Intel Ivy Bridge Processors to Arrive in March of 2012

Even though Intel hasn't committed on any specific launch date for its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors and settled with saying that these will arrive in March or April of 2012, a recent report has now made its appearance that suggests the Santa Clara chips maker is considering March for the release of the chips.

The report cites a series of motherboard manufacturers that talked with the WCCF Tech website about Intel's launch scheduled for Ivy Bridge.

The initial processor lineup will be comprised of both dual and quad-core parts for various markets, including desktop and notebooks computers.

Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips and features basically the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements.

This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance that current Core CPUs according to Intel.

In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.

In the mobile version of Ivy Bridge, all these improvements are paired with a configurable TDP design, which enables the CPU to greatly surpass its maximum thermal design power when additional cooling is provided (like when placed on a notebook cooling stand).

Together with the Ivy Bridge processors, Intel will also release the Z77, Z75, and H77 consumer PCH controllers, but the CPUs will also be compatible with the current LGA 1155 chipsets used for Sandy Bridge. 

Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, announced just recently that the company has started volume production of 22nm Ivy Bridge processors in the third quarter of 2011.

Read more »

Porsche Design BlackBerry Bold 9980 Confirmed for October 27

The collaboration between Research and Motion and Porsche Design is no myth at all, as the companies have just announced a common launch event on October 27.

The folks over at Suff have just received an invitation to this event that confirms the collaboration with Porsche Design.

“You have been specially selected to join us for a VIP preview evening on an exclusive collaboration between Porsche Design and BlackBerry,” the invitation reads.

The event will be held in Dubai, on Thursday, October 27 from 7pm and 10pm. Rumor has it that the companies will announced the mysterious BlackBerry 9980, also known as Knight.

According to the latest hearsay, BlackBerry 9980 is a luxury adaptation of the Bold 9900, which is specifically targeted for UAE and other regions where BlackBerry devices are still very attractive.

BlackBerry Bold 9980 have been spotted in China, which indicates that the device is real and ready to be launched on the market.

Although the last Bold 9980 that emerged bears China Mobile's logo, it appears that Porsche Design and RIM decided to announce the device in Dubai, instead of China.

However, this makes sense as UAE is a country where BlackBerry smartphones are still considered hot. 

Secondly, Bold 9980 is a premium device and will be priced accordingly, which makes it more suitable for a mature market like UAE, instead of an emerging one such as China.

If this is indeed an adaptation of the Bold 9900, then it should be delivered with BlackBerry 7 operating system, which might get an exclusive user interface to emphasize the collaboration between the two companies.

In addition, the phone is equipped with a single core 1.2 GHz processor and packs 8GB of internal memory, 768 MB of RAM, as well as microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).

Read more »

Rambus Makes Profits for Something Other than Lawsuits This Time

Rambus is one of the most infamous patent trolls out there, but it looks like, this once, it was able to rake in some profits without any settlement payments. 

Rambus made the news quite a few times last year, and the years before, for how it got into patent litigations with a whole bunch of companies. 

As such, it may have been a surprise to see a distinct lack of such court actions during 2011, not that other trolls didn't rear their heads, of course. 

Regardless, the fact is that Rambus didn't get any lawsuit settlement payments recently, but that didn't stop it from making profits anyway. 

After several quarters of less than stellar financial evolution, the company reported profits for the third one of the ongoing year (2011). 

Granted, this didn't prevent the total revenue for the first nine months of the year from falling to $229 million (166 million Euro), 2% less than during the January-September period of 2010. 

Nevertheless, the fact is that the licensing company made $100.3 million (72.72 million Euro) during the July-September period. 

That is approximately 51% higher sequentially and a solid 216% on-year improvement, which is nothing to scoff at. 

The net income wasn't too huge, at $0.5 million (0.36 million Euro, give or take), but still a long way from the $10.6 million loss of the second quarter. 

Licensing deals were the reason behind all this, since they imply that Rambus receive monthly fees from all those that would use its patents. 

The most lucrative of these were signed during Q2 and Q3 itself (the official announcement explains things in greater detail). 

What remains is to see if the company can keep on going without starting yet another lawsuit, since one could say there are plenty of those to go around already.

Read more »

Intel Retailers Raise CPU Prices After Bulldozer Launch

The disappointing performance that AMD's FX-Series desktop processors have turned out to deliver, has apparently made Intel reconsider the prices of its Core i5 and Core i7 processors, which now seem to retail for higher prices than before Bulldozer was out.

Usually, a product launch by the competition, forces the other company to lower the prices of its hardware in order to prevent sales from being disrupted and losing market share.

