WELL THAT DIDN’T take long, the first 3DMark Vantage numbers for one of AMD’s upcoming ATI Radeon HD 6800 cards has made its way onto the internets with a bit of help from a Chinese forum member. Normally we’d be very sceptical to post something like this, but the creator behind GPU-Z told us that the screen shot appears to be the real deal.
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AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.
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ZOTAC HAS FINALLY launched its CULV powered mini-ITX motherboard that we spotted back in June at Computex. Alongside it Zotac also announced a pair of new ZBOX mini PCs which also use Intel’s CULV processors paired up with Nvidia’s ION chipset. We’re still waiting for a few more products from Zotac that we were shown behind closed doors at Computex, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, instead let’s take a closer look at today’s announcements.
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NETGEAR IS GETTING ready to unleash two new HD capable media players unto the world and judging by the specs, we’re looking at two very capable devices here. At the same time Netgear is also about to launch two additions to its range of HomePlug AV adapters of which the high-end model is said to offer a theoretical transfer speed of 500Mbit/s.
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GOOGLE ISN’T A company that’s afraid to take on the competition with its many web based services and its latest addition allows you to make voice calls for free from within Gmail. Ok, so it’s a limited time offer until the end of the year and it only applies to calls initiated from within the US to phone numbers in the US or Canada.
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DESPITE ALL THE criticism Apple gets, the company has done one thing well, in fact so well that its computers are playing an entirely different game than the humble beige box we all know as the PC. When Apple moved to x86 it dropped hardware legacy support and started with a clean slate and we’re now at a stage where the PC is desperately in need for the same treatment. You may ask why, well read on and I’ll try to explain.
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WESTERN DIGITAL HAS been trying to branch out into new product areas beyond its storage solutions and have so far managed to do quite well with its media players. Today the company announced yet a new addition to its product line-up, the Livewire Powerline AV network kit.
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AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about Bulldozer, the upcoming new desktop and server core. It is the largest architectural jump in standard x86 cores in a long long time.
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INTEL AND NOKIA’S joint product development has now spun off a join laboratory that will be researching the world of “3-D” [sic] for mobile devices. The research will take place at Oulun yliopisto or University of Oulu, if you prefer, and it’s meant to lead to “new user interfaces and experiences”. We can’t guarantee the virtual sauna, but considering the Finnish people’s obsession with saunas, well, who knows what will transpire…
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INTEL HAS FINALLY unveiled its dual core mobile Atom N550 processor and the netbook manufacturers are jumping at the chance of getting something new into the market. However, don’t expect to see a raft of new designs, as instead it’ll be pretty much the same old chassis with slightly different bits inside.
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THERE HAVE LONG been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.
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INTEL’S PURCHASE OF McAfee is quite synergistic and makes a lot of sense to anyone following the company. Contrary to most opinions out there however, it has nothing to do with security.
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HP is an interesting company. They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it’s all seems very boring to the casual observer. They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses. They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable. Well the blob has done it again. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
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OCZ’S REVODRIVE PCI Express based SSD was something of a surprise when it was announced and it’s a fairly unique product in the market considering its competitive retail price compared to a standard SSD. However, it’s now looking like OCZ is readying a new model called the RevoDrive-B which is yet another PCI Express based SSD, but with an extra trick up its sleeve, it’s got a pair of SATA ports for drive caching.
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AMD’S 3DNOW! INSTRUCTION set was never as big of a hit as Intel’s MMX or SSE and it now seems like AMD is getting ready to drop support, sorry, that’s deprecate support for 3DNow! This means that most new AMD processors will no longer have support for 3DNow! but judging by AMD’s blog post on the subject, it’s hardly going to have any effect on the performance of its future processors.
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