Apple's long-rumored Mac Pro update could signal a return to NVIDIA for graphics based on claims about production progress on Tuesday. The company had reportedly been soured based on is experience with drivers and hardware failures, MIC Gadget heard. Instead, it would use NVIDIA's Kepler hardware, although which exact parts weren't mentioned.
Intel and New York state together stated Thursday that they had settled New York's antitrust lawsuit. The chip designer had managed to pay just $6.5 million and avoided having to admit or change its behavior over the wrongdoing. Its light penalty came after a district court judge had previously ruled that New York couldn't get tripled damages for willful violations and cut the statute on those affected by half, to three years.
AMD in conversations at the end of the week wouldn't discount the possibility of making ARM-based processors. When pressed by Wired, CTO and former Apple executive Mark Papermaster made the unusual non-denial that "the answer is not no." The company's long-term plans were aiming for a modular chip design that could drop in ARM or another architecture without losing Radeon graphics or other AMD-specific touches.
Computer chipmaker AMD took the opportunity at its yearly Financial Analyst Day to show off upcoming products for 2012 and 2013. They include CPUs and APUs (combined CPU and graphics) for ultrathin notebooks, tablets, all-in-ones, desktops, and servers, with most focusing on lower power use. Some are also designed with the developing world in mind and accessing the cloud.
Apple on Wednesday afternoon posted Mac OS X 10.7.3 (release notes). The Lion upgrade adds several languages, including Catalan for Spaniards as well as Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. RAW photo compatibility has expanded to several new cameras, including the Nikon J1 and V1, Olympus' current PEN cameras, and current Sony Alpha and NEX cameras, such as the NEX-5N.
AMD has hoped to corner the more widely accessible range of high-end video cards Tuesday by unveiling the Radeon HD 7950. It trims back slightly from the range-leading 7970 with 1,792 visual processing cores instead of 2,048, 112 texture units instead of 128, and both 800MHz core and 1.25GHz memory clock speeds versus the 925MHz and 1.38GHz of its counterpart. The chipset is still powerful enough to handle 4K video and carries the 384-bit memory bus and 3GB of video RAM.
NVIDIA was accused this week of using dishonest marketing to try to skew gamers towards its next-generation Kepler graphics hardware. Posters in the ChipHell forums claiming to have details of the new graphics core were reportedly discovered to be NVIDIA marketers. They made bold claims about Kepler's prices and performance in what appeared to be an attempt to downplay AMD's Radeon HD 7900 line.
Lenovo has stepped up its gaming credentials by quietly taking orders for the IdeaPad Y470p. The 14-inch notebook swaps out NVIDIA's low-end GeForce GT 520M video of the regular Y470 for a mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7690M, giving it an edge in 3D games. The 2.2GHz quad Core i7 and 8GB of RAM help keep the system running at full pace.
The delayed Lenovo ThinkPad X130e notebook is now available for pre-order on the company's website. Due to ship on February 9, the notebooks will start at $429. That price includes an 11.6-inch, 1366x768 display and AMD's dual-core, 1.3GHz E-300 Fusion processor.
The third-generation Xbox could mark a symbolic switch in storage but also a step back for game ownership. Kotaku understood from a rumor source that it would keep an optical drive but jump to Blu-ray, allowing it to hold larger games and play offline HD movies. For Microsoft, it would be the footnote to the HD disc debate of the mid-2000s, where the company officially backed HD DVD but was forced to drop plans after Toshiba axed the format and eventually supported Blu-ray.
A culmination of rumors may have given the first clearer picture of the next-generation Xbox's hardware. A tip to IGN has the system using graphics hardware roughly equivalent to AMD's Radeon HD 6670. Although strictly a mid-range graphics chip on the desktop, it would allegedly be about six times faster than the Xbox 360's 2005-era video.
AMD has reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and for 2011. Annual income was $6.57 billion, up two percent, while quarterly income was a flat $1.69 billion as compared to last year. Net income was $358 billion for the year, while for the quarter, the company reported a loss of $177 million.
Sony in a post-CES update has tweaked several of its VAIO notebooks for the spring. The VAIO Z now has the option of 4G LTE access on Verizon, making it one of the first full-powered notebooks with the choice. The $1,950 ultraportable now comes in a Carbon Fiber Silver color and gets newer Core i5 and i7 processors from the late 2011 upgrade.
