The AMD 64 2000+ (clocked at 1 GHz) has been found to rip the raved-about Atom processor by Intel, (clocked at 1.6 GHz), beating Intel in power and processing benchmarks. The stellar performance is mostly accredited to the very well designed K8 architecture.

AMD seems to be getting back on track, after having lost market share to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors and Nvidias’s graphics cards. AMD now has the HD 4870 X2, which was deemed the “world’s fastest graphics card”. Go AMD!

Specs:

via Tom’s Hardware

The new Nvidia forceware 180 drivers are to be released in September, and with the built-up hype Nvidia took the liberty to name it the “Big Bang 2.”  (”Big Bang” was first used for a big release in the Geforce 6000 series.)

Forceware 180 will bring new features such as:

• Multimonitor support for SLI
• Display Port support
• OpenGL 3.0
• Hardware video transcoding
• GPU PhysX support
• Performance optimizations

PhysX support will bring Geforce 8000 and 9000 users the opportunity to run a different card in SLI.  One can be used to do physics calculations while another can be used to run the graphics portion.

Prices are dropping as the competition between AMD and Nvidia heats up.  If you are in the market for a new graphics card, consider waiting a bit and letting the prices even fall further.

via Ars Technica