Larrabee gets inoculated

According to Xbit Labs, Intel is a bit worried that specialized viruses targeting GPUs could soon appear, as GPGPUs become increasingly popular.

We've talked about the potential benefits of GPGPU computing on numerous occasions. Although there's still not enough useful GPGPU applications for average desktop users, the concept is quite promising. Both Nvidia and ATI have GPGPU video encoding software, and Nvidia recently informed us that it's thinking about using its Fermi GPUs to power antivirus software.

40nm DirectX 10.1

Nvidia plans to launch a “new” generation of what´s exclusively been a OEM product and this new card will get a Geforce GT220 brand name.

The launch date is October 12th, which is just one day before the launch of Radeon HD 5770 and 5750, both DirectX 11 cards that might dominate this market segment.

Geforce GT220 works from 615MHz all the way to 700MHz depending on the configuration, while most of the cards use 1GB of 790MHz clocked 128-bit DDR3 memory. This is a single slot card with shader clock at 1335MHz.

The cards we've found listed should be selling from €57 to €72 which sounds quite affordable. Nvidia's DirectX 11 Fermi-based entry level won't arrive until first half of 2010.

Nvidia has delayed the development of chipsets that work with Intel's microprocessors, citing "unfair business tactics" employed by Intel, the company said on Thursday.

Nvidia's move also intensifies an ongoing patent-licensing battle in which both companies have accused each other of breaching a chip-licensing agreement signed in 2004. Nvidia currently makes chipsets -- a set of integrated circuits -- for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices CPUs, to help processors communicate with components like network and storage controllers.

Nvidia may have finally found the killer app that will bring the benefits of CUDA - its language for offloading highly parallel tasks on to the graphics processor - to the masses: CUDA-accelerated virus scanning.

As reported over on Fudzilla, the company's general manager of CUDA Sanford Russell has confirmed that his group is working on offloading the grunt work of scanning for viruses on to the GPU - potentially offering a massive speed-up over traditional CPU-based scanners.

No point. It is not only that Nvidia canceled its DMI chipset projects and won’t have its Lynnfield, Nehalem refresh chipset, it doesn’t want even to make a new AMD chipset. Mr. Drew Henry has explained us that since AMD's CPU business is doing so badly and since its market shrunk so much, it is simply not economically viable for Nvidia to continue developing chipsets for AMD. They simply cannot make enough money.

As many of our readers have been discussing Charlie's recent article. There is some serious scuttlebutt going around about NVIDIA's market intentions. Here is what Charlie Demerjian lead with yesterday.

NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it (Nvidia: NVDA) abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.

NVIDIA IS KILLING the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as Nvidia (Nvidia: NVDA) abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company's product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.

Getting better though

AMD's recently introduced Radeon HD 5870 is readily available in most European markets. After a somewhat bumpy launch, distributors are starting to get new shipments and they are finally coping with demand. Speaking of demand, there seems to be plenty of early DirectX11 adopters to go around. Prices range for the HD 5870 range from just under €300 in Blighty to €315 or €330 on the mainland, depending on the region.

Performance boost for games and OpenGL

Nvidia has released a new set of WHQL certified drivers with support for all Geforce GPUs ranging from Geforce 6 to Geforce 200 series, as well as the ION IGP. The new driver mainly brings performance boost in various games and the most important new feature is the support for OpenGL 3.2 on Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200 series and Nvidia's ION GPUs.

The performance boost includes ARMA 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood with SLI, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Prototype, and of course, Batman: Arkham Asylum when GPU PhysX is enabled. The performance boost ranges from eight percent in Batman to up to 50 percent in Call of Juarez. The performance boost results are taken from the 191.07 vs. 190.62 comparison.

The new driver also brings SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Need for Speed: Shift and bunch of other titles. In addition to these performance boosts, the new driver also brings numerous bug fixes.

The new driver can be downloaded at Nvidia's website, here.

Intel has a prototype processor that aims at being more energy efficient in all product ranges, from mobile to server markets. The new processor performs tuning based on various parameters, including clockspeed, temperature and voltage. By using some of die space, Intel's engineers are able to do way with some of the methods used today in processor binning.