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.
News of several graphics cards and notebook GPUs from AMD have leaked, courtesy of the usual shadowy DigiTimes sources. According to the insiders, AMD plan to launch their ATI Radeon HD 5700 series desktop GPUs in October, in the shape of the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750, followed by the Radeon 5870 X2 (R800) in November.
Temped by Crysis on the iPhone? Even with its most recent processor and graphics boost, Apple’s 3GS smartphone isn’t quite up to that level, but OTOY have been showing off how, thanks to AMD’s next-gen GPUs, they can squirt Crysis-level HD gaming across a network to your mobile. AMD demonstrated their next-gen platform’s 2.5 teraFLOPS of floating-point power and DirectX 11 abilities this week, and OTOY were on hand to show Ars Technica just how they’re using all that power.
AMD have revealed their latest attempt to corner the market in notebook hardware, with the launch of the 2009 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform “Tigris” and the Second-Generation AMD Ultrathin Platform. Both combine AMD’s latest CPUs and ATI-range GPUs, and promise up to 42-percent improved performance in the mainstream range and ultraportables that “visibly outperform” rival systems (such as Intel’s CULV, we presume) when it comes to 3D gaming, media processing and more.
One of the watermarks for the notebook industry is how many GPUs are sold in a given quarter. All notebooks sold today sport either integrated GPUs or discrete GPUs to handle graphics, gaming, and movie playback. Typically, the discrete GPU market in notebooks is mostly in NVIDIA’s court, AMD has changed that.
Sony have admitted that certain models of VAIO notebook may be affected by the notorious NVIDIA “bump” material issue, which can see the GPU overheat and eventually break completely. The nine model types on Sony’s list join the existing roll-call of faulty notebooks, which includes machines from Apple, HP and Dell. In response, Sony are offering free repairs for affected VAIOs, and to extend the standard warranty (on the GPU alone) from the regular 12 months to four years in total.
With official photos, full specifications, an unboxing and demo video behind us, all that’s left for MSI’s X-Slim X600 – before a post eventually saying it’s been retired, of course – is a full review. Happily LaptopMag are on hand to deliver just that, putting the 15.6-inch CULV ultraportable through its paces to see if it’s more than just good looks or falls flat like its smaller X340 sibling.
Dell have updated their XPS Studio 16 notebook with ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD4670 GPU, complete with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. The new option – which is already listed on the company’s US site – replaces the previous HD3670 with 512MB of memory, and can be paired with up to a Core 2 Duo T9600 processor running at 2.8GHz.
HP have announced two new graphics enhancements for their Z-series of workstations, including an optional Elemental Accelerator for use with NVIDIA’s Quadro that will see Adobe CS4 gain access to the CUDA processing. There’s also the option for up to two NVIDIA Tesla GPUs in HP’s flagship workstation, the Z800.
Those of you interested in the Dell Precision M6400 notebook series, will be pleased to hear that AMD will soon be outfitting them with their ATI FirePro M7740 GPUs, which will offer a serious graphics boost.
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