processors

Unless you're a hardcore gamer type, you've probably never heard of Ageia and their PhysX processor. This add-on card for your desktop PC works with certain supported games to provide additional processing power for in-game physics, leading to bigger explosions, more interactive environments, etc.

Of course, there are only a handful of games that support PhysX (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, and Unreal Tournament 3 are the only notable ones that come to mind), and game developers aren't exactly lining up to create extra content for a proprietary physics system that very few consumers will ever be … Read more

Power Downloader has been around long enough to know that young people tend to go through phases in their lives. Particularly in college, when young people are trying to figure out what path they want to take and what kind of individual they want to be, a certain degree of experimentation is expected. When Power's niece, Kitty Kilobyte, recently stated in an e-mail that she would no longer use any software from a huge corporation, Power smiled knowingly to himself and continued to read on. Kitty said one of the programs she needed was a full-featured word processor for her next year at school, but it had to be unique like she is--a program unlike what everybody uses at school.

In Power Downloader's many trips through the Download.com software library, he's found plenty of unique software apps; from the strange and wonderful to the just plain weird. But it wasn't enough to just grab the weirdest word processor available for Kitty; he had to find one that was both unique and useful.… Read more

These days, most new PCs have dual-core central processors (CPU). That's one chip with two complete microprocessors on it, both sharing one path to memory and peripherals.

If you have a high-end gaming PC or a workstation, you might have one or two processor chips with four cores each. An eight-core PC is a very powerful machine--in real terms, up to eight times faster than the best desktop PCs you could get in 2004. For many years, PC performance doubled roughly every 18 months; multicore technology has produced annual doubling for three years now.

But that's not really … Read more

Intel on Tuesday is scheduled to release the source code to a development tool for writing applications to run on multicore chips.

The company released Threading Building Blocks last August, a C++ template designed to simplify the job of writing applications that take advantage of processors with multiple cores, or processing units.

During the last year, Intel found that customers and potential customers wanted greater platform support and assurances that the toolset would be around for a long time, said James Reinders, the director of Intel's software development products.

To address these concerns, Intel has decided to release the tool … Read more

Mobile gaming just got sweeter: today, Intel announced the Core 2 Extreme X7800, its first laptop CPU under the Extreme Edition brand. The 2.6GHz dual-core processor features 4MB of L2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus, making it the highest-end chip in Intel's mobile lineup. Of greater interest to gamers, though, is the fact that the chip's overspeed protection has been removed, meaning laptop manufacturers and users will be able to overclock the X7800 for even more performance (Intel, of course, denies any responsibility for the consequences of overclocking).

Like Intel's other mobile product offerings, the … Read more

Ever since Intel showed off its 80-core prototype processor, people have asked "Why 80 cores?"

There's actually nothing magic about the number, according to Jerry Bautista, co-director of the Tera-scale Computing Research Program at Intel, and others. Intel wanted to make a chip that could perform 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. And 80 cores did the trick. The chip does not contain x86 processing cores, the kind of cores inside Intel's PC chips, but cores optimized for floating-point (or decimal) math.

Other sources at the company pointed out that 80 cores … Read more

IBM will introduce a new generation of Unix servers Tuesday, the first using its Power6 processors, according to sources familiar with the plan.

Better late than never. In 2004, IBM said the Power6 processor was supposed to ship in 2006.

IBM will likely release only one Power6-based mid-range server in the first half of the year, said sources, and follow with more models in the second half.

Power6 servers can hold more chips than those using the Power5+. Power6 servers can contain 64 chips; Power5+ servers maxed out at 32.

Like Power5 and the newer Power5+, Power6 chips have two … Read more

As if its new 3D graphics card announcement wasn't enough for one morning, AMD also made public the name of its forthcoming quad-core desktop processors, dubbed "Phenom," as reported on News.com. You can also read the official AMD press release.

We already outlined what we little we knew about Phenom, formerly called "Barcelona," a few months ago. Anandtech got its hands on a few PowerPoint slides that give some more details about Phenom, but there's really not whole lot of technical info here. From the look of it, we'll see, similar to … Read more

In the course of writing this week's CPU Roadmap feature (detailing what Intel and AMD will be up to in the next few years), we had a chance to solve the mystery of the Pentium Dual Core T2060 processor, which kept showing up in advertisements and options lists for budget laptops. See, the Pentium brand was supposedly retired with the announcement of Core processors in early 2006. A quick search of Intel's product page reveals no dual-core Pentium. To make matters more confusing, it has what looks like a Core Duo model number. What?

So we put on … Read more