Details are scant at the moment, and Fudzilla is quoting unnamed “industry sources” so take this news with a grain of salt even though it makes sense and probably isn’t that big of a stretch anyway.

The site is also positing that the ATI chip may be of the 28-nanometer variety but being that next generation consoles are apparently not due from Microsoft and Sony until 2012, GPUs by that time could be invisible and made out of unicorn horns and fueled by Sasquatch DNA for all anybody knows. It could happen!

ATI already won next gen Xbox deal [Fudzilla]

Thanks to John for sending this in.

What’s the matter with AMD? The number two chip maker in the whole world just posted some numbers that don’t reflect too kindly on its performance over the last few months. The big, bad Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corp lost $416 million last quarter; about $195 million of that was related to a corporate spinoff (see: GlobalFoundries). When put into scary percentages, AMD’s sales fell off 21 percent. Meanwhile, Intel, what with its Core 2 Duo and, more importantly, its Atom, continues to hum along nicely, expecting sales to rise for this same quarter. So what gives, AMD?

A few things, it looks like. One, you can’t ignore the fact that we’ve been in an economic funk for the past several months. People can’t as easily drop a few hundred dollars on a system pieced together from Newegg parts.

But then why isn’t Intel doing as poorly? Well, if you buy a netbook, those tiny, pointless computers that are all the rage these days (unless your name is “Apple, Inc.”), odds are you’ll find an Intel Atom processor in there. How the Atom compares to AMD’s Nano is the subject of many a message board thread, but message board threads don’t pay the bills.

(Sales of ATI GPUs aren’t doing so great, either, for whatever reason. That’s also not helping AMD’s bottom line now that it owns ATI.)

So, yeah. How about the fight for La Liga this year? Pretty damn interesting.

Photo: Flickr

I’m afraid one of CrunchGear’s shortcomings is a severe lack of contact with disgruntled Taiwanese manufactory workers. That leaves it to places like DailyTech, who thrive on such connections, to get hold of such precious booty. It’s obviously not a final version (my god, look at the case), but the components appear to be final. A new core clocked to 850MHz (capable of more), a gig of GDDR5, and some “tweaks and modifications” that are under investigation, likely to be changes aimed at the chinks in the 4870’s armor.

Expect more in the coming weeks.

A Dutch retailer did briefly list a 5870 X2 in inventory, specifically a Radeon HD5870X2. It seems more likely that a 58XX card will be an entirely new die and core and support DirectX 11, rather than show the refresh specs this mysterious product seems to offer. Perhaps it’s the Radeon HD4995 people have been expecting, which should recapture the top performance spot from NVIDIA? Nobody knows. Meanwhile, here are the specs, from Guru3d:

Memory Type: GDDR5
GPU frequency: 800 MHz
Memory Frequency: 4800 MHz
Interface: PCI-e 16x
RAMDAC: 400 MHz
TV-out: HDMI
DVI: 2 x
Max Resolution: 2560 x 1600 pixels
DirectX: 10.1
HDMI: 1 x HDMI

Sounds hot — like magma.

I’ve just read two head-to-head reviews of a GTX 260 and Radeon 4870, one at DriverHeaven and one at Bjorn3d, that suggest that at the enthusiast level (~$300), the GTX 260 has as much as 10-15% performance lead across the board. That’s huge, and what with PhysX and CUDA ascending, I think I know what my next card will be.
[via Rage3D]

I think you have to be a real hardware geek to find this stuff funny, so it’s no surprise that it made me smile. Although it’s not exactly credited, it’s pretty clear that this is a low-key effort by AMD to discredit NVIDIA — the cartoon casts a bediapered dinosaur as NVIDIA’s troubled last generation of video cards and makes fun of their limited and faulty hardware.

