To summarize the Llano APU, it will contain four X86 cores each with over 35 million transistors occupying just shy of 10mm2. All four cores get their own megabyte of L2 cache SRAM (which adds to the quoted total transistor count and silicon associated with each). AMD targets operation above 3GHz and supply voltages of 0.8 to 1.3 V.

Sometime in 2011 is the date for release, and AMD confirms a 32nm process. Details about the GPU portion have not yet been released by AMD, and they did not discuss them at ISSCC.

There is another CPU in the pile, called Athlon II X2 265 clocked at 3.3GHz with 2MB total cache that comes in mid-Q3. This looks to be AMD’s fastest dual-core so far and as every other dual core on market is based on Regor dual-core and manufactured in 45nm and fits in AM3 infrastructure.

So let's get right to it. How does a full-featured Phenom II Quad Core CPU for $99 sound? AMD's new dual core hotrod, the X2 555 BE, is a special chip under the hood; in fact, it's actually an X4 and just needs a bit of help to unlock those two extra cores for all the performance goodness you can dream about at bargain prices. Does AMD want this to become widely known? We're not sure to be honest; on one hand, this could really spur a surge in sales but on the other hand it could poach their Phenom II X4 lineup. Either way, we successfully unlocked the X2 555 BE and we'll tell you how today and show the resulting performance increase.

The significance of a dedicated Geforce graphics card for physics calculations is evident from the following table. Thanks to the dedicated Geforce 9800GT, Radeon HD 5870 managed to score over 100fps even with PhysX effects set at high, and impressively enough, not even the GTX 285-9800GT combination managed to beat this. After assigning a dedicated 9800GT card for PhysX, we couldn’t change antialiasing with our Radeon card so the tables feature same results in scenarios with and without antialiasing.

When I ran Windows Experience Index, the processor got a rating of 3.2. This is 0.1 higher than the same Athlon MV-40 on the ThinkPad X100e (WEI: 3.1) because I installed 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Intel kicked off its Itanium presentation today by saying the Itanium's system revenue since the introduction of 2001 has crossed the $5 billion mark. That outsells total sales of AMD's Opterons. And, according to IDC Itanium sales surpassed all of SPARC sales for the first time since the introduction of the Itanium. That was in 2001 and was the culmination of former CEO Andy Grove's dreams of a microprocessor that was truly mission critical.

But up in East Fishkill in New York State, architects and engineers continue to design future iterations of IBM's Power family. And today IBM has released new Power 7 CPUs that are in a different league to Intel's microprocessors.

It manages to achieve its low price point by using an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor - a single core chip with 512KB of L2 cache, clocked at 1.6GHz. To complement this, there's 2GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 3200 graphics chip. Understandably, performance is a bit of a mixed bag and the X100e lies somewhere between a netbook and a CULV-based laptop.

You can buy one here for $510.

Mainstream servers in the future could have a combination of graphics processors and CPUs in servers as applications take advantage of thousands of GPU cores, said Gina Longoria, director of the product management and workstation division at AMD. The company may provide CPUs and GPUs together in a server to run highly parallel applications, she said.

In Nov. 2009, TACC announced that the Ranger supercomputer had run over one million jobs in under two years. Since it entered full production Feb. 4, 2008, Ranger has completed over 1,089,075 jobs and logged 754,873,713.8 hours of processing time, with an impressive 97 percent uptime. The system counts 2,863 users across 981 unique research projects.