AnandTech
AMD Reveals Competitive Fusion APU TDPs: 9W for netbooks, 18W for notebooks - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
After the ATI acquisition AMD announced it would be creating a new category of microprocessors that featured integrated ATI GPUs. AMD called these hybrid CPU/GPUs Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and it branded the entire APU strategy: Fusion.
The first Fusion project we heard about was Llano for mainstream notebooks/desktops. Llano will integrate a 32nm derivative of the current Phenom II architecture with a relatively capable DirectX 11 AMD GPU. Llano isn't due out until sometime in 2011 so details are still light. However, AMD just released some details on its lower end Fusion APUs that will begin shipping in Q4 2010 (OEM system availability in Q1 2011).
Bobcat is the CPU core. Last month we went in depth on its architecture. In short, Bobcat is an out-of-order alternative to Intel's Atom that has the potential to offer significantly higher performance. But since we're talking about APUs, Bobcat is only a part of the equation.
AMD will be shipping two Bobcat based APUs in Q4: Ontario and Zacate. Both APUs implement two Bobcat cores and a DX11 AMD GPU with an undisclosed number of cores. Ontario is aimed at netbooks/nettops while Zacate can be used in ultra thins and value notebooks/desktops.
Today at IFA in Berlin AMD announced the Ontario and Zacate TDPs as well as shared a photo of a low power AMD Fusion APU (possibly Ontario?). The Ontario APU is rated at 9W, while Zacate is rated at 18W.
Read on for more analysis of AMD's announcement.
LG Optimus Series Smartphones to Feature NVIDIA Tegra 2 in Q4 2010 - Mon, 06 Sep 2010
LG was one of the first companies to demonstrate a Moorestown based phone as recently as earlier this year. Just one hour ago however LG announced that starting in Q4 2010 it will be shipping smartphones based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2.
We first introduced you to Tegra 2 back at CES 2010. It's NVIDIA's second generation smartphone SoC with a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores (ARM's first out-of-order architecture). The dual core CPU will run at 1GHz. Tegra 2 also features NVIDIA's own mobile GPU, although we know nothing of its architecture or how well it stacks up to high end GPUs from Imagination Technologies. NVIDIA calls it a GeForce GPU however I'd be surprised if there's any similarities between it and what's shipping in desktop GeForce GPUs today.
LG's press release is pretty light on details although we do get some performance projections. LG states that web browsing can be up to 2x faster and gaming performance can be up to 5x faster compared to single core processors running at 1GHz. If we're conservative and assume that is in comparison to Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC then we'd expect Quake 3 frame rates at just under 100 fps. Web browsing at 2x the speed of Snapdragon would be much faster than anything we've seen to date.
LG mentions that Tegra 2 will enable 1080p HD video playback however with no indication of bitrate it's too early to get excited about that claim. TI's OMAP 4 will also have 1080p support when it ships in phones next year. The same is true for Intel's Moorestown based devices.
Obviously SoC speed isn't all that matters, LG has to deliver a compelling smartphone design. The first LG Tegra 2 smartphones will be a part of its Optimus Series of smartphones, most likely running Android.
Read on for the full press release if you're interested.
Samsung Epic 4G Review: The Fastest Android Phone - Mon, 06 Sep 2010
This one has been a hotly requested item from you all: a review of the Samsung Galaxy S. Samsung sent us their newest Galaxy S phone, the Epic 4G for use on Sprint's WiMAX network. It's the first 4" phone we've reviewed, the first to use Samsung's Hummingbird SoC and the first with a Super AMOLED display.
The CPU performance proved to be on par with the Motorola Droid X and other 1GHz Android offerings, but the GPU performance is a good 30 - 45% better than anything else on the market today. The new Super AMOLED display is also a huge improvement over the AMOLED screens we've seen in other Android phones.
Battery life leaves a lot to be desired as the Epic 4G lasted less than 4 hours in our 3G/4G web browsing tests. We also encountered issues with the phone's GPS receiver as many others have reported.
Overall Samsung's Epic 4G is a nice step forward for Android, but with a few glaring issues it remains imperfect.
