May 12 - 3:45pm EDT   Leadtek on Monday announced it will demonstrate the first external video encoder equipped with a Toshiba-made SpursEngine media processor, the WinFast HPVC1100, at the 12th Embedded Systems Technology exhibition in Japan on May 15th. The device will let notebook or desktop users to play back or encode high-definition video thanks to a variation of the Cell Broadband Engine used in Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console, though it has half the processing cores here, at four. [full story]

December 2 - 2:55pm EST   NVIDIA on Tuesday switched focus to its highest-end workstation cards with the unveiling of the Quadro FX 4800. The chipset is based on the same architecture as the GeForce GTX 260 and carries 192 programmable shader cores but is tuned for 3D modeling and other pro apps: it carries a full 1.5GB of memory for higher-detailed models and textures, supports 30-bit color output and allows 32X full-scene antialiasing. The 4800 is roughly twice as fast as previous cards, the company claims. [full story]

November 10 - 8:30am EST   NVIDIA on Monday established a new flagship video card for its workstation line. The Quadro FX 5800 is a major improvement over the earlier 5600 that brings 240 visual effects cores, or nearly double the old model's 128, but stands out as the first-ever video card with 4GB of onboard memory. The capacity allows for extremely large textures and geometry and also enables apps with CUDA general-purpose computing support to feed very large data sets: 4D modeling that factors in time is now more realistic. [full story]