AMD FX-8120 WOX-Series Liquid Cooler CPU Now Available for Pre-Order

Besides the FX-8150 WOX that we spotted earlier this year, AMD is also preparing the release of a liquid cooled version of the FX-8120, which has recently been made available for pre-order by an online store in the US.

This bundle was dubbed the FX-8120 WOX by the chip maker, the WOX suffix at the end of its name pointing out that the processor is shipped together with an AMD-branded water cooler.

Besides the new bundle, the CPU sports the same specs as the regular FX-8120 according to CPU-World, meaning that it includes four Bulldozer modules to deliver a total of eight cores.

These are paired with 8MB of shared Level 3 cache memory and are clocked at 3.1 GHz, but thanks to the addition of the Turbo Core technology the CPU can reach speeds as high as 4GHz when not all cores are active.

The regular version of the FX-8120 comes bundled with an air-cooled fan/heatsink combo and has an MSRP of $205 (about 156 EUR).

In comparison, the new WOX edition FX-8120 CPU retails for $310 US (roughly 236 EUR), which makes it $105 more expensive than its air cooled version. Sadly, the availability date of the FX-8120 WOX is not yet known.

This is the second WOX-series Bulldozer processors to be spotted after the FX-8150, which we reported about at the beginning of February.

Both processors are bundled with the same AMD liquid cooling solution that was developed by Asetek and sports a 120mm radiator and two fans, the latter configured to work in a push-pull mode.

The FX-8150 WOX liquid cooling bundle has an MSRP of $375 (roughly 285 EUR) and is available from various retailers, including Amazon.

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Asus Officially Launches Eee PC 1025 Flare Series Netbooks

More than three months after being spotted for the first time, Asus’ Eee PC 1025 Flare series notebooks have finally been made official by the Taiwanese company, which has already started shipping them to various retailers around the world.

Asus’ Eee PC 1025C series actually comprises two netbook models, dubbed the 1025C and 1025CE, both of them featuring about the same specs.

The only difference is that the 1025CE comes equipped with two USB 3.0 ports  and one regular USB 2.0 

port with charging support, while the 1025C is limited to USB 2.0 connectivity.

The rest of the features list includes support for up to 2GB of DDR3 system memory (the standard version will feature only 1GB), a SATA hard drive with capacities ranging between 250GB and 500GB, and a 10.1-inch LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1024x600.

Connectivity options include 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 (the latter only on selected models), and an HDMI output, but also support for the WiFi Direct technology that enables users to share data between devices without the need of a wireless access point.

When equipped with a 6-cell battery pack, the Asus Eee PC 1025C laptops weighs only 1.25kg (2.75 pounds) and should be able to deliver up to 12 hours of running time.

Asus’ 1025-series also includes a couple of proprietary technologies, such as Super Hybrid Engine II with Instant On, which enables the netbooks to resume from sleep in just two seconds.

Pricing will start at $299 (about 233 EUR), but the netbooks will be available in various colors, eight for the Eee PC 1025C and three for the CE-version.

 Users who want a more powerful configuration can also go for the Eee PC 1225B that comes in a similar configuration as the 1025CE, but swaps the 1.8GHz Cedar Trail Atom CPU for an E-450 Brazos APU, and also packs a 12.1-inch higher-res (1366 x 768) screen.

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Nokia Is Working on New, Revolutionary Smartphone

Finnish mobile phone Nokia is expected to unveil to the world a new, revolutionary smartphone in the not too far future, some of the latest reports on the matter suggest. 

In a recent interview with Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti, Nokia’s design chief, Marko Ahtisaari, confirmed to the world that the handset vendor was working on new hardware that would change the manner in which users took advantage of their devices. 

According to him, with the new device in their hands, “users do not need to look down to use it and poke their finger at the screen.” 

The first thing that comes to our mind is that users will be able to control the new device using their voice, something that has been done before. 

If this is so, then Nokia will pack the phone with some sort of a rival for Apple’s Siri, though taken to a totally new level. 

On the other hand, there is also the possibility that users will enjoy a completely new design coming from Nokia, or some other capabilities that will make the device stand out in a crowd. 

Clearly, Nokia has already proven that it is capable of delivering change, especially after the launch of no less than four Windows Phone devices in only five month. 

