INTEL'S CEDAR TRAIL CHIPS TO HAVE DOUBLE GRAPHICS POWER

The Intel Atom Pine Trail chips are due to be released on January 11. These chips have processor, graphics and memory functions integrated into a single chip. Pine Trail processors are meant to reduce power consumption. They are unlikely to give a performance boost. But in 2011 or so, Intel plans to launch yet another line of processors code-named Cedar Trail. According to sources, the Cedar Trail processors will considerably improve the overall performance of the laptop.

The Cedar Trail chips will be based on the 32nm process, the Pine Trail processors, on the other hand, are based on the 45nm process. These processors are expected to deliver twice the graphics performance of Pine Trail processors. That should make them capable of handling 1080 p HD video content. But playing GPU-intensive 3D games will still be out of question.

GIGABYTE UNVEILS NOTEBOOK WITH EXTERNAL GRAPHICS

Gigabyte has unveiled a notebook that allows the option of using an external graphics card through a docking station. The new M1305 notebook has a 13.3 inch display with 1366x768 pixels. It runs on Windows 7 and can be configured with Intel Core 2 Duo, Pentium or Celeron ULV processors. The notebook has an integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD. But if you want better graphics performance you can use the Nvidia GeForce GT 220 GPU through the docking station.

Up to 4GB of RAM can be installed. The hard disk is available in 320 or 500GB capacities. Other notable features include eSATA/USB combo port. There is also an HDMI port for transferring video to an external monitor. The machine weighs 4 pounds with the six-cell 3800mAh battery. Gigabyte claims that it will offer up to 6.5 hours of runtime.

No information on pricing or availability has been announced as yet.

INTEL SHOWS OFF LARRABEE GRAPHICS CARD FOR THE FIRST TIME

Intel has unveiled its Larrabee graphics chip. This is Intel’s first discrete graphics card in several years. It is built to compete with Nvidia and ATI GPUs.

Larrabee is expected to become commercially available sometime next year. Initially it will be aimed at the gaming market. The chip was demonstrated on stage during Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The demonstration involved running the game ‘Enemy Territory: Quake Wars’. The research scientists associated with the chip claimed that ‘it allows a user to simulate the interaction of lights and action and make it more accurate’. Larrabee also takes fewer lines of code to render the images.

Larrabee uses the ray-tracing technique to render images. Most processors currently available in the market use vector processing technique which isn’t very good at rendering lifelike images.

AMD TO RELEASE GRAPHICS CARDS WITH DIRECTX 11 CAPABILITIES

AMD claims that its latest graphics hardware based on the DirectX 11 standard will make the graphics performance in Windows 7 better and smoother. The new graphics cards will be first used in desktop PCs, and are expected to be available for laptops early next year.

AMD has already unveiled discrete ATI GPUs with DirectX 11 capabilities. The desktop products will be released by the time Windows 7 arrives. The new graphics cards to feature the technology will be in the form of discrete GPUs. AMD expects to release integrated GPUs by 2011.

DirectX 11 is a set of programming interfaces supported by Windows 7. It will make images appear more realistic. The technology will also improve the performance of online and HD video playback.

INTEL SIMD TO BOOS GRAPHICS OF MID

Seems like everyone is catching on that graphics are essential to performance, even if its a stupid MID. That said, Intel is saying that they will be releasing an SMID (single instruction multiple data) module that promises to boost the performance of MID graphic wise as well as power wise.

GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR KNOW-HOW - NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800M GTX

Dual NVidia Geforce 8800M GTX is pooled by SLI with the function to proffer the greatest graphic presentation for notebooks. In addition, DirectX 10 games should sprint effortlessly with elevated details in towering resolutions. Nevertheless, not every game ropes SLI satisfactorily. Therefore, only an augment of 0-40% is feasible (games only up to 10%), when compared with one single card. One of the specific features of Geforce 8800M GTX SLI is the "Unified Shaders". There don't possess committed Pixel- and Vertex Shaders but 2x96 so called Stream Processors make the detailed work (which consequently was done by the Pixel and Vertex Shaders). In addition, the Shaders units are highly clocked than the Chip (1250 MHz versus 800 MHz).

The presentation of the 8800M GTX SLI is a great deal better than dual 8700M GT SLI and reinstate the Geforce 7950 GTX SLI at the top of the graphic card list. Present games should run confidently with the high details. For the 1st time, it should also be probable to play DirectX 10 games with towering details. The present consumption and fashioned heat is a great deal higher than with the 8700M GT and thus the chip will be augmented only in big and heavy notebooks (as the predecessor 7950 GTX). At moment, a rumor spells 2x35 Watt TDP.

