You can’t accuse Qualcomm of not looking ahead. While their Snapdragon chipset was in strong attendance at their London event today, they were also rolling out some particularly impressive predictions for the future of mobile chipsets. Qualcomm expect the mobile chipsets of 2011 to 2013 to be capable of gaming performance on a par with the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3, thanks to a new breed of dual-CPU SoCs with high-performance 2D and 3D crunching.
You can’t doubt AMD’s commitment to marketing speech: the company is describing their new ATI Radeon HD 5970 as the “fastest graphics card in the world”, and from glancing at the specifications it certainly looks potent. The Radeon HD 5970 – which we saw leaked in recent weeks – packs DirectX 11 support, dual Cypress graphics processors for up to 5 TeraFLOPS of power, and the potential for twice that if you hook up twin HD 5970 cards using CrossFireX. A single card can, thanks to Eyefinity, create a 7,680 x 1,600 workspace across three displays.
Remember the BeagleBoard prototyping platform, which was put to such cost-effective use in the DIY Beagle MID earlier this year? Expect to see plenty more of the $149 OMAP3 device in future, now that Symbian Foundation have released their latest build for the platform. Speaking at Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 conference today, Symbian Foundation’s Shaun Puckrin discussed the roadmap for Symbian^3 and Symbian^4, the next-shipping versions of the platform, together with some of the functionality that will be hard-baked into the OS.
NVIDIA’s Tegra may not have grabbed as much attention as its Ion sibling – the latter’s ability to grant the humble netbook with 1080p capabilities is certainly an eye-catcher – but the compact chipset is certainly doing impressive things inside the Zune HD and is poised to capitalize on Smartbooks too, so it comes as little surprise to hear that the company is readying its successor. The NVIDIA Tegra 2 – not yet officially named – is expected to drop in 2010, claim Fudzilla’s “high ranking industry sources”, with twice the computational and graphics power of the first-gen chipset.
Gigabyte have always thought a little different with their ultraportables, and their latest model is no different. The Gigabyte Booktop M1305, like the Booktop M1022 we reviewed back in June, comes with a desktop docking station; however, the M1305 is a 13.3-inch 1,366 x 768 machine and uses Intel’s CULV processors, rather than the paltry Atom N270, and squeezes an NVIDIA GeForce GT220 GPU with 1GB of DDR3 memory into the dock for improved graphics performance.
NVIDIA’s Ion LE promises to deliver the same 1080p HD playback as its regular Ion sibling, but at a cheaper price; to do that, it drops DirectX 10 support in favor of solely accommodating DX9. It turns out that the limitation is, in fact, an arbitrary one and that the Ion LE seems to have been artificially crippled by NVIDIA themselves; MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner found that by slightly modifying HP’s own Ion drivers he could get them to install for the Ion LE.
The poor global economy resulted in some of the worst quarters in the history of many electronics and notebook makers thanks to consumers not buying in droves. It looks like the market is starting to turn around for many computer makers and the latest figures for GPU shipments from Jon Peddie Research are in for Q3 2009, and they look good.
ASUS have outed their first supercomputer, and while you might associate the term with rooms packed full of ominous black totems, the ASUS ECS 1000 is actually a simple desktop. Despite the compact size, the ECS 1000 manages to hit speeds of up to 1.1 terraflops courtesy of NVIDIA graphics cards; the 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 is paired with three NVIDIA Tesla C1060 computing processors and a single Quadro FX5800.
Been waiting for some of that sweet NVIDIA 40nm GPU action, but aren’t keen on buying a new PC with an OEM card installed? You’ll be pleased to hear that the first retail versions of NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 220 and G210 video cards have emerged, initially courtesy of Gigabyte, and both carrying prices well under the $100 mark.
NVIDIA have confirmed that they plan to launch their second-generation Ion 2 chipset sometime in 2009, after rumors of such plans circulated in early July. According to Fudzilla the confirmation came from NVIDIA’s head of chipsets, with the Ion 2 expected to deliver a smaller die, far faster graphics and many more shaders.
Chrome OS: Waiting Is The Hardest Part…Though Necessary
Apple is no longer the Nordstrom of Tech, they’re the “New Nordstrom”
Can Anything Replace Windows XP As the Best Netbook Operating System?
Hey, Premium Notebooks or Netbooks, Get the Basics Right!
SlashGear Japan