However, it remains to be seen what exactly Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari wanted to say when naming this device revolutionary. Apparently, the smartphone is ready now, and might be launched soon.

At the moment, Nokia is said to be working both on new Windows Phone devices, as well as on a tablet PC that would run under Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 platform. The mystery phone from the vendor could run under Microsoft’s mobile operating system as well.

Until more details on either the new smartphone or on Nokia’s tablet emerge, you can learn more on what Ahtisaari said during the aforementioned interview from this article on TNW.

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AMD A6-4400M Trinity APU Shows Up in HP g4 Laptops

One of AMD’s upcoming notebook APUs based on the company’s next-gen Trinity architecture, the A6-4400M, was recently spotted in the specifications list of two HP g4-series laptops.

HP’s g4-2002ax and g4-2003ax specs pages are light when it comes to revealing details about this APU, but they did state that the A6-4400M has two CPU cores.

Furthermore, the listing also revealed that the integrated GPU utilized in the A6-4400M is called the Radeon HD 7520G, and that the two computing cores have a 2.6GHz base frequency and 3GHz maximum Turbo Core speed.

These frequencies are 18%, and respectively 15%, higher than those of the fastest AMD dual-core Llano mobile APU in production, the A4-3330MX.

However, since the Bulldozer CPU cores that the A6-4400 utilizes in its construction are less efficient than the company’s previous K10 architecture, which stands at the heart of the Llano APUs, CPU World doesn’t expect the A6-4400 to perform much better than its current counterpart.

That being said, AMD’s new APU should provide a better gaming experience than the A4-3330MX, while also offering a nice performance boost in applications that support its new AES and AVX instruction sets.

In the two HP notebooks, the A6-4400M will be paired together with the AMD A70M chipset and can use DDR3 memory with speeds of up to 1600MHz.

Based on its clock frequency, CPU-World expects the A6-4400M to fit inside a 35 Watt thermal envelope. 

AMD’s next-generation Trinity accelerated processing units are expected to be made official at the start of this summer, rumors suggesting a June or July launch.

According to a recently revealed AMD presentation slide, Trinity is said to deliver up to 56 percent better graphics performance than Llano, while its general application performance was increased by 29 percent.

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Galaxy S III to Sport 8MP Camera, Test Photo Unveils

Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone is expected to arrive on shelves with an 8-megapixel photo snapper on the back, the latest rumors around the web suggest. 

The handset has been also rumored to pack a 12MP camera on the back, but what appears to be a leaked test photo taken with it shows that it will actually pack a lower-quality camera. 

The said photo, taken with a smartphone that features model number GT-I9300, was spotted on Picasa, a recent post on AllAboutSamsung notes.

The resolution of the said image is 3264 × 2448, which might suggest an 8.1 megapixel camera.

Since the image might have been snapped with the resolution set lower than maximum, it is still uncertain whether the upcoming flagship device from Samsung will arrive on shelves with an 8MP or a 12MP camera on the back. Hopefully, it will be the latter.

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Script: LotusCMS

LotusCMS is one of the fastest, complete and most visually appealing flat-file CMSs you can find on the Internet these days.

Specifically designed on a flat-file access principle, the CMS can be installed on any web server in which a database connection is not available, or even blocked.

Useful features include user administration, automatic updates installer, module manager, custom SEO settings, pages, styles and template management.

LotusCMS is a good fit for small to medium projects, coming with plenty of self-included modules for blogging, menu management, WYSIWYG editing, file browsing, handling site backups and much, much more.

A graphic installer is also provided for easily installing the system on your server.

The LotusCMS website seems to be down for the moment, but most of the development and bug fixing is done via their SourceForge page anyway. Just install it on your web server and take it for a spin.

Download LotusCMS here.

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Galaxy S II Ice Cream Sandwich Source Code Released

Today, South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung Electronics made available for download the source code for the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich firmware for its Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. 

The leading handset vendor started to deliver the update to its users last week, and is expected to make it available for most of them in the not-too-distant future. 

Before that, however, it appears that modders and developers have the possibility to come up with custom ROMs for the mobile phone, now that the source code for it is available for download. 

The files and libraries included in the release will provide enthusiasts with the option to improve aspects of the device, including battery life, processor overclocking and more. 

