Nvidia has announced that it is in cahoots with various partners, including Alienware, Asus, Dell, Microsoft and Toshiba, in order to bring 3D PCs to the world. Speaking at the Computex expo in Taipei, Nvidia also welcomed Asus chief Jerry Shen to the stage to announce three new 3D capable PCs.

“Asus has a strong track record of pioneering new categories of PCs, as we did with the netbook,” said Shen.“Now Asus is very bullish on developing the 3D PC category by shipping notebooks, desktops and an all-in-one PC equipped with Nvidia 3D Vision. We believe that all entertainment-based PCs will become 3D capable within a few years.”

Nvidia is saying that a 3D PC must include a pair of 3D active-shutter glasses, like its 3D Vision kit, a 120Hz 3D-capable display and a discrete graphics processor, like its GeForce GPU, that is capable of delivering high definition imagery to the 3D display.

Nvidia states that a 3D PC will let you play 3D games, view and modify 3D photos, look at the web in 3D and watch 3D Blu-rays.

Asus boss Jerry Shen announced three machines that would be joining Nvidia’s 3D revolution. First up is the Asus G51Jx-EE, a laptop that relies on Nvidia’s 3D Vision active shutter glasses. Next is the Eee Top ET2400 which is a desktop with USB 3.0 support and a 23.6-inch LCD monitor. Lastly, the CD5390 tower was described as the “world’s most powerful gaming solution,” complete with a GeForce GTX 480 GPU and compatibility with three different 3D LCD displays.

There’s no official news on these machines and when we might be seeing them in the shops as of yet (thanks to Engadget for the details). We’ll be bringing you the full specs as soon as we get word from our Asus contacts.

3D is beginning to take hold in a big way. The cinema is experiencing a massive 3D boom as a result of huge titles like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, home cinema is also getting in on the act with 3D Blu-rays and TV sets and gaming is about to undergo some serious 3D enhancements. It seems only fair that PCs come along for the ride too.

Link to article: Nvidia gets serious for 3D PCs

A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.

NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the “dragon” scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.

Link to article: NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance

AMD has started shipping its 8-core and 12-core “Magny Cours” Opteron processors for sockets G34 (2P-4P+), and C32 (1P-2P). The processors mark entry of several new technologies for AMD, such as a multi-chip module (MCM) approach towards increasing the processor’s resources without having to complicate chip design any further than improving on those of the Shanghai and Istanbul.

The new Opteron chips further make use of third-generation HyperTransport interconnect technologies for 6.4 GT/s interconnect speeds between the processor and host, and between processors on multi-socket configurations. It also embraces the Registered DDR3 memory technology. Each processor addresses memory over up to four independent (unganged) memory channels. Technologies such as HT Assist improve inter-silicon bandwidth on the MCMs. The processors further benefit from 12 MB of L3 caches on board, and 512 KB of dedicated L2 caches per processor core.

In the company’s blog, the Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products, John Fruehe, writes “Production began last month and our OEM partners have been receiving production parts this month.”

The new processors come in G34/C32 packages (1974-pin land-grid array). There are two product lines: the 1P/2P capable (cheaper) Opteron 4000 series, and 2P to 4P capable Opteron 6000 series. There are a total of 18 SKUs AMD has planned some of these are listed as followed, with OEM prices in EUR:

• Opteron 6128 (8 cores) | 1.5 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 253.49 Euro
• Opteron 6134 (8 cores) | 1.7 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 489 Euro
• Opteron 6136 (8 cores) | 2.4 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 692 Euro
• Opteron 6168 (12 cores) | 1.9 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 692 Euro
• Opteron 6172 (12 cores) | 2.1 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 917 Euro
• Opteron 6174 (12 cores) | 2.2 GHz | 12MB L3 cache | 115W TDP – 1,078 Euro

Link to article: AMD Starts Shipping 12-core and 8-core ”Magny Cours” Opteron Processors

WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.

We first got word that production A3 GF100s were back in Santa Clara near the end of January. When enough of them rolled off the line to characterize the silicon, we hear there were no parties in Santa Clara. For those not interested in the ‘why’ side of things, the short answer is that the top bin as it stands now is about 600MHz for the half hot clock, and 1200MHz for the hot clock, and the initial top part will have 448 shaders. On top of that, the fab wafer yields are still in single digit percentages.

That said, the situation is far more nuanced than those three numbers suggest, and the atrocious yields are even after the chip has been downclocked and defective units fused off. To make matters even worse, the problems that caused these low yields are likely unfixable without a complete re-layout. Lets look at these problems one at a time.

Click here to read the rest of the article at semiaccurate.com

Link to article: nVidias Fermi GTX480 deemed “broken and unfixable” pre-launch

Holy huge die batman

If you just can’t wait to get your hands on AMD’s latest 12-cored ‘Magny-Cours’ Opteron processor, perhaps you’d care to risk buying leaked versions from eBay?

The as-yet unreleased dodeca-cored processors have popped up on the auction site under the user account oakvillemehlvillecomputers, available on buy-it-now at an eye-watering $7,700 (£4,880) for a batch of four 2.2GHz processors – designed for quad-processor socket G34 server systems and offering 48 logical processing cores to the host operating system.

The chips have 6MB of L2 cache, split 512k per core, but also have 12MB of L3 cache and use quad-channel DDR3-1333 ECC memory in addition to several HyperTransport connection to link the chips. There’s no further details yet on optimisations or core advancements, we’ll have to wait for AMD to detail those.

As reported by MaximumPC, the seller has even made plans to offer a pre-built server based around the Magny-Cours chips, offering 48 cores and 64GB of RAM in a Tyan VX50 serer case for a massive $20,000 (£12,674) – pending the release of the quad-socket Tyan S8812 motherboard designed to take the processors.

What isn’t clear is quite how the seller – who appears to specialise in high-performance computing equipment – has managed to get his hands on the AMD chips in the first place. Described as “the real thing” and “from [the] AMD assembly line” – along with, slightly worryingly, “no returns accepted” – there’s no clue as to whether the chips are pre-release test versions or the finished article. With AMD having previously committed to a 1H 2010 release for Magny-Cours, it’s not impossible that we could be looking at a more official release sooner rather than later.

Link to article: AMD’s 12-core Magny-Cours leaked on eBay

Intel is poised to release new performance and high-end processors across its various Core family brands, within Q1 2010 and later. OCWorkbench, citing sources in Japan, released tentative release dates and information of new Core family processors. Among a few known names such as the six-core Core i7 980X, there are a few new ones. Details and dates are as follows:

* Core i7 980X “Gulftown”: six-core, LGA-1366, 3.33 GHz (turbo: 3.60 GHz), March 16
* Core i7 970 “Bloomfield”: quad-core, LGA-1366, 3.33 GHz (turbo: 3.46 GHz), Q3, 2010
* Core i7 930 “Bloomfield”: quad-core, LGA-1366, 2.80 GHz (turbo: 3.06 GHz), February 28
* Core i7 880 “Lynnfield”: quad-core, LGA-1156, 3.06 GHz (turbo: 3.73 GHz), Q2, 2010
* Core i5 680 “Clarkdale”: dual-core, LGA-1156, 3.60 GHz (turbo: 3.80 GHz), Mid-May
* Core i3 550 “Clarkdale”: dual-core, LGA-1156, 3.20 GHz, Q2, 2010
* Pentium E6700 “Wolfdale-2M”: dual-core, LGA-775, 3.43 GHz, Q2, 2010

Although the Core i7 960 is available in its OEM form, the company doesn’t plan to retail it with its retail packaging.

Link to article: Upcoming Intel Core CPUs Detailed