Over at Hexus AMD and Nvidia debate by e-mail about something. It probably has to do with graphics cards.
Never missing a beat, AMD's Huddy fired back in a little over 24 hours, further suggesting that NVIDIA is "moving its focus away from gaming", before concluding that "GPU leadership is presently AMD's".
TSMC 40nm Yields Fixed By Year End?
Written by Chris Tom
Friday, 30 October 2009 12:38
Digitimes reports that TSMC's CEO promises that 40nm yields will be improved by the end of the year. AMD and Nvidia had better hope so.
TSMC said it has seen yield rates for its 40nm node drop to 40% due chamber matching issues. Main customers for TSMC's 40nm processes are GPU vendors AMD, which recently launched its new 40nm-based Radeon 5870 series, and Nvidia, who is scheduled to launch its 40nm-based GT300 series of chips in December, according to previous reports. TSMC's recent issues may impact the shipping schedules of the GPU vendors, market watchers commented.
Nvidia Throwing Stones At AMD From Glass House
Written by Chris Tom
Friday, 30 October 2009 11:40
Rich Brown discusses Nvidia sending out e-mails about AMD's lack of Windows 7 support for DX9 parts. Well the reality any not DX10 or DX11 card does not officially support Windows 7. In reality DX9 cards will work fine, and few will notice any differences.
The irony of Nvidia's finger-pointing, of course, is that until the unspecified release of its next-generation 3D cards, 100-percent of Nvidia's customers will miss out on DirectX 11, Windows 7's 3D graphics standard. We'd predict that DirectX 11 will become a far more important feature for gamers than DirectCompute. AMD and its DirectX 11-capable Radeon HD 5800-series may represent only 0.1-percent of the Steam DirectX 10 Systems respondent base at the moment (the Steam survey has no DirectX 11-category yet), but unlike Nvidia's still-absent DirectX 11 cards, at least AMD is on the board.
Powercolor Water Cooled HD 5870
Written by Chris Tom
Thursday, 29 October 2009 13:44
Fudo has details about a Powercolor water cooled Radeon HD 5870.
Due to the use of water block, the card now takes only one slot, but it still has a dual slot backplate. The EK water block is made out of copper and has support for both 1/2" and 3/8" fittings. The card got a slight factory overclock as well and it works at 875MHz for the core and 5000MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory, which is 25MHz overclock for the core and 50MHz (200MHz effective) overclock for memory.
Radeon HD 5850 Price Going Up
Written by Chris Tom
Thursday, 29 October 2009 13:41
Fudo reports that the Radeon HD 5850 is going to be raised in price by AMD. Apparently it is in too good of demand.
AMD / ATI still has an good supply of HD 5850 and since HD 5870 are very tough to get, they simply decided to try to make more money. The fact that GTX 260 and 285 are also insanely hard to find and that Fermi is still not out, helps ATI jack the prices up.