The source code for the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich platform for the Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100 is available for download from the Samsung Open Source Resource Center.

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Kaspersky Solves Duqu Framework Mystery

On March 7, Kaspersky Lab experts revealed that after analyzing Duqu’s framework they were unable to precisely determine what programming language had been used to develop it. Now they think they have the answer and they say that it’s most likely a custom object oriented C called “OO C”.

Kaspersky security researchers asked the community for help in finding out the name of the programming language and the most popular suggestions were variants of LISP, Forth, Erlang, Google Go, Delphi, OO C, and old compilers for C++.

Based on the community’s responses, they concluded that the input code was pure C and it was compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 with the options /O1, to minimize its size, and /Ob1, which ensures that it expands only inline.

There are two main possibilities. The code was either written using a custom OO C framework, or it was entirely written in OO C manually, without any language extensions. 

“No matter which of these two variants is true, the implications are impressive. The Payload DLL contains 95 Kbytes of event-driven code written with OO C, a language that has no automatic memory management or safe pointers,” Kaspersky’s Igor Soumenkov wrote.

“This kind of programming is more commonly found in complex ‘civil’ software projects, rather than contemporary malware. Additionally, the whole event-driven architecture must have been developed as a part of the Duqu code or its OOC extension.”

It’s believed that the developers are old school that don’t trust C++ and that’s probably why they relied on C. Another reason for using OO C is because back in the good old days it was more portable than C++.

The bottom line is that Duqu was created by a professional team that wrote the framework based on old code. Since this type of code is not used in newly developed malware, it makes Duqu one-of-a-kind.

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SLI Performance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680

After spotting pre-orders and photos of the Kepler, we finally get to see some benchmarking results for when two cards are set up in SLI. 

As far as the card alone goes, benchmarks have already illustrated its apparent superiority to the AMD Radeon HD 7970. 

That said, two GeForce GTX 680 cards in SLI were reportedly put through 3DMark 11 in Entry, Performance, and eXtreme presets. 

The Entry preset led to a score of E22878, while the Performance test scored P16860 and the eXtreme test left behind X6243. 

The GTX 680 were clocked at 1,150 MHz for the GPU and 7.20 GHz for the GDDR5 VRAM, while the rest of the system was made up of a six-core Intel Core i7-3930K CPU (at 5 GHz) and 16 GB of quad-channel DDR3-2133 MHz on an ASUS ROG Rampage IV Extreme motherboard. 

In other words, there was liberal tinkering with the performance numbers, but it is still perfectly possible to play games in 2560x1440/1600 resolution even without such overclocking.

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AMD Radeon HD 7870, HD 7850 Graphics Cards Reach Retail

Unveiled two weeks ago, AMD’s HD 7870 and HD 7850 graphics card released into the Radeon HD 7000 product family have now become available in the retail space with prices starting at $250 US (about 190 EUR).

The two Radeon HD designs are based on the company’s 28nm Pitcairn graphics core and come equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory buffer.

In the more powerful HD 7870, this will be accompanied by the Pitcairn XT GPU which includes 1408 streaming processors, 88 texture units and 24 ROP units, all of these connected to the memory via a 256-bit wide bus.

Thanks to the 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) VRAM operating clock, this configuration should be able to deliver 153GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

As far as the GPU is concerned, this works at 1000MHz, making it the second AMD graphics core to reach this frequency after the HD 7770.

For the Radeon HD 7850, AMD will decrease this frequency to 860MHz, while the memory works at the same 1,200MHz frequency (4.8GHz data rate). 

Other changes brought to the Pitcairn Pro core include a reduction in stream processors count, from 1408 to 1280, the number of texture units available also being lowered to 80 from 88 in the Pitcairn XT. 

“Bringing the first 28nm graphics cards to market in December spurred us to continue pushing the boundaries, product after product, culminating with today’s product availability,” said Zvika Greenstein, director of product management, GPU Division, AMD. 

“Look at our feature set: Graphics Core Next, AMD Eyefinity 2.0, AMD PowerTune, AMD ZeroCore Power technologies and of course our GHz Edition graphics cards – it is without doubt that AMD stands alone in the graphics industry,” concluded the company’s rep.

The recommended prices of the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 are set at $350 and $250 (266 and 190 EUR), respectively.

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