AMD Postpones the Radeon HD 7000 Launch to 2012 Says Rumor Mill

AMD may be forced to postpone the launch of the next-generation Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards to 2012, says a series of rumors that have recently hit the Web and which blame the problems TSMC has with its 28nm chip fabrication node.

AMD has promised time and time again that the Radeon HD 7000 series will arrive by the end of this year, but rumors regarding the delay of these GPUs started circulating since mid-September.

Much like this latest Hardcore Hardware report, the previous rumors also blamed TSMC's low 28nm yields for the delay, as well as the foundry's limited wafer production capacity for this node.

The large die size and complex design of the HD 7000-series GPUs is also a problem for TSMC, so it had focused its attention on building less complex 28nm chips.

In addition to detailing the troubles faced by AMD with the production of the Radeon HD 7000 graphics cores, the report also comes to dismiss previous claims that suggested the Sunnyvale-based chip maker wanted to pair these GPUs with XDR2 memory developed by Rambus.

Instead, AMD has decided to stick with GDDR5, but this time it will go for a 384-bit wide memory bus in order to improve the bandwidth available to the GPU.

No other information about AMD's next-generation graphics card series is available at this point in time, but from the previous leaks that found their way to the Web, we now know that AMD's Radeon HD 7000 product family will use two different architectures.

The first solutions to arrive will use the VLIW4 shader arrangement introduced with the Radeon HD 6900 series, and these will be known under the code names of Lombok and Thames.

Later in 2012, AMD will also introduce the company's first graphics cards based on the Next Generation Core (NCG) architecture, which was detailed at the Fusion Developer Summit.

This architecture will be used in the Tahiti GPU, that will also spawn a Radeon HD 6990 replacement known under the code name of New Zealand.

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AMD Is Already Testing the First Trinity APU Samples

A series of processors from AMD's upcoming Trinity APU series were just spotted online in a benchmark database suggesting that the Sunnyvale-based chip maker has already started testing these CPUs and may have even sent them to its partners.

Results of tests run using these processors were added to the OpenBenchmarking.org database and included not just the names and clock speeds of the APUs, but also information regarding their performance.

All these details however have been removed from the database by the Phoronix Test Suite author “to save these engineers on too much embarrassment or trouble.”

Despite this measure, Phoronix has however disclosed a few basic info about the chips. These are actually four in number and all are Engineering Sample processors.

The APUs include either two or four processing cores, have their clock speeds set between 2.5GHz and 3.3GHz, working integrated graphics and seem to function well under Linux with the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver.

AMD's next-generation Trinity APUs are based on the Piledriver core which is said to offer 10% better performance than Bulldozer and feature a VLIW4 GPU derived from the Cayman graphics used inside the Radeon HD 6900 series.

Much like the current Llano APUs, the chips will lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU.

According to AMD, Piledriver based APUs will be divided into three main versions for specific price-points and markets.

All the chips will be manufactured by Globalfoundries using the 32nm fabrication process and early estimates indicate that the quad-core version of the chip will feature more than 2 billion transistors. 

The first Trinity APUs are expected to arrive at the end of Q1 2012 or in early Q2.

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Taking Photos on Nokia N9 and Sharing Them Is Easy

Nokia's MeeGo-based N9 has a lot to offer to its users, and the Finnish handset vendor is keen on showing to the world what the device is capable of. 

We already had a look a video that explained the manner in which users could connect to the Internet from their MeeGo devices, and a new one is available for your viewing pleasure, showing you how to take a photo on N9 and then share it on the Internet. 

Today, users are connected with their social networking accounts almost at all times, being capable of easily sharing various content is one of the features they praise the most. 

Nokia N9 does come with fast access to the Internet, as well as to social networking sites, such as Facebook, and this is what the video above will show you.

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8GHz Not Hard to Reach with AMD FX-8150 Says Overclocker

Expected to arrive in just a few hours from now, AMD's upcoming FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture seem to feature an impressive overclocking potential according to an enthusiast who recently stated that 8GHz is easy to reach using the upcoming FX-8150 CPU.