Read about it all and more in our full review of the Epic 4G.
Cooler Master Silent Pro M1000 1000W - Sun, 05 Sep 2010
The Silent Pro series is one of the best-known series power supplies from Cooler Master, previously covering range from 500 to 700 watts. The range has now extended to 1000W with two models rated at 850W and 1000W, including flat connection cables found in higher power classes. Today we are looking at the latter. The 1000W model comes with a 5-year warranty, promises a maximum efficiency of 86%, and uses a single +12V rail. Excluding the motherboard connectors all cables are fully modular. Cooler Master also makes note of the high quality of selected components. Even though the housing of the PSU seems to be very similar to the smaller Silent Pro, a different ODM is responsible for the manufacture. On the next pages we will explore the design and topology and see if Cooler Master is able to keep their promises.
Lenovo ThinkPad X100e: When Build Quality Matters Most - Fri, 03 Sep 2010
The pricetag of Lenovo's ThinkPad X100e has come down a couple of hundred dollars from its lofty perch when it entered the market more than six months ago, but it still remains a pricy alternative to CULV and Atom-based ultraportables. The X100e is saddled with AMD's outdated Congo platform, but is there more to a notebook than just the hardware under the hood? We think so, and we took the ThinkPad X100e for a spin to prove that the platform isn't always what counts.
DailyTech
Researchers Help Severely Paralyzed Humans "Speak" With Their Thoughts - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
New smaller, impenetrable microelectrodes could help paralyzed patients communicate safely
Android-powered HP PhotoSmart Printer With Detachable Tablet Revealed - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
HP's latest wireless printer features a detachable 7" display/tablet
Verizon's Galaxy S to Blast Off on Thursday - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
Bleeding-edge Android smartphone goes on sale Thursday at stores
Dell Gains PC Market Share as Acer Stumbles - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
"If you ain't first, you're last" - Ricky Bobby
Samsung Mobile Display Production Capacity to Get 10x Increase Next Year - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
Production will hit 30 million monthly with new facility
VR-Zone
Mini 5103 Is HP's Latest Touch-enabled Mini Notebook PC - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
vr-zone.com -
Today, HP announced their new business mini notebook PC, the Mini 5103, which comes with an optional touchscreen that allows users to navigate conveniently via multi-touch gestures, finger taps and swipes. Comes in red, blue and espresso, the Mini 5103 is available now.
VIA Technologies To Release First Dual-Core And Quad-Core Processors - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
vr-zone.com -
After years of trailing behind the competition, Taiwan-based VIA Technologies has finally announced its plans to roll out dual-core and quad-core variants of its VIA Nano processors. Will this move serve as the push needed to help VIA regain its competitiveness in the PC processor market dominated by Intel and AMD?
Read on to find out more...
New iPhone Apps On App Store (6 Sep 2010) - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
vr-zone.com -
For those of you who are using an iPhone, you may be interested in these iPhone apps - fotopedia Heritage, Spider Man: Total Mayhem, EpicWin, etc . Oh, did we mention they are new on the App store?
AMD Plans To Drop Its Stickers From Desktops And Notebooks - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
vr-zone.com -
Do you get annoyed by the amount of stickers OEM put on your brand-new notebook or desktop? If so, you are not alone: AMD apparently also takes issue with the practice, and is working to develop stickers which peel off cleanly. That, or scrap its sticker scheme altogether. Sounds great for the consumer, no?
LG Showcases New Entertainment Sharing With Optimus 7 - Tue, 07 Sep 2010
vr-zone.com -
At the IFA trade show 2010 in Berlin, Korean manufacturer LG showcased their unique sharing technology with their new Optimus 7 smartphone and other DLNA-compliant devices, with just a touch of their finger.
