AMD Reveals its Quad-Core Design

Many people question what is AMD doing while Intel is shining with its Core 2 Duo and its soon Quad Core chips. When is AMD releasing their Quad-Core stuff? Many talks have been going on and some AMD supporters sigh when Intel will be releasing their Quad-Core chips soon.

Though AMD has claimed that their Quad-Core design will significantly be better than the Intel's, but without any physical proof, it can only be theoretical and thus be fantasised by some people.

Well, AMD has recently leaked a bit of their CPU design for the Quad-Core chips.
AMD has always claimed that its native quad-core design is superior to Intel's plan of bundling two dual-cores in one chip. The company has already started revealing the details that back-up its superiority claims. At the heart of the issue lies AMDs Direct Connect architecture which utilizes serial hypertransport links to directly connect memory, CPUs and some IO subsystems. The design offers great advantages in scalability and is allowing AMD to even consider octal-core implementations.

If they release their quad-core, it is possible to see a octal-core chip shortly after that with a design such as these. I think that AMD is purposedly letting Intel getting all the limelight while AMD works on their little design. I personally believe that AMD will beat Intel in going to octal-core chips.

Intel's Kentsfield design is based on the sharing of the front side bus, a hurdle which AMD avoids using the dedicated HT links for each dual core CPU. I wonder if Intel will change or postpone the release of their quad-core for home users to a later date now that this information is available.

AMD has also confirmed that its CPUs will be available in speeds varying from 2.6 to 3.0 GHz. Does it mean that each core is producing that clock speed or does it mean that all 4 cores total to that speed?

nVidia's GeForce 8800 & Intel's Quad-Core Chips

It is official now. The GeForce 8800 GTX will be released somewhere in November though sources say the date is November 8. The specs will be the revolution of new technology and totally surpass the cards that we can buy now. The GeForce 8800 GTX will be the flagship of the 8 series as there will be another card which is much lower (8800GTS) performance for affordability. Though lower performance, the performance still outperforms any card available today (not counting SLI of today's cards)

The new cards will support DX10 and shader model 4.0. To cut the long story short, here are the specs of the GeForce 8800GTX

Core clock: 575MHz
Pixel pipelines: 128 @ 1350 MHz
Memory: 768MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 384-bit
Memory bandwidth: 86GB/s

And the GeForce 880GTS

Core clock: 500MHz
Pixel pipelines: 96 @ 1200 MHz
Memory: 640MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 320-bit
Memory bandwidth: 64GB/s

After looking at the specs, with the pipelines exceeding whats possible today with 48 pixel pipelines from ATI and 32 from nVidia, it is really a big leap forward. Though some of the cards today have clock speed higher than what is shown here, but I doubt there is any single card which has more memory on it than what is shown up there (does not count 7950GX-2, thats 2 cards in 1). Lemuel was right in saying that it is really best to wait till at least a DX10 card is released.

The manufacturer claims that for someone to run these cards, one must need a minimum power supply of 450 Watt for the GTX and 400 Watt for the GTS. If you were to SLI any of it, you must find a power supply of 800Watt at least or it might have complications.

The question is, DX10 games won't be out till at least 2007 or so. So, is it really worth to purchase now where nothing supports DX10? Or should one wait till Windows Vista is release which provides support for DX10? That all depends if you have the money or if you are really desperate for a new card like right now.

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On other news, Intel has announced plans to reveal its quad-core chips in Q4 2006. Hewlett Packard has released its dates of its Quad-Core chips PC on November 13 with the Xeon 5300 chips. There won't be a chip for mainstream desktop till Q1 2007 when the Core 2 Quad chips will be released. Gamers would surely want to get their hands on the Core 2 Extreme version of the Quad-Core chips.

AMD, Intel's rival though are lagging behind in their Quad-Core chips claims that when their chips are released in Q2 2007, it will be far superior than Intel's. They claim that Intel is getting Quad-Core chips by connecting 2 Quad-Core chips together in 1 chip. AMD claims that their architecture is different and it would totally be better than what Intel did. However, these claims cannot be clarified till both quad-core chips are out and compared side by side.

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Now, is it worth it to wait for all these to come out first before purchasing a new PC? :)

Intel to purchase nVidia?

As we all have seen, ATI has been bought over by AMD. While all these is going on, many have asked what are Intel's reactions to all these things taking place. Well today a rumour has spreaded that Intel might be courting Nvidia into purchasing it.

Rumours of this has shot the nVidia's stock up slightly and some sources claim that there will be an announcement made tonight about the plan to buy over the industry giant, Nvidia.

It is odd as nVidia is very expensive, about USD 10 billion, while Intel already has a thriving graphics section, something which AMD did not have before the ATI acquisition. There are, of course, issues of prestige and the need to be associated with a high-tech graphics company but this would seem more like tit for tat rather than a sound business move, unless Intel has some other plans which may need nVidia expertise, such as developing in-game physics, unified shader architecture etc.