AT&T just revealed it has began selling Acer's 11.6-inch Aspire One A0722 netbook. The dual-core, 1GHz AMD C-50 system sports a full-sized keyboard and can connect to the carrier's HSPA+ network. A six-cell battery may give it long battery life, although it's not known by how long.
TSMC in trimming back its expectations for 2012 also gave a possible clue as to a big mobile push early in the year. Company CFO Lora Ho anticipated a double-digit climb in demand for processors both in home electronics and PCs, implying some level of mobile technology. CEO Morris Chang added that the US would do relatively well in 2012, and that most of the poor performance would come from Europe and Japan.
AMD is reportedly preparing to bring its Trinity-series chips to the ultrabook market, after a wide range of Intel-based ultrabooks were promoted last week at CES. AMD's new platform is said to be under development using the code-name Ultrathin, with price points that are said to fall 10 to 20 percent below Intel's alternatives, unnamed sources have told DigiTimes.
HP has unwrapped a super-sized interactive display wall. The VantagePoint combines six high-resolution displays to create a seamless 11-foot by 4-foot (132-inch diagonal) screen. HP sees multiple applications for the wall including executive briefing centers, showrooms, retail, financial services, automotive, airline, home goods, and government.
Microsoft on Monday confirmed that the first Surface 2.0 table, the Samsung Surface SUR40, was shipping. Coming out a year after it was first shown, the multi-touch table introduces optics in the panel itself that can see objects and react accordingly. It can now react to as many as 50 simultaneous contact points and uses a quicker 2.9GHz AMD Athlon II X2, a Radeon HD 6700M graphics chip, and runs on Windows 7.
Samsung had a few extra stand-out devices at its CES booth this past week, and we got to try many of them. The Series 9 All-In-One PC is effectively Samsung's answer to the 27-inch iMac. Whatever you think of Samsung's affinity for Apple design, the 9 is certainly unique just from aesthetic perspective: it uses Samsung's distinctive asymmetric look and tucks all of the computer into the base, leaving the display itself to be less than half an inch thick.
AMD is developing a parallel to Intel's Thunderbolt, the chip designer unveiled at a closed-doors demo late into CES. Conspicuously known as Lightning Bolt, what AnandTech saw would similarly use Mini DisplayPort jacks and would share both power, USB 3.0, and video over a lone cable. Unlike Thunderbolt, it would make very minor changes to the cable and cost as little as a dollar premium over a basic Mini DP connection.
Lenovo's lead-in to CES has included three new ThinkPad Edge models. Fronting the pack, the S430 has an 0.8-inch thickness bordering on ultrabooks but still keeps to regular notebooks: it uses Ivy Bridge-era Intel Core processors and is one of the first Windows PCs with Thunderbotl, giving it very high speed storage and displays on one cable.
Contract manufacturer Quanta has filed suit against chip maker AMD. Taiwan-based Quanta alleges that AMD breached its contract by providing defective products that caused the computers, into which they were installed, to malfunction. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, specifically identifies the problem as being rooted in NEC laptops.
An Intel Core i7 processor has been paired with a Gigabyte motherboard to set a world record for overclocking multipliers. A six-core i7 3930K, which normally runs at 3.2GHz, was overclocked to 5.6GHz with a record multiplier of 57x. The Motherboard used with the i7-3930k was a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 with an Intel X79 chipset and showed the relative headroom the gaming-focused platform has.
Signs of a long-in-waiting Mac Pro update have appeared in earnest through the Apple Store. Picking either the 12-core stock workstation or most build-to-order changes knocks the shipping time back to between one to three weeks, usually a sign at Apple that supplies are dwindling. A refresh isn't necessarily imminent and might depend on both the sales rate of remaining stock and how soon new components are ready.
ASUS has given a tease of the full strategy for the Eee PC 1200 series with renders and details of how they'll appear at CES. Now called the Eee PC Flare, the netbooks will have curvier designs colored almost end-to-end, with black, blue, red, and purple wrapping around the entire body. They should have a MacBook-style hinge that brings the display behind the base as well as a chiclet keyboard and a 'stealth' trackpad.
A detailed leak may have given out details of AMD's mid-range Radeon HD 7000-series desktop graphics. The 7750 and 7750 as explained by Fudzilla would sit on the new mainstream Cape Verde Pro and XT cores and each scale back considerably from the higher-end but more expensive Radeon HD 7970. Both would drop from 384-bit to 128-bit memory interfaces and 900MHz core clock speeds.