“8GHz on 990FXA-UD7, not hard to reach without cherry pick CPU, LN2 Cooled -192°C,” said Hicookie, Gigabyte's in-house overclocker, who also helped the company develop the X58A-OC motherboard.

Of course that “not hard to reach” for an extreme enthusiast such as Hicookie doesn't mean the same as for the rest of us, since as one can clearly see the AMD processor was actually cooled using liquid nitrogen which has a boiling point of -192°C.

This sort of cooling was required for the CPU in order to allow the overclocker to raise the voltage of the chip all the way to an impressive 2V.

Thanks to this vCore the FX-8150 was able to reach 8,030MHz with a bus speed of 292MHz.

To put things in perspective, the eight-core AMD flagship processor used by Hicookie has a base clock of 3.6GHz and a maximum Turbo Core frequency of 4.2GHz, so this translates into a 130% core speed increase over the chip's stock settings.

The rest of the system used for this overclock was comprised out of a high-end Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 system memory and an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. Only two out of the eight computing cores were active during this experiment.

The highest frequency achieved to date by an FX-8150 processor was reached in mid-September when the CPU reached an impressive 8,429MHz. 

Liquid helium was used for that overclock and the CPU used has become the the world fastest clocked processor, surpassing by 120MHz the previous world record. (via Gigabyte Tech Daily)

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First iPhone 4S Gets Delivered to Germany - Pictures

Germany appears to be the place where the first lucky iPhone 4S buyer lives, though no one can be sure others didn’t already receive one but failed to take the pictures and upload them to the web.

9to5 reveals that while Germany is proud to have unboxed the first customer-ordered iPhone 4S with pictures, Italy is even a more exciting place to be if you like the technicalities behind the glass plates of the new iPhone.

A tech-site from pizza-land has compared the 'spare parts' from an iPhone 4S with the hardware of its predecessor (the iPhone 4), and found quite a few differences.

Screw placement is different, the proximity sensor has an additional part and it’s also placed differently, better glass covering the camera, harder glass on the back, and more.

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Revolutionary Supercomputer 'Titan' Makes Liberal Use of NVIDIA Tesla

While it is busy promoting consumer graphics, NVIDIA has also snared a deal on the supercomputing front, where it has sealed a contract through which the “Titan” will use its Tesla accelerators.

GPU computing modules have gained a role in supercomputing thanks to their immense parallel processing capabilities. 

NVIDIA's series of such products bears the name of Tesla, of which the Tesla M2090 will be used for the upgrade of the Jaguar.

Based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), this supercomputer, which was once at the front of the Top500 list, will be upgraded with 960 such GPUs as part of the first phase of creating the Titan.

The ultimate goal is to enable peak performance of more than 20 petaflops, two times faster than the current top HPC installation, the Japan-based K.

The 960 Tesla will act as complements to the multi-core CPUs of the Cray XK6-based supercomputers.

“Oak Ridge’s decision to base Titan on Tesla GPUs underscores the growing belief that GPU-based heterogeneous computing is the best approach to reach exascale computing levels within the next decade,” said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of Tesla products at NVIDIA, referring to computing performance levels of 1,000 petaflops. 

“The Tesla GPUs will provide over 85 percent of the peak performance of Titan. You simply can’t get this level of performance in a power- and cost-efficient way with CPUs alone.”

Speaking of energy and cost efficiency, the Titan will be three times more efficient than K.

As for the second phase (will start in 2012), Oak Ridge intends to go as high as 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation “Kepler” architecture.

“All areas of science can benefit from this substantial increase in computing power, opening the doors for new discoveries that so far have been out of reach,” said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

“Titan will be used for a variety of important research projects, including the development of more commercially viable biofuels, cleaner burning engines, safer nuclear energy, and more efficient solar power.”

