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Microsoft on Sunday cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 Pro model game console with a 20GB hard drive from $349 to $299.

Microsoft on Sunday unveiled an Xbox 360 with a 60GB hard drive. It's expected to go on sale in August.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The company also introduced a new Xbox 360 model with a 60GB hard drive. It will go on sale in stores in the U.S. and Canada for $349 in early August.

Microsoft's announcements, which were widely expected, come on the eve of the start of this week's E3 video game industry trade show in Los Angeles.

Rumors of the Xbox price cut swirled on popular gaming blogs Joystiq and Kotaku last week. The two sites received snapshots of Kmart and RadioShack fliers advertising the $299 price.

Microsoft announced in May that Xbox 360 had become the first next-generation video game console to hit 10 million units sold in the United States. All told, Microsoft said it has sold 19 million Xboxes worldwide.

Kodak's new little black media player.

(Credit: Kodak)

I'm not sure whether I should call the new Theatre HD Player Kodak's answer to Apple TV, but that's the best analogy I can come up with on short notice. Whether it is or not, Kodak is doing its best to get into your living room with a little Wi-Fi-enabled black box that connects to your HDTV, displays images and other multimedia content, and links directly to Kodak Gallery, the company's online photo-sharing service, and Flickr. Due to roll out in September, the Theatre HD Player will retail for $299.99 and continue to add features through firmware upgrades after it's launched.

Kodak calls the Theatre HD Player, "An interactive device displaying personal content--pictures, video, podcasts, music--and Web-based content on a HDTV, while wirelessly connecting to a household's private Wi-Fi network." In a nod to the Nintendo Wii's popularity, Kodak includes gyroscopic remote, and you navigate the onscreen menus much like you would with the Wiimote. Like Apple, Kodak has an alliance with YouTube for video content. RadioTime is onboard for streaming audio.

The Theatre HD Player's connectivity options.

(Credit: Kodak)

In its press release, Kodak notes that the "Theatre HD Player lets consumers relive their favorite, and even forgotten, memories in customized slide shows, incorporating their personal music and video collections, Internet Radio, plus online video- and photo-sharing sites. Consumers can also edit and upload images and videos to popular online content sharing sites on their HDTV from the comfort of their living room." It's able to display high-resolution still images in a 16:9 aspect ratio and 720p video through it's HDMI and component video connections.

I got a look at the unit last night at an event for the product's unveiling (along with a few other Kodak products) and thought it had some nice features and an elegant menu system. There's some promise here. However, the Theatre HD Player is going to pose a marketing challenge for Kodak. Company reps seemed to shrug off the fact that the little black box's price tag approaches that of the Playstation 3, which not only has built-in memory card slots (and a hard drive), a good photo viewing application, and the ability to play back music and video files from your computer, but there's that built-in Blu-ray player--and oh, it plays games and has a Web browser. In my humble opinion, this device needs to cost less than $200 and probably closer to $150 to be viable. Of course, I keep telling Apple TV reps the same thing about their device, but that hasn't seemed to have had much of an impact.

Anybody interested in buying this thing? And, at what price? Or would you rather go for Apple TV or a PS3 for that matter?

Advanced Micro Devices' bet on a new approach to graphics chip design appears to be paying off, according to analyst Jon Peddie. This could put AMD's ATI graphics chip unit on top again--or at least on equal footing with Nvidia, the graphics leader over the last few years.

Peddie heads Tiburon, Calif.-based Jon Peddie Research, which specializes in graphics chip market research.

Test reports on AMD's and Nvidia's newest graphics chips are pouring in. Both companies are racking up good scores. (See Diamond Viper Radeon HD 4850 review here.)

But beyond the day-to-day test scores, AMD's ATI graphics chip unit may be winning the longer strategic battle. ATI has gambled on a radically different strategy for its latest series of chips--the HD 4850, HD 4870, and upcoming dual-chip R700.

"(AMD) is starting in the middle of the market and scaling up. That's a break with tradition," said Peddie. "We always started at the very, very tippy-top and build the most powerful thing you could and then let it scale down over time."

But Peddie said this traditional approach just isn't practical anymore. "The chipsets keep getting larger and larger despite the fact that we were going to smaller and smaller (manufacturing) process nodes. The chips grew faster than the process nodes shrunk and the consequences of that is that the power consumption went up, the costs went up, and it got to the point where it's kind of impractical to continue along that way," he said.

In essence, AMD's ATI unit strategy is to build smaller, less power-hungry chips and then gang them up to get better performance. Nvidia's strategy has been to build one large, extremely fast--and extremely power hungry--chip.

