AMD releases the first GCN card, the Radeon HD 7970

AMD has finally released the first card that uses it's new more computing-oriented GCN architecture. In a step similar to the one NVIDIA took a few years back with Fermi, AMD has decided that it needs to focus more on GPUs as a computational tool. Nowdays you can do a lot of tasks in the GPU spending only a fraction of the time that would be required in a CPU approach. You can decode and encode videos, decrypt and encrypt files, do physics simulations, ... with speeds that are hundreds of times faster that what you can achieve in a CPU.

This doesn't mean that AMD is putting games in a second place, they are still it's main concern, but before this new architecture AMD cards where almost useless for GPGPU in most of the scenarios.
The 7970 is also the first PCI-e 3.0 and DX11.1 graphics card, this doesn't mean much for the end user, but prevents the architecture from getting "obsolete" in a year or so when this technologies start making a mainstream appear in consumer hardware and software.

Right now there are a LOT of reviews of this card, if anyone is interested and has the 550$ to spare, go to this anandtech recap of it's review, with lots of external links to other review sites. For the people more interested in the technical aspects of this new architecture and an in deep analysis of the card, anandtech too has an in depth review that will cover everything you might want to know about this new card.

New ARM Cortex a8 board with SATA

This might interest only a few people, but for those few I have great news: At last there is a low price, high performance cortex a8 board with SATA.

The board is this one:

 http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2011/03/01/new-low-cost-cortex-a8-board-from-freescale/

And it’s mostly on par with the beagleboard (even on price), but packs a few more things. Most relevant among them is the SATA interface. I don’t know how many people reading this have actually used a beagleboard or any other similar board, but for those who have, I guess we all can agree that the I/O performance with the SD memory card is just horrible.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly OK for its main purpose of being a prototype platform and I have enjoyed every moment I spent toying around with it, but the moment you try to use it as a low power desktop/home server replacement, performance problems start to show almost immediately. Now this new board from freescale has the potential to get rid of that annoying bottleneck(and the extra ram and features are a welcomed extra) and allow us to trow away those power hungry core 2 duo or even the lower power atom in the low end, low performance desktop sector.

I have a simple example of a situation where this might/will be useful for a home user. Half my family has computers that are only used for 4 things: web browsing, watching movies, google talk and the occasional office document. The one with lower power consumption of those computers is a low power atom 510 that still consumes almost 30w while not doing 3 of those 4 tasks (web browsing, movies and google talk) faster than my beagleboard, and now with the freescale board I could just replace that atom with something that consumes about 5-7w and thanks to the improved speed of SATA vs SD card, can achieve a very similar performance using openoffice.

And it’s not limited to that, put a 2Tb hard drive in it and you have a home server where you can download, store and stream movies to your pc, ps3, phone, laptop,… while consuming almost no power.

In resume, great news if you are a fan of the low power desktop replacements, and I hope this catches on and we can soon see more cortex a9/tegra 2 boards with SATA interfaces for home use.