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Intel Prepares New Sandy Bridge ULV Celeron Processors

In the first quarter of next year, Intel will expand its product portfolio with two new Celeron processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture that are targeting ultra-low power and ultra-thin computers as they feature an ULV design.

Intel has designed the first one of these chips, the Celeron 867, so that it would replace the previous Celeron 857, built around the same Sandy Bridge architecture and introduced in the third quarter of this year.

Just like its predecessor, the new Intel CPU sports two computing cores, which this time are clocked at 1.3GHz, but it also includes an on-board dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory controller and an integrated GPU.

This has a base frequency of 350MHz and a maximum Turbo clock speed of 1GHz, but it supports only basic feature set dropping even ClearVideo support, not to mention more advanced technologies such as Quick Sync or InTru3D.

In addition to the single processing core, the Celeron 867 also sports 2MB of Level 3 cache. Its TDP is set at 17W.

As it’s the case with all the other Sandy Bridge-based Celeron processors launched by Intel, the 867 also lacks support for some of the more advanced technologies found inside higher-performing second-generation Core processors like Turbo Boost or HyperThreading.

When it will arrive in the first quarter of 2012, pricing for the Celeron 867 will be set at $134, which is the current price of Intel's Celeron ULV 857.

In addition to the 867, Q1 2012 will also mark the introduction of the Celeron 797, that features the same specifications as the 787 is meant to replace, but comes with a 100MHz higher clock speed as it runs at 1.4GHz.

According to Fudzilla, around the third quarter of 2012 Intel plans to replace all its Celeron CPUs with faster models that will most likely still be based on the Sandy Bridge architecture as the Ivy Bridge Celerons aren't expected to arrive until later next year.

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Android Apps Can Run on Desktop PCs Now

The Android Market was already available for access from desktop PCs, and, starting today, applications developed for Google's Android platform are also available for these computers, courtesy of the new BlueStacks App Player for Windows PC.

Android is becoming the leading mobile operating system on the market at a fast pace, with about half of the users who purchased a smartphone in the past three months said to have chosen an Android device. 

The number of applications and games available for these users is also on the rise, with over a quarter of a million already confirmed by Google themselves. Starting today, these apps and games are available for both Android and non-Android users as well. 

Not all people out there have an Android device on which to download, install and run application, and this is where the new BlueStacks App Player comes into play. 

Available in an alpha flavor at the moment, the software offers users the possibility to easily access Android applications on their PCs, as well as on any Windows-powered laptop or tablet they might own. 

One of the main benefits that this application arrives on the market with goes to the developers of software for Google's Android operating system, which have now a wider user base to reach. 

“The openness of Android is enabling innovation around the world. We are grateful to Google and others for their contributions,” Rosen Sharma, president and CEO of BlueStacks. 

“This is also a social equalizer in the US and countries like Brazil, India and China, where a large percentage of the population who can only afford smartphones can now enjoy and benefit from the ubiquity of apps on the Android platform.”

“We look forward to getting feedback from our users on the alpha release,” Rosen Sharma continued. 

The new BlueStacks App Player for Windows PC is available for download as well, via this link.

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BlackBerry Network Still Down - 10/11/2011

As originally reported yesterday, BlackBerry users have been hit hard by an outage that initially affected Europe, Middle East and Africa.

We have received hundreds of reports from unhappy BlackBerry users who were unable to use BBM, email accounts, Internet, or any other application that requires data connection, including Facebook, Twitter and App World.

Research in Motion stated that the problem only affects EMEA countries, it appears that the outage spread and is now affecting both Americas, as well.

Fortunately, it appears that the services are coming back up in some regions, as some users already reported full restoration of BlackBerry services.

At 6AM UTC BlackBerry services were fully restored in Romania (Orange), Netherlands, and UK (partially).

Unfortunately, the network is still down for BlackBerry owners in Canada, Africa and Middle East. Additionally, outage reports have started to come in from US-based users as well at around 2AM UTC on Oct 11th.

It's been 24 hours since the first reports about the outage came in and RIM has yet to make any official statements regarding the issues that are now affecting its users at a global scale.

