News Bits: GPU Antitrust, Mobile DX 10, Save the Planet

Department of Justice opens antitrust investigation of AMD

The Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation in the market for computer graphics processors. Although some news sources report only that AMD has been subpoenaed in this investigations, this report confirms that AMD rival Nvidia has also received a subpoena from the Department of Justice. It is unclear whether or not this investigation has anything to do with AMD’s recent acquisition of ATI.

This investigation follows charges made by the Department of Justice against companies in the DRAM market for price fixing. Several memory providers have been fined millions of dollars for their involvement. A similar investigation has also been opened in the SRAM segment of the computer memory market.

It is unlikely, however, that the any of these investigations will benefit end users.

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Lower your PC’s power consumption and Save the Planet

A free application, Local Cooling, has been launched by Uniblue Research Labs. Uniblue claims that Local Cooling will reduce your PC’s power consumption, save energy costs, and help save the planet by reducing CO2-producing energy consumption. It works by giving you more control over key components in your computer, like the processor and hard drive.

Essentially, it is very similar to applications like Notebook Hardware Control. The difference is that Local Cooling’s main objective is to save energy and be eco-friendly. This application allows you to monitor wattage used by components and calculates your energy savings. The Local Cooling website even allows you to set up an account and track your progress against others.

Total energy saved is measured in terms of KWhs, barrels of oil, and trees. Download Local Cooling here.

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Nvidia DirectX 10 GPU’s release?

Thanks goes out to Donald Stratton of PowerNotebooks who reported what he’d heard from some Nvidia representatives at a Technology Conference. Apparently, Nvidia will not have a laptop version of the 8xxx series until the 3rd Quarter of 2007, and it will be scaled-down from the desktop version as many have already guessed. Power consumption is the main concern there.

Lucky for us, Donald managed to get more information out of them. When pressed further, they said “maybe” by July we would see the next advancement in mobile GPUs. None of this is official, however, so take what you want from it. As many of you already know, Nvidia has only announced that they are sampling DX10 mobile GPUs.

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Congrads on the News Bit Chris.

And for out friends at AMD I would like to play the 'Wah-Wah' sound effect.

 

Great info with the DirectX 10 GPUs. The desktop market for DX10 GPUs isn't even populated yet - hopefully we'll see a midrange card in the future that can be more easily converted for laptop use.

 

That LocalCooling app does look to be the same as NHC but with a different marketing spin. Still, it's free and a nice way to promote their product there so power to them. If anybody downloads it I'd be curious to hear what they think.

 

The one thing I like about the Local Cooling app. is that it has the wattage monitoring feature. I had the wrong image displayed and wanted to show that panel initially. I have changed the post to show the right panel (instead of the NHC-like panel). Other than that it is basically NHC with an environmental spin to it.