Bloomfield - or as you would probably have heard from your techy pals: the next CPUs in line for the X58 platform. Somehow, some way, NVIDIA crawled out of its shell and agreed to integrate it's patented SLI technology onto Intel's chipset. It's an alliance that people always anticipated since the merging of AMD and ATI, yet always seemed eluded reality. X48-based motherboards are still CrossFire only, so will the PC enthusiast finally receive optimum CPU performance with state-of-the-art GPU technology in X58? More at the full story.

Gaming piracy is a serious problem that seems impossible to eradicate. But is there hope for game developers? According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, there is, thanks to the TPM encryption chips that are being built into some of the latest motherboards. More in the full article.

Were you worried that Dell and AMD might be ending their celebrated partnership? Chill out because the exact opposite seems to be happening. New Dell systems are being built around AMD processors, adopting Athlons, Phenoms, and other hardware models of that ilk. Details follow after the jump.

Nvidia today introduced their latest offering: the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra. Those of you who keep up with hardware and graphics chip news would know that this new graphics processing unit is being touted as the new holder of the "world's fastest GPU" title.

Here's the skinny on the new GeForce 8800 Ultra:

• The GeForce 8800 Ultra performs an average of between 10 and 15% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, previously considered the fastest GPU on the planet, across a wide range of top games and applications.
• Nvidia nForce 680i SLI-based motherboards for Intel processors provide the fastest and most feature-rich platform for the GeForce 8800 Ultra.
  
• GeForce 8 Series GPUs are the first shipping DirectX 10 GPUs and are the reference GPUs for Microsoft DirectX 10 API development.

Graphics cards equipped with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU and 768MB of video memory will be available worldwide by May 15 for around €699 (US$ 950).

The whole videogame industry is currently in the middle of the transition to high-definition next gen visuals with the introduction of DirectX 10, and to make the transition an easier process, here comes Nvidia with the "definitive" game development platform, Nvidia SDK 10.

The core of Nvidia's new platform is the new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit. It promises to "save developers time and money in creating games that deliver almost lifelike graphics and physics realism." The platform consists of Nvidia GeForce(R) 8 Series graphics cards, Nvidia nForce(R) 680 motherboards, and DirectX 10.

The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit also includes instructive code samples, advanced shaders, performance tuning, and more, all in a bid to make the creation of Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible games easier.

The Nvidia Developer Toolkit also includes the following:

• SDK 10: all-new DirectX 10, OpenGL, and CUDA code samples for the latest GPUs
• Texture Tools: Powerful libraries and plug-ins for working with textures - now with DirectX 10 support and approximately 10x faster due to GPU acceleration via CUDA
• PerfKit 5: powerful tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 -- now with shader edit-and-continue, render state modification, customizable graphs and counters, and more
• ShaderPerf 2: detailed shader performance information with support for new drivers
• FX Composer 2: a world-class development environment for cross-platform shader authoring; DirectX and OpenGL support with HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX
• Shader Library: the world's largest collection of GPU shaders featuring more than 100 different shader effects and support for external submissions

Nvidia is currently demonstrating the entire development platform and distributing some of its components free of charge at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).