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Thermalright today rolled out its mid-range CPU cooler offering exclusive to Intel's newest socket, LGA-1156. The Thermalright >>MUX-120<<, like most other coolers from the firm sports the trademark tower design consisting on a CPU block from which arise four 6 mm heatpipes, conveying heat to an aluminum fin array with 48 fins. The heatsink part measures 133 x 38 x 160 mm (L x W x H), and weighs 670 g (1.47 lbs). Bundled with it areThermalright's X-Silent 120 mm fan (1200 rpm, 23.5 dBA max, and 41.8 CFM), a tube of ChillFactor 2 thermal compound, and the necessary retention parts. At the moment the cooler only supports LGA-1156, though it is believed that a future version of the MUX-120 will include support for other sockets. Although pricing isn't announced, a competitive one is expected to be set.
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Way to differentiate hardware
In addition to the yesterday's buzz about AMD's DirectX 11 Evergreen family of GPUs, AMD has announced its new Vision technology. Vision is basically just a way for AMD to bundle its high-end, mainstream and low-end hardware into one brand, Vision.
For now, Vision will have three levels, depending on the hardware inside, Vision, Vision Premium and Vision Ultimate. AMD is using this in order to simplify the buying experience for mass consumers, and this is something that enthusiasts really don't care about. The Intel "star" system, AMD's Vision is just something that is meant for mass consumers and their way of saying that Ultimate is better than Premium.
AMD is also planning to introduce a fourth level as well, which will be called Vision Black. The Black brand has sort of become AMD's brand for special products. This one will probably debut sometimes next year, once the other three levels become something that we'll see often on retail shelves.
Mass consumers, those that really don't care about the hardware inside, will have an easy task when it comes to AMD, it's either Vision, Vision Premium or Vision Ultimate, depending on what do you need to do.
source: fudzilla.com
Advanced Micro Devices is preparing a desktop processor with six processing engines, sources familiar with the company’s plans revealed. The new central processing units (CPUs) will not be available this year, but are likely to boost performance of AMD’s desktop platforms sometime in 2010.
AMD’s processor code-named Thuban is the company’s first desktop processor with six processing engines. The microprocessors will be compatible with socket AM3 infrastructure and will have integrated dual-channel PC3-10600 (DDR3 1333MHz) memory controller. It is very likely that Thuban processors will retain AMD Phenom II brand name as well as design of the code-named Istanbul chips for servers, thus, will feature 3MB L2 cache (512KB per core) and 6MB of L3 cache. The chips will be made using 45nm SOI fabrication process.
Thuban is a star in the constellation of Draco and it also means “dragon” in Arabian language. The new six-core chip should be compatible with existing AM3 infrastructure (and, quite possibly, even with AM2+ infrastructure with split power plane), it remains to be seen whether Thuban becomes a part of AMD’s current high-end desktop platform called Dragon, or will power the company’s next-generation Leo platform.
AMD’s Leo platform will be based on the AMD 890FX and 890GX core-logic sets. The new chipsets will offer better performance and functionality, e.g., they will support Serial ATA-600, 14 Serial ATA 2.0 ports and so on, but both will only hit mass production in April, 2010, and will be formally released in May next year, according to market sources.
Provided that AMD has its Thuban processors ready before May 2010, the company is likely to start shipping them as soon as possible so that to be able to compete for the high-end desktop segment. In fact, it is somewhat surprising that AMD will only be able to offer six-core desktop chip about a year after it started to ship six-core chips for servers. Nevertheless, based on currently available information, AMD Thuban is due only in Q3 2010.
At present AMD does not position its six-core Opteron processors even for single-socket workstations and recommends its customers among makers of dual-socket workstations to stick to quad-core chips due to their higher clock-speeds compared to existing six-core central processing units. At present AMD’s highest-performance six-core chips operate at 2.80GHz, meanwhile, the fastest quad-core CPUs function at 3.40GHz.
With six physical cores AMD will be able to demonstrate rather high performance in multi-tasking and applications that need to execute numerous threads at once. Moreover, as future video games that rely on DirectX 11 start to arrive, the advantages provided by six-core Thuban and Istanbul processors will be even more apparent.
Intel Corp., the larger rival of AMD, plans to unveil its six-core code-named Gulftown chips for desktops in Q2 2010.
AMD did not comment on the story.
source: xbitlabs.com
