Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

HD content is all the range now and unless you’re living under a rock you aren’t going to know about it. Acer have announced two new models into its netbook range powered by AMDs new range of chips focusing on the power needed for mobile HD use on a computer, which some smaller form machines might struggle with.

The 521 is a 10.1” 1024x600 affair run by a single core AMD V105(1.2GHz) whilst the meatier 721 is at 11.6” 1366x768 run by a dual-core AMD Athlon Neo K325. Both run Windows 7 and can have up to 4GB RAM. For the HD”ness” they will both run ATi Mobility Radeon HD4225 GPUs easily capable of firing out Full HD video and modern PC games should run ok too.

Other features include HDMI out so you can output onto a larger screen, a multi-touch trackpad for easy use. It will also have built in webcam and Bluetooth and there’s also optional 3G connectivity for internet on the go. We aren’t doing well today for getting prices on products but we do know they should be available by next month.

AMD has announced the Tigris laptop platform which will become AMD's "mainstream" platform capable of full 1080p, DirectX 10.1 support and offloading video encoding to the Radeon HD 4200 GPU. The CPU is the new 45nm dual core Caspian CPUs, with speeds ranging up to 2.6GHz which should make for quite a powerful little netbook. Unfortunately though the battery life is only rated at 1 Hour 55 Minutes of active use.

Congo will offer the same HD video and DX10.1 support but use the slightly less powerful HD 3200 and dual core Neo chips inside meaning that you will get two hours 26 minutes of computer use.

AMD today launched a factory-overclocked version of its ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics chipset. The move takes the 850MHz core clock speed of the standard edition and boosts it to 1GHz.

This overclocked model is the first GPU to reach the 1 gigahertz milestone, which according to AMD will boost the peak computing power from 1.36 teraflops to 1.6 making it theoretically faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285.

Even though this card will be pulling more power AMD say the card will run fine on fan cooling.

The card should be available through regular 3rd parties such as ASUS, MSI and XFX.

No word on pricing but the card should be available immediately.

It is normally desktop GPUs that introduce new technologies into the graphics world, especially with die shrinks. However AMD are bucking the trend and have announced that the worlds first 40nm GPUs will be the Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and 4830.

The 4860 and 4830 will both have 640 stream processors, but the 4960 will feature up to 4GHz GDDR5 memory, and the core will be clocked at 650MHz and the 4830 will feature a core clock of either 450MHz or 600MHz, depending on the circumstances. The 4830 will also have either DDR3 or GDDR3 memory, which will be clocked between 800MHz and 900MHz.

Both GPUs will have 128-bit memory bus, and contain 826 million transistors. This is actually a reduction in transistors compared to the 55nm Mobility Radeon HD 4850 which has 956 million transistors. This therefore has meant that AMD has been able to reduce the die size significantly which is shown in the picture below.

MD’s senior vice president and general manager of graphics products, Rick Bergman said:

it's well documented that notebooks have surpassed desktops in worldwide sales.

 

this is the fifth consecutive time that AMD is first to launch graphics processors based on a new process node, but the first time we've chosen to make such a debut in the mobile market. Shrinking these chips smaller and smaller means that OEM partners are able to pack more graphics horsepower into smaller notebooks, so that consumers can enjoy all the goodness of DirectX 10.1 games, home theater-quality HD multimedia on HD displays and energy-efficient features for long battery life on a wide range of notebook form factors.” For those of you who are eager to see what AMD will do with 40nm desktop GPUs, Bergman tells you “not to worry” as “40nm desktop parts are coming soon.

Availability should be as soon as the 2nd quarter.

Via Bit Tech

AMD’s triple-core X3 CPUs are actually a quad core CPU with one of the cores disabled. According to Playwares, you can enable the fourth core of the Phenom II X3 710 simply by selecting Auto in the Advanced Clock Calibration setting on a Biostar TA790GX 128M motherboard.

The site has posted some interesting screenshots that show a test system’s start-up screen before and after the BIOS change. It starts off detecting a Phenom II X3 710 that’s been overclocked to 3.12GHz, but after the BIOS setting it then detects the CPU as a 3.12GHz Phenom II X4 10, complete with four cores.

The site has also run CPU-Z on the CPU before and after, which appears to show the same CPU with four cores after the BIOS change.

The site also ran the CPU tests from 3DMark06 on the system, and the score increased from 3795 to 4776 with the extra core enabled.

According to Bit Tech it is in theory possible that the 4th core with have stability issues. AMD use a native quad core system which means if one core if faulty they could just disable it and sell it.

According to BetaNews, the Intel is cutting prices on quad-core 'mainstream' chips by up to forty percent in response to the launch of the Phenom II X4 range from rival AMD. In order to compete with the Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz processor – which is sold in batches of 1,000 for $275 – Intel is slashing the cost of its 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad Q9650 from $530 to $316.

However just a few hours after this announcement AMD responded by cutting the prices for its new 45nm Phenom II CPUs.

According to Bit-Tech the prices haven't affected AMD's official price list, Novatech and Newegg have reduced the price of both the 940 and 920 processors.

In the UK, the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition was selling for around £220 including VAT and Novatech is now selling a boxed retail Phenom II X4 940 for under £190. Meanwhile, the 920 was selling for about £190 and Novatech now has it down at £160.

Granted it could be possible that the AMD price drops are just retailer related but it is quite a big coincidence that  large companies drop the prices at the same time.

The important thing is that price drops are good for us as the consumer!

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, raising the performance bar for graphics cards priced at less than $150 (USD).

Like all ATI Radeon HD 4800 series products, the new offering delivers game performance and HD multimedia capabilities, as well support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 cards will also support ATI CrossFireX technology allowing gamers to combine as many as four cards in one PC.

Ok so we have seen the first Penryn but it is a quad core desktop version. Daily Tech are reporting the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme dual core processors for Notebooks will land in January with the first appearance at CES 2008 (January 7th).

While the current lineup with be 35W the Montevina platform released in the 2nd half of the year will lower the TDP to 25W.

I have to say that Intel are definatly on a winning streak at the moment, I hope AMD start to improve their releases.