3D Realms shut down

So long Duke Nukem Forever, it was nice waiting 12 years for you.

Financing ended and the studio was forced to close it's doors.
Take 2 still owns the franchise, so something may emerge at an even later date.

This comment below the news post is probably true, given what I've seen during the years:

Channel_F, a previous employee of 3DR, posted some interesting info:

In my best interest, I'm going to be somewhat candid for now. I will, however, elaborate a bit on some things:

The 2001 trailer was 100% scripted cinematic, and not actual gameplay. They built specific demo maps just to record video from to make a trailer. Everything you see in that trailer was phony.

The typical work flow there went something like this:
Designer would be assigned a task (build a new map, rebuild an old map, polish a bit of a map, etc.). Designer would work on said task for two, three weeks, a month, all the while lower management would be looking over it and making sure it was going in a "good general direction." Designer would move on to another task. A month or two later upper management would finally look at the work and say, "It's all wrong, do it again." Rinse, repeat.

Entire maps would be done from the ground up, almost to beta quality, and then thrown out simply because no one would make decisions early on in the process. (Read up on Valve's 'orange box' method of design -- that's how you make games)

Another example of WTF is the fact that there was one part of one map that was being worked on before I started working there. Nineteen months later and the same designer was still working on the same part of that same map... I'm not blaming the designer, it wasn't his fault.

It did look to good not to be scripted:

And I was fooled, someone at Take 2, this time, wasn't.
This was before they switched engines again, current development was done using the Doom 3 engine:

RIP.

Source: ShackNews

Netbooks are destroying the laptop market

eWeek reports on the "troubling" lack of revenue generated since the introduction of "netbooks". Let's take a look at recent events before employing the term "destroying" again in a title.

Foul. There, I said it. Can we move on now?

Everybody knows that, at first sight, lower average prices for notebooks is a bad thing in a economic troubled era but panic must not ensue. These prices are being artificially lowered because of the following reasons but not limited to:

• We're in a recession(or whatever you like to call it)
• "Netbooks" can't be priced higher because Microsoft limits the amount of RAM, HDD/SSD size and screen you're allowed to bundle XP with.
• Nobody wants Vista.
• The DRAM industry ASPs hit rock bottom when this data was taken and is only recovering now.

And are being rightfully lowered because:

• Most useful apps are processed on the server right now and more demanding ones should follow that route soon - the little Atom becomes enough.
• I can has 7+ hour battery life for $399! Cores 2 $1000 no can not has.
• Lower thermal output from CPU and chipset(Poulsbo) means less money spent on thermal design R&D and parts.
  

Yet, most netbooks are overpriced. I've seen crap netbooks selling for $399 and better laptops selling for $399. I then witnessed the netbooks go down to $300, over the course of three months, while these $399 laptops now sell for $499.
The strategy right now is build the cheaper you can to sell for $399 and go down to the tune of your sales - or stay put. When the netbook is old and selling for sub $300, launch a new model, with little difference, for $399 and start again. This is what Asus has been doing with the Eee PC.
Netbooks are making money, they sell a lot and I would bet for yet higher margins than most laptops.

But Intel is scared with what it's little chip can do and, like in the Netburst times, it's sitting around doing nothing with it's new pearl. Intel lacks the will to embrace progress gracefully, like AMD has been doing with it's new gem and the Atom is progress: it's the laptop processor and it could be much more.

It isn't the costly to build, power management-less Celeron M, and a dual core would be considerably better all around then the Core based Pentium Exxxx. Yet Intel refuses to embrace the new chip, in a situation all too similar to what the Pentium M ended up doing to the Netburst based chips.

While the higher volume sales of notebooks today also contribute a lot to what's been happening to ASPs, one has to consider the impact of the massification of wireless networks. Manufacturers themselves haven't expressed problems with margins - AFAIK - still, I read this:

By moving netbooks to a fully subsidized model, carriers would benefit from locking customers into lucrative data contracts.

Which is a recipe for evil - as far as consumers go - and:

Overall laptop ASPs would go down, perhaps even more, but margins would go up.

And both of which make me wonder which shares does Mr. Joe Wilcox own.

AMD is playing catch-up and soon will have a dual-core 15W chip while the dual core Atom can go lower than that but not with the same performance, right now. HP likes cheap chips and has been enjoying good margins with the DV2, the $699 12" laptop with technology from two years ago - which is still a good thing. Usually the 12" category went closer to double that, in part due to the inherent thermal design constraints that are now mostly irrelevant.
ARM chips are gearing up to own the low-end of the spectrum - a $150-$299 spectrum - with more battery life than what Atom chips can do right now and cheaper, also due to the lack of the same thermal constraints that traditional chips have suffered from.
I won't hesitate to pay a higher price than $399 for a smaller and well engineered notebook with a 15w dual-core chip, be it from AMD and Intel - blue just seem unwilling to give it me since they like to position ULV chips as premium items.

We now have the means to achieve 16+ hours battery life on decent sub-$1000 laptops, I'll say one word when I get there: progress. I'll worry about margins, ASPs and it's effect on the industry latter.

Nvidia GT300 delayed to 2010

Charlie Demerjian, from The Inquirer, is reporting that the GT300 from Nvidia is delayed until 2010. That does seem likely, given the specs circulating around the web.

