At the Microprocessor Forum, Intel demoed its V8 workstation running the POV-Ray benchmark. The machine is equipped with Intel’s Workstation Board S5000XVN, 2 quad-core Xeons 5365, clocked at 3GHz and 16GB RAM. And the results are simply impressive: Intel scored over 4,900 pixels per seconds versus a little bit over 4,000 for AMD’s 4 sockets quad-core (Barcelona) system. Again, this is an AMD 16 cores system versus Intel’s 8 cores V8 machine. Read the rest of this entry »
NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra demo “Human Head” delivers a startling leap forward in realism for real-time characters. A new sum-of-Guassians formulation of subsurface scattering within a multi-layered skin model coupled with the blazing shading performance of GeForce 8800 Ultra enables rendering of realistic human skin at a level never before seen in real-time.
To evaluate the complex skin shader and HDR lighting, “Human Head” computes 17 offscreen textures every frame totaling over 40 Million pixels, each shaded with lengthy pixel shaders. That’s more than 1.2 billion pixels every second! 4096 x 4096 color and normal textures provide photo-realistic detail even at extremely close ranges. All this shading and texture processing requires both a level of shader performance and memory bandwidth unavailable until now thanks to GeForce 8800 Ultra.
Minimum system requirements: GeForce 8800 Ultra with 256 Mb, Windows XP, ForceWare 97.44, 512 Mb RAM.
Download demo here, or watch the video here, if you don’t have a 8800 Ultra card.
Codemasters released a new demo for their upcoming Colin McRae game called DIRT.
Game is confirmed for release on June 15th 2007, for XboX360, PC and later for Playstation 3. Demo is available for XboX from Xbox live Marketplace. A PC demo comes with complete multiplayer event, available at Codemasters web page here. Update: Buy DiRT at amazon.com Read the rest of this entry »
Sony Business Solutions website has published the details of new Sony VAIO BX740 and BX760 business-class notebooks, both based on Intel “Santa Rosa” platform and Centrino Duo technology.
The latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, ranging from T7100 at 1.8GHz to T7700 at 2.4GHz, power the 14.1-inch VAIO BX740 series and the 15.4-inch BX760 series. These laptops feature Intel GM965 chipset paired with integrated Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 or PM965 chipset with ATI Mobility Radeon HD2300 dedicated graphics card. Both systems support up to 4GB of DDR2 memory, and come with up to 200GB hard drive spinning at 5400rpm. Sony VAIO BX740 and BX760 have DVD burners.
www.theinquirer.net:
Wily Ferret posted some hefty and honest remarks on the state of OpenGL yesterday. Regardless of thenumber of hate e-mails monsieur Wily received, the truth is that OpenGL got stuck in too much politics, and DirectX just switched to a higher gear. Read the rest of this entry »
Balance is an authentic luxury-smartphone. Up to now, these two categories (luxury and smart) have diverged, and few well-executed alternatives exist. The choice of material (titanium and stainless steel) and its mechanism (a shell-slide solution) impart exclusivity to the phone, while its features satisfy the most exigent business and multimedia requirements.
In its last conference call, Nvidia mentioned the name of its next generation chip. It is not G90 as we’ve heard previously, instead it will be called G92. With 1 Teraflops performance it should end up being twice as fast as the current G80 Ultra, at least in raw numbers.
The chip should be ready in late 2007, some time around Xmas if all goes well and it should be out before ATI gets its R700 ready. The mid range cards will follow in the spring of 2008.
Nvidia doesn’t feel intimidated by R600 or RV630 and 610 and it would be very interesting to find out if R670 can beat the G80 Ultra. If ATI succeeds with this chip, it will dethrone Nvidia by at least a few months.
We will ask around about this G92 chip, but it sounds like a shrunk G80 to us.
www.engadget.com:
He did it, British climber Rod Baber made a cell mobile phone (apparently using a MOTORIZR Z8, not a satellite phone) call from the top of Mount Everest. In fact, he made the record breaking call twice: the first to a voice mail account, the other to his wife and children. He even sent a text message to Moto which read, “One small text for man, one giant leap for mobilekind - thanks Motorola.” Real cute, Rod. The Motorola sponsored “world record” was made possible by a Chinese mobile base station installed with a line of sight to the north ridge. Officially, the calls were made at 29,035 feet (about 8,848 meters) in temperatures of -22 degress fahrenheit (-30 degrees centigrade) — so cold that Rod had to tape the batteries to his body just to keep them active. We’re not sure where he stored the banana-shaped Z8. Of course, anyone who has ever made a call from a commercial aircraft (hey, it happens) knows that it’s really not a record, but who are we to argue with Guinness?
Jeff Hawkins, one of Palm’s founders, is rumored to unveil next week a 3rd product category that’s neither a handheld nor a smartphone.
Mr. Hawkins has been talking about his company’s plans to create such a product for about two years now. And now the situation is getting clearer. There are lots of predictions of what it will be. The new Palm device is expected to be a kind of an ultra mobile PC referred to as the Hawk. If we believe the rumors, we’ll know the details on the product very soon.