Xbit Labs
Toshiba's New Secure Digital Cards Offer Performance Akin to Inexpensive SSDs - Mon, 06 Sep 2010
Toshiba Launches "Industry's Fastest" SDHC Memory Cards
Asustek Computers Become More Reliable - Service Company - Mon, 06 Sep 2010
Asus, Apple and Lenovo Continue to Lead Reliability "Hit Parade"
Via Technologies Plans to Release Quad-Core Chips in Late 2011 - Mon, 06 Sep 2010
Via Nano Quad-Core Processors Due in a Year - Report
Next-Generation ATI Radeon Graphics Board Allegedly Gets Pictured - Sun, 05 Sep 2010
Alleged Radeon "Cayman XT" Image Gets Published
Elpida and Spansion Manufacture Charge-Trapping NAND Flash Memory - Sun, 05 Sep 2010
Elpida and Spansion Produce Charge-Trapping 4GB SLC NAND
Ars Technica
Probabilistic processors possibly pack potent punch - Wed, 18 Aug 2010
A DARPA-funded processor start-up has made bold claims about a new kind of processor that computes using probabilities, rather than the traditional ones and zeroes of conventional processors. Lyric Semiconductor, an MIT spin-off, claims that its probabilistic processors could speed up some kinds of computation by a factor of a thousand, allowing racks of servers to be replaced with small processing appliances.
Calculations involving probabilities have a wide range of applications. Many spam filters, for example, work on the basis of probability; if an e-mail contains the word "Viagra" it's more likely to be spam than one which doesn't, and with enough of these likely-to-be-spam words, the filter can flag the mail as being spam with a high degree of confidence. Probabilities are represented as numbers between 0, impossible, and 1, certain. A fair coin toss has a probability of 0.5 of coming up heads.
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Cars hacked through wireless tire sensors - Tue, 10 Aug 2010
The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.
Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego showed that the ECUs could be hacked, giving attackers the ability to be both annoying, by enabling wipers or honking the horn, and dangerous, by disabling the brakes or jamming the accelerator.
The new research shows that other systems in the vehicle are similarly insecure. The tire pressure monitors are notable because they're wireless, allowing attacks to be made from adjacent vehicles. The researchers used equipment costing $1,500, including radio sensors and special software, to eavesdrop on, and interfere with, two different tire pressure monitoring systems.
The pressure sensors contain unique IDs, so merely eavesdropping enabled the researchers to identify and track vehicles remotely. Beyond this, they could alter and forge the readings to cause warning lights on the dashboard to turn on, or even crash the ECU completely.
Unlike the work earlier this year, these attacks are more of a nuisance than any real danger; the tire sensors only send a message every 60-90 seconds, giving attackers little opportunity to compromise systems or cause any real damage. Nonetheless, both pieces of research demonstrate that these in-car computers have been designed with ineffective security measures.
The Rutgers and South Carolina research will be presented at the USENIX Security conference later this week.
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Nonvisual interface may allow blind people to drive cars - Mon, 05 Jul 2010
A newly developed driving interface may let blind people independently drive cars on the open road. Designed by engineers at Virginia Tech, the system incorporates various nonvisual cues into the driver's seat of a dune buggy that could help the blind navigate roads without assistance.
The project began in 2007, when a group of Virginia Tech researchers placed in a DARPA competition to develop a vehicle that could drive itself. Later, the same group received a grant from the National Federation of the Blind to incorporate the laser detection system that allowed the car to navigate and detect obstacles into an interface that could be understood through senses other than sight.
The new, nonvisual interfaces use a combination of tactile cues to inform the driver. One is called Drive Grip; it's a set of gloves that vibrate on various portions of the knuckles to signal the driver when it's time to turn.
The interfaces are set to be incorporated into a Ford Escape and demonstrated at the Rolex 24 At Daytona on January 29, 2011. The ultimate goal is an ambitious one: the car could lead to a change in longstanding legislation that prohibits driving while blind, so long as the vehicle is equipped with the appropriate technology.
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Courier lives, kinda, with new Toshiba dual-screen portable - Mon, 21 Jun 2010
Today Toshiba announced the Libretto W100, an ultra-mobile PC sporting a pair of 7" 1024 Ă— 600 multitouch screens, a 1.2GHz Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB RAM, and a 62GB solid state disk. The all-touch device is designed to be used as a conventional laptop, and vertically, like a book.
