According to NordicHardware, Sapphire Or Zotac Might Launch Larrabee. No further information on Larrabee yet, though; as we already wrote, the Larrabee lauch date is set to 2010. The only news from Intel so far is about i3, i5, i7 CPU naming system: Lynnfield, Clarksfield, Arrandale, Clarkdale; besides, Intel plans shipments of 32nm ‘Clarkdale’ in Q4.

The world is waiting for the specifications of currently most powerful processor – AMD Phenom II 42 TWKR Black Edition aka Formula 1. They say it has an unlocked clock multiplier for ease of overclocking, though consumes 200W and thus requires good cooling. One of the pictures on the website of Maingear PC founder and CEO (Wallace Santos) has a not-for-sale-note which caused a gossip that the new processor is not meant for retail, but probably for direct selling from AMD to “extreme enthusiasts”.

Sorry I did not write blog for some time… Just returned from one-week vacation at Rhodos (Greece).

It looks like AMD has outrun NVIDIA today. Its World’s First Microsoft DirectX® 11 Graphics Processor, presented a few hours ago in Taipei, is currently the best hardware for Windows 7. Catch up, NVIDIA! However not many details of it suggested. At least enjoy the graphics:  

First of all, sad news: Intel Larrabee is delayed till 2010 (we were expecting it in Q4’2009), according to the reports. With 32 cores onboard (though this number is not confirmed yet), it looks like a very good system for password cracking. Some Larrabee development tools and resources are already available, and of course, we’re porting our code to this platform, and will share the results with you as soon as we’ll be able to (we’re under the NDA with Intel; as well as with Nvidia and AMD :)).

Considering a (new) AMD/ATI or NVIDIA video card for password cracking with Wireless Security Auditor or Distributed Password Recovery (to get the most from GPU acceleration technology — at an affordable price)? Read the Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May ’09 at Tom’s Hardware. I especially like the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.

Tom’s Hardware has tested two mainstream NVIDIA cards (GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX) on several CUDA-enabled applications. The applications were:

AMD has hit another megahertz milestone record today. In fact, this is ATI Radeon HD 4890 card, overclocked to 1 GHz at the factory (normally, it runs at 850 MHz); surprisingly, air cooled (I thought that water cooling would be needed).

AMD revealed that its plans a 12-core Opteron processor in 2010, and a 16-core Opteron in 2011. Unfortunately, almost no further/technical details — more cores is definitely good, but we’d like to see whether AMD is able to implement SSE2 effectively. Right now, SSE2 instructions are executed much slower on AMD processors than on Intel ones, while they’re really important for SHA-1 (the most password checking routines are based on). Or may be SSE5 will give provide additional benefits for password cracking?

According to Tweak Down, AMD will start shipping them next month. We’ll see how do they compare with Intel Gulftown.