Latest hardware news from HARDiNFO
  http://www.hardinfo.com/

Lord Acton once wisely noted that, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." In his latest column for ABC News, Michael S. Malone has made an argument suggesting that great companies may also be bad companies and that even Google, despite its much-hyped guiding motto of "Don't be evil" may be no exception.

Google makes its money by knowing more about its users than any other company in the world, but Google's new browser, dubbed "Chrome", may be the first step along a darker path for the company. Shortly after its release, legal watchdogs brought to light a section in Chrome's terms of services that grant Google "perpetual, irrevocable, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive" rights to any content posted using Chrome as a browser. Google has since stated that it will change the offending section, but one is left to wonder whether the original clause was a mistake, or just the first in a coming series of such moves?

Google is already sitting pretty on a huge pile of cash that has been made in a relatively non-offensive manner. Perhaps they should just continue to make bank and not try to become the next Microsoft. Another wise being once advised, "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." And while they still haven't found a way to hurl force lightning at their enemies via cable-modem, if any company can figure out how to do it, it's Google.
  http://www.hardinfo.com

ABIT, the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, is getting out of the motherboard business. First-tier mobo-makers like ASUS, Gigabyte, ECS, and MSI have been putting the squeeze on niche players like ABIT for years, and it looks like the hammer has finally dropped.

ABIT became a household name in overclocking circles when it stunned the world with the BH6 motherboard for Pentium-II and Celeron processors. Since then, ABIT has catered to the high-performance crowd, leading the way with overclocking innovations like SoftMenu and μGuru.
  http://www.hardinfo.com

Samsung will enter the SSD market next month when it introduces its new Low density SATA II solid-state drives. The drives will come in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities, and will mainly be targeted at super-cheap system builders.

This could be a godsend for hard-core geeks who need drives with no moving parts for rugged applications such as building a carputer. The full story can be read
  http://www.hardinfo.com

In a reversal of it's previous policy, NVIDIA has announced at NVISION 08 that it will support SLI configurations for motherboards using the new Intel X58 chipset.

This is good news for gamers, who can now buy a single motherboard that supports both NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire configurations. X48 and X38 chipset owners are out of luck, as this policy change will not apply to their chipsets
  http://www.hardinfo.com

Another month another driver - AMD releases the much awaited Catalyst 8.8 driver which usually brings alot of bugfixes and performance over the older catalyst drivers.

AMDs ATI Catalyst 8.8 driver is as well the first driver to officially support ATIs recently launched Radeon HD 4870 X2 card.

Grab the latest drivers from our link below and see if they improves the performance in your system.

The driver contains the following builds:

• Radeon ™ display driver 8,522
• Multimedia Center ™ 9.16 (Windows XP only)
• HydraVision ™ for both Windows XP and Vista
• HydraVision ™ Basic Edition (Windows XP only)
• Remote Wonder 3.04 (Windows XP only)
• WDM Driver Install Bundle
• Southbridge / IXP Driver
• Catalyst ™ Control Center Version 8.8

  http://www.hardinfo.com

IDF (Intel Developer Forum) is running for the full exhaust in San Francisco and in this occasion Hynix has taken the opportunity to showcase the manufacturer's new DDR3 R-DIMMs modules, which uses the latest MetaRAM technology.

Metaram technology makes it possible for the memory providers to use cheap mainstream 1GBs DRAM chips to produce large 2 rank memory modules with capacities of 8GB, 16GB, 24GB or even greater.

Hynix has chosen to display 2 different modules at IDF where it has an 8GB and 16GB DDR3 memory module on display which both uses the Metaram technology. The Metaram technology makes it as well possible to use 3 pcs. of 16 GB DIMM R-DIMMs modules to make the benefit of the entire 48 GB of memory per channel at 1066 MT/s. The competition is only able to cope with 16GB per channel and that makes Hynix the number 1 for high capacity modules.

With Hynix latest invention it makes it possible for Intel to demonstrate a server solutions with a stunning 160GB memory using Hynix DDR3 R-DIMMs technology that is rather impressive.

The information unfortunately doesnt tell anything about pricing of the modules, but it is likely that they will be extremely expensive at launch even if the modules are produced by inexpensive 1GB DRAM chips.
  http://www.hardinfo.com

According Fudzilla will NVIDIAs upcoming GT200 55nm part not see the light of day in either August or September. But the timeframe for NVIDIAs launch of the GT200 55nm version is closer to November or even December.

