Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"If the Radeon HD 5870 was characterized by roughly twice the computing resources as Radeon HD 4870, then the Radeon HD 5770 represents a halving of Radeon HD 5870. You’d think that’d yield something that looks a lot like the Radeon HD 4870 to which you’re already accustomed—and you’d be close to correct."

ATI is currently going through a release-fest right now, having just revealed their prized Radeon 5800 series. The 5700 series, while a little more pedestrian, seems to keep in line with what the market is offering right now. Both the 5770 and 5750 are priced to sit in the mid-range category of video cards and perform similar to those in the $125-$175 range, but they do offer some neat new bells and whistles such as triple-display Eyefinity goodness and bitstreaming. For those already with a good video card, I do not think it is enough to make you open your wallet, but those looking to build a new computer, this definitely would be the way to go. Tom's Hardware seems to think that these cards could be a viable option for an HTPC, especially with its bitstreaming capabilities, though the fan, albeit quietish, begs to differ. Me, I just hope that this potentially drives the price of their 4870s down, otherwise, the new cards only become an incremental upgrade over the previous generation.

"San Francisco, Calif. AMD has introduced a "mainstream" notebook platform designed to provide improved performance for multimedia applications and 3D gaming. Tigris - which has already been adopted by 8 OEMs - supports full 1080p HD playback and offers up to 25 percent longer battery life (55+ minutes) than previous AMD mobile platforms."

Notebooks have been dominating the sales charts for quite a while now, and Intel, with its Core 2 line, has been sitting nicely at the top of the chart. AMD first struck at Intel in the netbook segment with its ION platform, and it looks like they are now ready to compete on bigger laptops. Tigris and Condo appear to offer some impressive boosts over Intel in both performance and battery life. The charts they provide are pretty, but the past few years, I've seen AMD's mobile line run pretty hot and with poor battery life. I really hope they have come up with a real contender(s) here but I will wait until the reviews come out to believe all their claims.

"AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that's normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal "GPGPU" trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU."

Parallel processing is a hot trend in computing. Taking advantage of the horsepower available in video cards has become more and more desirable, especially to accelerate media processing. Both NVidia and AMD have been working hard to provide a development platform that allows you to use their video cards for more than just pretty 3D graphics, but AMD has just taken it a step further, extending their platform to support x86 processors. The biggest benefit I see is it makes OpenCL much more universal, giving developers more incentive to use it. Those of us with the extra horsepower can then see a great boost in more programs, but those of us without will not be left behind.

"Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices wants to show the world that its processors are capable of breaking the world records when it comes to their overclocking capabilities. As such, the company sponsored an overclocking event in Finland, where its AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition processor was pushed up to the impressive speed of 7.0GHz, a figure that might become a new world record in case the results are validated."

7 Ghz? Sweet mother of motherboards! That's...insane. I drool at the thought of encoding h.264 video at 7 Ghz. So the question is, if this new chip is capable of insane speeds like that, why don't we see chips in the more "mundane" range of 4 Ghz or 5 Ghz? Power consumption? Stability? Longevity of chips? I'd happily accept a 5 Ghz chip that only lasted 36 months if I knew it would be stable during that period.

"The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU."

It took nearly two years for AMD to come out with a response to NVidia's CUDA platform and even at that, when ATI Stream was first released it was severely limited. AMD has finally released an update that puts ATI Stream much more in line with the competition. Toms Hardware takes the update for a spin and finds that there are still a few parts that need polishing. It's great to see GPUs getting more use since their parallel processing capabilities are astounding, CUDA still seems to have a considerable edge for varying applications which along with video and image processing can also do things such as PhysX.

