The M1695, which is comparable to the SiS756 chipset from Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and the K8T890 chipset from VIA Technologies, will have a graphics interface that supports both PCIe and AGP8x standards, the sources said.

CHIP FIRM AMD said that it, and its Spansion division, ARM, Nanoamp, Smedia, Toshiba and Spreadtrum are to form a council promoting the Platform Independent Storage Module (PISMO, yes, Pismo) standard.

Our general concern about AMD and marketing reached its zenith back in January when we saw details of its Brand Council. This draws on a number of luminaries within AMD and concentrates on what it regards as a general lack of credibility within the business sector. Firms like Intel, Dell, Cisco and Microsoft have, it concludes, vast credibility in the corporate marketplace. It concludes this presumably because it's organised or had organised a set of focus groups to relay feedback from a gaggle of corporate users on how the market sees it.

Company founder and CTO Vern Brownell attributed the move to customer demand. It will put AMD squarely in the enterprise data center where it wants to be much to Intel's chagrin. Egenera says Opteron will expand its own addressable market.

Volume V confirms AMD will support SSE3. Volume IV might be full of interesting stuff, but we and our readers fell asleep before we could read the headers.

AMD, together with a number of leading vendors, including Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer, Asustek Computer and PC distributors, will wage a promotional campaign worldwide on April 18 to promote the Turion 64-based notebooks, the sources said.

"With AMD64 technology in the MTC, our teams will have the ability to help optimize customers' 32- and 64-bit .NET applications all on a single platform," Adam Hecktman, director Microsoft Technology Centers in Chicago, said in a statement.

McNealy said Sun will aggressively promote AMD's dual-core Opteron processors, which boosts computing power by combining two processing engines into one single slice of silicon. That chip is still on schedule to arrive this year, Ruiz said, but offered an optimistic footnote about the schedule.

"We're doing all the engineering and development. We've seen it," Ruiz said. "Officially, we intend to be launching it in the marketplace around the summertime. Sometimes things happen and you might do better."

He also points to this Heise story.

By the way: AMD Dualcore (e-Stepping, Strained silicone, optimized 90nm, 2x1MB Cache, 64Bit) could bring some performance gain in particular with multiuser/multithread. With single user applications with the data base on the server (e.g. MySQL) dual core would have the advantage that this runs as own thread and probably more memory-intensively than the application (only one Memory Controller). In addition the memory accesses are often deferred. Will Dualcore threads comunicate procedure-calls via Cache? Particularly then the large Cache (2 times 1MB) would be from assistance (System Request Interface). http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/50540
The trends 2005 are toward 64Bit, power management (by clock and voltage) and evenly dual core.

So should we be looking for dual core sooner than later? :) I've posted his entire e-mail in the extended text.

Texas Gaming Festival presents the ATI
Ultimate Lan! We have teamed up with ATI to bring a first class 500 seat lan
gaming experience to Dallas this Winter. It will be held in the shadow of the
Cotton Bowl on the grounds of Fair Park at the 25,000 square foot

Food and Fiber Pavilion from February 25th-27th. The cost will be $10, and
that goes to charity. We are working on a new FAQ and on the schedule of
tourneys. Thanks to DFWFrag and
Gamewyze for their assistance with this
LAN! Remember you must sign up for
TXGF.com here, then come back to this page and click the button to sign up
for the lan!

The following are the current tournaments with prizes (subject to change):


Counter-Strike: Source 5v5 $5,000 purse

Counter-Strike 1.6 5v5 1st place 5 Radeon X800s, 2nd and 3rd Kingston memory

Half Life 1v1 Deathmatch 1st place Radeon X800, 2nd X700 and 3rd X600

Battlefield Vietnam 1st place $2,500, 2nd place 5 Radeon X800s, 3rd place 5
X700s

Battlefield 8v8 Desert Combat prizes TBD

Call of Duty Search and Destroy 6v6 prizes TBD

No major tourneys will begin before Saturday. Friday night we will
likely hold a few BYOC tourneys. Details about tourney boxes are
forthcoming as well. Make sure you have signed up for the tourneys you
will compete in. The more tourney signups we have the more prizes we will
be able to get. Please check the forum or #txgf on Gamesurge if you have
questions.

Non tourney competitions include the following (subject to change):


ATI Overclocking Contest
Mod Contest

ATI Pimp my PC
$5,000 PC Giveaway
TXGF
rap contest

Sponsors, partners, swag (subject to change):

ATI
Kingston
Atari
FragDolls
Ubisoft
Running With Scissors
Bawls
OCZ
Maxtor
Corsair
Geeks.com
Thermaltake
Geil
Abit

New Features

This section provides information on new features introduced in the ATI Proprietary Linux software driver. This release introduces the following:

* Drivers for X.org 6.8 are now provided
* x86_64 drivers now available for XFree86 4.3 and X.org 6.8

Answering the call for more power to meet the demands of customer applications, the Thunder K8WE (S2895) delivers new heights of performance never before available in the workstation market. Based on the NVIDIA nForce� Professional 2200 and 2050 core-logic solutions, the Thunder K8WE (S2895) also features support for dual AMD Opteron� 200 series processors with 32-bit and 64-bit power, Dual PCI Express x16 slots with FULL SPEED x16 lanes on each slot to support NVIDIA SLI� technology at unprecedented speeds. Other features such as USB 2.0, FireWire, Serial ATA-II with NVRAID�, audio, and NVIDIA nTune� support, the Thunder K8WE (S2895) provides speed and capabilities for next generation worksation systems.

In a way, today's high-end PC gaming is what street racing was to an earlier era. In both cases, top speed produces the bragging rights. Making a strong argument for those bragging rights this month is the Ultimate M5-64, a high-end gaming system from ABS. Powered by AMD's flagship 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 FX-55 processor, dual 74GB hard drives in a striped RAID 0 array, and a 256MB EVGA-E GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card, the M5 took honors as the second fastest PC we've tested to date, turning in a smoking 107 on our WorldBench 5 tests. Only the Alienware Aurora 64 FX-55, which we tested at the same time, was faster, with a recording-setting WorldBench score of 110. The ABS also fell just behind the Alienware in graphics performance: In our Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament gaming tests, both systems pumped out graphics at a blistering average of nearly 300 frames per second.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_winxp_6.39 (Win XP)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_win2k_6.39 (Win 2K)

Nvidia said there are general bug improvements, as well as a Disk Alert System included and more. I'm hoping they may also clear up an issue we are having running the Gigabyte 6600GTs we have in SLI mode.

This year, the company still expects its mainstream and consumer-SFF systems to account for about two-thirds of its barebones sales, but the company still plans to beef up its SFF products. Asus will add some AMD CPU-based products to what is currently an all-Intel lineup, and at CeBIT 2005 there will be some PCIe SFF PCs at the company�s booth.