Tomorrow's News Today

Please visit our Sponsor

RSS Feeds

• Anandtech

• CNET News

• CrankyGeeks

• DailyTech

• Endgadget

• Security Now

• TechARP

• TGDaily

• Winsupersite

Tech News for Wednesday, September 22nd 1999

3DFX's Voodoo 4 officially delayed

Posted: 09/22/99     Source :3DNews   Added by: Lance Gibb
3DFX officials today began notifying investors that their Napalm chipset (otherwise known as Voodoo 4) will be delayed until February or March of next year.  The following is a quote from Greg Ballard, President/CEO of 3DFX:

"There is no press conference scheduled, nor is there a "formal" announcement being made. We have started today to inform investors that we have determined that Napalm will not ship in the 4th quarter or if it does, too late in the quarter to have a meaningful impact on revenues. We now expect it to ship in mid February with an outside chance of mid March. We expect that when it does ship, it will be the leading performance chip in the market."

Tech News for Tuesday, September 21st 1999

DirectX 7.0 to be released tomorrow (09-22)
Posted: 09/21/99     Source :ActiveWin   Added by: Kim Heise
There is just too much useful tech news out today that I had to get in these posts before we leave on our vacation.
Microsoft is releasing their much anticipated new DirectX 7.0 sometime tomorrow as being reported by ActiveWin. Check the ActiveWin site or the Microsoft site for download locations near you. 
Remember that if you plan to purchase the new nVidia GeForce256 then you need to have DirectX 7.0 installed.

3dfx Voodoo 4 chip to be delayed to Q1 2000
Posted: Avault reports that 3dfx will be posting a press release that the Voodoo 4 chip will be delayed until Q1 of 2000 due to complexity issues with the chip. There is a remote possibility the chip may actually ship in Q4 of this year. Check with Avault to read the press release from 3dfx when it becomes available.

Pentium III 600mhz "overclocked" Pentium III 500mhz?
Posted: 09/21/99     Source :The Register  Added by: Kim Heise
The team over at the Register have an article that indicates that Intel is selling Pentium III 500mhz chips overclocked at 600mhz.  Here is a snippet from the article:

The latest SL3JT 600MHz P3 shares the same stepping, core stepping and tagRAM stepping as the original SL35E 500MHz chip introduced at the beginning of the year. The only difference is an increase in clock multiplier from 5X to 6X and core voltage from 2.0V to 2.05V.

This reminds me of all the lectures one receives about why not to overclock - especially those from Intel.

AMD released 475mhz mobile CPU
Posted: 09/21/99     Source :ZDNET  Added by: Kim Heise
AMD has released six new processors in a move to keep up the competition with Intel. In fact the new AMD 475mhz mobile CPU beats Intel's fastest mobile Celeron by a full 15mhz. Here are the six new chips from AMD:

• AMD-K6-III-P 450MHz ($320).
• AMD-K6-III-P 433MHz ($283).
• AMD-K6-III-P 400MHz ($246).
• Mobile AMD-K6-2-P 475MHz ($209).
• Mobile AMD-K6-2-P 450MHz ($189). 
• Mobile AMD-K6-2-P 433MHz ($159).

These new chips will be incorporated in the new Compaq Prosignia 150 and Presario 1600 series systems.
This comes as good news since Gateway decided to drop AMD as a source for CPUs.

• Visual Basic type library for DirectX.
• Visual Basic DirectX samples.
• DirectDraw support for stereo display devices.
• Direct3D support for hardware transform and lighting engines and cubic environment mapping.
• D3DX library providing increased ease of use for Direct3D.
• DirectSound support for hardware voice management and selectable 3D algorithms.
• DirectMusic support for DLS-2 hardware.
• DirectMusic Producer support for hybrid notation and editing of sequence tracks in segments.
• DirectInput support for WDM drivers on Windows 98.
• Enhanced game controllers control panel.
• DirectPlay performance enhancements.
• New sample applications that illustrate the use of the new features.
• New DirectInput force editing tool.
• Improved documentation, including. dynamic filtering for language-specific information.

Expect it to become available within the next couple of days.

Preview of the new Intel "Camino" Chipset.
Posted: 09/19/99     Source: Reviewzone    Added by: Kim Heise
This has been a really slow weekend in terms of tech news but this article is worth the read.
The Reviewzone has a preview on the upcoming Intel "Camino" chipset that is to be launched on September 27th. Here are some of the specs on the new chipset taken directly from the article:

• 133/100mhz FSB speeds
• Asynchronous AGP and PCI/IDE speeds (no more worry with overclocking your peripherials, at least according to sources at Intel.  YET UNCONFIRMED, as this motherboard cannot overclock)
• Accelerated Hub Architecture
• Support for the Coppermine CPU
• Native support for Rambus at 600 and 800mhz
• Native support for UltraDMA/66
• PC99 compliant 
• No more ISA slots

Note the second item-There is a possibility that the overclocking days are over and this would mean that I would hope to avoid this chipset ;) I am hoping that Abit or Asus will release a version of the chipset that allows overclocking.

Some quick important notes from the article:
The article also states that the author tried to purchase 128MB RIMM (Rambus RAM) and the price was $825.00 for 128MB!!!! Apparently there will be an option to add standard DIMMS to these motherboards but then it defeats the purpose of the new chipset. 
They run through the basic benchmarks comparing the new chipset to a top-end BX board and there is NO performance gains. In the Quake3 benchmarks the BX chipset beat the new Intel "Camino" chipset by almost 20 frames!!

I agree with the article in the conclusion that if this is the best Intel is going to be provide then users will be moving to the better AMD K7 architecture by the hundreds. At this point the AMD K7 is still the system to upgrade to.