For ATI, the execution of this chip-ganging strategy is the key. And this is where ATI appears to have been successful. "The inter-processor communications. Getting that to work has been the trick. This is what ATI has done. They've come up with this stellar way of doing inter-processor communications so they can in fact get the scaling," according to Peddie.

And there's more than meets the eye. ATI has also cut in half the number of bits in the memory interface, Peddie said: down to 256 bits while Nvidia has remained at 512. "That has the benefit to ATI of reducing a big hunk of the power consumption."

Peddie said in the past this kind of approach would have been suicidal because it would have decimated ATI's test scores. "The argument against this is that graphics performance is a function of memory," he said. "Typically you want wider and wider (bit width)."

But ATI has countered this by using the fastest memory standard available. "So to compensate for shrinking down the bit width, ATI has jumped to the next-generation in memory design called GDDR5. GDDR5 is approximately three times faster than GDDR3--which is what Nvidia is still using and what ATI uses on their smaller cards," according to Peddie.

"So with three times the speed but half the width, they end up with 1.5 times the processing capability with the memory."

"A very clever thing that they did but mind you it was a gamble that looks like it's going to pay off," he said.

ATI has more processing units than Nvidia inside its chip too. "The other thing is that ATI has 800 processors in their chip and Nvidia has 240. That has a processor count advantage," Peddie said.

Though it remains to be seen if this advantage is borne out in testing over time, he added. "Nvidia and ATI keep improving their drivers so they'll seesaw back and forth with their scores, almost from week to week."

But in the long run, Nvidia may be forced to adopt ATI's strategy to keep pace in these week-to-week battles. "If ATI is successful, as we expect that to be, then Nvidia will have no choice but to adopt (ATI's) approach, just out of practicality," Peddie said. "It just makes a whole lot of sense."

AMD-ATI's upcoming R700 (rumored to be called the 4870 X2) two-chip graphics board will be the ultimate test of this strategy.

"It's a new proprietary inter-processor communication technology. If they put these two chips on one board and it does scale properly, then they have pulled off a coup," he said.

"When you gang up graphics chips (using the traditional Scalable Link Interface or CrossFire technologies) they roll off pretty fast. ("Roll off" implies that performance doesn't scale up well.) "So when you put two boards in, you don't get twice the performance but you (only) get one and a half. You put four boards in and you (only) get about 1.7, 1.8. What ATI is saying is that with two chips using (their) proprietary inter-bus, they will get 1.8 (the performance) with two chips. If that's true, you can expect to see four of them giving you something around 2.5."

Getting 2.5 times the performance from four boards would be a masterstroke for ATI.

The previous ATI dual-chip solution was very different, Peddie said. "The HD 3870 X2 was not a proprietary bus but a CrossFire connection. The CrossFire connection and the SLI connection are at the very, very end of the pipeline. Not the most efficient place to do an inter-processor communication. That's one of the reasons ATI has abandoned it."

AMD's ATI unit is also better positioned than it was before in manufacturing. "Part of the reason that Nvidia has been ahead is that ATI has been suffering over the last three or four years with manufacturing problems. It's not that ATI didn't have a good chip, the problem was that ATI couldn't build enough of them."

This should change with the newest series of chips. "This (design)--so they say--will really go into high-volume production." Though he cautioned this still remains to be seen.

"The (new ATI chip) is a really efficient, tight design. They used to do this all the time but they kind of got off that trail. And now they're back on it."

(Credit: Amazon)

Tomorrow, the HD DVD version of the Irish flick Disco Pigs goes on sale along with the Japanese anime collection, Freedom: 6. According to Wikipedia's entry on HD DVD, these will be the last HD DVD titles to be released in the United States (though Bandai Visual says it wants to release the remaining episodes of the Freedom Project series on HD DVD). The final big studio releases, Warner's Twister and P.S. I Love You, hit stores in May.

Personally, I wish The Last American Virgin was the last American HD DVD. That film, a minor 80s classic, was marked by a brutal ending that showed that sometimes nice guys do indeed finish last. HD DVD, a good format to many, shared a similar fate.

So, anybody out there still buying HD DVDs? Any collectors plan on buying Disco Pigs?

UPDATE: On Monday, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia are launching graphics chips based on distinctly different design philosophies.

Nvidia chips are big and powerful

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's GTX 280 and GTX 260 are designed to deliver the biggest performance bang per chip. A so-called "monolithic" approach packs 1.4 billion transistors and 240 processing cores onto one piece of silicon.

(See Peter Glaskowsky's review of the GTX 280.)

AMD's modular approach tends toward less is more: smaller, less power-hungry chips that can be strung together to achieve higher performance. The company plans to implement this strategy with the HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics processing units (GPUs) that are being introduced on Monday. (See "Notes" below.)

