X-bit labs

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Intel’s 65nm Chips Can Operate at Beyond 4GHz. Intel’s 65nm Processors Overclocking Preview

Intel Corp. started recently started revenue shipments of its dual-core Intel Pentium D processors made using 65nm process technology and no surprise that some of those chips “leaked” to the hands of reviewers. AnandTech has managed to get some of the upcoming chips, measured their power consumption and investigated overclock-ability.

Intel’s upcoming Presler and Cedar Mill processors are likely to be among the last NetBurst-based chips with two and one processing engines respectively. It is projected that the aforementioned chips are derivatives of Smithfield and Prescott central processing units produced using 65nm process technology with minimal architectural changes.

“The new cores do definitely overclock much better than their predecessors, and they will allow any serious overclocker to reach speeds greater than 4.0GHz effortlessly. Most exciting to us was the 4.25GHz overclock that we saw on Presler, as a 4.25GHz Pentium D will truly be a formidable opponent to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2. Cedar Mill offered reasonable overclocking headroom as well, but we would have liked to see a 5.0GHz overclock on standard air cooling, given that reaching 4.0GHz is possible today on Prescott ,” concludes AnandTech .

“The reduction in power consumption is impressive, but still not enough to give Intel an advantage over AMD, which makes things better, but hardly fixes the problem in our opinion. Unfortunately, we will have to wait for Intel’s next-generation processors for a true competitor to AMD's low power Athlon 64s,” writes AnandTech .

• AnandTech: Intel’s 65nm Processors: Overclocking Preview.

ATI Talks about Avivo Technology. ATI Explains Avivo in Detail

With the arrival of the latest generation of ATI RADEON X1000 graphics cards ATI Technologies introduced a new technology designed to improve image and video quality on personal computers. The Avivo includes both hardware and software capabilities and will be available on some of ATI’s multimedia products as well as on all next-generation RADEON products.

Since the technology is still new to the market there are a lot of questions regarding its capabilities and functionality. FiringSquad have interviewed Godfrey Cheng, ATI’s director of marketing for multimedia products, to find out more about Avivo.

“Before any video is actually seen by a customer, there are a finite series of steps that must occur to process and display the video. Any errors or weak links in any one of these steps results in these errors being propagated further down the chain resulting in poorer video quality. Avivo is a platform of technologies designed to systematically improve each and every step. While we are focusing on primarily HD H.264 decoding, De-interlacing & scaling, complete 10 display processing and 2 Dual Links this time…..we may talk about new TV products or mobile technologies the next time we talk about Avivo technologies. The one constant is that we are going to systematically invest in each and every step of the video pipeline to deliver the best video & display quality on the PC,” explains Godfrey Cheng.

According to ATI’s director of marketing for multimedia products, Avivo will fit just fine into mobile PCs as well.

“While CPUs do many things well, there are just some things that the GPU does better. You do not want a CPU running at full power all the time….remember Notebooks are a big portion of the market so fan noise and power consumption are as important as the decode performance itself! The early adopters for H.264 are the HTPC guys…no one there wants a CPU with a helicopter rotor cooling it. We know in many instances that even the fastest CPUs today cannot play back. Our estimates show that this will remain the case for a considerable amount of time (the same thing happened when MPEG2 first arrived on the scene),” says Godfrey Cheng.

• FiringSquad: ATI Avivo/Video Quality and Features Interview.