According to AMD, the new ATI Radeon HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1GHz clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power. AMD also lists a dozen of ATI Radeon HD 4890 Overclocked Editions from add-in-board companies including Asus, Sapphire, Powercolor and XFX.

“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD. “The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL.”

Dual-Core Pentium E6300 Listed in Advance

The model is priced at Yen8880 according to ASCII which is about US$90.

The 5-star level consists of Core i7 Series, QX9000 Series and several other high-end mobile CPUs. And Celeron falls to the lowest segment, including Celeron E1000, 400, T1000, 900, 700 and 500 Series.

Currently, the CPUs shipped by both AMD and Intel are fabricated using the 45nm process. The Sunnyvale company has managed to come to the market with processors manufactured under the 45nm process only in the fourth quarter of last year, but it seems that it expects to be able to move to the next-generation 32nm fabrication by mid 2010.

Unlike the previous generation of chips made by AMD, the 32nm CPUs will only be designed by the company, The Foundry Company being the one that will take on the manufacturing process. It seemsthat the spinoff of its facilities into a new entity helped the chip maker keep on track with rolling out new-generation processors only about a year behind archrival Intel.

According to Meyer, AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Co., formed by the Abu Dhabi government, will close today the deal regarding the spinoff of the chip maker’s manufacturing operations into a joint company. This move is expected to help AMD put an end to an entire line of quarterly loses.

Meyer says that the chip maker expects the Foundry Co to provide it with the necessary resources, mainly due to the fact that AMD will own 34 percent of the newly formed joint venture. At the same time, he seems to believe that the spinoff was a great move for AMD. “We’ve been actually impressed to see the quality and depth of the relationship a fabless company can have with its partners,” Meyer said.

Intel Core i7 Nehalem launching on November 17

The event ran under the headline of “the fastest processor on the planet”. The two major characteristics of the new i7 architecture are the triple-channel integrated memory controllers and the new interface called Quick Path Interconnect (QPI). Other highlights include the monolithic die to consolidate all four cores in a single piece of silicon, and the shared L3 cache. Further improvements include the use of the Hyper-threading as well as the Turbo Boost technologies. The Core i7 processors are also optimized to operate with Intel’s X58 chipset.The Corei7 series will feature three quad-core models: The 2.66 GHz Core i7 920 will aim for the sub-$1000 class of PCs, the 2.93 GHz Core i7 940 for more expensive PCs in the $1500-$2000 range and the 3.2 GHz 965 Extreme Edition at enthusiast PCs.

The prices (1K pieces) of these CPUs are $999 for the Extreme Edition, $562 for the 940 and $284 for the 920.The X58 Express chipset covers both the northbridge/southbridge operations. The X58 IOH supports up to 36 PCIe 2.0 lanes. Depending on the processor model, QPI may run at either 6.4 GT/sec (Core i7-965) or 6.4 GT/sec (Core i7-940, i7-920) to communicate with the X58 Express chipset in each direction. This is twice the bandwidth of Intel’s currently available X48 chipset, plus the full-duplex transport instead of the half-duplex. AMD’s HyperTransport 3.0 still has an advantage herewith up to 41.6GB/s of bi-directional bandwidth.However, the X58 Express does not support the legacy PS/2 IDE, serial or parallel ports.

Turbo mode

Under the “TurboMode”, the utilization of the number of active cores is used to adjust the frequency. For example, if only two cores are active, then there will be much more headroom within the thermal and power envelope and the CPU will be clocked higher. So the “turbo” frequencies of each core depend on the number of cores active. We could say that this is mainly a power saving feature.

Turbo Mode boasts single threaded applications as well as the performance of multi-threaded applications, according to Intel. Below is a graph that Intel showed with the Core i7 Extreme CPU to process in single-core and quad-core configurations, with Turbo Mode enabled. The graph shows the percent performance increase with Turbo Mode enable.