There are several websites that were allowed to preview the 4870X2 and all of them came to the conclusion that It beats Geforce GTX 280 in most of the tests. Most analysts are tempted to believe that ATI’s card will also be faster than the upcoming GTX 280 55nm version.

ATI went through some rough times last year, but now things seem to be clearing up for the Canadians. ATI really needs to steal NVIDIA’s performance crown this time. The single GPU Radeon 4870 took even NVIDIA by surprise, forcing the green guys to lower the prices and change the strategy.

Apparently, the 2GB of memory that won’t really make the card faster than the 1GB version, but it could prove to be perfect for general purpose computing solutions. The standard version of the 4870X2 card will be available for $540 due to the amount of GDDR5 memory present, but ATI’s partners will certainly come up with overclocked models that may push the price a bit higher.

The Catalyst driver that was specifically written for the new card has been ready since the 25th of July. ATI is now waiting for the desired volumes to be reached. Worldwide availability should begin the 21st of August.

“We are seeing SSD interest in a variety of applications where historically hard disk drives have reigned. For many, the most logical place is in notebook computers, but there is incredible value for SSDs in enterprise server systems,” said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.

Micron’s RealSSD P200 family is specifically designed for enterprise computing and comes in densities ranging from 16 gigabytes (GBs) to 128GBs and is available in a standard 2.5-inch form factor. The overall improvements are facilitated through Micron’s high-performance single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology, which allows the P200 series to provide the industry’s fastest 3Gb/s SATA-based sequential read and write speed of up to a maximum of 250 megabytes per second (MB/s).

The RealSSD C200 lineup is aimed at notebook applications. C200 will be available in 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors, with the 2.5-inchers providing densities of up to 256GBs, while the 1.8-inchers offer densities from 32GB up to 128GB. The notebook line provides a read speed of up to 250 MB/s and a write speed of up to 100 MB/s.

“With our C200 products, we are providing a balanced price to performance solution specifically designed for notebook applications by utilizing MLC NAND technology and highly optimized NAND management algorithms,” continued Klein.

Mass production for both P200 and C200 lineups is expected in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The n RV870 (codename “Lil Dragon”) next gen GPU is primarily a shrink of RV770. According to NordicHardware, the node following 65/55nm (current gen) would be 45/40nm , as Intel’s and AMD’s CPU demonstrated earlier this year. However, there’s a strong possibility that the next ATI GPU would skip the 45nm phase directly to 40 nm. The main reason to do this is the achievement of a performance per watt ratio twice that of RV770.

Surprisingly, the overall performance gain for the RV870 is set somewhere around 20% over the RV770, but ATI will also drop the power consumption significantly. NordicHarsware estimates that the next gen GPU is going to integrate to 960 unified shaders (192×5), 48 texture units and 24 ROPs. Thus, the TDP of the RV870 should be around 150W, in case ATI maintains the usual frequencies.

Another mystery is represented by the inclusion of the DX11 support. Since DX11 is going to be available in late 2009 and the new GPU will be release next summer, ATI will probably stick to DX10.1 for the time being.

The Innovator is quite massive, measuring 605×550x208mm (HxDxW). I comes standard with enough room for two ATX power supplies. The innovation here is a special cable that powers the secondary PSU at the same time as you power on the system.

According to Fudzilla, the case is made of steel, so it should provide enough cooling potential, but Scythe thought it would be a good idea to fit a plastic front door to it that hides the six 5.25-inch drive bays. In addition, the Innovator supports two 3.5-inch drive bays and six internal 3.5-inch drive bays. Also in front, users can find four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port and a headphone and mic jack.

More features include rubber coated thumb screws for better grip and reduced vibrations, a bunch of extra long thumb screws for add-on cards, especially for graphics cards.

Weighing 14.8kg, it certainly appears to be server-oriented. It is already available in Japan for about €78, but Scythe didn’t mention anything about world-wide availability.

The Intel hybrid platform is codenamed Havendale and will feature a CPU with integrated GPU capabilities as well as an Ibex peak chipset which will be a single-chip solution, fusing the Northbridge and the Southbridge together. Even though the hybrid processor integrates an iGFX GPU, the motherboards will still support external PCIe graphics.

According to Fudzilla, the CPU part of the Havendale is only a dual-core, Nehalem derived 45nm model. OK, it’s not a six-core, but it comes with integrated memory controller on the CPU side of the chip. The processor is DDR3-only compatible and it interconnects with Ibex peak directly through a memory interface (DMI).

In order to provide decent graphics performance, Intel is going to interconnect the Ibex peak unified chipset with the GPU through Intel’s Flexible Display Interface (FDI). Additionally, the new chipset has an input/output part and something known as a Manageability engine, already present in Intel’s 4-series Northbridge.

Although it’s not a high-end processor, the integration of a CPU and a GPU will mean lower power consumption and greater performance at the same time.