AMD + ATI

With all the hubbub surrounding the Core 2 from Intel, some of you may have missed out on the bigger news in the industry: AMD is planning to buy ATI in a $5.4 billion purchase. If you look even just a little out there, you'll see that this deal was recently approved by AMD's stockholders, and pending SEC approval, it looks like it is good to go.

Actually, even if you've been following the Core 2 launch yesterday, you will have no doubt heard of the emergency revamping of machines from ATI graphics to NVIDIA graphics. There was supposed to be an ATI Crossfire exhibition right on stage using the Intel Bad-Axe motherboard, however early this week those machines were pulled. You really can't blame Intel, the media would blow it up.

What's more interesting to me about the merger is the direction that AMD will move with the addition of GPU's and high-performance chipsets to their line up. Back in January, I wrote about the return of the co-processor. In that article, I said that we would begin to see field programmable arrays that could fit into the standard Opteron socket to speed up things such as Java applications. We have indeed seen that happen, and Cray has announced a super computer using a mix of FPGAs and Opterons.

Of course, how many of us use multi-million dollar supercomputers? I went on to describe how the movement would affect the average consumer. I talked of NVIDIA creating chips to accelerate TCP/IP interactions and encryption, or rendering chips to accelerate CAD and 3d modeling. I still think this is in the works, however it may be an ATI product now.

Then onto the standard desktop. I can see that in just a few years there will be the option to use socketed graphics chips, physics chips, audio/video processors or network accelerators in the home machine. The beauty of these chips will be their ability to be upgraded. No more having to buy an entire PCB, complete with power management features, memory, and all the headers and the like. You can just buy the chip and swap it out on a board.

What this has to do with the merger is that since AMD has access to Hypertransport, so does ATI. AMD is already talking heavily about multi-socketed motherboards with their 4x4 initiative, and it will not be difficult to make an ATI physics processor for gaming. As usual, everything will start in the enthusiast market and trickle it's way down to the home user.

Overall, I'm very excited about the future of computing. Windows Vista is a huge change from XP, and any time you have such an impressive change, you will have hardware adapting to best utilize what's available. It's a great time to get into computers!

intel's Big Strike

While not shipping to vendors yet, intel's newest Core 2 Duo chip is making quite the waves all over the industry. Unfortunately, as this is not a hardware review site, I haven't had hands-on experience with one yet, but what I've read backs up everything I've ever said. Everyone in the industry is claiming a revolution in processing power.

A lot of people asked me if this chip was worth waiting for, and honestly, I think it might just be in certain groups. Fact is, under normal circumstances, the Core 2 is not all that much faster than the latest AMD offerings, maybe 5 to 10 percent. However, once the variables of over-clocking come into play, this thing is killer.

The Core 2 to get is the E6600 chip. This is the least expensive chip with the full 4MB of cache on board. At stock speeds, this chip runs at 2.4ghz, on a 266mhz system bus. The fastest of the Core 2 line currently is the X6800, running a cool 2.93ghz on the same bus. For a quick reference, CPU speed is derived by multiplying the bus frequency by a number. In the case of the X6800, that number is 11, and the E6600's is 9. To get the $319 E6600 to the $999 X6800's speed, you'll simply need to get the bus to go faster. For 3ghz, you'll need a 333mhz bus, which is exactly what intel's 975x chipset was designed to push.

Reports on the web show that bus speeds on some motherboards are in the 450mhz range, giving an impressive 4ghz with this little chip. Interestingly enough, this little guy can run up there with a little more voltage and proper cooling. At 4ghz, there's nothing even close to this chip.

So what this means for the consumer is that there will be enthusiast companies putting out super-clocked machines that can obliterate the competition. It also means there's a lot of headroom for the X6900 and beyond. It will be very easy for intel to ship faster chips when they need to.

Cheers to intel for finally pushing the processor market forward.