In the case of Bulldozer however quite the contrary happened, as Intel has seen AMD's inability to deliver a compelling product as an opportunity to increase the margins of its products.

Using the Geizhals.at price comparison engines, one of the largest of its kind in the world, Bright Side of News analyzed the prices of Intel's processors both before and after the launch of AMD's FX-Series CPUs.

This way, the Website has found out that pricing for the Core i7-2600K rose from €237.62 to €258.29 in the timeframe taken into consideration, which is almost a 9% increase in price.

According to the same publication, the change cannot be explained due to fluctuations in the USD vs. EUR exchange rate as this would have caused the chips to be cheaper by a few percent.

Furthermore, similar price changes were also spotted in other processors that were monitored, including the i5-2500K, and i5-2400, so this appears to be a general trend in the market.

AMD launched the first FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture the last week, on October 12, but despite being eagerly awaited by many PC enthusiasts the performance of the chips has disappointed.

In most tests that were run by reviewers, AMD's FX-8150, lagged behind the Intel's Core i5-2500K, while a few tests showed it coming behind even a last-gen Phenom II X6 1100T processor.

In order to fix some of these performance issues, AMD is apparently working on developing a B3 stepping of the Bulldozer architecture.

Read more »

Intel 520-Series Cherryville SSDs to Include SandForce Controller - Report

With the launch of the high-performance Cherryville series of solid state drives Intel will continue the tradition started with its the 510-series SSDs and will use a third-party controller which will be built by SandForce, according to a report that just hit the Web.

The first rumors regarding Intel's plans to utilize SandForce controllers in their SSDs appeared quite some time ago, and recently SweClockers claimed that it has seen a document that confirms these reports.

According to the Swedish website, the controller used by Intel for its 520-series solid state drives is similar to the one included in Corsair's or OCZ's SSDs.

In this report is indeed true, than Cherryville SSDs should be able to reach sequential read and write transfer rates in excess of 500MB/s, while the 4K random access performance should be rated at 85,000 IOPS.

This last number is quite a departure from the 40,000 IOPS detailed by previous reports which covered Intel's 520-series drives.

This performance increase however isn't without its flaws, as drives powered by second generation SandForce controllers had all sort of reliability problems that caused random BSODs or other issues.

Solid state drive makers have resolved these bugs with various degrees of success thanks to a steady stream of firmware updates, but so far no one was able to fully resolve the issues. 

Intel designed the Cherryvile SSDs to spread the series in capacities when compared to the previous 510 Elm Crest drives, so the maximum capacity to be reached now is set at 480GB compared to the previous 250GB.

Furthermore, the Cherryville line of solid state drives will also witness the introduction of a lower 60GB model, which should be a great option for user seeking a fast boot drive for their system. 

Intel's 520-series of SSDs is expected to reach retail until the end of this year, but pricing is yet unknown.

Read more »

Nokia 603 Starts Shipping

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has just announced that its new Nokia 603 smartphone has started shipping, and that it will arrive in user's hands in the near future.

The new mobile phone was unveiled to the world only a few weeks ago with the new Symbian Belle operating system on board. 

The handset features a powerful 1GHz application processor, complemented by a large 3.5-inch touchscreen display. 

It also comes with a high-quality camera on the back, with support for video recording, as well as with great connectivity capabilities, including WiFi, Bluetooth or 3G. 

Moreover, the new mobile phone was made official with NFC capabilities inside, the same as other new devices from Nokia. 

The new Nokia 603 also packs various applications inside, along with support for social networking sites, so that users can stay connected with their friends and family at all times. More on the new phone on Nokia' website here.

Read more »

AMD E2-3200 Makes Appearance in HP TouchSmart AIO System

Expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year, the entry-level AMD E2-3200 APUs based on the Llano architecture has made its appearance in the TouchSmart 320m series of all-in-one systems produced by HP.

AMD has designed the E2-3200 to be used in computing system that don't necessitate vast amounts of computing power and it includes two processing cores, with a clock speed of 2400MHz.

These are paired together with 1 MB of Level 2 cache and an integrated DDR3-1600 memory controller, while also packing an on-die graphics core which is dubbed the Radeon HD 6370D.

Since the E2-3200 is an entry-level APU, the Radeon graphics unit is limited at supporting 160 stream processors clocked at a rather low 443MHz operating frequency.

In the HP all-in-one, this APU can be paired together with as much as 8GB of DDR3 memory working at 1333MHz, a 2TB hard drive and a SuperMulti DVD burner or a Blu-ray combo drive.

In addition to the E2-3200, the HP TouchSmart 320m desktops can also be configured to feature the A6-3600 and A8-3800 accelerated processing units.

