AMD today announced the availability of GPU PerfStudio 2.0, a free, platform-agnostic, next-generation AMD graphics application development tool for game developers, obtainable through a closed beta program. GPU PerfStudio 2.0 has been designed from the ground up to easily integrate with existing projects, and help to identify and resolve performance issues early in the development cycle. With these tools, AMD is bringing its unparalleled understanding of 3D graphics technology and the leadership of its line of ATI Radeon graphics cards to bear on the development process.

"The GPU PerfStudio 2.0 suite of tools is extensive, customizable and, most importantly, based on open standards, which is critical for developers looking to integrate them into their existing workflows," said Neal Robison, director, Developer Relations, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "AMD is committed to arming developers with a full complement of hardware and development tools that help increase their development efficiency and improve 3D performance quality."

Today, Intel made its newest piece of silicon, the Core i7 series processor official with the introduction of three models based on the newer architecture, and socket. One of the significant feature-additions for Core i7 is the 192-bit wide DDR3 memory bus, meaning that memory modules in groups of three or six can be used to make use of the triple-channel memory controller the processors come with.

For memory vendors, it means selling kits consisting of three or six modules of 1 GB or 2 GB per module, resulting in 3 GB, 6 GB or potentially, a 12 GB kit (consisting of six 2 GB modules). Corsair, on its part, has been advertising the benefits of 4 GB system memory in the recent past, in a bit to sell its 2x 2GB kits. One of the important benefits Corsair noted was, that it benefited today's games. Come Core i7, and Corsair thinks 6 GB of memory would significantly benefit gaming PCs based on the Core i7 processors. The company released a whitepaper, in which gaming performance between Core i7-based systems equipped with 3 GB and 6 GB of memory were compared.

The market for laptops is quite uncertain at the moment. With Apple having made/making a transition over to Intel, ASUS launching more EeePCs and an anticipated flood of cheap computers, the market could go anywhere from its current state. Analysts over at Gartner have a pessimistic view of the future. They think that the very thing that got people into laptops in the first place could doom the industry. A desire for capable, portable information powerhouses could, by 2012, push businesses and people away from laptops, and towards smaller devices such as PDAs and so-called smart phones.

Manufacturers are nowadays bound to their respective marketing gurus resulting in ridiculously exaggerated trends which the usual customer tends to overlook. Let us talk about power supplies for instance. With 1000 Watt power supplies available from many companies and 2000 Watt power supplies just around the corner one can come quickly to the conclusion that you really need that much power.
But you don't! Mostly every website out there who puts PC hardware states the electric power consumption or gives a rough figure about it. If you then add those numbers together for every component you have you might be surprised about the result. For Example, the guys from Legion Hardware put together a dead fast machine consisting of a quad-core Intel CPU, two GeForce 8800GTX cards, a feature-packed ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard and four 1GB DDR2 memory modules. Additionally the system had four Seagate 320GB hard drives and six 120mm case fans and let's not forget the water-cooling system. Now reckon what wattage the power supply they used to power that beast was rated at!
550 Watt - They took a Thermaltake Purepower 550w and it works like a charm for more than two months now.

Power supply output ratings are actually quite inaccurate and can be very misleading. This is why it is very important to purchase a trusted and respected brand name.

If you came this far I would suggest you reading that article, it's well written and outlines every aspect of what to have in mind when purchasing a decent power supply.

Besides the usual R600 and K10/Barcelona talk that keeps us busy all day long there is another side of AMD that many people don't seem to realize: the financial part. If you are interested on being reading some well written thoughts I would suggest a recent two-part article at Overclockers.com. There Ed Stroligo explains AMDs actual financial situation with all the losses of revenue during the last quarter and gives some forecasts on how AMD will react to this.

Get to the first part here and don't miss the second part.

Btw.: There are several other interesting articles about various subjects of the computer sector at their front page.

Hardcore Windows XP fans will claim that Vista is currently buggy and bloated. Hardcore Mac OS X fans will claim that at least half of Vista is inspired by Mac OS X. Hardcore Linux fans laugh at all of this, and simply install the free Beryl user interface on the latest free distro of Ubuntu (or some other *nix distro). However, The Register has found some compelling reasons to move from whatever you're using to Windows Vista. The following is a shortened list, please click the source link for the full version of the list.

