Intel Readies Price Cuts

Last week, AMD talked about its desktop plans for the upcoming year in Sunnyvale, California. Although AMD showed its upcoming desktop processor running in single and dual-socket configurations, the company chose not to announce an official launch date for its next-generation desktop processors. According to Robert Rivet, AMD executive vice president and CFO, however, AMD's next-generation processors will be ready by Christmas.

Despite how distant the possible December launch date of AMD's native quad-core desktop processors may seem, Intel is already stepping up the competition and will be instituting a series of aggressive price cuts in July. We originally reported these major price cuts, which will be targeting Intel's quad-core desktop and server processors, in March. At the time, we didn't know the official date of when the price cuts would take place. We can confirm today that the price cuts will take place on July 22.

Intel Core 2 Quad
QX6800 2.93 GHz 8MB 1066 MHz $999
Q6700 2.66 GHz 8MB 1066 MHz $530
Q6600 2.40 GHz 8MB 1066 MHz $266

The first part of the price cuts will center on Intel's quad-core desktop processors. The Q6600, which Intel launched in February, currently sells for $530 in quantities of 1000. When the product was originally launched, it was priced at $851 in quantities of 1000. The next round of price cuts will effectively lower the price to $266. The selling price of the Intel QX6700 will also be lowered, coming in at $530 by the end of July.

Story obtained from DailyTech.com

GeForce 8800 Ultra

We barely managed to get used to GeForce 8800 GTX and Nvidia has released a newer more powerful card; GeForce 8800 Ultra. They finally brought the Ultra back after we last seen it on the 6 series. So whats new in this Ultra card? Well the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra performs an average of between 10 and 15% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU.

The new graphics card features a G80 GPU clocked at 612 MHz, a mild increase from the GeForce 8800 GTX’s 576 MHz. The 612 MHz G80 GPU pairs with 2.16 GHz memory, up 360 MHz from the GeForce 8800 GTX’s 1.8 GHz. Aside from subtle clock speed increases, there is still 768MB of video memory attached via 384-bit wide memory bus. NVIDIA has raised the shader clock speeds by 150 MHz to 1.5 GHz as well. A new cooler spanning the entire length of the card also joins the list of upgrades.

So why do you want the new GeForce 8 series anyway? Well here's why:

1. GeForce 8 Series GPUs are the first shipping DirectX 10 GPUs and are the reference GPUs for Microsoft DirectX 10 API development.
   
2. GeForce 8800 GPUs are the developer's platform of choice for this year's top DirectX 10 titles, including Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Crysis, Age of Conan, Hellgate: London, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, World in Conflict, BioShock, PT Boats, and Cryostasis.
   
3. Developers creating next-generation OpenGL titles, such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are also using GeForce 8 Series as their development platform of choice.
   
4. GeForce 8 Series GPUs include all required hardware functionality defined in the Microsoft Direct3D® 10 specification, with full support for the DirectX 10 unified shader instruction set and Shader Model 4 capabilities.
   
5. DirectX 10 is included with Microsoft Windows Vista and delivers unparalleled levels of graphics realism and film-quality effects for games, all rendered in real-time on a GeForce 8 Series DirectX 10-capable GPU.