Looking for new password cracking hardware (to take advantage of GPU acceleration)? Wait just a little bit more: new ATI and NVIDIA cards (with DirectX 11) will be available soon.

ATI is going to release Radeon HD 5000 cards (5850, 5870, 5870 X2) in October — well, hopefully. The top one (HD 5870X2: single-PCB, dual-GPU) will retail for $599.

As for NVIDIA’s new GT300, the specifications were revealed in April. In brief, it groups processing cores in sets of 32 (up from 24 in GT200) — up to 512 cores total for the high-end part. If the clocks remain the same as on GT200, that will double the overall performance. And there are other improvements as well: e.g. GT300 cores rely on MIMD-similar functions. Some fresh information about GT300 availability:

• Where is the nVidia GT300?
• nVidia plans GT300 demos for late September
• NVIDIA GeForce Drivers Include Details on GT300 GPU Series

You may ask — what about Intel? Well, new Core i5 and i7 (codename Lynnfield) now available. Nothing revolutionary new, just Intel P55 Express Chipset support: integrating both a 16-lane PCI Express 2 graphics port and two-channel memory controller on a single chip (previous chipsets required separate northbridge and southbridge), as well as several minor improvements. More information and some benchmarks at Intel Lynnfield; Core i5 750 and Core i7 870 Evaluation and New Intel Core i5, i7 Processors Product Matrix.

And still [almost] noting about Intel Larrabee, mostly just rumors:

• Intel says Larrabee is still 1st Gen
• Intel Larrabee Based Graphics Card Coming in 2010 Still

Finally, funny article: NVIDIA to Intel: Your Days Are Numbered 🙂