• UAC- It really makes the OS more secure, and despite how annoyed you may get with it, you have to admit it's a step in the right direction.
• Windows Aero- It's pretty and easy. Enough said.
• It comes with better bundled software- All the programs that come pre-loaded with Windows are either old favorites, or very new programs with great features.
• Vista Live = Xbox Live for the PC. Really.
• Halo 2- What Halo fans have been waiting for over the years is finally coming to the PC. And it looks better than most of us imagined.
• DirectX10 API- All new games/ graphics cards will eventually be exclusively for DX10 and Vista, so we better get used to it.
• Windows Vista search functions- Windows indexing the everything really helps when you misplace something.
• Windows Firewall- It's pretty good this time around, if you need a firewall.
• Lots of pretty hardware/laptops are coming out that are designed just for Vista.
• Microsoft is pushing for a complete move to Windows Vista, hence, they'll drop support for everything older just like they did for Windows 9x and ME.

AMD's ATI has a fancy name for their graphics card computing solution (Stream computing), so why doesn't NVIDIA? Since the CUDA name isn't exactly very appealing to the consumer market, NVIDIA is planning on renaming the CUDA incentive when it has something more ready for public release (such as a Folding@Home client). Rumor has it that NVIDIA will call their GPU-accelerated computing solution "GPU Computing", but we will see when NVIDIA actually releases clients to the average user.

For those of you that don't know, CUDA is a C compiler that compiles software so that it can be run/accelerated using an NVIDIA GPU as a processor.

People who want the right to rip their own DVD movies onto their computers have just won a major battle. The DVD Copy Control Association was trying to stop a California-based startup company from selling their only product, which ripped DVD's onto computers. When the DVD Copy Control Association brought this to court, the judge and jury took one look at the license and declared that not letting this company do their thing would violate the DVD Copy Control Association's own license. The judge says that "This (the license) is a product of a committee of lawyers". Basically, the license that tried to enforce copy-protection laws really just ended up shooting the copy-protectors in the foot (figuratively speaking, of course).

On February 16th of this year, NVIDIA went ahead and announced their new GPU computing client, CUDA. Over seven weeks later, we have yet to see so much as a beta of CUDA. And so, this means that NVIDIA, similar to the G80 Vista driver fiasco, has yet to deliver a product that they promised we'd see. The part about this that NVIDIA users probably hate the most is the lack of a GPU-based Folding@Home client. It seems that these days, everything except an NVIDIA system (even the PS3) can run a Folding@Home GPU client. This is an extreme opposite to ATI's GPU processing client, called "Stream", which has a large list of clients that can be used to accelerate programs using the GPU.

Desktops have been the dominant computer format ever since personal computers first took off, but a new report has suggested that laptop sales will overtake those of desktops by 2011. Analysts predict that the laptop market will grow by 16.1% each year until 2011, with just 3.8% predicted for desktops - during 2006, 140 million desktops PCs were shipped worldwide with 82 million portable computers being sold, up 2% and 26.3% respectively from 2005. Shifting towards mobile computing is becoming more popular as the performance gap gets smaller and notebook computers become cheaper, aided by the increased availability of wireless networks. In the USA, laptop computers have already begun outselling desktops, with 2005 being the first year in portable computers became the number one choice. Desktops are likely to remain the main choice for computer enthusiasts and those wanting to get maximum performance, as their easy upgradeability and more powerful components make them a more suitable option.

While Sony has seemed to have market dominance in the console wars ever since the PS1, times have certainly changed. Analysts at a company called "IDC" predicted exactly how the market would come out. They claimed that Sony would have the least sales of the three companies in the console market, Microsoft would ride high sales from the start, and Nintendo would have the best thing, due to innovation instead of going head-to-head with the hardware specs. IDC then goes on to predict that Nintendo will maintain those high sales well into 2008. After that, the future is uncertain, and Microsoft may become the winner of this generation of console wars.