This design philosophy is based on the same multicore strategy now employed by AMD (and Intel) for the CPU, the main PC processor. Instead of making one chip bigger and faster, AMD boosts performance by stringing together multiple chips. This approach also allows a chipmaker to avoid the time and expense of designing separate processors for the midrange and very-high-end segments.

(Clarification: In the case of a CPU, a core refers to a "scalar" x86 processor core found, for example, in a quad-core Intel or AMD chip. The GPU core is a "parallel processing core." GPUs these days typically contain hundreds of these cores.)

"The beauty of this design is that it's scalable. You can put one or two (chips) on a board," said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing at AMD's Graphics Products Group.

In the midrange segment ($200 to $300) AMD uses a single chip--for example, an HD 4870. At the high-end ($500 and above), it adds another chip to scale up to better performance. This dual-chip design--code-named the R700--will be marketed as the 4870 X2.

On the other hand, Nvidia says its emphasis on a single, very-high-performance chip is necessary to keep it out front. "At the high end, there is no prize for second place," Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce products at Nvidia, said in an interview with Nanotech: The Circuits Blog last month.

(Nvidia also offers multichip designs, but it puts each chip on a separate board, while AMD puts two chips on one board.)

And Nvidia is trying to raise the bar with GTX 280. "We're rendering about 3 million triangles per frame," Curtis Beason, an engineer at Nvidia, said last month at an event where Nvidia previewed the GTX 280 chip.

AMD targets smaller chips that can be strung together to get better performance. AMD chip on left, Nvidia chip on right.

(Credit: AMD)

"With (the previous-generation) GeForce 8800, what we achieved is a very photorealistic character. Very detailed skin. But it was a single character," Jason Paul, the GeForce product manager, said at the Nvidia event last month. "With GTX 200 what we're moving to is multiple highly realistic characters."

Nvidia is also boasting that a dual-core GTX 280 can convert a high-definition movie into iPod video format in 35 minutes, compared to about five hours for a quad-core CPU system with low-end integrated graphics.

Hewlett-Packard's Voodoo unit will be one of the first to adopt the new Nvidia GPUs. "We are excited to be one of the first companies in the world to offer the technology in the new Exhilaration Edition of the...HP Blackbird 002," said Rahul Sood, chief technology officer, HP Voodoo Business Unit.

Notes: updated 6/16, 12:10 PM:

--AMD 4800 series processors will be available starting next week at Besy Buy, according to AMD VP Rick Bergman, speaking Monday at an AMD event. "In just a little over a week from today. You'll be able to walk into a Best Buy and buy this chip (4800 series) on a graphics board for about $200. A teraflop for $200," Bergman said. He added that systems will also be available from Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro, and ibuypower. "We're also introducing a system that can take four of these boards," he said. "That's almost five teraflops of performance in a personal computer."

--Both AMD and Nvidia say their GPUs can achieve about one teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) of performance.

--Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 will retail for $649 and be available on graphics boards starting Tuesday. The GeForce GTX 260 will be priced at $399, with availability slated for June 26.

Intel has launched a Web site to help game and visual content developers create software for its graphics silicon and processors. Intel's next-generation Larrabee graphics chip is also slated to become part of the focus.

"Supporting the new Intel 4 Series chipset family introduced at Computex, Intel has launched the Intel Visual Computing Developer Community, a technical resource to enable developers...to create innovative graphics and video applications," Intel said in a statement.

The Intel 4 Series includes the G45 Express chipset and GMA X4500HD graphics media accelerator, which has built-in support for Blu-ray 1080p high-definition video playback. The chipset also supports Microsoft DirectX 10 and game-centric graphics technologies such as Shader Model 4.0.

Intel says these improvements deliver "everyday gameplay for the most popular game titles."

Intel Visual Developer Community Web site

(Credit: Intel)

Intel is clearly ratcheting up its presence in the gaming and visual computing segments. In a video posted on the site, Roger Chandler, director of marketing for the Visual Computing Software Division, said that though Intel works with developers in the digital content creation space, "We're really focused on the game industry...The big focus we have right now is the game space."

Chandler's team is focused on processors, integrated graphics products, and mobile platforms.

"We're entering this era where folks have been so focused on making games look real, (but) they're now realizing that we need to make them act real," he said. Chandler cited artificial intelligence and game physics as two pillars of this "act real" strategy.

The video also indicated that the upcoming Larrabee graphics platform looms large. "This effort is supporting a platform we don't talk about all that much--Larrabee," said Paul Steinberg of Intel, who participated in the video. Intel has described Larrabee as a "many core" Intel Architecture graphics chip that is expected to debut in the second half of 2009.

The site also contains white papers on high definition audio and video, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis, Intel said.