The W100 includes haptic technology, giving the touchscreens tactile feedback; there's also 802.11b/g/n support, Bluetooth, and a built-in camera. This is all in a slightly bulky—7.95" Ă— 4.84" Ă— 1.2"—but lightweight—1.8 lbs (just a hair more than the iPad)—package. In spite of the size, it is certainly a fully-featured machine.
Toshiba is describing the W100 as a "concept PC," an acknowledgement that it won't be a machine suitable for everyone. It will hit the market in August, with prices starting at $1099, albeit with limited availability. The device was shown as part of Toshiba's celebration of 25 years of laptops; the first clamshell laptop was released by Toshiba some 25 years ago.
The company is positioning the W100 as an Ultra Mobile PC—something highly portable, but still in every sense a PC, with all the functionality that entails. The similarity to Microsoft's Courier concept, however, is striking. Courier paired the dual-screen, book-like form-factor with specialized software that fully exploited the touch capabilities to provide a natural, intuitive interface.
However, as with so many tablet-like devices before, the W100 does not do this. The W100 includes Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a perfectly good operating system, but it is not purpose-built for pure touch machines. The user interface is designed for a mouse and a keyboard, and though Windows 7 does include some concessions to touch (for example, it includes an on-screen keyboard with multitouch support, and it enlarges certain interface elements when used with touch machines), it still falls a long way short of the purpose-built interfaces found in so many cell phones and the iPad.
To fill this gap, the W100 does include some custom software: a "Toshiba Bulletin Board," that provides a touch-friendly, widget-based desktop, and "Toshiba ReelTime," with touch-friendly file management. The device can also be used as a more conventional laptop, with one screen serving as a keyboard. A number of keyboard layouts are supported, including a neat split mode for use with thumbs.
The software problem is a continued issue for Microsoft. Given the hardware specs of the W100, Windows 7 is in some ways a natural fit: this is a piece of hardware that's got the horsepower to run fully fledged desktop apps without a problem (in terms of computational capabilities, it has something like five times the integer performance of the A4 processor in the iPad). Using one screen as a keyboard—a keyboard with tactile feedback, no less—arguably also justifies the use of full Windows 7, as it makes the W100 functionally equivalent to a standard laptop.
But if that's all the device is going to be used for, it might as well abandon the second screen and just use a regular keyboard. The unique value of the W100 is that it can be tilted sideways and held like a book with a pair of screens—only it lacks the software to really make use of this mode.
As such, it's hard to see the point of the W100. A similar device based on, say, Android would make sense with the touchscreens, but would then be (in comparison to other Android devices) immensely overpowered, with the drop in battery life that implies. Sticking with Windows 7 limits the utility of the touchscreens, but justifies the stuff under the hood. Combined with the price, it's not hard to see why Toshiba is labeling this a "concept PC." The W100 is unlikely to emulate the iPad's sales figures, and isn't enough—yet—to herald a new era of portable computing.
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Hands-on with Wii Classic Controller Pro: fingerprinty! - Wed, 28 Apr 2010
So we were sent a Wii Classic Controller Pro, the $20 update to the first-generation Classic Controller for the Nintendo Wii. Does it look more "pro" to you?
The controller is laid out very similarly to the first Classic Controller, with the exception of the fins coming down from the bottom of the controller. These fins are thinner than they look in pictures, and they take some getting used to. The idea here is to give the player a better grip than the SNES-style original, but in practice they never seemed to be positioned where we'd like them.
The black controller is also glossy, which means it looks like a mess of fingerprints within seconds of being taken out of its box. It also looks goofy as hell hooked into all my white Wiimotes. You can buy a white version of the controller for the same price if you're into a matching home theater set up.
As nice as the controller is, it never really seemed to fit perfectly in my hand. The Z-button is now placed behind the L and R buttons, giving you two triggers on each side, much like a Dual Shock 3. This also took a little while to get used to. For some odd reason it always felt as if it was going to fall out of my hands.
If you already have a Classic Controller, there isn't much reason to upgrade to the Pro. If you don't, however, head to your local game store and try them both out before making your purchase. More choice is never a bad thing.
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