July 3 - 2:50pm EDT   NVIDIA will soon cut prices for its GeForce GTX cards despite releasing the hardware less than three weeks ago, the company confirmed today. Although unwilling to provide specific details, company spokesmen Bryan Del Rizzo and Ken Brown say the company is "adjusting the prices" for the GTX 260 and 280 downwards from their respective $400 and $650 markers and should be more affordable by next week. The costs will vary by card manufacturer, many of whom produce overclocked or otherwise non-reference versions. [full story]

July 3 - 8:35am EDT   AMD is preparing a dual-chip version of its Radeon HD 4870 card within a matter of weeks, say board designers. The 4870 X2 would be a direct sequel to the 3870 X2 and would once again graft two high-end graphics processors on to one card with a similarly doubled amount of memory; the 4870 edition would be the first home card to carry 2GB of total memory. Past cards have also been underclocked slightly from the single-chip version to avoid overheating. [full story]

July 2 - 11:40pm EDT   Nvidia says that a heat problem in with one of its mobile chips will hurt its earnings for the second quarter, sending its shares tumbling down almost 25 percent to below $14 in after-hours trading. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia said that the overheating problem -- which appears to be focused on older chips for notebook computers -- caused higher-than-normal failure rates in certain GPU models as well as related chip sets; the company's said that it could see a revenue shortfall of nearly 24 percent in the second quarter (ending July 27th), but also cited problems such as general market conditions, price cuts to match rival AMD, and delayed product ramps. ... [full story]

July 1 - 12:00pm EDT   HP this morning used an educational conference as an opportunity to unveil a quad-core workstation inexpensive enough to be bought by anyone: the xw4550 uses a latest-generation 2GHz AMD Opteron to offer up performance which is normally off-limits to those in school or at work. The system can handle video editing and other heavy-duty tasks while still being durable and tamper-proof enough to sit in a public place, according to its creator. The system can appropriately be locked down in hardware and software. [full story]

July 1 - 10:30am EDT   AMD is gearing up for the launch of a special Radeon HD 4800 card designed explicitly to push past the GeForce GTX 280 in sheer performance, according to a new leak. The unnamed hardware would use the extra energy headroom of the card along with a custom water cooling system to clock the card well above the company's best individual card, the 4870: the core would reach 950MHz or more, while the video memory would be pushed to a 1.2GHz actual speed. [full story]

June 25 - 7:45am EDT   AMD this morning publicly rounded out its video card updates with the full launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. The launch supports earlier low-key announcements but marks the formal appearance of the higher-end Radeon HD 4870; the double-slot card is said to be twice as fast as an equivalent Radeon HD 3870 card and performs at about 1.2 teraflops per second, or enough floating-point math calculations to generate help generate AMD's purportedly near-realistic Cinema 2.0 experience with high detail, many objects, and camera-like focusing effects. [full story]

June 23 - 12:25pm EDT   Motorola is placing nearly all its faith in a high-technology phone whose success or failure may determine the outcome of the company, according to a tip sent to BGR. The unnamed device (likely a future ZINE model) would have a previously hinted-at 8-megapixel camera but should also have true GPS and other features meant to draw attention in the crowded high-end field. It will also be one of the first devices to ship with NVIDIA's Tegra APX 2500 processor and should be fast enough to produce advanced 3D as well as HD-resolution video, according to the claims. [full story]

June 20 - 5:10pm EDT   ASUS yesterday unveiled its ARES CG6155 desktop PC, designed for very high-end gamers. The tower was modeled after Eastern and Western armors of the past and present. The looks are backed up with more durable hardware such as dual power supplies delivering 2kW of energy and liquid cooling technology to ensure system stability. The PC uses Intel's quad-core Extreme QX9650 CPU rated at 3GHz, with ASUS providing the necessary software to overclock the chip to 4GHz. [full story]

June 20 - 11:00am EDT   Preempting a formal introduction by AMD alone, both AMD and Diamond have publicly introduced the Radeon HD 4850. Both the reference video card and Diamond's own model are some of the few upper mid-range cards to fit in a single card slot while still outperforming more expensive cards: in benchmarks, the 4850 is known to roughly match the performance of the more expensive GeForce 9800 GTX and the dual-chip Radeon HD 3870 X2. A boost in the number of stream (pixel and vertex) processors from 320 to 480, plus a 625MHz core clock speed and 993MHz memory, is credited for much of the improvement. [full story]

June 19 - 12:00pm EDT   NVIDIA today addressed the sudden performance gaps created by the GeForce GTX 200 with a new mid-range video chipset. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has the same two-slot design as the earlier 9800 GTX but uses NVIDIA's smaller and more efficient 55 nanometer technology to ramp up clock speeds: a reference card's core speed increases from 675MHz to 738MHz while shaders jump from 1688MHz to 1836MHz. Both are intended to give the card better performance against AMD's upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4850 launching later this month. [full story]

June 17 - 11:40am EDT   The Khronos Group late yesterday established a new alliance between vendors that could see standards for high performance computing such as OpenCL gain a foothold across many operating systems and hardware platforms. Called the Computer Working Group, the team includes graphics rivals 3DLabs, AMD, and NVIDIA, processor makers such as ARM, Freescale, Intel, and Qualcomm, and end product manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia, all of whom hope to create and maintain genuinely open and royalty-free standards for using newer graphics hardware to process very demanding compute tasks. [full story]

June 17 - 9:15am EDT   Toshiba this morning revealed a near-total overhaul of its Qosmio notebooks with three new models, all of which are the first with new features. The Qosmio G55 is the first-ever notebook to build in a variant of the Cell processor from Sony's PlayStation 3. In the portable, the chip is set to use just four cores but uses them to transcode video far faster than would be possible using the main processor. A 10-minute video that would take an hour to process takes just one minute to handle on the G55, the company says. It also upscales DVDs to 1080p to minimize the low-resolution artifacts that creep up on an HD-capable screen. [full story]

June 16 - 4:30pm EDT   NVIDIA on Monday used the occasion of its GTX 200 introduction to quietly update its Tesla line of workstation processor cards. The T10P chipset added to the cards is virtually identical to the 240-core GTX but is her spun entirely towards accelerating high performance computing tasks such as medical research and very high-level math. The very specialized nature of the chip lets it calculate as much as 900 gigaflops by itself, or 73 percent more than the earlier card it replaces. [full story]

June 16 - 2:10pm EDT   HP today followed up NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 unveiling with expanded details on an upgrade to the Blackbird 002. The Exhilaration Edition bundles two GTX 280 cards in SLI mode and gives the gaming PC a substantial advantage over its previous configuration. Both cards are also liquid-cooled and so won't overheat at full speed, HP adds. The system also gets a 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme with a similar cooling treatment and is paired up with low-lag Corsair DDR3 memory. [full story]

June 16 - 10:00am EDT   NVIDIA today took the wraps from its anticipated GTX 200 series video chipset, introducing its first new architecture since the 8-series appeared in late 2006. All new boards have an architecture which is as much as 50 percent faster than even the top-end 8800 Ultra; the fastest part in the launch, the GTX 280, nearly doubles the amount of effects processors to 240. [full story]