Whether it’s “official” or not is hard to say, but it’s fun no matter what.
[via HardOCP]

The graphics card market is stuffed to the gills right now and you can find competition and clear choices practically at every $10 interval. If you’re looking to upgrade, just set your own price, be it $100 or $500, and seek out the best deal for that money.
[image credit: Hot Hardware]

AMD is teaming up with these guys to make something nice for its high-end video cards. That’d be another leg up on NVIDIA, as they’ve already pretty much got them beat in price and performance; efficiency and low heat would be icing on the cake.

AMD and Celsia Technologies Collaborate on High Efficiency GPU Cooling Solution

AMD invites Celsia to become part of its technology development project and
present at the 2008 AMD Technical Forum and Exposition

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Celsia Technologies
(OTC Bulletin Board: CSAT) is partnering with AMD’s graphics product group
on a vapor chamber based cooling solution for high end graphics cards. The
cooling module includes Celsia’s patented NanoSpreader(TM) that
significantly outperforms competing heat pipe based solutions.

“Working with AMD, we were able to meet all of the design criteria for
a new GPU cooler. Namely, it had to be lighter, perform better and be lower
cost than the current heat pipe based design,” said Joe Formichelli,
Celsia’s CEO. “Unlike thermal modules using heat pipes, our two-phase
NanoSpreader comes in direct contact with the heat source whereby removing
costly, heavy base plates.”

As part of AMD’s technology development project, Celsia has been
invited to present at the 2008 AMD Technical Forum and Exposition tomorrow
in Taiwan. Additionally, a short video explaining Celsia’s NanoSpreader
vapor chamber technology will be shown as part of the conference’s opening
presentation.

But if you trust HardOCP (and I do), that doubling of video RAM makes for a simply better gaming experience , and at a relatively small premium to boot (a 512MB 4870 costs ~$275, a 1GB 4870 ~$300). Although games are pushing more on the performance front than the RAM front, it helps to have that cushion of space for swapping, caching, and so on.

Direct X 11 is on track for a 2009 release, according to AMD’s little slide up there. You’ll also note that the company expects Windows 7 in 2009, too. That’s cute.

And how many Direct X 10-only (or even DX10-enhances) games have there been since its release, what, two years ago? Doesn’t look like too many to me.

Also, just what is “HD+” supposed to mean?

via Gizmodo

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 graphics cards are a wet dream for gamers on a budget by delivering DirectX 10.1 graphics and an HDMI port with 7.1 channel audio while keeping the price low. The $55 HD 4550 is equipped with 512MB of DDR3 memory with a 96 GFLOPS of power. The smaller but still potent HD 4350 packs 256MB of memory for $39. ATI claims that this type of power has previously not been available at this price point and I think they are right. These are a heck of a deal when they launch sometime in October ‘08.

PR

Of course, first we look at AMD. What the hell, guys? They’re quick to point out that the faulty cards were all from a single distributor: Diamond. So! The culprit is found! Wait though: Diamond didn’t manufacture the cards. They have a stable of OEMs who make the various lines of tech they distribute. Fortunately for blame-seekers, the faulty ones were traced back to ITC/GeCube, so that’s the end of the story, right? Actually, blame could go back up the ladder if it turns out Diamond tweaked the card too much or didn’t do enough quality assurance, and it seems AMD never checked them either. Alienware, who received a significant chunk of the faulty cards, has replaced Diamond as a partner, and to be honest I would be wary of them as well. If you’re the proud owner of one of the 15,000 or so faulty cards, Diamond will gladly replace it, so at least you have that, but it sounds like there’s enough blame to go around for everybody. Not nearly the level of SNAFU achieved by NVIDIA, but this kind of bad PR may be harmful to AMD’s big comeback.

The ATI Radeon HD 4600 is out of the gate and already talking a big talk.  Allegedly the new, low price card can outperform both the HD 3650 and the 9500GT while still keeping the cost under 80 bones for the GDDR3 flavor. Plus, the HD 4600 is now one of the least expensive DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.x supported graphics card. The graphic-creating power comes from a 55nm manufacturing process and the same 320 stream processors of the HD 3650. The basic 512MB, GDDR2 version is available for $69, with the upgraded GDDR3 edition going for $79. AMD even has plans to ship a 4670 version, complete with 1GB of memory later this month for an undisclosed price. As for the performance claims, we’ll wait for the benchmarks to hash out the details.