Steve Jobs announced that he really wants to see DRM go away, much like the rest of the music industry. At the Digital Music Forum East conference, Steve Jobs was made to look like a bit of a hypocrite. While he may want DRM free music, every song (and possibly video) featured on iTunes comes with some form of DRM protection. They claimed that if Steve Jobs really wanted DRM-free music, he would have done away with the DRMs in iTunes as soon as he could. They also said that Apple's proprietary version of DRM is giving the rest of the music world a lot of pain. This falls back on the original music industry's agreement that they need to either do away with DRM's, or all use one version of it.

Or, that's what the The Porn Talk is calling their latest anti-pornography campaign. The Porn Talk appears to be a parent activist group aimed at helping parents talk to their kids about porn. They seem to have taken the ability of the Wii to access the internet a wee bit too far. Their latest campaign's goal is to teach parents how to protect their children from the pornography that can be accessed using the Nintendo Wii. While the Nintendo Wii already has plenty of safety features put in place programmed to do just that, The Porn Talk claims that it simply isn't enough.

The solution lies in parents getting the facts and then talking to their children about expectations for online activity... The Wii is an amazing console and tons of fun but parents need good info on how to keep kids safe.

Some people at the BitTorrent Entertainment Network didn't do their homework properly it appears. The guys at ArsTechnica have a report about their first look at it and to sum it up, it doesn't sound very convincing.
That you must have Windows Mediaplayer 10 installed is clearly visible from the System Requirements guide. But with WMP 11 it was not possible to play the file (though the guide states 'Windows Media Player 10 or higher'). Before that happened BitTorrent refused to recognize his PC, starting the download from a Mac was not an issue. But you have to know that playing it on the Mac is not supported at the moment.
The good news is that the downloads were quite fast (for example: a 485MB file in around 25 minutes), the audio-visual quality of the movies being good and two of four Torrents worked flawlessly.

As you may have noticed, RAM prices have dropped sharply over the past few months. Turns out that it's a good idea to "buy low, sell high", to quote a familiar stock market tip. The prices are only temporary, and as Vista really gets popular among consumers, and as prices get too low to compensate for manufacturing costs, manufacturers will simply raise prices again. Expect to see prices go back to "normal" during the second half of 2007. In the meantime, feel free to buy plenty of RAM while prices are still low and reasonable.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has revealed that 34% of internet users in America have used wireless networking to access online material, with 27% of users accessing the net outside their own homes. The survey has also shown that 20% of users have wireless networks at home, which has doubled from last year. This is the result of more shops and public areas offering wireless services (and even entire cities) and increased consumer awareness - one interesting discovery is that wireless internet users check their emails more than those with wired connections.

Ever wonder how much profit companies are making on your purchases? Have you considered building products from parts, and saving a lot of money? Or are there some things where the company selling the product is at a loss?

Business Week has posted an article about how much profit or loss companies like Microsoft, Sony and Apple are making on their products - definitely worth a read here.

While Apple seems to be making a profit on all of its products, Microsoft and Sony are both at a loss with their gaming consoles - we must remember, however, that most of the money will come from the games purchased for the consoles.

When the Sony PlayStation 3 was released to the United States, people queued for days, and even shot each other over the next generation console from Sony. Sony has managed to ship 1 million PS3s to the United States, however, people just aren't buying them. Some people blame the high price of the console, others blame a rather lackluster collection of launch titles. Whatever the reason is, the PS3 simply isn't doing well right now. While PS3s are filling space on store shelves, the Nintendo Wii has become very successful, due to having reasonably good supply, a low price, an interesting controller, and a great set of launch titles.

A recent study by retail analysis group NPD, which consisted of putting tracking software on a group of 12,500 volunteers, has found that video piracy is a lot more common than initially thought. Only 2/10 people downloading video got it from a legitimate source such as Apple, and the other 8/10 downloaded from P2P networks. The study also found that 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were pornographic, 20 percent were television shows and 5 percent were mainstream movie content. There are several good reasons behind the high amount of piracy, however. There is a much larger volume of content available on P2P networks, there are no DRM's to stop someone from converting the video to a different format and/or burning it to DVD, illegal videos are generally of higher quality, and P2P doesn't cost anything.