A Taiwanese smartphone app developer called Bungbungame has unveiled a new tablet dubbed the Photon 100, DigiTimes reported. The tablet is meant for business use only, however, including at restaurants, hotels, insurance companies and for medical care. It runs on Windows 7 Home Premium and packs a dual-core, 1GHz AMD Z01 processor into its 10.1-inch form factor.
ASUS has made the Eee PC 1225B with AMD Fusion APUs official. The new ultraportable-netbook crossover centres on an 11.6-inch display, which is slightly smaller than its 12.1-inch 1215B predecessor. Resolution, however, remains at 1366x768 pixels resulting in a sharper image thanks to the increased pixel density of the new display.
AMD on Thursday retook the top spot for single-card graphics speed through the Radeon HD 7970. The video card is the first anywhere to use a 28 nanometer chipmaking process and uses this to pack 2,048 cores, or a third more than the Radeon HD 6970 it's replacing. Performance comes also through a newly widened 384-bit memory bus, PCI Express 3.0, and a full 3GB of GDDR5 memory, again a record for a single-chip card.
Chipmaker AMD on Tuesday revealed updates to its A-series desktop and notebook Fusion processors. The flagship dual-core and quad-core chips get speed boosts, and users can for the first time overclock the x86 and graphics settings on unlocked models. All the chips also get the AMD Steady Video feature, which is meant to get rid of the shakes and jitters in home videos.
More information on AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7900-series graphics cards and the HD 7970 model in particular, have appeared online, thanks to OBR-Hardware. The new slide reveals a compute power of 3.5 teraflops and a 925MHz core clock speed. The 2,048 shader processors seen here confirm an earlier report as well.
NVIDIA took a major step towards spurring growth of its CUDA general-purpose code technology for video cards on Tuesday by posting the CUDA source code. Developers and education now have access to a variant on the LLVM compiler that will let them add new processor types and languages. The extension could see CUDA run on AMD's Radeon hardware, Intel's integrated graphics, and even use relatively old code like Fortran.
A series of early benchmark tests centering around the upcoming Intel Atom N2600 have been performed by NetbookLive. The low-power Cedar Trail chip uses 32nm architecture and uses dual cores to attain its 1.6GHz clock speed, though these specs aren't yet official. Intel's integrated HD 3600 graphics running at 400MHz are onboard and it should support as much as 2GB of RAM.
Dell has updated its Alienware Aurora gaming desktops introduced at the past CES show. The new PC is being touted as the most advanced Alienware desktop created thus far, sporting a choice of second-generation, six-core Core i7 chips ranging in a factory-overclocked clock speed between 3.9GHz and 4.2GHz, along with the X79 Express chipset and as much as 16GB of quad-channel DDR3 RAM. Active vents and a liquid-cooling system are present to keep the system running quietly.
Intel is on schedule to begin building its next generation Ivy Bridge architecture with an advanced 22 nanometer production process in the first quarter of 2012. The technology will help keep Intel a step ahead of its competitors, AMD and ARM. In an interview with Nordic Hardware, Pat Bliemer, Managing Director Intel Northern Europe, has revealed that Intel already has the generation beyond that, 14nm, off the drawing board and running in its test labs.
AMD's Australian and New Zealand regional head Brian Slattery in a discussion [reg. required] Monday said that AMD could have its own take on ultrabooks could arrive as soon as January, likely at CES. Calling them "ultrathins" in a likely attempt to avoid colliding with Intel's term, he explained to The Australian that processors for thin but fast computing would be ready soon. In opposition to Intel, however, AMD didn't have set guidelines and would let companies use larger screens as well as thicker and heavier systems if they felt it necessary.
Samsung in its home country has rolled out the Series 5 Ultra in what's considered a tenuous claim to the ultrabook title. While a 13-inch system at 0.6 inches thick and 3.1 pounds is largely inside of the official definitions, the 14-inch system at four pounds and 0.8 inches is outside of the class, even with an aluminum shell. In including the choice of an optical drive, they also fit more closely to the definition of a traditional notebook.
Chipmaker AMD has replaced seven of its A-series CPUs for notebooks. The differences aren't major, as they basically amount to 100MHz faster base and Turbo processor speeds for all but one of the chips, Hardcore Hardware found after noticing the quiet update.
Nintendo's upcoming Wii U will reportedly be powered by a quad-core processor based on Power architecture. Although the gaming company has yet to fully detail its next console, unnamed developers who are claimed to have early access to the device have told Tom's Guide the U's 45nm 3GHz processor is "very similar" to the 3.2GHz PowerPC chip used in the Xbox 360.
