86 réponses à ce sujet

[Gorath Alpha]

I agree with you that it's something we should know about. Not all branded PCs and all retailers can be trusted to service such problems properly, so for the time being, buying AMD is the wisest course.

The specific chipsets that were designed to allow the newest, Sandy Bridge model, CPUs, their greatest level of usability had an undiscovered error in the SATA circuits. The Chipset in question (family of chipsets) has two types of SATA connections, one newer and faster than the other. It is the slower of the two that has the problem.

It's going to cost them literally $700 million, up to as much as a $billion, to recall their chips and replace them.

[Tyrax Lightning]

I just found a cool read!

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-12570323

This talks about a new PC Peripheral Connection Type coming out called the 'Thunderbolt'! It's anyone's guess if it's gonna make obsolete everything from USB 3.0 to Firewire! I wonder if even HDMI will survive this...?

[Gorath Alpha]

The original articles referred to "Lightpeak".  here's something pertinent:

http://www.anandtech...-as-thunderbolt

It's looking as something still rather distant in the future before game players' systems start using it.  But computers are interesting, at least partly because of the mutability, but very much because of the comparative rapidity at which changes are introduced. 

[Tyrax Lightning]

Sweet! That Article had even more details!

I wonder if i'll be using Thunderbolt on my next build, or if it'll get delayed by problems with the design, or if it'll take forever to become affordable? Still... If Thunderbolt succeeds, Computer Cable numbers used to hook stuff up from outer parts of peripherals to each other may drop to 1-3 Cables for typical Home PCs... That's gonna look damn good! Then again... if one wire of the Cable breaks, will we see the entire Computer Functionality going splat all at once until Cable replacement...? Perhaps the next step past Thunderbolt is to research improvement in Cable Durability & Robustness.

[Tyrax Lightning]

Incoming Quantum Computing!!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-12811199

[Gorath Alpha]

Gorath Alpha wrote...

Because of events in California, in Silicon Vallley, I've been editing my several reference articles here in these forums, and did bring a couple of them nearer the top of the cyclic pile recently.  This particular thread hadn't been updated in awhile, and it won't hurt for it to bump its way upward tonight. 

I was curious whether the disruptions rising out of the disasters in Japan would affect computer parts availability, but it seems that it has not.  I bumped pne of the main VGA references yesterday, and a diffeent article an hour ago, and I thought this one could use a recycle as well. 

[Gorath Alpha]

Gorath Alpha wrote...

Two different approaches to the integration of graphics into the actual central processor functions are appearing soon (when I wrote that).  One is a bare minimum effort**, from the champion of bad video, Intel.  The other is AMD's far more creative and in my opinion, more useful, contribution.  Intel's Sandy Bridge was due in April or May, when the same basic low quality Intel video now riding along piggy back inside the processor package of the i3, i5, and i7, is entirely integrated in the next series of CPUs.  Intel rushed their own out the door half-cooked, to beat AMD to market.  .

The AMD device combines a far more capable graphics capability, closely related to the Radeon HD 5n00 generation as an integrated function to their multi-core CPU, and the mobile versions (were supposed to be) already in the (figurative) hands of Netbook, Notebook, and laptop manufacturers, with the PCs using them originally expected about the time of CES 2011.  The desktop Fusion APUs were expected in mid-April.

Although pricing wasn't being discussed yet, the presumption is that the difference between an APU with business graphics, and one with the equivilant of the HD 5570 graphics integrated will be relatively small compared to a card, probably less than $10 to the OEMs, translating to maybe 125 retail (my guess there).

THOSE APUs will run games such as DAO & ME2 without any separate GPU card, which is why it's significant to this article.  We can expect to see what the Mobile Fusion products will look like at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2011, which opens on January 6th.  Until mid-December, it had been my understanding that products would actually shipping by January 6th. 

The current expectations put the shipping dates for the Netbook and NetTop APUs closer to the end of March, 2011.

The foundries that both Global and TMSC were supposed to have on line this past winter, using 32 nm media instead of 40 nm both failed to produce.  TMSC gave up entirely on 32 nm and will skip ahead to 28 nm.  The video graphics updates that should have been on 32 nm last fall had to be completely redesigned to fit the older 40 nm wafers, and the same thing affected both the APUs and the planned release of the new Bulldozer CPUs, 

The 40 nm APUs for Notebooks and Laptops are supposed to have finally shipped to the OEMs late last month, so that retail availability should be at the end of this month.. 

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 22 mai 2011 - 09:04 .

[Gorath Alpha]

Anyone in the market for a laptop should play some "wait and see" right now.

Read this to see what I meant:

www.dailytech.com/AMD+Fusion+Emerges+as+Serious+Threat+to+Intel+in+the+Notebook+MidMarket/article21763.htm

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 31 mai 2011 - 02:20 .

[Gorath Alpha]

AMD had a preview setup of their eight-core Bulldozer (32 nm) at E3 with a new chipset and their latest high end graphics, so perhaps the 32 nm problems have been, or are about to be, overcome! 

www.dailytech.com/AMD+Previews+Scorpius+Platform+FX+Octacore+Bulldozer++Radeon+6xxx+/article21833.htm

[Gorath Alpha]

Gorath Alpha wrote...

AMD had a preview setup of their eight-core Bulldozer (32 nm) at E3 with a new chipset and their latest high end graphics, so perhaps the 32 nm problems have been, or are about to be, overcome! 

www.dailytech.com/AMD+Previews+Scorpius+Platform+FX+Octacore+Bulldozer++Radeon+6xxx+/article21833.htm

Here's the very latest on the Llano APU ("Fusion") for the "Middle Market" laptop buyers:

www.dailytech.com/AMD+Ships+Llano+ASeries+Looks+to+Punish+Intel+on+the+Budget+End/article21898.htm

[Gorath Alpha]

Nothing has happened in the three years since the HD 3450 was introduced as a very Low End business graphics card to make it more useful today than it was then. It's made for business charts, graphs, presentations, and spreadsheets, not for games.

Incidentally, the leaked information about an August date as possible for AMD's HD 7n00 series was based on an optimistic prediction for the TMSC 28 nm Fabs.  It turns out that the yields have been way below expectations.  What that means is that there are way too many rejects, which raises the cost by a large margin.  Since nVIDIA's GTX 600 is unlikely to be ready before the middle of the first quarter of 2012, AMD has the luxury of putting off the GPU release until yields improve. 

The current prediction is mid-November, 2011. 

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 04 octobre 2011 - 08:43 .

[Gorath Alpha]

It seems that no matter how often we repeat that Intel video is barely above the worst garbage level, they continue duping new suckers into buying their crap. Today's victim did at least get a truthful answer from SR Labs this time.

Gorath Alpha wrote...

Sorry, you can only "play at" running the game with any chipset graphics by Intel.

DAO requires a REAL graphics card from a real 3D gaming graphics company, which Intel most certainly is not. You can force such a bad video device to run way over its head and accept the very poor performance, but over time, the odds are not in your favor that the machine will survive that level of mistreatment. It will eventually fail to perform even at the bad level it was originally capable of, and continue to deteriorate further.

And it seems that our victim didn't / doesn't care if he / she will damage that laptop with the overstress. 

The situation regarding Intel's onboard video chips, and anyone else's chipset video chips hasn't changed measurably over the past year (this edit is from late December, 2011), although the Llano family of AMD APUs are showing up in gaming forums as convenient and economical choices for Budget-level game playing.  There are several Llanos able to provide equivalent graphics performance to the Radeon HD 5570 / HD 6570 cards. 

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 22 décembre 2011 - 06:20 .