
| Extremetech
Bethesda Clarifies Oblivion PS3 Rumors
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: PC, PlayStation 3, Role Playing Games, Rumors, Xbox 360,
IGN’s preview of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the Playstation 3 seemed to trigger some debate about the release, particularly regarding the rendering engine upgrades and optimizations and the fact that many of the downloadable modules for the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game would be missing. Pete Hines, Vice President of Public Relations and Marketing at Bethesda tried to clear up some of the issues.
First, Hines clarified that the missing content for the PS3 version was not due to any technical limitations of the console. His explanation was that some of the content was not appropriate for the balance of the game for a new player and that for other content, Bethesda simply hadn’t had time to look into developing content for the Playstation Store; he believes that Bethesda will be making some content available at a later date. Bethesda’s decisions here seem a little flakey; saying that delaying the release of content so that gamers could have a better experience seems a little odd considering that an Xbox 360 or PC user that buys Oblivion this week can have the content on day one. Still, given the choice between having Oblivion in PS3 gamers’ hands earlier without Playstation Network support or facing further delays while Bethesda works on implementing downloadable content, one would certainly want to have the game sooner rather than later.
On the new hardware optimizations, Hines admitted that the PC and Xbox 360 would see the shader improvements in an upcoming release, but indicated that certain vague Cell-specific enhancements would be exclusive to the PS3. Specifically what those enhancements are were left undefined.
Read More | IGN
Bleeding Edge TV 134: The Nine Hour APC Notebook Battery
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Gizmatic, Short Bytes, Accessories, CES, CES 2007, Features, PC / Laptop, Videocasts,
Greg from American Power Conversion gives us a look at their universal laptop battery that lasts for nine hours. Yeah. Nine hours. These are fairly cool, and sit below your laptop. It takes about 16 hours to charge, so an overnighter is smart with these - but seriously, nine hours of extra power is fantastic. This battery runs about $199 USD. The company also has a battery for portable devices that provide about 55 hours of power for $69.99 USD.
Bleeding Edge TV 133: New APC UPS Features
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Gizmatic, Short Bytes, CES, CES 2007, Features, Household, PC / Laptop, Videocasts,
American Power Conversion shows off their latest Uninterruptable Power Supplies. These are consumer level, and feature LCD screens that allow you to view different things going on with the unit and the power flowing through it. It even shuts down your applications for you so that you get a graceful shutdown, and it works in PCs and Macs. Not bad for $199 USD.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two Delayed Again
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Electronic Arts, First Person Shooters, PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360,
EA and Valve Software officially announced the Half-Life 2: Episode Two packages that will be available at retail for the PC, Xbox 360, and the Playstation 3. Gamespot reports that two retail SKUs will be available, the Orange Box, which will include Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 & 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. This box will be available on the PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. The Black Box, only available for the PC will include Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Pricing was not discussed for either set. Slipped into the announcement was a change in the release date; the game is no longer set for a summer release and is now targeted for the fall or winter quarter. One of the supposed advantages of the episodic release format was a shorter development cycle between releases; now it appears that Episode 2 will hit retail around 18 months after the release of Episode 1. We know Valve likes to release things when they are ready, but the continued delays are getting to be tiresome.
Read More | Gamespot
Bleeding Edge TV 128: Latest Intel Viiv PCs
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Gizmatic, Short Bytes, CES, CES 2007, Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment, PC / Laptop, Videocasts,
We caught up with Intel where we got the lowdown on the Viiv platform along with the latest Viiv-based PCs. For a definition on what Viiv is, we go to Wikipedia:
Viiv is a platform marketing initiative from Intel. Like Intel’s Centrino and vPro, Viiv is a computer platform certification for a particular combination of Intel products as its primary components. It is an open specification for an Intel-based Media Center PC. Specifically, Viiv is a particular combination of CPU, mainboard chipset, software, Digital Rights Management and network card. It is intended for primary use as an in-home media and desktop platform with the ability to operate as a normal PC or as a hardware media player/centre - running applications, playing DVDs, CDs, MP3, photographs and games as well as subscription based (partially DRM protected) content such as ILoveFilm, Napster and SKY.
So, if you want to hop on board with the next-generation of computing devices specifically targeted towards multimedia in a living room environment, check the video to get all the details from Intel.
Blizzard Makes Burning Crusade Downloadable
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Internet, MMORPG, PC,
For those gamers who might be trying to avoid the time-sink that is The Burning Crusade, Blizzard just pushed the crack pipe a little closer. Some addicts might try and keep themselves away from retail stores to avoid the temptation; Blizzard has eliminated that excuse by making the new content available for download. Gamers can now simply log into their accounts online and click to download. If there is already a credit card account stored, then a simple click on a link and $39.99 will get the download started.
Read More | World of Warcraft
2.4 Million Join Burning Crusade
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Corporate News, Internet, MMORPG, PC,
Blizzard Entertainment has broken PC sales records by selling over 2.4 million copies during the first 24 hours of availability of their expansion World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. According to their press release, the company sold over 1.2 million copies in North America and 1.1 million copies in Europe, and over 1.7 million users logged in the first day. The press release did not state how many of those people wound up queued for their game servers, or how much productivity is dipping during the week of the game’s release. Blizzard assures gamers that have not yet purchased the expansion that more copies are shipping daily; while GameStop and EBGames made an insightful decision to just order enough copies to cover pre-orders, local Fry’s Electronics stores reportedly have stacks of the game available for purchase.
The full press release continues after the jump.
Click to continue reading 2.4 Million Join Burning Crusade
CES 2007 Video: Intel Talks Up Their Quad Core Processors
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Gizmatic, Short Bytes, CES, CES 2007, Corporate News, Features, PC / Laptop, Videocasts,
Dan Snyder from Intel chats with us about their upcoming Core 2 Quadro line, and explains why the move to four cores is an important one. As Intel says, programmers are starting to write for multi-core systems, and if you want the snappiest PC on the market, you will likely want to be looking towards Intel’s quad core chips.
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