This news is not good for NVIDIAs partners as AMDs ATI-partners seem to gain a good hold on the entusiast market with its popular Radeon HD 4800 series. Fudzilla further mentioned that the GT200 55nm version will as rumoured adopt GDDR5 RAM and possess a higher core and memory frequency.

Besides fudzilla rumours is there talk about NVIDIA will add additional shaders to improve the performance on the card which can neither be confirmed or ruled out.

So far we have to wait and see if NVIDIA will be able to compete with AMDs latest flagship Radeon HD 4870X2 and the upcoming cheaper version "Radeon HD 4850 X2".
  http://www.hardinfo.com

According to TGdaily is AMD and IBM, the first to implement a production of 22nm SRAM-cell, which is normally the connector, to implement a CPU production of 22nm manufacturing process. It is the first time for AMD and IBM to beat Intel in this area in history.

AMD, Freescale, IBM, STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering went all together, to beat Intel at its own game. They chose to use a traditional six transistor design on a 300mm wafer as a starting point and managed to get an SRAM-cell size of 0.1 μ m2, which is 22nm. Intel's 45nm manufacturing is known for comparison in the level of 0,346 μ m2.

Intel showed similar in September last year, production of 32nm Cell chips, which now are being used in Nehalem and showcased at this year's IDF. Intel's production of 22nm SRAM-cell chips will definitely take place in a few years time and it is precisely here that AMD and IBM managed quite surprisingly already seem ready.

IBM further emphasised that it will be in place with its 32nm high-K metal gate technology, which can be expected soon and further pointed out that no other manufacture would be able to match theirs. It seems that with these mentionings that AMD and IBM both have turned on is struggle to beat Intel and we will certainly in the future see a greater competition in CPU manufacturing!.
  http://www.hardinfo.com

Hexus.net has as many other media visited the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) in San Francisco and in this occasion they had the opportunity to look at Intel's Core i7 also known underthe code name Nehalem. It succeeded Hexus to be supplied with a system based on a Single Socket Quad Core Nehalem processor at 2.93GHz (2MB L2 Cache, 8MB L3 Cache) which will be the second largest processor at the launch.

Hexus have chosen to compare Intel's Core i7 processor with Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 2.93GHz and AMDs Phenom 9950 Black Edition (2.6GHz). Intel's Nehalem system has been spiced with a Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 cards, 3 GB Kingston DDR3-1066MHz and Intel's X58 preproduction board.

Hexus chose to use a large large number of CPU-intensive benchmarks respectively Sisoft Sandra 2008, ScienceMark 2.0 32bit, Hexus Pifast, WinRaR, CineBench, PovRay, etc. Intel's Nehalem performs quite reasonable and intend to win most the benchmarks as with most reason is due to the integrated memory controller.

But in terms of pure gaming benchmarks the Intel's Nehalem processor setup at seems to have optimization problems. The chosen Nehalem testsetup didn’t manage to surpass Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9770 in Company of Heroes, QuakeWars or 3DMark Vantage!.

Hexus suspect, however, that Nehalem test setup is not optimized properly and it weren’t possible, to find out what may be wrong due to time pressure at writing.
  http://www.hardinfo.com

According to GPU Cafe will AMD ATI Radeon HD 4670 soon see the light of day and been based on the ATIs RV730 GPU. AMDs RV730 GPU will be manufactured at the 55nm manufacturing technology at the begining and later on this year be reduced to 40nm manufacturing process.

AMDs ATI Radeon HD 4670 will at launch of carry a 701MHz core frequency and 900MHz GDDR3 RAM, which constitutes a memory bandwidth at 28.8Gbps. The card will further be available in 512MB and 1024MB configurations and have a 70W TDP value that can be said to be on the good side.

AMDs ATI Radeon HD 4670 will carry a introduction price for 150 USD $ and will mainly mainly be competiting against cards such as NVIDIAs GeForce 9500GT. Radeon 4670 will finally offer single 1 DVI port and 2 displayport interfaces that make the card ready for the new display standards.

With AMDs further launches of Radeon HD 4870 1GB and Radeon HD 4850 X2 version in september will AMDs Radeon HD 4800 series be quite competitive to NVIDIAs offerings. GPU cafe have a picture of the AMDs Radeon HD 4670 which can be seen at the belowed link..
  http://www.hardinfo.com