Tech News
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Nvidia GeForce GTX 680: Kepler arriving this month
Published: Sunday, March 11, 2012 | By: DennisIf the rumors are true we should see the next generation of nVidia GPUs coming out later this month. The initial rumors were for a April/May release (which might still be the case) though reports out of CeBit has pushed this timeline up quite a few weeks.
And now the most important bit: Specs. The GK104/GTX 680 will have 1536 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory controller connected to 2GB of GDDR5 memory (4GB will be an option). The core will sit at 705MHz, while the shaders will be clocked at 1.4GHz. The memory will be clocked at 2GHz QDR (6GHz effective) and should be capable of 192GB/s. There’s no information on the GK107, but the GK110 is expected to have 2304 shader cores. It is rumored that the GTX 680 will be slightly faster than the HD 7970 in some tests, and slightly slower in others.
Given the name the GK indicates an entirely new core though will likely follow some of the same architecture patterns found in Fermi. A new feature will be "turbo boost" which will help even out framerates and lower overall GPU temps. From a spec standpoint the GK104 might just be the best gaming card ever.
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NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Accelerate Science on HP ProLiant Generation 8 Servers
Published: Thursday, March 8, 2012 | By: DennisI don't normally post press releases in the news but this story seemed fitting considering my recent encounter with an HP Proliant DL360 G5.
HP ProLiant SL250 Gen8 CPU-GPU hybrid servers combine the world's most powerful parallel processors, NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, with new Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.
With an average of 12 percent higher performance for scalar processing, the new Intel E5-2600 CPUs relieve sequential bottlenecks for GPUs to tackle and complete parallel tasks significantly faster. This results in dramatically higher GPU utilization and overall increased application performance.If you think about it this is a natural progression for server systems when they need more power. We have been doing the very same thing for years in our desktop PCs but we don't use them for science experiments but for games and we call the technology SLI and Crossfire.
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Walton Chaintech returns to motherboard and graphics card markets
Published: Thursday, March 8, 2012 | By: DennisThis is an interesting read, I wonder how serious they are at getting back into the market.
Taiwan-based Walton Chaintech has announced it will form an alliance with China-based leading graphics card vendor Colorful and return to graphics card and motherboard industries. The company quit the motherboard and graphics card markets in 2006.
Walton Chaintech chairman Lu Li-Cheng (transliterated from Chinese), pointed out that the company has many years of experience in motherboard and graphics card production, R&D and marketing and as the company received OEM orders from Colorful, the company expects to gradually return back to branding business in 2013 and is targeting to breakeven in 2012.Lets hope when they do get production rolling their motherboard offerings are better than they used to be. Then again one of the last great AMD 754 based motherboards we used was a Chaintech design, and a motherboard I still have in my collection.
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Cebit 2012 HardwareHeaven Coverage
Published: Wednesday, March 7, 2012 | By: DennisThere are three major trade shows that occur throughout the year. The first is CES which focuses on personal electronics, I attend this show because it is close (In Las Vegas) and rather inexpensive for me to attend. The next is CeBit in Hannover Germany. This show is geared more for the EU market than a worldwide stage. Of course the third is Computex and might be the best tradeshow in the world, at least for a hardware guy like myself.
We headed over to Germany this week to check out the latest tech on offer at Cebit 2012. Check out our coverage.
The quote is very descriptive of their coverage but I fully expect to see more from them.
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Introducing the EVGA Classified SR-X Motherboard
Published: Wednesday, March 7, 2012 | By: DennisThe EVGA SR-X is the anticipated upgrade to the famed SR-2 using the latest LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors and quad channel memory x2.
March 6th, 2012 - EVGA Corporation, the leading-edge 3D processor and motherboard manufacturer, announced the ultimate in high performance motherboards, the EVGA Classified SR-X. This motherboard sets a new standard for what is considered an enthusiast motherboard with dual CPU support, 4-way SLI support, SATA III 6GB/s, SAS, USB 3.0 and more. Whether you are an extreme power user, workstation, server admin, folder/cruncher; this is the ultimate board for you. This board was designed from the ground up to support the latest and greatest in technology, and be able to complete any task you throw at it faster than you ever thought possible.
Keep in mind this is server class hardware meaning you'll need to run Xeon processors for proper SMP.
More photos in the Ninjalane Message Forum and more information using the link below.
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Minor Issues with URL Rewrite
Published: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 | By: DennisIt would seem that the webmaster tools at Google alerted me to an issue with the URL rewriter in charge of converting the review URLs from the old querystring format to the new hackable directory structure we see today. The issue has been resolved and I doubt it caused any "real" visitors any harm.
