ASUS always provides quality motherboards with lots of innovative features and the M3N-HT tries desperately to live up to that reputation. In this era of multiple, monster sized video cards and gigantic power supplies, the new 780a chipset offers an energy saving feature that I applaud and feel should eventually be implemented in all enthusiast motherboards in some fashion. The onboard graphics is no slouch either as it is designed for High Definition video playback. Add to this features like 3-way SLI, ESA and PCIe 2.0, and its hard not to get excited about the possibilities..

It looks that the current GDDR5 design sticks with 512-bit memory interface and that RV770PRO will use 256-bit GDDR3 memory. The RV770PRO will need a smaller cooler, as it is definitely going to end up the cheaper of two, and you can bet on a sub-$200 price.

Two companies are gearing up new capabilities that can help software automatically take advantage of today's multicore processors. The MathWorks has built new parallel processing techniques into its flagship MatLab environment, and startup Exludus Technologies, Inc. (Montreal) is preparing an enhanced release of its scheduling middleware for multicore X86 servers. The efforts mark two small steps on the way toward tackling the grand challenge in computing today: Creating an easy-to-use approach for software to fully use the many cores and threads supported on the latest microprocessors.

Shares in the Singaporean chip shop were up six per cent over the weekend after AMD chairman Hector Ruiz failed to share details of his strategy at the firm's stockholder meeting last week.

The five chips run at clock speeds ranging from 1.7GHz to 1.9GHz. Three of the chips -- the 2344 HE, 2346 HE, and 2347HE -- are designed for servers with two processors, while the other two -- the 8346 HE and 8347 HE -- can be used in servers with four or eight processors. They are priced from $255 to $873 in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard way of quoting chip prices.

It is pretty clear why AMD focused on the server market. Without a complete redesign it is not possible to beat Intel's integer crunching power and the fast and big L2-cache and that is exactly what a modern game needs. Barcelona build further on the K8 architecture and inherited the relatively inflexible integer pipeline. While Core 2 has sophisticated reordering of loads and stores, Barcelona does a limited reordering of loads. While Core 2 offers a 32 entry queue to the integer units, Barcelona has 3 rather inflexible separated 8 entry queues. So the right way forward for AMD was to focus on HPC and server applications where it could leverage it's strong points. We can bash AMD for being so late, and coming up with relatively low clocked CPUs, but even a 2.8 GHz Phenom would not have raise AMD's ASP significantly in the desktop market. We can tell you that we are almost done with our first round of quad socket benchmarking and we can tell you that we are having a lot more fun than Anand: it is good old exciting fight between AMD and Intel. Don't believe us? Let intel do the talking again.

Johan knows his stuff. The ZDNet bloggers don't. It is that simple.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- May 12, 2008 --AMD (NYSE:AMD) today introduced the industry’s first energy-efficient x86 server processors with four processing cores and an integrated memory controller all in a low 55-watt ACP thermal envelope. Blade and rack systems based on five new low-power Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ HE (Highly Efficient) processors are now widely available from global OEMs and solution providers.