RADEON HD 3200 GRAPHICS FROM THE HOUSE OF AMD

The Radeon HD 3200 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) at the hub of Puma is possibly the most exhilarating division of the platform, and lawfully so. It offers quite a few features that Intel's IGPs just can't touch and NVIDIA is under pressure to keep up with. First and principal, the HD 3200 is one of the most - if not THE most - power-efficient IGPs available today. At the same time, it's without doubt the greatest, being essentially an intact Radeon HD 2400 with practically no changes prepared to it. As a consequence, it shares the reimbursements of that ancestry, including 2 key features: 5.1 sound over HDMI and UVD (Unified Video Decoder). While resonance over HDMI isn't an enormous development, it's supported natively in the Radeon HD 3200, building design simpler for OEMs. It also permits easy association to high-definition televisions, and in my opinion I think notebooks serving double duty as media center computers may coil up becoming a increasing niche because of this.

The 2nd, the Unified Video Decoder (UVD), is a huge deal. UVD permits the computer to delegate video decoding from the central processor to the graphics processor. While this isn't a huge deal for watching DVDs or nearly all or any standard classification fare, watching high-definition substance can cause processor handling to shoot straight up or even max out entirely, parting you with stuttering video. The insertion of UVD tolerates for Blu-ray to persist trickling down the marketplace as well as civilizing battery life by plummeting processor strain in decoding high-definition capture.

PERIPHERAL GRAPHICS CARD LIKELY TO BE RELEASED BY FUJITSU

Leaked information from Fujitsu Siemens Computers reveals that the corporation is scheduling to launch an elucidation in the next duo of weeks. The AMILO Graphic Booster is pivoted on "ATI XGP" expertise and makes it possible for Fujitsu Siemens AMILO laptop owners to promote their graphics accelerator card, something that was not feasible in the ancient times. Fujitsu claims a 4.7X recital development with the Graphic Booster compared with the graphics of a "small form factor" AMILO laptop, which are most aptly incorporated.

While on the move, users can put aside the Graphic Booster behind and benefit from extended battery life courtesy of their onboard graphics elucidation. The Graphic Booster permits users to hook up up to 3 exterior displays to their laptop: it comprises DVI-D and HDMI connectivity options. It is indistinct how this piece of equipment connects to the laptop itself and whether it will labor with other laptops besides from the Fujitsu Siemens variants or only the AMILO’s.

No pricing particulars are obtainable at this instance, and some specifications remain indistinct, but this is a hopeful piece of equipment. ASUS revealed its own peripheral graphics card elucidation, the XG Station, at CES 2007, but they have botched to make public anything of the sort that was shown of; over a year afterward nothing has debuted on the market and the company has maintained noiseless about it.

APPLE FACES ALL NEW GRAPHICS BASED ISSUES

Apple is intriguing the graphics glitches upsetting its latest notebooks, reports allege. Mac-Book and Mac-Book Pro possessors have been argumentative of intolerable graphics presentation on their equipment on the Apple's own chat forums. They have been continuing strange visual sleaze, in which the text emerges to have been replicated, documents stop working to scroll or videos appear to glimmer. Some reports even claim the dilemmas are resolute in the newest Mac OS X 10.5.3 software, but that is barely currently being disseminated among developers for trying. Multiple reports propose the predicament is software rather than hardware related, with demands mounting on the producer to accelerate a fix for the quandaries.

ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 3000 SERIES OF GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR CARDS LAUNCHED

The first set of laptops with the newly-launched ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series of graphics accelerator cards have shored up in the U.S. Toshiba and Asus are rendering the HD 3650 in their variants of P305 and M50Sa laptops correspondingly. The HD 3650 is powered between 512MB to 1GB of memory, 120 rivulet processors, and a 128-bit memory border. Toshiba is also proffering the budget-adjusted laptop HD 3470 with 40 stream processors and a 64-bit memory interface in the P305 variant. AMD is also setting up to reveal the Mobility Radeon HD 3850 and HD 3870 graphics accelerator cards and even the dual-core variants (presumably HD 3850 X2 and HD 3870 X2); the single-core variants will feature 320 stream processor units and 256-bit memory interfaces (expected to be doubled on the dual-core variants).