A cutting edge card will draw nearly 300W at maximum, which is what we were running our entire computers on a couple years ago. Certainly performance has increased more than proportionally, but if extreme gamers are buying 1000W power supplies for their rigs, there’s something crazy going on. While hardly anyone in the world is running quad-SLI Radeon 4870s, the increasing necessity for a separate video card is driving up total power costs all the way down to the budget sector. It’s not quite “burning the rainforest” bad but as we work as a culture to reduce our energy footprint, this might be a good place to start.

“If you have the performance high-ground, you can price your products according to performance,” Baumann said. “If you don’t have the high-ground, you have to price them to products around you.”

And AMD is practicing what it preaches. The 4870 was such a good performer they could put it at the perfect price point, and NVIDIA had to accommodate them, and now NVIDIA is pricing around AMD’s offerings because they can’t hit them straight on. It’s a low blow, but what with increasing demand for graphics performance in low-end hardware, it may be the punch they needed to throw.

AMD is, I think, releasing press releases just for giggles. This one is pretty insubstantial, but it linked the neat demo video above so it’s worth mentioning. Essentially, AMD is attempting to extend its current (and possibly short-lived) dominance by emphasizing how well the conquering 4800 series works with DirectX 10.1. I have to say, the lighting tools shown in the extremely long ping pong ball demo above are pretty nice — the occlusion is subtle and the global lighting is effective. I dare say my next video card purchase will be a Radeon.

AMD’s DTV assets include Xilleon integrated DTV processors and reference designs, NXT receiver ICs, the Theater 300 DTV processor, and a line of panel processors that perform advanced motion compensation, frame rate conversion and scaling.

We aren’t sure how this is going to affect the PC DTV market, but hopefully, Broadcom will keep the AMD/ATI ball rolling and pump out more digital tuners for our computers.

Hydra’s “Lucid” technology does all the SLI-organizing work in hardware, and is so good at it that it can work with a Radeon and a GeForce at the same time as easily as it might with two of either. It breaks up the scene, assigns and keeps track of the parts each card renders, and reintegrates it once the cards do their calculations. Man, that’d be nice, I hope it really works.

Advanced Micro Devices is apparently getting set to split up into two companies, according to TG Daily. There are two fluffy, happy, candy-cane strategies currently in place, one called Asset Light and one called Asset Smart. It looks like each may become more than just a strategy, though, as they’re expected to split into two distinct companies in a matter of weeks.

The two companies are rumored to be a development company and a manufacturing company. It’s speculated that the development company will be run by new CEO Dirk Meyer and that former CEO Hector Ruiz might be tapped to run the manufacturing company. Ruiz recently stepped down as CEO but remained on AMD’s board.

Grains of salt, here, as nothing’s been set in stone. We should know more in the coming weeks, though. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to ATI as well.

Hope you didn’t buy an Nvidia GTX 260 or 280 in the past month, since their prices were just slashed overnight. The GTX 280, once retailing for $649, will now set you back only $499. Meanwhile, the GTX 260, once $399, is now $299. Or, in scary percentages, that’s a 30 percent and 25 percent drop, respectively.

As Devin mentioned in last week’s podcast (and previous posts), Nvidia is under pressure, price-wise, from ATi this generation. For a while there we were all like, “ATi, what gives? Your cards stink.” Its upcoming 4870 X2, which is rumored for an August release, is essentially as powerful as the GTX 280. How was Nvidia supposed to sell a GPU for $150 more than the 4870 X2 if they were essentially the same thing?

Seeing these prices, the thought of serious PC gaming seems so absurd to me. I’m fine with a 360 and my MacBook for the occasional hour of WoW