Computex – day 1

Computex Taipei, Taiwan, is happening as you read this and during the first day weäve seen some of the things we’ve been talking about in teh news lately here at NH. ATi presented its R520 for the first time, nVidias G70 was sighted even though nVidia didn’t have much to amention and AMD seemed to get more attention than Intel for the first time. Perhaps thanks to the sponsored F1-car it had placed outisde its booth and the press conference on X2, while Intel chose to cover an entire wall with mainboards.

ATi showed the crowd R520’s ability to render H.264-compressed video. R520 has integrated support for encoding, transcoding and decoding of H.264, I.e. full support for H.264. In a live-test ATi displayed the difference between enabled and disabled hardware support and the load on the CPU varied from 33% up to 95%.

AMD’s X2 which we’ve gotten to know pretty well by now has had a steady launch,if anyoen was doubting it, and it confirmed that single-core Athlon 64 will be phased out pretty soon. Other than that its new Geode has been welcomed with arms wide open by Samsung and Microsoft among others.

ATi Crossfire was officially revlealed for the first time. You can read more about the impression in our other news. Both DFI and ECS displayed own cards based on the Crossfire-circuit even if ECS was the only company to show boards for both platforms, Intel and AMD. The only noticeable difference was the socket.

VIA displayed a few new things, e.g. its SLI-solution that is very similar to nVidia’s even though there are soem differences. Firingsquad has been able to get a copy of a reference board and will review it shortly.

nVidia has chosen not to present G70 to any noticeable degree even if third party manufacturers have had private shows with the card. Intel was also relatively passive the first day compared to earlier years. Their main attraction was a wall covered with boards based on its new midend-chipset i945 which you can see in Anandtech coverage.

 :: Anandtech :: Digitlife :: FiringSquad ::