AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5830 has already had its specification leaked and detailed, but Chinese website IT168 has today continued to undermine AMD’s upcoming launch by releasing official product shots of various Radeon HD 5830 cards. The latest addition to AMD’s enthusiast-orientated HD 5800-series line is said to feature a 40nm GPU clocked at 800MHz, 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at an effective 4,000MHz and 1,120 stream processors arranged in 14 SIMD units. We’ve recently suggested that the HD 5830 could well be a HD 5870 core that didn’t make the cut and found itself rebadged with fewer features, but what’s interesting here is that the leaked images imply that all of AMD’s partners have unique Radeon HD 5830 designs. It’s therefore logical to assume that AMD hasn’t created a reference PCB, and is instead providing just the HD 5830 ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) to its partners for implementation on a custom board. Looking at Sapphire’s card above, it’s almost identical to the HD 5850 Vapor-X, further suggesting that the HD 5830 is a toned-down 5850/5870 core.

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Nvidia had plans for a chip that we keep calling ION 2, but the original version of the chip was apparently canceled back in the summer of 2009. At the begging of the year Nvidia planned to launch a new chipset – GPU and likely brand it as ION 2. This chipset was supposed to have 40 shaders, more than two times the number or the Original ION and it was supposed to be substantially faster. Since Nvidia came to some sort of silent ceasefire with Intel, this chip with 40 Shaders will never make it to ION 2. The product was codenamed MCP89 and it might show up on some Intel-based chipset a with high possibility of launch at Cebit next week.

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Bloom Energy debuted on Wednesday its highly anticipated power plant-in-a-box that supporters claim represents a breakthrough in clean energy produced from solid oxide fuel cells. The company unveiled the Bloom Energy Server, dubbed the “Bloom Box,” at eBay’s San Jose, Calif., headquarters. Attendees at the highly orchestrated media event included California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Bloom Energy has raised about $400 million from investors, which include the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers. Kleiner Perkins discovered and funded such highly successful companies as Amazon and Google. Bloom Energy is the firm’s first investment in clean energy. With so much money backing Bloom Energy, the hype behind the company’s launch has been intense, with supporters painting the company’s technology as revolutionary. The company lists as customers eBay, Google, FedEx, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, and Staples. “For years, there have been promises of new energy solutions that are clean, distributed, affordable, and reliable; today we learn that Bloom, formerly in stealth, has actually delivered,” venture capitalist John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in a statement. “Americans want clean, affordable, energy, 24×7 — and all the jobs that go with it. Bloom’s boxes are a breakthrough, serving energy, serving demanding customers, and serving our country.”

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It was only a matter of time before Brussels began looking at an antitrust complaint against Google. Murmurings of discontent about the dominant search engine have been going on for several years now, and recently there has been a rash of smaller cases against the company. Three particular cases are being considered by the European Commission. A complaint by Foundem, a UK vertical search company, one from ejustice.fr, a French legal search site, and a complaint made initially in Germany by Ciao!, a vertical search site recently bought by Microsoft. Google has also recently lost points with European regulators over its plans to make books searchable, and over privacy, with its StreetView service arousing particular concern in several countries. Swiss authorities, for example, have taken Google to court over the service. Yesterday, an Italian court also found against Google in a case over an offensive video being posted on YouTube, and sentenced four of its executives to six months in prison. The US company is not flavour of the month anywhere on the continent.

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Buy it now on Ebay

CHIPMAKER AMD is reporting that it is churning out and shipping its latest 8-core and 12-core processors, codenamed Magny Cours, to select OEMs and Ebay auctioneers. Magny Cours or rather Opteron 61xx chips feature revised quad channel memory controllers and remain within the 75W power envelope occupied by their predecessors, the 6-core Istanbul chips. However the Opteron 61xx requires a new socket, the G34, so it won’t be a drop-in upgrade like the step up from Shanghai to Istanbul was. In order to meet this impressive power target, AMD has scaled back the clock speeds and reined in the core voltage. But none of this really matters as those who deploy these will jump for joy at the fact that their existing cooling solutions will be able to cope with twice the number of cores. In a blog post, AMD’s John Fruehe was positively gushing about his company’s new toy, however his claim that AMD is supplying only “a few select end customers” couldn’t have referred to an Ebay auction last week.

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U.S. communications regulators will unveil on March 17 a blueprint aimed at bringing fast affordable Internet access to more than 90 million Americans being held back by fees and technology. The Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that the long-awaited National Broadband Plan will try to help connect 93 million Americans to high-speed Internet to find jobs, access educational and healthcare services, and reduce household energy costs. “In the 21st century, a digital divide is an opportunity divide,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement, highlighting that various roadblocks are stopping one-third of the United States from subscribing to broadband. “To bolster American competitiveness abroad and create the jobs of the future here at home, we need to make sure that all Americans have the skills and means to fully participate in the digital economy.”

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Microsoft and Amazon have signed a cross-licence patent agreement to swap access to intellectual property, including that relating to Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. The companies said that the specifics of the deal will be kept secret, and that Amazon will pay an undisclosed sum to Microsoft. Amazon will use the access to improve integration between Microsoft products and its proprietary and open source programmes, while also avoiding any future litigation. “We are pleased to have entered into this patent licence agreement with Amazon.com,” said Horacio Gutiérrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft.

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As you already know, the Acer Aspire One 532G is the first officially announced Nvidia ION 2 netbook but unfortunately we don’t know very much about the “the next generation ION” despite the rumors that it will be a discrete GPU part, possibly the GeForce-GT218. The great news is that this week we’ve managed to do some testing on the 10-inch AAO 532G netbook that was presented at MWC in Barcelona. The test consisted in using 3DMark03 graphics benchmark test on the netbook but, as we didn’t expected, the results were not too promising. The Aspire One 532G managed the performance of 3,049 on the 3DMark, a little bit weaker than the 11.6-inch Samsung N510 who managed to score 3,593 using a Nvidia ION LE chipset, and as you probably think, it’s disappointing to see the AAO 532G not outperforming current ION netbooks.

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