A new report released Tuesday says that less than half of high-definition television owners in the U.S. know what Blu-ray Disc is.

While that's an improvement over a year ago, it still means that more than half of that group--the target audience for high-definition video vendors--still has no idea what Blu-ray is.

(Credit: Samsung)

According to The NPD Group, a market research company that tracks consumer awareness, while 45 percent of HDTV owners surveyed said they were "familiar" with the format, only 9 percent said they planned on buying a Blu-ray player in the next six months. That's only slightly higher than the general population, 6 percent of which said they planned a similar purchase.

HDTV owners familiar with Blu-ray stood at 35 percent as of June 2007. So what's more odd is that that group's awareness of the format has creeped up only 10 percent in the past year, in spite of the most intense battles between Blu-ray and now-defunct HD DVD taking place at the end of 2007, and early 2008.

The report suggests that Blu-ray is still facing the same problem of a year ago: prices are still too high compared with less expensive upscaling DVD players that are "good enough" for most consumers.

Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics chip unit doesn't want to build "huge" chips like rival Nvidia, an executive says.

But an Nvidia exec says smaller isn't always better or more efficient.

Such statements will help define how the two chip giants do battle at the high end of the graphics chip market in the coming years.

One of the largest graphics chips yet will be Nvidia's upcoming high-end GTX 280. This is the kind of chip that high-end gaming enthusiasts crave. But great performance often means a large transistor count. And the GTX 280 is expected to have both.

Here is an Asus board using AMD-ATI 3870 X2 that will be superseded by the new X2 board.

(Credit: Asus)

AMD, of course, also intends to deliver extreme graphics technology with its upcoming X2, a follow-on to the current 3870 X2 series. And AMD wants to be clear: its strategy is fundamentally different than Nvidia's.

"We took two chips and put it on one board (X2). By doing that we have a smaller chip that is much more power efficient," said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing for the graphics products group at AMD.

"We believe this is a much stronger strategy than going for a huge, monolithic chip that is very expensive and eats a lot of power and really can only be used for a small portion of the market," he said. "Scaling that large chip down into the performance segment doesn't make sense--because of the power and because of the size."

Skynner said that AMD tries to design GPUs (graphics processing units) for the mainstream segment of the market, then ratchet up performance by adding GPUs rather than designing one large, very-high-performance chip.

Nvidia's "strategy is to design for the highest performance at all cost. And we believe designing for the sweet spot and then leveraging for the extreme enthusiast market with multiple GPUs is the preferred approach," Skynner said.

This applies to memory too. AMD thinks support for technologies like GDDR5 memory is another way to deliver good performance at a reasonable cost. "You don't need a huge chip with a huge data path to get the bandwidth. You can utilize a technology like GDDR5 to get that bandwidth," Skynner said.

Nvidia tends to favor very-fast, single-chip solutions.

Nvidia, of course, has a different take on why it chooses to develop big, fast chips.

"If you take two chips and put them together, you then have to add a bridge chip that allows the two chips to talk to each other...And you can't gang the memory together," said Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce products at Nvidia.

"So when you add it all up, you now have the power of two GPUs, the power of the bridge chip, and the power that all of that additional memory consumes. That's why it's too simplistic of an argument to say that two smaller chips is always more efficient."

Desai takes this argument a bit further. "They don't have the money to invest in high-end GPUs anymore. At the high end, there is no prize for second place. If you're going to invest a half-billion dollars--which is what it takes to develop a new enthusiast-level GPU--you have to know you're going to win. You either do it to win, or you don't invest the money."

(Note: Nvidia does offer GeForce 9800 GX2 technology but the GX2 uses a dual-board design--two 9800 chips, one on each board--rather than putting two chips on a single board as with AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2.)

AMD-ATI and Nvidia are preparing for the next graphics chip showdown. And there is already a good deal of information (and rumor) on the two chips due in June.

The names of the two upcoming product families have been widely reported: The ATI line is branded as the Radeon HD 4800, while the Nvidia is dubbed the GeForce GTX 200.

Advanced Micro Devices is expected to launch the HD 4850 (price estimates of graphics boards range between $189 and $219) and then follow with the 4870 (estimates range between $199 and $279). In the fourth quarter, AMD plans to add the dual-chip ATI Radeon 4870 X2.

Nvidia will respond with the high-end GeForce GTX 200 family. Initial products will be the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280.

VR-Zone has already gotten its hands on some preliminary performance numbers for the HD 4850 and 4870. German-language site Hardware-Infos has posted a table with specifications of the HD 4850 and 4870.

Tech site tg daily said "that card vendors will start printing their boxes next week, which means that the specifications are final at this time."

Less seems to be known about the Nvidia GTX 260 and 280, though a Turkish site is claiming to have all the specifications.