Senin, 28 Juli 2008

The Intel Atom Dual-Core processor is coming

Supposedly the new Intel Atom Dual-Core processor will be available at September 21st.

The internet news site Fudzilla reports, that Intel plans to present its new Dual-Core Atom CPU at September 21st.

The new Intel Atom Dual-Core A330 CPU offers a performance of 1.6 GHz and provides 1 MB L2 cache. Every CPU core disposes of 512 KB and a front side bus of 533 MHz is used as well.

The Single-Core Atom CPU costs $ 29 and the Dual-Core model costs $ 43. One nice feature is that the new processors fit to mainboards with the BGA 437 socket.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX

The Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX (partially also called nVidia GeForce Go 8800M GTX) is based upon the desktop G92 chip. It is the new top video chip of Nvidia for DirectX 10.

A particularity of the GeForce 8800M GTX are the "Unified Shaders". There don't exist any more dedicated pixel- and vertex shaders but 96 so called stream processors make the graphic work (which has been done by pixel and vertex shaders in former days). Further, the shader units are higher clocked than the chip (1250 MHz versus 800 MHz).

The performance of the 8800M GTX is higher than the performance of the 8700M GT due to the 256 bit wide memory bus and the high amount of Unified Shaders. The 8800M replaces the GeForce 7950 GTX at the top of the single graphic cards. Curent games should run fluently with highest resolutions. Also DirectX 10 games can be played in highest details for the very first time (Crysis not in the highest details). The memory equioment is 512 MB GDDR3.

An advantage of the GeForce 8000 series is the integrated PureVideo video processor. It is able to help with the decoding of H.264-, VC-1-, MPEG2- and WMV9 video material in HD quality and eases the CPU.

The current consumption and the waste heat are clearly higher than with the 8700M GT and therefore the chip (like the predecessor 7959 GTX) will only be availbale in big and heavy laptops. At moment, 35 Watts TDP are a rumour.

Compared with desktop graphic cards the performance should be at the level o the slightly faster clocked 8800 GS (8800GS 600/900 MHz clock, 192 bit memory
interface and 96 Unified Shaders).