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Feature: 2008 - Sim Year in Review

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Technology / Hardware

The Intel Core™ i7by John Reynolds

2008 saw another bad year for AMD pass. The Phenom processor line failed to compete against Intel's Core 2 CPUs, and to add insult to injury Intel released the poorly named yet incredibly fast Core™ i7 line in November, increasing their already considerable performance lead. This combined with Intel's aggressive pricing saw quarterly report after report deep in the operations black for AMD. Which resulted in multiple waves of employee layoffs that will most likely continue into 2009 and the subsequent news of AMD divesting itself of its fabrication capacity. AMD's struggles won't lessen unless the upcoming Phenom II can compete against Intel's 775-socket Core 2 processors.

But the news wasn't entirely bad for the struggling company. The RV770 GPU hit the market this summer and made NVIDIA's GTX 200 boards look ridiculously overpriced. After the Radeon 2900 series had hit the market with a thud, NVIDIA has enjoyed years of clearly dominating the add-in graphics market with their GeForce line. The Radeon 4850 and Radeon 4870 radically altered the market's expectations on performance at the mainstream price point, leaving NVIDIA scrambling to compete with what were undeniably overpriced GPUs (seriously, $600 for a GTX 280?). Whether or not AMD's graphics division continues engineering mainstream chips with such performance and feature-rich designs and using multi-GPU boards to address the high-end market remains to be seen, but 2008 was a year in graphics SimHQ would love to see more of.

ATI Radeon HD4870

2008 also saw the proliferation of solid-state drives hitting the market. While still horribly overpriced for the storage capacity offered, SSD performance clearly heralds the future of both home and business storage.

SimHQ reviewed the Western Digital VelociRaptor in the first half of 2008 and thought it would be the fastest drive we'd test for the year. We were proven wrong when Intel included their X-25 SSD with their Core i7 test package. This writer now zones faster in LOTRO than anyone else on the Nimrodel server, and virtual life in Middle-earth is good.

One new hardware item for flight simmers made it's debut — CH Products released their Eclipse Yoke. Look for a review of the new flight controller soon.

2009 Forecast

2009 will see AMD release 45nm Phenom IIs. Expectations are quite high for these updated Phenoms, and if AMD fails again to compete against Intel's parts things will become even more grim for the company. Intel has recently signaled that a 32nm update to the Core i7 line should see daylight in late 2009, which will continue to keep the performance pressure on against AMD.

Graphics-wise, SimHQ expects to see 3rd-generation DX10 GPUs released as ATI and NVIDIA continue to battle for market dominance These new GPUs will be even more adept at handling generalized processing tasks, with the OpenCL standard hopefully leading the charge for the growth of parallel computing applications. And of course there's NVIDIA's acquisition of PhysX and ATI's partnership with Intel's Havok that could see in-game physics support become more than a mere feature bullet point. Beyond these considerations, there is also Windows 7 and the DX11 hardware both graphics firms are undoubtedly designing even now.

The Technology and Hardware Category Winners Are...

CPU Winner
The Intel Core i7 Series

GPU Winner
The Radeon 4000 Series

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