Both of these were announced by AMD quite a while back, but have been missing from the retail market as the Sunnyvale-based chip maker seems to have preferred to ship the APUs to OEMs.

Compared to the rest of the Llano chips released by AMD, the A6-3600 and A8-3800 are a bit special since both parts feature quad processing cores, Turbo Core support and have a TDP of just 65W. 

Outside of the TouchSmart 320m series, the two 65W chips are also offered by HP in the TouchSmart 520z series All-in-One PC, and HP Pavilion p7z and Gateway SX2370 desktop computers, according to the CPU-World website.

Read more »

NVIDIA CEO Confirms Mobile Roadmap: Kal-El, Wayne, Logan and Stark

Chip maker Nvidia has started to gain market share on the mobile market, and it seems that the company wants an even bigger chunk of it, and that it might also have the means to get it. 

Previous rumors suggested that the company was working on new mobile application processors to address the various segments of the mobile market, along with the various needs that users have, and all have been just confirmed, right from the horse's mouth. 

Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA CEO, has spilled the beans on the company's plans for the mobile market, confirming that the company already has a well-established Tegra roadmap. 

For those out of the loop, we should note that Tegra includes Nvidia's family of mobile application processors, and that it became highly popular due to the Tegra 2 chipset, currently packed in a wide range of Android smartphones and tablet PCs (especially tablets). 

Nvidia's Tegra series has just been expanded with a four-core chip, called Tegra 3 and codenamed Kal-El, which was included in the newly showcased ASUS Transformer Prime. 

Kal-El is only one of the new mobile CPUs the company has in store for users, and the future should bring along Wayne, Logan and Stark, all powerful application processors for the mobile market. 

“We'd like to have a processor every year, and so we're building three in a row,” Jen-Hsun Huang also stated. 

Tegra 3 is the first quad-core ARM processor unveiled to the world, the same as Tegra 2 was the first dual-core, it seems. 

Nvidia already invested billions in the development of Tegra, and will continue the work on its development, so as to gain more market share in the mobile segment. 

Also, the company plans launching high-performance ARM cores in the Tegra family starting with Stark, pairing ARM cores with GPU cores for the delivery of increased raw power.

Read more »

NextStream 2U Blade Server Is Now Compatible with Nvidia Tesla C-Class GPUs

NextComputing, a manufacturer of small form-factor and dense computing servers and workstations, has just announced that its NextStream blade server can now be configured with Nvidia Tesla C-class GPU computing processors, including the recently launched Tesla C2075.

The NextStream is a 2U rackmountable unit optimized for high-performance computing tasks that require a mix of traditional multi-core CPU processing with GPU co-processing in a dense form-factor.

Despite its compact size, NextComputing clients are able to configure the 2U chassis with three independent dual-processor blades, each with dual Intel Xeon 5500 series chips packing up to six-cores per CPU and 96GB of memory.

If all the memory banks are populated, this could allow admins to install a maximum of 288GB of memory per chassis combined with the physical 36 processing cores delivered by Intel's CPU's.

Furthermore, each blade has its own PCI Express x8 expansion slot and internal Gigabit networking between blades.

In a GPU-optimized setup, the NextStream can be configured with two blades, each with dual 6-core Intel Xeon processors, 96GB RAM, and a dedicated Nvidia Tesla GPU computing processor on a full PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot.

“We’re enthusiastic about the benefits NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing processors can bring to our entire product line of small form-factor servers and workstations,” says Bob Labadini, President and CTO of NextComputing. 

“As the demand for GPU computing continues to grow across many of our key vertical markets, including the government, entertainment, and various high-end 3D visualization applications, NextComputing is uniquely positioned to offer specialized platforms such as the NextStream that fulfill needs where traditional servers cannot,” concluded the company's rep.

NextComputing hasn't provided any information regarding the starting prices of the NextStream rackable 2U blade server, but such details should be available upon request by contacting the company.

Read more »

Windows Phone 8 with Dual-Core CPUs, HD Displays

With Windows Phone 7.5 Mango now out on the market, Microsoft is already hard at work on the development of their next flavor of the mobile OS, and it seems that there should be a series of appealing features packed inside it. 

Among them, we can count the inclusion of support for dual-core application processors, complemented by the availability of Windows Phones with HD screens.

The Windows Phone 8 OS flavor, which is reportedly codenamed Apollo, will also bring along support for more connectivity options, such as LTE, though it seems that this capability will actually debut before its release. 

The next Windows Phone update, supposedly called Tango, it expected to include support for the said 4G services, and might also be loaded on devices that sport HVGA (480 x 320 pixel screens). 

Windows Phone has been on the market for only one year, but it should benefit from great improvements in the not too distant future, it seems.

Read more »