Lenovo early Tuesday upgraded its most inexpensive ThinkPad X-series with a mind to help students and the public at large. The 11.6-inch X130e has a stronger bezel, hinge system and even 33 percent stronger edges, all meant to let them survive casual bumps. Performance is now much better as well, with the option of a 1.65GHz AMD E-450 chip versus the earlier E-350 as well as a new Intel Core i3 2367U.
Signs of Apple's long-in-waiting Mac Pro update emerged in earnest after a discovery in the latest Mac OS X 10.7.3 beta. Netkas found code references in the ATIRadeonX3000 driver extension to "Tahiti," the known codename for AMD's upcoming high-end desktop Radeon HD 7000 line. The chipsets are expected to be the first 28-nanometer chips and have a completely new, liquid-cooled graphics core meant to improve general-purpose computing tasks like those in OpenCL.
The unofficial first Android 4.0 x86 port won't get help from Intel, the company's Google program lead Alec Gefrides said in an interview Friday. He noted to EE Times that the Android-x86 project, which is focused on bringing Android to traditional PCs, was largely a straight compile of the basic source code with generic PC support that wasn't Intel's focus. Intel was focused only on optimizing Android for Atom-based phones and tablets, and a spokeswoman added that supporting Android-x86 might fragment the platform further.
The Android-x86 project team has released its first Android 4.0 build for devices based on Intel's x86 platform. The current Ice Cream Sandwich release is still under development, though the team has already enabled basic functionality such as Wi-Fi connectivity, multi-touch input and OpenGL ES acceleration when used with AMD's Radeon hardware.
NVIDIA orchestrated a mid-cycle upgrade for the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. A new Limited Edition bumps it from 384 visual processing cores to 448 to keep it relevant. While the main, individual, and memory clock speeds take a step back to 732MHz, 1.46GHz, and 900MHz each, NVIDIA is counting on the extra parallelism and a jump to a wider 320-bit memory bus (up from 256-bit) with 1.25GB of RAM to let it handle considerably more at once.
AMD-branded RAM modules will soon begin shipping, the company said Monday. It used its AMD OverDrive performance optimization tool to test and optimize DRAM for its Fusion chips, Radeon graphics cards, and more traditional processors. The chipmaker also worked with Patriot Memory and VisionTek in the undertaking, utilizing their experience.
A surprise entry into the mini desktop market may have upset the traditional definition of a nettop. Compulab's fit-PC3 is both thin (one inch) and small (6.3 inches long) but manages to fit AMD's lower-powered Fusion-based processors, giving them enough performance to handle 1080p video, as much as a 2560x1600 DisplayPort monitor, and even 3D video over HDMI in its most advanced configuration. Although its size pushes it into using a 2.5-inch notebook drive for storage, it has both mini PCI Express micro SATA to provide room for specialized upgrades.
NVIDIA championed a milestone for supercomputers Wednesday with the launch of a new supercomputer cluster that focuses on eco-friendly power. Tsubame 2.0, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, uses a mix of traditional processors with Tesla cards to dramatically step up the potential maximum performance without having to ramp up the energy it uses. Although it can calculate at up to 1.19 petaflops, it uses a comparatively modest 1.2MW of power, making it 3.4 times more efficient at getting work done than Los Alamos National Laboratory's processor-only Cielo Cray.
Lenovo staked out an aggressive claim Tuesday by launching the IdeaCentre Q180. The nettop is billed as the "world's smallest desktop PC" and, Lenovo says, has the footprint of a paperback. It gets to that claim by becoming one of the first mainstream nettops to use Intel's new Cedar Trail-based Atom processors, picking the dual-core 2.13GHz Atom D2700 to use just 10W of power.
Apple is switching back to NVIDIA graphics processors with its next generation of MacBooks, claim sources for SemiAccurate. In more recent years Apple has been relying on a mix of AMD and integrated Intel graphics in its computers. A major reason for the return to NVIDIA GPUs is supposedly a botched attempt at basing the most recent MacBook Air on an AMD Llano processor, thwarted by issues like AMD's supply capacity.
The first Microsoft Surface 2.0 multi-touch table, the Samsung SUR40, has gone up for pre-order. Those in 23 countries can request the new Surface ahead of its launch in January. A handful of companies have already publicly lined up, including aircraft maker Dassault, Fujifilm, and Royal Bank of Canada.
