July 2 - 9:45am EDT   AMD is developing an integrated graphics chipset for budget PCs that could take the performance crown in the category, a leaked roadmap shows. Codenamed RS880 but likely to be badged Radeon HD 4200 when it ships, the design will have a new graphics core that should run about 15 percent faster than "anything comparable" on the market, implying that NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 or 9400M may be the primary targets. The Inquirer adds that it should support AMD's Stream general-purpose computing technology and, by extension, would eventually support OpenCL. [full story]

July 1 - 2:30pm EDT   The sequel to NVIDIA's Ion platform could be much faster than its predecessor when it ships, leaks today would show. While the current graphics and chipset combo is based on the GeForce 9400M and has just 16 visual effects cores, Fudzilla now hears that it will have 32 cores, potentially doubling the amount of simultaneous effects it can handle at once. The difference will have the most dramatic effect on 3D but could also impact general-purpose computing tasks that need CUDA or OpenCL. [full story]

June 3 - 8:00am EDT   AMD this morning said it has demonstrated the world's first graphics processor capable of supporting DirectX 11 and matching features in other software standards. The part is capable of tessellating polygons in real time, or breaking them down automatically into smaller shapes. Games and other apps that use the feature can have smoother details to characters or terrain without requiring as much processing power or that artists add all the information themselves. [full story]

May 21 - 10:10am EDT   Apple has posted a job listing that hints at the company's future hardware direction for the iPhone, iPod touch and possible other devices. The position for a High Perform/Low Level Programmer asks for someone familiar not only for programming assembly-level code for ARM processors, which Apple already uses in its handhelds, but for the NEON vector math units used in the newer Cortex architecture for the mobile chips. Apple is especially concerned about experience with vector math and particularly values anyone with additional knowledge of vector units through general CPUs, such as Intel's SSE or the AltiVec units found on PowerPC G4 and G5 cores. [full story]

May 8 - 7:30pm EDT   NVIDIA has released version 2.2 of the CUDA toolkit and SDK. The new version of CUDA profiles C coded applications to use the computers GPU in addition to the CPU. This can enhance the computer's overall processing speed. The update also includes the ability to zero-copy, or to read and write directly from pinned system memory rather than send it through the graphics memory system. Using the technique requires either a GeForce 9300/9400 (or 9400M) integrated graphics core or else a GeForce GT 200 series board. [full story]

March 27 - 4:40pm EDT   At the currently ongoing Game Developers Conference on Thursday, chipmaker AMD was demonstrating Havok's physics middleware on its platforms for the first time, including the premiere display of the first OpenCL-supported Havok Cloth character- and environment-enhancing software. Havok is the latest graphics Software Development Kit to be compatible with ATI Stream technology that uses multi-core architecture to provide faster processing, utilizing both the CPU and GPU for computational tasks related to graphics processing. [full story]

January 15 - 4:35pm EST   Apple's Mac mini desktop will switch to NVIDIA's Ion platform and Intel's Atom chip as a result, an alleged confirmation by an NVIDIA partner asserts. The Cupertino company is believed to be using the combination graphics and system chipset in an updated computer that would also use the 1.6GHz, dual-core Atom 330. While slower in processing power than the existing Core 2 Duo, the mini system would have video performance close to if not exactly like the GeForce 9400M currently found in all aluminum MacBooks. [full story]

January 9 - 9:15am EST   Imagination Technologies has quietly introduced a new PowerVR SGX chipset at CES that may point to the future of the iPhone and other graphics-intensive smartphones. The PowerVR SGX543 is the first to use a new platform which its creator estimates is much faster than older SGX and MBX chips. Its new, more vector-friendly graphics engine is about 40 percent faster than the previous SGX series in very effects-heavy graphics, the company claims, and is much faster in floating point math, geometry setup, and culling unneeded parts of the scene than the previous generation. [full story]

December 9 - 10:50am EST   Working through the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple has filed for a trademark on Grand Central, a technology expected to be used in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, due sometime next year. Not to be confused with Google's phone management system, the Apple technology is intended to aid developers in supporting multi-core processors, which can often be underexploited even in high-end software such as games and rendering tools. [full story]

December 8 - 11:40pm EST   Heralding the era of GPU-enhanced computing, the Khronos Group on Monday evening announced the ratification and public release of the Apple-proposed OpenCL 1.0 specification, the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming in PCs. The OpenCL spec, proposed by Apple under six months ago, is designed to improve performance of software applications (ranging from gaming to scientific and medical software) and is supported by vendors such as Activision, Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Electronic Arts, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Samsung. The OpenCL standard was completed in nearly six months time by the working group in order to be ready ... [full story]

November 21 - 3:20pm EST   Apple has filed for a trademark on OpenCL technology, documents from the US Patent and Trademark Office show. The standard is intended to better distribute processing power on a computer, by using the normally segregated processing on a video card to help with tasks unrelated to graphics. Video cards can be extremely powerful, Apple notes, but only tend to maximize their use in certain applications, such as games. [full story]

August 13 - 8:40am EDT   Standards backer Khronos Group has published the specifications for OpenGL 3.0, the next major revision to the universal graphics programming format. The new version focuses on high dynamic range (HDR) images and now includes support for 32-bit, floating point data both for depth and rendering buffers as well as for textures. The advance allows for more precise color and also permits more accurate calculation for visual effects. [full story]

July 30 - 8:40pm EDT   Apple's rumored non-Intel mainboard platform may primarily involve a change of suppliers to NVIDIA rather than any kind of custom development, PCPer suggests. The enthusiast site notes that Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has been developing its first nForce mainboard chipset for Intel-based notebooks, currently codenamed MCP79, with the aim of improving several weaknesses that have affected Intel's own designs and thus Apple as well. The architecture would support all the necessary components for Intel's just-announced Core 2 processors, including a 1,066MHz system bus and the option of DDR3 memory. [full story]

July 23 - 9:45am EDT   Microsoft's next version of DirectX will have its own alternative to the OpenCL standard proposed by Apple, the company revealed yesterday at its GamesFest conference. DirectX 11 will have support for "compute shader technology" that allows modern, more generalized video cards' effects processors to perform tasks other than rendering video, including physics calculations and other chores that would normally be handled by the main system processor. [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]