"In the early years of the new millennium, with CPU clock speeds finally accelerating past the 1 GHz mark, some folks (Ed.: including Intel itself) predicted that the company's new NetBurst architecture would reach speeds of 10 GHz in the future. PC enthusiasts looked forward to a new world where CPU clocks kept increasing at an accelerating pace. Need more power? Just add clock speed. Newton's apple inevitably fell soundly on the heads of those starry-eyed dreamers who looked to MHz as the easiest way to continue scaling PC performance. Physics doesn't allow for exponential increases in clock rate without exponential increases in heat, and there were a number of other challenges to consider, such as manufacturing technology. Indeed, the fastest commercial CPUs have been hovering between 3 GHz and 4 GHz for a number of years now."

This is a long-standing issue with me - the battle between CPU makers putting more cores on their CPUs and software developers trying (mostly in vain) to create software that can utilize those cores. The article itself breaks it all down quite nicely through a series of benchmarks, but here's the bottom line: if you know you'll be using software that can properly utilize four cores, such as video editing software, you'll see big performance gains from going with a quad-core CPU. On the other hand, if you're not using software that can use four cores, you'll get more speed for your dollar by going for a dual-core CPU - you'll typically get more Mhz on a dual-core for the money.

"AMD faithful and bargain hunters alike have a pair of new toys to play with starting today, as AMD launches two new processors for its socket AM3 platform, the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and 945. Both parts boast compatibility with AM2+ (DDR2) and AM3 (DDR3) motherboards, while the Phenom II X4 955 BE supplants the AM2-based 940 as AMD's new flagship entry in its Phenom line. Coinciding with the launch, AMD has also overhauled its Dragon Platform Technology, saying "every aspect of the platform has been improved and the overall value is impressive." And we'd have to agree, considering both new chips are being priced below $250."

Things have been bumpy for AMD lately, but they're still in the game, and with the release of the 3.2 Ghz unlocked (meaning easily overclockable) Black Edition CPU at a street price of $245 USD, they're proving they've still got some fight left in them. This chip doesn't measure up to the Intel Core i7 mind you, but in this craptastic world economy, AMD seems to have the right idea: performance matters, but so does the cost of the parts.

"Invented by Intel in 1978, the x86 architecture has evolved through the ages, not only getting faster, but increasingly flexible as more and more extensions and instruction sets accompany each new release. It's been a wild ride the past 30 years, and whether you lived through it all or have only recently picked up your first processor, we invite you to join as we look back at not only the most popular x86 CPUs in its history, but ones you may never even have heard of."

Maximum PC takes a trip down memory lane to celebrate the 31st year of the x86 legacy. Despite competition from various other types of processors and its current battle against the ARM chip, x86 from the 8086 to the Core i7 has dominted the PC market. The look back on the history of this line covers the arms race between Intel, AMD and Via as well as some other notable events. I have to admit that I'm surprised that the Pentium-M was not touched on, which I consider to probably be one of the biggest turning points in recent history, especially for Intel. It's still good to get a get a sense of how we got where we are with PCs and for those of us who have lived through most or all of this legacy, it brings up some points of nostalgia. I for one miss the "Turbo" button.

AMD first shows the new HP dv2, a small computer that uses the AMD Neo processor, a 1.6 Ghz, 25 watt CPU that's part of their Yukon chipset. It's a very interesting little machine - far more powerful than a netbook, but starts at $699 USD, so not that much more expensive than most of them. AMD also talked a little about their new Phenom II CPU, and how it forms a pillar in their new Dragon platform. The Phenom II CPU has been overclocked to 6.3 Ghz with liquid nitrogen, and to 3.7 Ghz with air cooling. They stressed that they believe the experience of using a computer is about more than the speed of the CPU. I agree, except when I'm having to render a huge HD video file; then it's ALL about the speed of the CPU. They talked a little about the Fusion Render Cloud, but not in very much detail - I suspect this is still too new of an initiative to have much in the way of detail.

After AMD talked, Image Metrics got up to show what they've been able to do with ATI GPUs - and the results are quite impressive! I've also hated how artificial most face animations are in games - especially how bad the lip-sync tends to be - so I can't wait to see their technology in the games I'm playing. Filmed at CNTRSTG.