AMD’s Hammer Less Than Four Weeks Away For almost two years, AMD’s eighth-generation, 64-bit “Hammer” CPU architecture has garnered endless media exposure, while the actual processors have slowly made their way from paper announcements to real-world products. Now the wait can be counted in days, not quarters: While the desktop and notebook-oriented Athlon 64 chip Read more…
Keeping Up with Ultra-Fast GPUs As PC graphics cards’ 3D accelerators have grown more and more powerful (indeed, ATI Technologies’ new Radeon 9700 Pro chip has as many transistors — 110 million — as two Intel Pentium 4s), manufacturers have moved from generic memory to faster VRAM and SGRAM and, nowadays, DDR memory. But ATI Read more…
The Next Big Thing, or Not for Everybody? Dozens of technologies have started off in high-end, expensive systems and servers only to trickle down to mainstream use. Someday, chipmakers are betting, it’ll happen with 64-bit computing — so far exclusively for enterprise servers and scientific supercomputers, but lately buoyed by increased Windows support and AMD’s Read more…
Hot-Rod Pentium 4, Multicore CPU Announcements Start IDF with a Bang Next week AMD will blitz the high-performance PC market with the launch of its Athlon 64 processor, but this week Intel Corp. is enjoying the spotlight — and telling PC manufacturers and users what comes after the Hyper-Threading Technology of today’s desktop Pentium 4 Read more…
Updating Your Cheat Sheet on Barton, Prescott, and the Hammers Unlike carmakers, CPU vendors don’t just introduce the 2003 models in the fall of 2002 — they add new processors all year long (which is good), as well as tantalizing tech fans by busily leaking information about products that won’t really ship until 2004 or Read more…
Startup Claims Embedded-Systems Breakthrough Embedded systems design is all about having the right tool for the job. General-purpose processors (GPPs) like those in desktop PCs can be programmed to tackle virtually any computing job, but lack the performance of more specialized or task-optimized digital signal processors (DSPs). Still more specialization and performance is possible with Read more…