Fujitsu Siemens Amilo SA3650 Review

Notebook Check has reviewed the FSC Amilo SA3650 using the integrated video and also the XGP with a Radeon 3870.

Notebook specifications:
Processor AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 2.4 GHz
Mainboard AMD M780G
Memory 4096 MB, 2x 2048 DDR2 PC-6400 Samsung 6-6-6-18-24
Graphics adapter ATI Radeon HD3200
Display 13.3 Zoll 16:10, 1280x800 pixel, BrilliantView, Glossy
Harddisk Fujitsu MHZ2320BH G2, 320GB 5400rpm SATA-II
Soundcard Realtek ALC888

Connections:
1 Express Card 54mm, 5 USB, 1 Firewire, 2 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 Kensington Lock, 1 eSata, Audio Connections: Headphones (SPDIF), Microphone, Line-In, Card Reader: 15-in-1 Cardreader, Webcam, XGP Port (Graphic Booster)

Networking:
Realtek RTL8168C/8111C Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC , Atheros AR5008X Wireless Network Adapter , V2.1 Bluetooth

Optical drive Optiarc DVD RW AD-7640S
Size height x width x depth (in mm): 42 x 317 x 235
Weight 2.25 kg Power Supply: 0.45 kg
Battery Lithium-Ion, 6 cell Sanyo 2.6A
Price 1250 Euro
Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32 Bit
Additional features Graphic Booster (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 - 512 MB, Core: 648 MHz, Memory: 999 MHz, GDDR3), 24 Months Warranty

Verdict:
The fastest 13.3 inch notebook currently available. This is certainly the basic statement of the preceding test of the FSC Amio SA3650 notebook. The notebook itself is only to a small extent responsible for the immense power thrust. This is primarily due to the external Amilo Graphic Booster which provides the average equipped notebook with a high performance graphic card of the type ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870.

Merry Christmas

A Christmas e-card from AMD, click the Fusion Stamp to open

or click here:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DigitalMedia/holidaymessage.html


Below is a Christmas Tree made by Vic's fans:

AMD and XFX Announce Technology Partnership

XFX, known for its high-performance NVIDIA™-based products, is pleased to announce the addition of AMD/ATI as a new technology partner. A world leader in graphics cards, motherboards and computer accessories, is now an official AMD technology partner, joining the elite group of successful AMD add-in-board (AIB) partners. XFX plans to provide new products based on the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series GPUs to consumers, beginning in early 2009.

“With the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series, AMD redefined the graphics market and delivered graphics cards for gamers in every segment,” said Michael Chiu, Chairman and CEO, Pine Technologies Holdings, makers of XFX graphics cards. “It wasn’t just AMD gaming prowess that caught our attention; the company’s technology leadership in multimedia performance, including video transcoding, HD content playback and surround sound audio, made it clear that AMD was and continues to be a great fit for users everywhere. We are excited by this partnership as it allows us to incorporate current and future ATI graphics technology into our graphics card designs, enabling our R&D teams to develop an even wider range of XFX graphics products for consumers in every region and every segment.”

About XFX

XFX is a global presence in the world of electronic gaming. With its focus on taking gaming to the extreme, XFX has developed an exciting array of video cards and accessories that are designed to maximize the entire entertainment experience. A division of PINE Technologies, XFX operates its own manufacturing facility and maintains an R&D team that features some of the industry’s most renowned talents. Learn more about XFX at http://www.xfxforce.com/

Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition "KUMA"

Most of the news out of AMD lately has been out of ATI with their video cards lately and most new attention is focused on Phenom II which should be coming out very soon from AMD. But AMD is also launching a new CPU series codenamed Kuma.

AMD today announced the Athlon X2 7750 – a STARS-based processor that is a brand new dual-core processor based on the Kuma core. Since this processor is based off the Phenom core it has L3 cache, this should make it competitive in terms of both price and performance to the $82.99 Intel E5200 dual-core processor. The AMD Athlon X2 7750 is launching today with a $79 price tag.

The AMD Athlon X2 7750 is a dual-core processor with a 2.7GHz clock frequency. This is a Black Edition processor, which means that even though it comes set at 200MHz x 13.5, it has an unlocked multiplier that you can change for improved overclocking. The Athlon X2 7750 has 2 x 512MB of L2 Cache and 2MB shared of L3 Cache. The Athlon X2 7750 uses the same HyperTransport 3.0 bus that Phenom processors used. The Athlon X2 7750 has the HT set to run at 1800MHz an will work just fine in any socket AM2+ motherboard. The X2 7750 features a maximum Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 95 Watts, which means that it should be able to work in nearly any motherboard with the proper socket.

