While VIA may have invented the Mini-ITX market, they sure don’t own it and with boards like the KI780G things are looking good. Compared to an EPIA board, you can choose you own CPU, memory and it’s just that simple. Upgrading is possible on the Albatron board while the CPU is a fixed feature on the VIA board. Where the VIA board is more suited to a car PC that you set and forget, the digital PC and home theater option is more the Albatron KI780G’s aim.

An Italian retailer is currently listing the Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition 2.7GHz box for €86 inc. VAT. Considering this is the fastest Kuma so far, and that this is an early price, probably a tad higher than the MSRP, we can say that it looks like a rather good deal. The only currently available Kuma, the 2.3GHz Athlon X2 6500 costs €99.

The RD890 is AMD’s highest end chipset that will go well together with SB800 Southbridge. This chipset supports Hypertransport 3.0 and it should improve overclocking scores. It supports second generation PCIe and two and four way Crossfire with improved P2P. The SB800, Southbridge part of the chipset will have support for SATA 6 Gb/s, Radeon 0, 1, 5 and 10 and something called advanced clock calibration. This chipset has support for both AM2+ DDR2 based Phenom II’s as well as AM3, DDR3 based Phenom II, Deneb generation CPUs but this support will depend on the motherboard design.

Apart from plain performance gains, the new Catalyst brings support for Stream technology. Thanks to Stream, 4600 and 4800 series cards will support ATI Avivo Video Converter, roughly comparable to Nvidia's Badaboom app. It will allow fast video transcoding and some other goodies. Video reproduction will also be improved through noise reduction control for progressive video content.

Also you can find a link to get them here.

AMD is reorganizing and we've learned that this might meant hat some more people will have to say good buy to this chip company. The Q4 2008 scores will likely be worse than Q3 2008 and some more people will have to go.

AMD has announced its 22W Athlon X2 quite some time ago and we’ve learned that Athlon X2 dual core 3250e with 22W TDP should be available any day now. The original plan was to start shipping these CPUs in November but so far we couldn’t find them available in EU or USA. This is the AM2 CPU based on Brisbane core has 2x512KB cache and is developed in 65nm.

AMD will be among the supporters and we believe that the hard drive industry will follow. We are sure that SATA 3.0 devices will run a bit faster and you can forget about doubling your performance simply from going from SATA 2.0 to 3.0. Theoretically, SATA 3.0 has doubled the bandwidth that jumped from 3 Gb/s to 6Gb/s and this should bring some performance improvements but we wouldn't expect some huge leaps.