X58, Intel’s First Nehalem Chipset
Posted by Jason on
May 10, 2008
Intel’s upcoming generation of processors, called the Nehalem, will be introduced later this year, and all the signals point to a Q4 release. As previously stated by the chip manufacturer during this spring’s Intel Developer Forum, the first Nehalem units to hit the market will be built on the 45-nanometer process technology (Bloomfield silicon) and will sport four processing cores.
It is widely known that the 4-core behemoth will come with an integrated DDR3-1333 memory controller, SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) technology and 8 MB of L2 cache. The SMT implementation will allow each of the CPU cores to simultaneously process two threads, just like the previous HyperThreading technology introduced back in the Pentium 4 era. Read More »
Nvidia Due to Implement on-the-fly GPU Switching
Posted by Jason on
November 24, 2007
Nvidia have announced that the MCP78S chipset will give the user the possibility to switch between GPU cores. The new chipset incorporates a GeForce 8-class DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 graphics engine, but also has the capability of controlling a PCI Express 2.0 graphics card connected via the chipset’s 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes.
This is not a title of novelty, since this feature is widely supported by most of the integrated chipsets, but the chipset also supports HybridSLI, giving the user complete control over the two GPUs. Should the system need hardcore graphic performance, the user may enable the graphics card, while on average computing the system graphics is hosted on the lower-power integrated GPU. This feature really comes in handy since, unlike the previous versions, GPU switching does not need a computer reboot. Read More »