Some Reviews:
AMDZone
TweakTown
Legit Reviews
Guru3D
Hexus
Overclockers Club
X-Bit Labs

Getting To See Phenom II Before It Launches

After AMD showed off the new Phenom II processors and the Dragon platform to the media they went one step further and did a private showing to select forum members that were able to come to a scheduled showing in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Legit Reviews put an alert out to forum members about the event and XstollieX jumped at the chance and made it to the Chicago event (December 9th). By going to the event he was able to get a sneak peak at Phenom II a month before it launches and will be getting one when they launch next month.

The first thing he saw were two large displays. Each one was connected to the new Dragon platform set up in the new Antec Skeleton cases. Each machine was running the Phenom II X4 940, a Gigabyte 790GX motherboard, and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. To show off what these machines could do they had the game Race Driver: Grid set up with the full Logitech driving seat, wheel and pedals. The games were set at the highest resolution and ran flawlessly. They had Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Company of Heroes, and last but not least Crysis.

Then he found table with two more computers set up on it, both were connected to 50 inch displays, and both playing Crysis. The computer on the left was AMD’s new Dragon Platform, and the computer on the right was the new Intel Core i7 @3.2GHz. Both machines were running the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. The two computers side by side ran great on the highest settings.



The last area was more of a spectator event. This was the overclocking demo/contest. For this there were two teams. The first was from AMD and the second team was from Finland. The contest was done in two parts. The first part was air-cooling and the second was done using Liquid Nitrogen. Each team was randomly given Five of the Phenom II X4 940 chips cooled by a Cooler Master Z600 in a push-pull configuration. The goal of this was to achieve the highest stable overclock. Stability was tested with two loops of the Crysis CPU test. Each team worked side by side with only 30 minutes to achieve their highest stable clock. Both teams were using the Gigabyte 790GX motherboard and the 4870 X2 graphics card. The result was astonishing. Team AMD achieved a 3.94GHz clock speed and Team Finland fell just short with a 3.9GHz.

After a short break for the overclockers, the fun began. Liquid Nitrogen was used to cool the CPU. Using liquid nitrogen they were able to bring the temperature of the chip’s close to -180 degrees. Using the new AMD Dragon platform Team Finland won this round achieving a core clock of 6.0GHz. Team AMD fell just short at about 5.9GHz. After they ran the Crysis CPU for two loops they ran 3DMark05. It scored ~35,000 3dmarks when all was said and done.

Catalyst 8.12 now Available

With the release of ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream™ technology for millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics processors worldwide.

ATI Stream™ enables the hundreds of parallel cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications. These capabilities will allow ATI Stream™ enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.

Also introduced the ATI Avivo Video Converter, an application that use ATI Stream technology. Owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Basic View) to achieve incredible performance levels in video transcoding.

You may download the Catalyst 8.12 here at : http://game.amd.com

OpenCL 1.0 spec released

The Khronos Group has released the first version of the OpenCL specification. The 1.0 spec has been ratified by a large number of companies, including AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, Nvidia, and many others. Since this is a public release, developers can grab the spec itself and documentation right now through this page.

The OpenCL programming standard and associated technologies are aimed at better enabling developers to write vendor-neutral applications that can execute on either the CPU or GPU within a system. This allows developers to easily take advantage of whichever processor is best suited for the task at hand.

AMD is a founding and contributing member of the OpenCL working group in The Khronos Group, and has consistently been one of the most vocal and active proponents of the standard. AMD is committed to getting this valuable new technology into the hands of programmers as quickly as possible, and is rapidly evolving its free ATI Stream SDK to make it happen. AMD is making good progress on its OpenCL-compliant offering and plans to release a developer version of the ATI Stream SDK with support for OpenCL 1.0 for content developers in the first half of 2009. Working from early specifications of OpenCL, AMD’s engineering team has already started running code on its initial implementation.

AMD has announced its plans to release the free download of ATI Catalyst™ driver update, version 8.12, which will instantly unlock new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics cards. The driver is available for download on or around December 10.

About ATI Stream
ATI Stream is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD graphics processors (GPU), working in concert with the system’s central processor (CPU), to accelerate applications beyond just graphics. This enables better balanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever. For more information on ATI Stream and the ATI Stream SDK visit www.amd.com/stream.

Core i7 'Nehalem' also have TLB issue

If you open Intel’s official document that is stored here, on page 37 AAJ1 Clarification of TRANSLATION LOOKASIDE BUFFERS (TLBS) Invalidation part, you will see that Intel says that in some rare cases improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior and can hang your OS or result with incorrect data.

Here is the word to word quote: "In rare instances, improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior, such as system hangs or incorrect data. Developers of operating systems should take this documentation into account when designing TLB invalidation algorithms. For the processors affected, Intel has provided a recommended update to system and BIOS vendors to incorporate into their BIOS to resolve this issue."