THERE HAVE BEEN some concerns over TSMC’s manufacturing capacity of 12-inch 40nm wafers and it seems like the company is set on solving this problem, although it won’t happen overnight. TSMC broke ground for its new Fab 15 earlier today in Taichung, Taiwan and the new fabrication plant is set to be ready to start mass production in the first quarter of 2012.
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Another day, another quarterly earnings conference call. AMD came in with their latest and greatest batch of numbers, tidbits of product information, and future guidance for the company. While your man was unable to squeeze any questions in this time around, (and apparently vuvuzelas are frowned upon during these conference calls for some reason) there were still plenty of interesting nuggets of information dropped along the way, so let’s begin.
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APPLE MIGHT NOT be having the best of times at the moment thanks to the iPhone 4 antenna issues, but it seems like that isn’t stopping the company from working on new products. The latest rumour is of an 11.6-inch MacBook Air and the much rumoured next gen iPod Touch. The new rumours are courtesy of Digitimes and although the Taiwanese outfit has been correct before, we’ll take the MacBook Air rumour with a pinch or two of salt for now.
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THERE’S NO DOUBT that Google’s Android smartphone operating system has become a huge hit and we’re seeing more and more devices with that OS. Details of what is potentially HTC’s next high-end Android handset has turned up on a UK website and it looks like HTC is getting ready to take up the fight with the latest models from its competitors.
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While listening in on hour-long industry financial conference calls should be the most fulfilling part of any geek’s day, for some reason people expect outfits like us to break it all down into nice bite-size chunks that they can assimilate over morning coffee. Whatever, who are we to judge? Bottom line, Intel is on a tear this year and has just announced record quarterly; revenue ($10.8B), gross margin (67%), operating income ($4.0B), and earnings per share ($0.51).
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THE ANNUAL RUNNING of the moles in Santa Clara yesterday had some surprising results, not just in the record number of IC engineers gored, but also the information leaked by those trying save their backsides. One of them even leaked some details about the upcoming PSP2’s CPU, but it didn’t save him.
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THE MOST IMPORTANT announcement from SemiCon West was a subtle statement from Global Foundries about tools. Putting some bits together, it is pretty clear that the company is going to use EUV lithography at the 15nm node.
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SONY IMPRESSED WITH its first two NEX mirrorless DSLR cameras (for a lack of a better term), but its third camera in the NEX series is something entirely different, namely a camcorder with interchangeable lenses. It shoots 1080p video, of course, but in addition to this, it also shoots 14Megapixel still pictures thanks to its Exmor APS HD CMOS sensor.
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WE BROKE THE news about Renesas new USB 3.0 host controller back in April. Back then we reported that the new controller was going to have a reduced power consumption, but at the time we didn’t know by how much. Renesas has finally unveiled the new host controller and has managed to reduce the power consumption by 85 percent when no peripherals are attached to the controller’s ports.
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JUNIPER SYSTEMS HAS announced its new Mesa Rugged Notepad and if you’re the kind of person that likes to take your “pad” with you wherever you go, no matter the conditions, then this is the product you’ve been waiting for. Juniper Systems claims that it’s the world’s first rugged notepad, although we’re not entirely sure that this statement is correct, although as they’re not calling it a tablet but rather a notepad, they might just be right.
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AS OF YESTERDAY, the Open Handset Alliance gained a new member in MediaTek, a company mostly known for its optical drive controllers and various solutions for DVD players. However, the company has more recently become a serious player in the cellular phone market, especially in China, so its move to join the OHA makes a lot of sense.
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What a difference a “4” makes. The NDA on Nvidia’s new midrange GTX 460 (GF104) cards was lifted last night to a general reception of “right performance at the right price”. No doubt, after reading over many different reviews this card appears to be the real deal at the $200 price point (for now). Despite the glowing reviews however one nagging question remained; considering that GF104 has an estimated die size of 320mm2 (which is nearly 96% of AMD’s high end Cypress part at 334mm2), can Nvidia actually make money on this part, or is it simply designed to put pressure on the market share laceration that’s been bleeding out lately.
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IT’S NOT EASY to differentiate yourself as a motherboard manufacturer these days when it comes to hardware features, as very few things are exclusive to one manufacturer, bar possibly power regulation design and a few other little features. This means that we’ve started to see a lot more in-house software features, some of them rather good, while others have proven to be less useful. Today, Gigabyte announced two new software features for overclockers, Cloud OC and Hotkey OC.
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NVIDIA DID INDEED launch the GTX 460 today and if all the reviews are anything to go by, the new cards have proven to be better than expected in terms of performance, at least compared to the early leaked numbers. The $199.99 price point we guestimated from the European pricing also proved to be correct for the 768MB models, but if you’re going to get a GTX460, do yourself a favour and spend an extra $20 on a 1GB card.
Updated
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AFTER WEEKS OF hunting down obscure sources harboring even more obscure technical knowledge, we can say that Nvidia massively screwed up the GF100 based cards, they have reverted to using some of the Bumpgate bad materials again. Nvidia is once again unwilling to talk about it, and their customers probably will be kept in the dark too.
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Although Intel has announced new high-end parts that are slated to launch later this year the i9-7900X is still Intel’s fastest desktop CPU to date.
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In this article we’ll look at the air cooled version of AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64.
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Today we’ll be looking at AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU.
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In this review we’ll be looking at AMD’s other Ryzen Threadripper chip the 1920X.
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