This has been an interesting quarter of the year for technology. CES was held in early January while Cebit was on early this month. Those events are traditionally where manufacturers announce new products, and technology trends can be predicted for the year.
Faster 55nm GT200: Slimmer Goliath?
In CES ’09, NVIDIA announced the GTX285 and the dual-GPU GTX295 using 55nm GT200 chips. Mind you these are optical shrinks of the original 65nm versions which are more than twice the size of AMD’s RV770 chips. Even after shrinking it still is almost twice as big as its competitor. Though AMD’s RV770 is (much) smaller, it’s more efficient, cooler and ALMOST as fast. This sort of situation forces NVIDIA to bring down prices of GT200 cards that may cut into production cost. AMD can sell two RV770 with the price of NVIDIA’s one GT200. That means AMD could have twice as much profit than NVIDIA. Size doesn’t matter after all. NVIDIA may have won back the performance crown, but AMD made more money. David still beats Goliath, right?
The G92b Identity Crisis
This month, NVIDIA released the GTS 250. It’s only a twin of 9800 GTX+ with different. I don’t say you shouldn’t buy it. It’s just that consumers should be better informed of companies renaming products for exploitation. AMD just reduced the price of the 4870 to match GTS 250′s. Take my word, buy the Radeon, it’s much faster. After all, it was design to compete against the GTX260.
Cheap 4GB DDR3 At The End Of The Year
Kingston demoed their 24GB DDR3 Core i7 system last month. 6 sticks of them, 4GB each in single sided configuration. Meaning we’ll have 8GB double sided DDR3 soon. Most new systems next year will be loaded with 8GB DDR3 in dual channel. Don’t bother if you don’t play games.
RV740 Preview
3DGuru previewed the first 40nm GPU from AMD, the RV740. Impressive? Hell, I might buy it if it wasn’t for the impending release of Windows 7 and DirectX 11. Still don’t understand the need for GDDR5 on it though. AMD still wins this round of GPU war.
Intel vs. AMD: x86 License Battle
It’s all over the net. Find it yourself. Personally, in view of maintaining marketing competition and to make everyone happy, Intel might have to close one eye on this. AMD’s weapon is the people.
Next month…
We’ll see the rise of the RV790 a.k.a. Radeon 4890. And also Intel introduces faster Core i7 CPUs, with AMD following suit with the Phenom II 955 at 3.2GHz.