If you're affected, let us know in the comments and make sure you state your location.

UPDATE: UK is still struggling, as BB services in London have not been fully restored yet; emails and BBM work sporadically and only for receiving. Germany continues to be in the dark completely, however.

UPDATE 2: BlackBerry owners in South Africa are seeing services being fully restored.

UPDATE 3: I have reached out to all RIM media contacts for an official statement and will update everyone as soon as one is provided.

UPDATE 4: Just received a reply from RIM's EMEA PR: "Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services. The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologize to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience". That doesn't seem to be the case, however, based on reports we've been receiving from users.

UPDATE 5: Starting 9:15 AM UTC, several members of our team have noticed BBM and email delays (Orange Romania). Wondering if these delays and recent US outage reports could mean that RIM has moved all customers to the US infrastructure while it struggles to fix its EMEA network. 

UPDATE 6: 11:00 AM UTC - outages are starting to return to most territories that were restored over the last few hours. Reports have come from South Africa, the UK, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and we've noticed it at Orange Romania as well.

UPDATE 7: 11:50 AM UTC - downtime recurrence reports start coming from the Middle East (Qatar) and Africa (Nigeria).

UPDATE 8: 12:30 AM UTC - BIS now affected in Greece as well.

UPDATE 9: 1:50 PM UTC - outage reports coming from India, Egypt, Dubai and Italy.

UPDATE 10: It appears that Turkey never recovered since yesterday's outage

UPDATE 11: Users in Spain and Switzerland report BB services are down for them as well.

UPDATE 12: BlackBerry owners in Romania using Orange's network are receiving apology text messages. Translation: "We apologize if the BlackBerry service is temporarily unavailable. The service provider - RIM - will resolve the issue as soon as possible." (original SMS screenshot in the attached gallery)

UPDATE 13: We've received a follow-up from RIM's PR: "Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays.  We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."  Again, this doesn't seem to be entirely correct, since we're getting outage reports from other territories  as well.

UPDATE 14: BB services have started again to go up and back down intermittently. For some users, certain services work while others have long delays or are unavailable completely.

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AMD FX-8150 Processor Gets Previewed and Benchmarked

Just a few more days are left until AMD will make official its highly anticipated FX-Series of desktop processors, and the company's flagship CPU based on the Bulldozer architecture, the FX-8150, was just put through a series of extensive benchmarks that compare its performance with that of the Core i7-2600K.

The FX-8150 is the most powerful of the three FX-Series processors AMD plans to launch and it includes four Bullodzer modules for a total of eight processing cores.

These are paired together with 8MB of Level 3 cache as well as with 8MB of L2 cache memory and the CPU also packs a dual-channel DDR3 memory controller supporting speeds up to 1866MHz.

AMD has set the base clock speed of the FX-8150 at 3.6GHz, but when less than half of the cores use the Turbo Core technology can raise its operating frequency up to 4.2GHz.

In comparison, the Core i7-2600K features quad processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, also 8MB of Level 3 cache memory and a 3.4GHz base clock speed with a 3.8GHz maximum Turbo.

Despite the higher clock speed and core count of the FX-8150, the AMD processor seems to be no match in front of Intel's chip, which managed to outpace its competitor in all the benchmarks run by Lab 501.

This includes highly threaded applications like Handbrake of CineBench R11.5, which should have favored the eight-core AMD CPU.

Furthermore, the FX-8150 also loses in front of Intel's chip when it comes to power efficiency as it requires no less than 129W when running in full load compared to the 93W of its competitor.

Outside of the usual performance tests, the preview also investigated the overclocking potential of the FX-8150 and the maximum SuperPi stable frequency reached was 5066MHz. However, total system stability could be achieved unless this was dropped down to between 4700-4800MHz.

AMD will release the FX-Series processors on October 12, and the FX-8150 is going to be priced at $245 US, about 182 Euros, which makes it $72 cheaper than Intel's Core i7-2600K.

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