FutureMark announces the availability of 3DMark 2003

More details on Intel Madison and Montecito

ASUSTeK announces P4S533-X/LAN on the SiS645DX chipset

Photo of the day: NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 and Quadro FX 1000

Minolta DiMAGE S414: new 4-megapixel digital camera

FutureMark announces the availability of 3DMark 2003

FutureMark Corporation (former MadOnion) announced the availability of 3DMark 2003, which is a new version of a popular 3D benchmark.

From the moment of the first release 3DMark has become a standard in 3D-benchmarking. Good results in these tests speak for the nice graphics hardware as well as the entire system quality. Besides, 3Dmark is known for its accuracy in measuring graphics cards performance. Moreover, easy-to-use interface is a good thing as well.

3DMark03 includes four game tests (see below), as well as CPU, 3D features, image quality and 3D sound tests. These latter are not added to the final rating, being indirect to target 3D-graphics performance. CPU test enables to evaluate its effect on typical 3D workflow. 3D features tests isolate performance of key features (mostly related to shaders). 3D sound test, new to 3DMark, allow to evaluate the impact of 3D sound sources on graphics perfromance. In its turn, a number of image quality tests lets you feel the integrity of graphics hardware and drivers.

So, the first test is Wings of Fury based on DirectX7.

Next two feature Battle of Proxycon and Trolls´ Lair, respectively. They utilize DirectX8, Pixel Shaders 1.4 and Vertex Shaders 1.1.

The last game test — Mother Nature. Beautiful scenery illustrates the performance of DirectX9, Pixel Shaders 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0.

You can download 3DMark03 from here.

P.S. DirectX7-based graphics card owners note: most likely, you will be to run just a single game test and a small number of 3D features tests, as this new version is aimed at DirectX9. So think, if you really need this 181Mb piece of software.

(Images taken from MyDrivers.com)

More details on Intel Madison and Montecito

First of all, the company confirmed that new-generation 64-bit Madison will be shipped as scheduled, i.e. in mid-2003. For the first time Intel defined the number of processors in this new line. There will be three Madison variants with different clock rates and cache size. Being made using 0.13-micron process technology, they’ll feature 410 million transistors, 3Mb / 4Mb / 6Mb L3 cache size and 1.3V core voltage. The crystal square of a 6Mb L3 cache variant will make about 374mm² (vs. 421mm² of 0.18-micron McKinley with 3Mb L3 cache).

upper one – Madison, 6Mb L3 cache, lower – McKinley, 3Mb L3 cache

New processors’ clock speed are supposed to be about 1.5GHz, however this has to be confirmed. Madison chips will consume about 130W of energy, i.e. about the same as the existing McKinleys.

The next generation of Intel´s 64-bit processors expected in 2004 will include chips codenamed Madison 9M and Deerfield. Madison 9M will have 9Mb L3 cache, 1.5GHz+ clock speeds and over 500 million transistors. Deerfield is to be a low-power version of a rackmount Madison variant.

Much more light was shed on dual-core Montecito line, which release date had been moved to 2005 from 2004. Each core is expected to feature own L1, L2, L3 cache (at least 18Mb per body; about 1 billion transistors total).

The new arbiter bus technology that to debut here is a kind of a common processor system interface with up to 6.4Gb/s throughput and up to 400 million transactions per second performance. According to the company the bus will enable to double cache size of each processor.

Despite the bus is meant for Montecito dies, Intel doesn’t rule out other multicore solutions in the future supporting this technology as well. At the last Microprocessor Forum Intel reported plans for Itanium2 family supposed to feature four cores per body.

ASUSTeK announces P4S533-X/LAN on the SiS645DX chipset

SIS645DX stepping B0 supports 3.06GHz Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 processors with Hyper Threading and 533MHz FSB. In addition, the board supports up to 2Gb PC3200 DDR or up to 2Gb SDRAM PC133 (two slots for each type), AGP 4X graphics. SIS962L Southbridge supports ATA133 and USB2.0.

P4S533-X/LAN also features 6-ch. AC97 codec (ADI1980) and a LAN controller. MSRP of ASUS P4S533-X/LAN is $67.

Photo of the day: NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 and Quadro FX 1000

NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000

Minolta DiMAGE S414: new 4-megapixel digital camera

DiMAGE S414 features 1/1.8" 4.1mp (4 million effective pixels) CCD, 4x Minolta GT optical lens with 2.2õ digital zoom (7.15-28.6mm, 35-140mm in 35mm equiv.), built-in flash, USB and a Compact Flash slot, and supports movie recording. The new camera utilizes 12-bit DAC and CxProcess technology. 32-bit RISC processor and SDRAM buffer enables to achieve high image processing performance (0.8s per shot, up to 1.3fps in up to 7-shot series).

The novelty requires 4xAA alkaline batteries. Pricing information is unavailable for the moment.

Source: LetsGoDigital

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