However if you were caught up in that issue over the past few days AND you happen to be reading this, then accept the apologizes of the Core Ninjalane Staff and Chief developer.
The real issue here is SEO since Google tends to work slow at indexing sites and when you have errors like this they tend to consider you a failure and remove your existence from their database. And just to think I had finally gotten the whole site re-indexed
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AMD HD7870 Launch Day
Published: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 | By: DennisI can't believe I missed this.
Video Cards
- Radeon HD 7870 Overclock Guide @ Guru3D
- AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition & 7850 Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
- AMD Radeon HD 7850 and HD 7870 Video Card Announcement
- AMD Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 review
- AMD's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition
- AMD Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850 Graphics Cards Launch Review @ HardwareHeaven
- AMD Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 graphics cards
- AMD Radeon HD 7870 and 7850 GPU Previews @ HotHardware
- AMD Radeon HD 7870 & HD 7850 Review @ Hardware Canucks
- AMD Radeon HD 7850 & HD 7870 2 GB @ techPowerUpThe HD7770 hasn't even gotten cold yet and there is already a new mid-high range GPU out and about. Funny thing is I hear reports of people having trouble buying anything related to the 7000 series.
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Windows 8-Ball Consumer Preview @ TechReport
Published: Saturday, March 3, 2012 | By: DennisI was going to do a little write-up on Windows 8 Preview (and still might) but after reading thru what TR's David Morgan has to say about it I would feel like I was copying them word for word. I mean everything they say about Windows 8 is exactly how I feel and my exact same experience.
The only difference? I ran my demo on a Core i7 3960X with 16GB of Ram and a single GTX 580, A considerably faster with the same end results.
In its current form, I feel Windows 8 is woefully inadequate for desktop power users. At best, the Metro tiles can be organized into groups and used like a restrictive version of Stardock's Fences. For touch-enabled devices, however, Windows 8 will truly be able to shine. Swiping from the edges of the screen to access menus is more natural and intuitive than having to drive your mouse pointer all over creation to call up and click on options that seemingly never pop up near the cursor's present position.
After playing with the OS, it's painfully obvious Windows 8 should be marketed purely for touch devices. The fact that it can run regular desktop applications may suggest otherwise, but even in desktop mode, everything tries to get you back to the Metro interface as soon as possible. In fact, desktop mode feels a lot like a virtual machine, existing for those rare moments when you need to dock your tablet to a keyboard and get some meaningful work done. Admittedly, I could happily put up with the annoyances of the desktop interface if I were only using it in such short bursts.I sat down to play the included Pinball game and loved the graphics and hated how ill responsive the controls where. You know how when you play online there can be a lag? Well this is a desktop game and by the time you press to hit the flipper some time has passed and the ball is no longer on target.
Seriously, how do you fuk up Pinball?
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Welcome to Ninjalane v3.5 - HTML5 Edition
Published: Saturday, March 3, 2012 | By: DennisFor the longest time I was holding back on updating Ninjalane.com to the new HTML5 standard due to the lack of browser support. Though as time rolled on I quickly that HTML5 is the future and while it isn't an official standard (according to the W3C) the fact that all modern browsers support some part of HTML5 was good enough for me to go forward with the update.
As of this news post Chrome is still the only browser to fully support HTML5. Both FF and IE9 support the majority of HTML5's new tagging structure but lack some of the other key components. Personally I still think that 3rd party plugins are the way to go when it comes to some of the new HTML5 features so ultimately I'm glad they opted not to support them.
Question:
What about IE8 and IE7, don't they lack the basics when it comes to HTML5?
It is true that IE8, IE7 and *shudder* IE6 are clueless when it comes to understanding the new tags in HTML5 but the browsers do support stylizing XML. The trick is you must tell the browser what to look for and how to stylize them, after that it the browsers will render things like in newer browsers. For the time being I've added a new JavaScript file that will create the additional code required to render HTML5 in these older browsers.If you are curious about the HTML5 upgrade or run into any rendering issues please stop by the forums and let me know.
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Intel Confirms Ivy Bridge Core Processor Specifications @ TPU
Published: Thursday, March 1, 2012 | By: DennisIntel "Ivy Bridge" is so hot right now. Let's hope the smaller process can sip power and clock higher than "Sandy Bridge"
These include details of its desktop Core i7, Core i5 processor models, notebook Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and their corresponding ULV variants, and so on. Specifications include model numbers, clock speeds, Turbo Boost 2.0 speeds, and basic features such as Built-in Visuals (integrated graphics), caches, HyperThreading, and fab process.
TechPowerUp has posted some of the slides that show current processor architecture and where the new 22nm Ivy Bridge parts fall into the portfolio based on their new part number and performance targets.
