And Forget About E3 Too!

It’s the S|A weekly roundup!

Flaming WaferIt’s been a relatively quiet it week in the hardware world. With E3 coverage dominating the tech press right now, it seems that most of the big players at last week’s Computex are all out of announcements. Oh, well, AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit is next week, so we should get some interesting news out of that event. Look for in-depth coverage here at S|A as part of out partnership with AMD.

I’d like to announce that the S|A weekly roundup, written by yours truly, will be moving from an (aimed for) Friday release schedule, covering Fri through Thursday, to a Monday release schedule, that will be covering Monday through Friday for the week prior. Thanks for reading, and now let’s get to this weeks news.

AMD - logo

The was more news on the upcoming Bulldozer launch this week. 4Gamer.net sat in on AMD’s E3 2011 presentation where it relaunched it’s high-end FX processor brand. AMD also put up this web-page as the landing site for it’s upcoming Zambezi (Bulldozer) related announcements. The new metal packaging for the highest end SKU is a nice touch from AMD and it seems that they’ve decided to keep the sweet looking graphics that were leaked earlier. With competitive pricing the only major questions left for enthusiasts and DIYer’s alike are how well will it overclock? And will the disabled cores on the lower models be unlock-able? Let’s hope so!

Some more information about AMD’s imminent Llano launch with Fudzilla reporting that the final date being set as the 14th of June. Hexus showed off a Llano ES chip that it picked up at Computex and called its performance interesting when compared with Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips. A partial review of an Llano chips was up over at MyDrivers.com with some rather confusing numbers. AMD itself even put out a new video and blog about the battery life of the Sabine platform this week. It appears that Llano based laptops will at least be at par in terms of battery life with Intel’s offerings now.

NviNvidia world icondia Released it’s PhysX 3.0 SDK this week. It promised a number of new features in its blog post. Ranging from more effective multithreading to streaming assets data into an ongoing physics simulation. Cyril Kowaliski of TechReport covers the bases pretty well here. It seems that PhysX isn’t dead yet, despite the defection of it’s leader to AMD’s Fusion initiative a while back.

New information this week came to light about the fate of Nvidia’s low end discrete GPU business. Apparently sales are down between 40 and 45 percent in China, instead of an expected decline of 10 to 15 percent. This is bad news for Nvidia’s bottom line, and it seems that the death of the low-end GPU market is accelerating as new chips from Intel and AMD are coming to market.

Chrome 12 was released this week. Google’s blog post promised better security, more control, and better graphics capabilities. Most of the changes in Chrome 12 are relatively minor updates from the previous version, but updates are always appreciated. With that said I suppose we’ll be seeing a number of browser updates and releases in the near future.

ECS

It looks like both they guys at VRZone and Guru3D got to take a tour of ECS’s headquarters in Taiwan. For the most part they cover the same things such as what the offices look like and the products that ECS wanted to show off. But I think it’s fair to say that VRZone offered more of an overview of the company while Guru3D focused on ECS’s office space. A pat on the back, and a good job to both teams though.

E3 Logo

There were a number of announcements from the game industry this week due to E3. John Carmack did an interview about his upcoming game called Rage and online video game streaming services. In an interview with an EA representative GameTrailers.com managed to tease out the status of a Mirror’s Edge sequel that will likely be showing up in 2012. Even Activision’s CEO wanted to play EA’s Battlefield 3 at E3, the game is looking like one of the best titles of the year for PC gamers, and even though they wouldn’t let him play, we can all count on Activision’s CEO as a fan of Battlefield 3…S|A

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.