AMD on Tuesday introduced its 2010 lineup of components for mainstream desktop PCs, including a 3.0GHz Athlon II X4 offering. The X4 640 is said to be the company's first quad-core desktop CPU in the Athlon II family to run at 3.0GHz, a modest increase over the current X4 635 model that offers 2.9GHz performance.
Five owners of Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard laptops have combined their lawsuits against Nvidia in an attempt to make the company replace allegedly flawed processors, according to court documents. The five plaintiffs filed an amended complaint last week in San Francisco federal court that accused Nvidia of violating the consumer-protection laws. According to one plaintiff Todd Feinstein of Louisiana, after purchasing his MacBook in April 2008, the computer ran hot, periodically shut-down without warning and displayed only grey or black at times.
IBM on Thursday announced plans to use water to cool its next-generation of computer chips internally, allowing it to develop faster multi-layer processors that don't require additional external cooling. To this end, the company showed off a prototype 3D chip with thousands of tiny water passages in between the chip's layers. The company says interlayer cooling was necessary, as traditional heat sinks weren't efficient enough to cool today's densely packaged processors. The water-carrying tubes are just 50 microns in diameter, and integrating them into the chip necessitated the development of a new thin-film soldering technique by IBM engineers.
On the heels of its C7-based OpenBook reference design, VIA Technologies on Thursday formally introduced its VIA Nano processor family based on the "Isaiah" architecture. VIA claims that the Nano family, which uses Fujitsu’s 65 nanometer process, offers as much as four times the performance of its previous-generation within the same power and thermal envelope, while offering pin-compatibility with VIA C7 processors. Introduced in January, the new low-power CPU features out-of-order processing, a large 1MB L2 cache, and an improved FPU for 2-4 times the performance of the previous-generation C7 processor at the same clock speeds. While already sampling the chips to vendors, VIA says expects to ship the low-power (L-series) and ultra-low-power (U-series) Nano chips in the third quarter in speeds up to 1.8GHz.
Details of AMD's planned announcements at Computex have emerged, OEM sources for TG Daily are said to claim. The Puma platform is expected to be launched at the beginning of the show, June 3rd, and will feature the "Griffin" CPU, now named the Turion Ultra. Also said to be included is the RS780M, a mobile version of the 780G chipset; on this will be a Mobility Radeon 3200 graphics chip, and Wi-Fi receivers from the likes of Atheros and Broadcom.
AMD on Monday announced it will be adding Business Class platforms to its line-up of multi-core CPUs. The maker's dual-core Athlon and triple or quad-core Phenom CPUs, coupled with AMD 780V chipset and optional ATI Radeon integrated graphics support are featured in the Business Class. The benefits of the new platforms will include up to 24-month image stability when installed in first-issue desktops, and a minimum 12 months in subsequent models. Furthermore, all are energy efficient thanks to Energy Star 4.0 rating.
AMD engineers this week said that the company plans on introducing new 12-core processors later this year. The first processors based on 45nm Shanghai platform are due later this year and will be nearly identical to the B3 variant of the Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) shipping today, according to DailyTech. The processors will reportedly use the faster HyperTransport 3.0 for inter-CPU communication and will debut later this year as a "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently code-named Istanbul. That processor, the report claims, is "clearly targeted at Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor." A few months later, Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment, allowing for up to 12-cores per package, the report says.
