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Tid-bits
12/19 - ATI is to release a new set of drivers on Thursday (12/22), but beta, unsupported drivers are currently available from AnandTech. Emphasis on unsupported. Certain features of the drivers work on Radeon X1000 series graphics cards only. However, "more creative users may be able to find ways around that".
The reason creative individuals might want to find a way around the Radeon X1000 restriction is that the ATI drivers comes with a video transcoding tool for converting video from one format to another. Avivo Video Converter uses the host CPU, so you would think that the transcoding would be GPU agnostic. But it's not. That being said, the video transcoder shows remarkable results versus other transcoders, improving decode times by over half in most tested instances.
The other item of note that the new ATI drivers provide, in conjunction with Radion X1000 graphics, is hardware assisted decoding of H.264 video. "ATI's work on H.264 decode acceleration today is extremely important because H.264 is the codec of choice for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD".
H.264 decoding is very CPU intensive, so any help that the GPU can lend is welcome. Like the video transcoding, the hardware assisted H.264 decoding shows remarkable results, this time in decreasing the load on the CPU. "The average CPU utilization without ATI's GPU acceleration is a staggering 65% higher".
ATI's drivers and GPU work in conjunction with Cyberlink H.264 decoding software. The result is that H.264 video can play in Windows Media Player. The quality of the playback is determined by the horsepower of the graphics card. 720p and above is HD. 480p is not HD. You can even play high definition content from Apple, such as Apple movie trailers, if you have a beefy enough X1000 card.
NVIDIA intends to concentrate on high-end chipsets for the Intel platform with its acquisition of ULi Electronics. Typical NVIDIA. The company hopes to do with the Intel platform what it has so successfully done with AMD: "build on this success by producing more value-added solutions for the high-end Intel platform".
At last, an article on Flash memory hard drives. Actually they will be hybrids of flash memory and traditional hard drives, combining the best of both worlds: the speed, robustness, and low power consumption of flash, and the lost cost and high storage density of magnetic media. Microsoft has designed a hybrid hard drive. So has Intel. Microsoft writes the operating system, so support for Microsoft's design shall be included in Windows Vista. Sorry Intel. Wider "adoption is expected as standardization of the platform expands".
One of the advantages of hybrid hard drives is faster reboots and resumes. Speeds range from faster reboots to instantaneous resume. Lower power consumption is another advantage—add an extra hour to the battery life of your laptop, for instance. Finally, a solid-state medium should be more durable and "boasts superior shock resistance".
There are three possible ways to build hybrid hard drives. One way incorporates NOR flash memory, the other two NAND. The NOR solution is simplest. Both NAND solutions require "additional research and development'.
Performance benchmarks tend to favor a pre-production sample of Bensley, Intel's forthcoming platform for Xeon, whereas power consumption favors AMD's Opteron. Performance per watt should improve with the arrival of Intel's Woodcrest CPU in the second half of 2006. Although Intel has begun to preach power per watt, Intel's current technology is not optimized for it, although in the future it should be. "Intel's performance per watt play won't come into full effect until next year, with Woodcrest".
One of the bottlenecks of the Xeon platform is the front side bus. The Bensley platform and its Blackford chipset address this bottleneck by using "a dual independent bus architecture operating at 1066MHz".
Clarification. Intel's 975X chipset works with dual-card configurations from NVIDIA, as well as ATI: or any other graphics card maker for that matter. All "that is needed is driver support".
The move to Intel's next generation notebook platform—Napa—is taking place much faster han the move from the first generation Centrino to the second generation Sonoma. Centrino was intoduced in 2003, its successor early in 2005. The third generation Napa is on target for January, 2006, just around the corner. Laptops did not really take off until the second Centrino generation—Sonoma. And take off, it did. Trends predicted in 2003 for 2007 are being fulfilled today. Intel execs "expect Napa to accelerate the already growing adoption of mobile notebook technology".
Process manufacturing cycles are becoming shorter. Current state-of-the-art is 65nm (nanometers), though work is being done on smaller sizes. At Intel, within "20 months, the 65 nm process has reached a maturity level which 180 nm reached in 38 months, 130 nm in 30 months and 90 nm in 26 months".