General purpose processing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has been discussed for years, however, without standards that are accepted by the whole industry popularity of the technology is not high to say at least. But that may change once Microsoft Corp. unveils its DirectX 11 application programming interface and Khronos Group finalizes the OpenCL language.

“Industry standards are essential to unlocking the compute potential of GPUs and driving broad adoption of this capability in mainstream applications. GPGPU is now moving past the era of closed and fully proprietary development chains. With the advent of DirectX 11 and OpenCL, C/C++ programmers worldwide will have standardized and easier ways of leveraging the GPU’s computational capabilities,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, graphics product group at AMD.

At present AMD is promoting GPGPU with its proprietary Close-to-Metal, Brook+ and Stream SDK technologies, whereas Nvidia is pushing its own CUDA technology as a part of GPGPU popularization. Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that Nvidia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia ’s notebook chips aren’t the only ones that could be defective, if an Inquirer report is to be believed.

According to sources, the entire line of G84 and G86 chips all suffer from the same defect, regardless of desktop or notebook application. The chip generation utilizes the same Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit ), which supposedly has an issue with an “unnamed substrate or bumping material, and it is heat related.”

As expected, Nvidia is staying mum on the topic, but analysts are spilling various details. One story is that HP was the recipient for the majority of the defective chips – only limited to a specific batch. Further explanation reveals that it was isolated to an end-of-life batch that used a different bonding/substrate process. Read the rest of this entry »

NZXT has unveiled a gaming mouse called Avatar. Equipped with a 2000 dpi optical sensor, this USB mouse features an ambidextrous design and has 7 programmable buttons (that have a life span of 5 million clicks) that allows the users to customize their games configurations. A rubber grip helps avoid slipping during intense game play. It’s MSRP is of USD 60.

Asetek’s industry-leading, LCLC liquid cooling solution is now available for AMD’s much anticipated multi-GPU cards, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 family of graphics cards (codenamed R700). The unique, liquid cooling approach is exactly what OEMs need to extract the highest performance from the graphics card and produce top-of-the-line gaming and entertainment products. Read the rest of this entry »