There’s still a graphic card with AGP interface? is it true? is AGP is still alive? yes you heard me right, there’s a brand new graphics card with AGP interface very much alive in the market.

Fact is, there’s still one or two motherboard manufacturers that still consider manufacturing AGP boards, one even combined it with Intel’s Socket 775. There is still so many people who haven’t upgraded to a PCI-E system because to them, the old one is still usable plus the cost of having to upgrade the entire system just to accomodate for one new PCI-E interface, very costly huh!

Fear not my dear readers, for Sapphire, the one company that have made an effort to give us AGP users a flavour of current graphics technology has offered two cards which is based on AMD’s 3000 series of GPUs; the HD3650 and the HD3850.

Furthermore, they have even make it’s clocks sligthly faster than standard. It’s core clock has a speed of 700MHz, 30MHz over the reference design, while the 512MB of GDDR3 memory works nicely at 846MHz, increased over the standard’s 825MHz. Plus, all features of the equivalent PCI-E are present including 320 stream processors, 512-bit internal memory ring, support for shader model 4.0 and DirectX 10.1. The GPU also features ATI’s PowerPlay, the technology which reduces power consumption depending on what the card is doing.

Thing’s though, we can’t record HD through the bus because there’s no enough bandwith with AGP, but this has nothing to do with the card itself. The AGP version is a single slot cooled design with a passive heat-sink over the voltage regulators, built on a blue PCB with a matching blue color.

The card uses an eight-pin PCI-E power connector but the standard six-pin connector will supply enough voltage but nonetheless Sapphire bundles a four-pin Molex to six-pin adaptor in case you haven’t got either. Performance-wise, based on tests on 3DMark05 and 06 Sapphire’s HD3850 is the fastest AGP card on the block with scores ranged up to 7,200 and 2,210 at 1,024 by 768-pixel resolution.

Congratulations to Sapphire for not forgetting us who still own and use AGP-based system.

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Football or Soccer has managed to influence almost everything in our life, including the designers of gadgets for some time; we have seen many different devices that follow this sport inspiration. In this article, we are reviewing the design of an MP3 player though football related, looks remarkably like the core of uranium (like in the movies when the crook is preparing to nuclear strike a town).

The design of this MP3 player is probably one of the most distinctive shaped MP3 players available. Its lines and details makes it a very desirable gadget. Sized only 4.5cm makes it looks more attractive, and a value added portability.
Features in the player also included an 80 x 48 resolution OLED screen, a stopwatch, up to 30 preset FM radio stations nad comes with 256MB, 512MB and 1GB of internal memory. This round yet nice MP3 player has all the desired qualities with a great look, plus it suits everyone!

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Just a short tidbit, but it has all the makings of a great soap opera. First chapter: Intel thinks the CPU can be a GPU. Second chapter: Nvidia is offended. Third chapter (where we are right now): Nvidia fires back and says the CPU is dead. Wonderful! Can there be a more entertaining piece just before the weekend? Sit back and enjoy!

read more | digg story

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Tired of having to fight through messy spaghetti ball of wires just to charge up your Centro? Need to charge up all six of your gadgets at the same time? Here comes Callpod with a new charging solution, called Chargepod.

As depicted here Chargepod is a six point charging device, meaning that its user can charge up to six devices all in a time without having to deal with messy wires or extension leads. Worried that your gadgets get burned because of power overload? or your devices lifespan will be cut short because of improper way of charging? Worry less because you don’t have to. This central charging hub (somehow it reminds me of that central USB hub, don’t you think?), is controlled by a voltage regulator technology to make sure that your devices gets only the right amount of power needed. There is also a blue indicator light at each connection point to your device, indicating that power is flowing through and the device connected is being charged.

Whether it is a good idea or not, it is possible to charge a variety of six devices at one time (of course, you can see it in the picture) but it is yet to be proved. On second thought, having only one plug to put into the power outlet does looks good. Cool isn’t it?

Popularity: 85% [?]

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Intel has revealed new details about the firm’s next-generation CPU microarchitecture, code-named Nehalem. It is on track for delivery in the second half of 2008. In fact, hereported that each chip will be comprised of approximately 731 million transistors.

In its “largest configuration,” Nehalem will pack eight CPU cores onto a single die. Each of those cores will present the system with two logical processors and be able to execute two threads via simultaneous multithreading (SMT)—a la HyperThreading. So a single Nehalem chip will be able to execute 16 threads at once. In terms of numbers, this means a power gradient of 10-25 percent for single-threaded applications, and between 20 and 100 percent for multi-threaded applications. Nehalem will integrate a high-performance memory controller and a new chip-to-chip interconnect known as QuickPath—both provisions similar to AMD’s Opteron processors.

Here are some new initial disclosures around Nehalem microarchitecture:

* Dynamically scalable for leadership performance on demand with energy efficiency
o Dynamically managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces and power
o Leverages leading 4 instruction issue Intel® Core microarchitecture technology
o Simultaneous multi-threading (similar to Intel Hyper-Threading Technology) returns to enhance performance and energy efficiency
o Innovative new Intel® SSE4 and ATA instruction set architecture additions
o Superior multi-level shared cache leverages Intel® Smart Cache technology
o Leadership system and memory bandwidth
o Performance enhanced dynamic power management
* Design scalable for optimal price/performance/energy efficiency in each market segment
o New system architecture for next-generation Intel processors and platforms
o Scalable performance: 1 to 16+ threads, 1 to 8+ cores, scalable cache sizes
o Scalable and configurable system interconnects and integrated memory controllers
o High performance integrated graphics engine for client

Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and there is some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent that is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments.

The blockbuster revelation is that some Nehalem designs will sport an on-die memory controller and integrated graphics processor. Is there would be a GPU integrated onto the actual die along with the general-purpose CPU cores? The answer is that the GPU would be “in the socket” with the CPU or in other term Intel will almost certainly be using its packaging skills to put a GPU in the same package as a Nehalem CPU. Furthermore, this is going to help out with mobile products, small-form-factor devices, and anywhere else that power and cooling are more critical than raw performance. It is expected that such CPU/GPU devices will cut down on the number of on-die cores that you can put on the CPU die (for power dissipation reasons). A Nehalem CPU/GPU combination is expected to consist of a dual-core Nehalem CPU that sports an on-die memory controller, with a GPU sandwiched in the same package with it. This will be a killer mobile part in terms of performance per watt.

As far as the on-die memory controller, this has been a long time coming for Intel. Intel is saying that not every Nehalem part will necessarily have an integrated memory controller—they’ll tweak the number of cores and the on-die components to fit certain performance-per-watt targets for certain segments. The other big revelation is that Nehalem will bring back simultaneous multithreading to Intel’s processor line. Since the Pentium Pro (in 1995) Nehalem has the most significant new architectural changes. It is highly scalable with different components for different tasks. According to Intel it will have 1 through 8+ cores and integrated memory controllers for DDR3 SDRAM with 1 to 4 memory channels. Nehalem will also utilize the new point-to-point processor interconnect, that is the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, replacing the legacy front side bus. This processor will be launched in both native quad core and octo core.”native” here means the configuration with all the cores situated on single silicon die. Quad core is known to have 731 million transistors and unknown amount of L2 cache. As for Nehalem processors with additional features such as GPUs, there will be two separate dies that is one with the cores and another one will have the additional features.

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