As Charlie mentions, the GT21x cards are MIA, which is an indication that Nvidia could be in trouble with the next generation chip.
That's not the most alarming news piece, given what AMD has done to NV in the $100-$150 range with the HD 4770. They really need to come up with something good and scrapping some of those parts makes sense. The original specs for the new midrange GT200 chip called for 160 shaders on 40nm but we didn't heard anything regarding that card and it wasn't surely targeted at the $100 price point, given the expected die-size.

Nvidia is planning a cheaper, single board GeForce GTX 295 and there's no good reason to redisign a high-end, low volume, dual-GPU part unless you really need it to stick for longer - if the GT300 would debut in October, it wouldn't make much sense to spend resources on it.
If you consider that Nvidia might have to delay the card for god knows how long into 2010 while AMD is expected to debut the RV870 chip over the summer, then the "GTX 295+" starts to make more sense.

There's also the die-size question. With rumored specs of the GT300 pointing at 512 shader cores, that would mean a huge core that would only be possible on the troublesome 40nm process from TSMC. (The actual architecture should change but that's a story for a whole other post)

Computex 2009 starts in the 2nd of June and more news should follow about the next gen offers for this year, will the GT300 be among them?

Supermicro brings Intel's Atom to server environments

Atom CPUs are now, officially, everywhere.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a leader in application-optimized, high performance server solutions, today announced the launch of 4-watt and 8-watt Intel® Atom™ processor-based Server Building Block Solutions®. These extreme low-power and quiet solutions deliver the best expansion and storage features of any Atom-based platform and are designed for embedded industrial PC (IPC) applications.

These quiet, energy saving solutions make ideal storage and network appliances or print and email servers. In addition, Supermicro's mini-tower chassis with advanced user-friendly design features create a very cost-effective home or office workstation for basic computing including Internet usage, office and educational applications.

"Bringing the low-power consumption advantages of Atom processors to the server appliance market empowers our customers with energy-saving, quiet solutions that provide flexible expansion and storage features previously unattainable with Atom solutions," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro.

Optimized for the single-core Atom 230 processor, which consumes only 4 watts of power, Supermicro's cost-effective X7SLA-L platform supports up to four SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, along with seven USB 2.0 headers, 2 GB DDR2 memory, Intel GMA 950 graphics and a Gigabit Ethernet port. For more performance-intensive applications, the high-end X7SLA-H integrates the dual-core Atom 330 processor, which consumes 8 watts of power and expands upon the features of the X7SLA-L with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, an additional onboard Type A USB 2.0 connector and an extra internal serial port.

Weighing only ten pounds and with a depth of 9.8 inches, Supermicro's mini-sized 5015A SuperServers feature a high-efficiency, quiet power supply, two internal hard drives, and a full-height, half-length expansion card option. The fan-less design of Supermicro's SC502-200B chassis enables silent operation and minimizes system power consumption.

For greater expansion and storage features, Supermicro offers the SuperServer 5035A, which supports four hot-swap drive bays and three add-on cards. This server features a high-efficiency 300-watt power supply that has earned the 80-Plus® Bronze level certification for achieving 85%+ power efficiency. The system's mini-tower chassis (SC731i-300B) also includes a host of user-friendly design features for easy installation. These quick-and-easy features include a toolless side panel, toolless drive bays, 90-degree pivoting hard disk drive cage, and stamped motherboard support (no standoffs required). This small footprint server also supports two external 5.25" bays and Kensington lock security to safeguard the system.

Although Supermicro targets these at IPC applications, they will no doubt make their way into servers. These solutions are based on the desktop variants of the Atom, which support useful things like x86-64, which are nowadays very important for that kind of environment.
The choice is yours, virtualization with very expensive Xeons/Opterons or a Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes?

ATi Radeon HD 4770 Crossfire vs Nvidia GTX 285

Keywords: AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB review crossfire
The HD 4770 is here, and what a graphics card it is.

You've probably already read the reviews around the web but lets look at what's been somewhat overlooked, HD4770 CrossFire benchmarks:

(click to enlarge)

A contender for the GeForce GTX 285, 275 and HD 4890 at a lower price point and power consumption. With these cards pulling in 150W to 200W, Xbitlabs has measured a power consumption of 50W for the HD 4770 card - or 100W for two of them.
For owners of systems with dual PCI-e x16, this is definitely something to consider.

Some might call it a revolutionary card, I call it progress instead; progress like we haven't seen in a while, were a company puts it's fears aside and builds the best card it can for a given price point and manufacturing technology - little compromise and no crippling the card with fewer texture units or ROPs, as is usual for $100 cards; stuff which costs little transistor budget and is sabotaged purely for product placement strategies.
This card makes the HD 4850 mostly pointless, yet, that is progress - it's a more expensive card to build and it should go away now. It has been like this with the 4670 and 3850 and this is how it should be from now on.

It's remarkable what AMD GPG has been doing for the last year and we as consumers can only rejoice. They are also happy, they (the Graphics Product Group) are profitable, which is even more remarkable nowadays.
I have been following the graphics market since the debut of the 3dfx Voodoo and I can only appluad at what I'm seeing nowadays from the red camp.

Weekly DRAM price update

DDR2 prices are slightly down this week, while DDR prices remain virtually the same.
The market is mostly in a "wait and see" state, as the global recession seems to ease off and Qimonda's assets still haven't found a new owner.