AMD/ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 are the video cards to pick up if you’re looking to build a new gaming rig. An excellent balance of price and performance really shook up the video card landscape and it was no accident. This was a planned attack which began in 2005.

AnandTech has the back story which involved gutsy moves, new ways of thinking and patience. I was surprised to find out that AMD/ATI decided to not only use both a new manufacturing process and a new architecture which focused on price/performance, but they also decided to use GDDR5 memory when it wasn’t even properly speced yet.

When the options were either make the chip too big or make the performance too low, ATI looked elsewhere: let’s use a new memory technology. Again, put yourself in ATI’s shoes, the time was 2005 and ATI had just decided to completely throw away the past few years of how-to-win-the-GPU-race and on top of that, even if the strategy were to succeed it would depend on a memory technology that hadn’t even been prototyped yet.

The spec wasn’t finalized for GDDR5 at the time, there were no test devices, no interface design, nothing. Just an idea that at some point, there would be memory that could offer twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3, which would give ATI the bandwidth of a 512-bit bus, but with a physical 256-bit bus. It’s exactly what ATI needed, so it’s exactly what ATI decided to go with.

What a gamble.

After much waiting, the “Jasper” revision for Microsoft’s failure prone Xbox 360 has been spotted in the wild. Xbox-Scene have the nude pics for those who wish to see what’s under all that white plastic. For those who only care about the noteworthy changes, here’s the breakdown:

• 65 nm GPU (down from 90 nm) which results in a cooler running and (hopefully) longer lasting Xbox 360.
• 256 MB of internal storage (up from 16 MB)
  • The New Xbox Experience will live in here along with Xbox Live! Arcade saves (according to VentureBeat)
  • Current Xbox 360 owners are forced to use their hard drives and external memory units for the NXE.
• New 150W power supply introduced (down from 175W used with the ‘Falcon’ models)

Little to no info was revealed on how prospective buyers can pick one of these cured Xbox 360s, but it’s safe to say that the longer you wait, the more likely you are to get a “Jasper” unit.

As for me, with the NXE, my problematic DVD drive is no longer a problem. Now, I’m just fussing over the lack of affordable storage space.

If you could recall, I read Dean Takahashi’s The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. It shed some insight into why the Xbox 360 hardware was dying so frequently, but nothing remotely concrete. Well, Dean’s got the “final chapter” to his book written up in an article called: Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft’s video game console woes

It’s written in the same style as his book and it can be digested independent of it.

The article details a myriad of mistakes Microsoft made including:

• Rushing the machine in attempt to beat Sony and Nintendo to market.
• Cramming too much into the box since they were trying to make a powerful yet appealing hardware
• Too bent on cutting costs

(more…)

This piece of news is pretty big. If you purchase an Intel X58 based motherboard for your Intel Core i7 you will be able to use both AMD/ATI’s Crossfire and Nvidia’s SLI capabilities with the appropriate video cards. Intel chipsets tend to be the best of the bunch and with this solution, you aren’t forced to make that decision of red team or green team; now you can choose the blue team and get both!

There are many hoops for motherboard manufacturers to jump through and since they are part of the Intel “X” chipsets, they will be expensive motherboards, but this is the step in the right direction.

I wonder how long it will be until we see this capability trickle down to the more mainstream chipset offerings.

AnandTech and The TechReport have their reviews up. They like it. It’s a fast card, but it is a multi-GPU card and multi-GPU cards only flex their muscle with proper driver support. So if you’re willing to spend $549.99 USD and willing to deal with the fact that not all games will benefit from it, the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a prime choice.

Personally, I would still go for AMD’s Radeon HD 4850 — it’s a steal for the asking price of ~$169 CAD.

Well it’s technically not a “GPU”. It’s actually something like this:

Well, it is important to keep in mind that this is first and foremost NOT a GPU. It’s a CPU. A many-core CPU that is optimized for data-parallel processing. What’s the difference? Well, there is very little fixed function hardware, and the hardware is targeted to run general purpose code as easily as possible. The bottom lines is that Intel can make this very wide many-core CPU look like a GPU by implementing software libraries to handle DirectX and OpenGL.

So it’s not really a GPU by default, but this upcoming Intel processor can run GPU code. Great, isn’t? This is a small step towards what could be Intel’s official move into the GPU market. It isn’t happening for another year or so, but it’s worth checking out if you’re interested.

AnandTech has a technical writeup explaining what and how Larabee will work. This could be the beginning of something spectacular.

What I found most interesting is how Intel is re-using re-tooled Intel Pentium processors for this new CPU design. They’ve managed to squeeze in about 10 of these original Pentium cores into the same die space of a Core 2 Duo.