Jun 28, 2010

Texas Instruments USB 3.0 host controller almost here

Other key parts ready today

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS HASN’T been in a hurry to bring its USB 3.0 products to market, but it now appears that the company is getting ready to start rolling out its first few products. Today TI announced the availability of a USB 3.0 physical layer transceiver called the TUSB1310 which is targeting a wide range of devices such as smartphones, portable media players, navigation devices and digital still and video cameras etc.
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Jun 28, 2010

Asus rumoured to outsource motherboard production again

ECS seems to be the likely partner

THERE’S NO DOUBT that Asus is getting ready to outsource more and more of its production now that the Pegatron spinoff has finally been set in stone. As of the end of last week, Asus and Pegatron are two entirely separate businesses trading on the Taiwanese stock market as separate businesses. As the two didn’t part as friends, it now looks like Asus is looking at outsourcing options for its motherboard and graphics card business and it seems like ECS is on the cards once again.
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Jun 25, 2010

iPhone 4 Black-Balls Right Handed Porn Seekers

…or should that be blue?

APPLE INC., ESTEEMED purveyor of glass-covered shiny objects, has launched its latest salvo against the pornography industry with the release of its new “retina-display” packing iPhone 4.  The all new fingerprint collector has the highest pixel-density of any phone to date, offering a 4X improvement in areolic-clarity compared to previous models.  The appeal of this feature is immediately apparent, however Lord Steve-o has built in a special surprise for his right-handed lackeys.
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Jun 25, 2010

128GB BDXL Blu-ray spec finalised

Only for BD-R, but 100GB BD-RE discs are also coming

THE BLU-RAY DISC Association has announced that it has finally ratified the BDXL standard which means that we’ll see 128GB writeable Blu-ray discs in the future. This is the good news, the bad news is that these are four layer discs which will require new drives to both write and read the new standard.
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Jun 25, 2010

iPhone 4 has reception problems

Whatever you do, don’t touch the side of the phone

LO AND BEHOLD, Apple’s new baby, the iPhone 4 isn’t more than a day or so old in terms of retail availability and there are already reports of problems with the signal. Despite Apple’s new “magic” antenna design, the web is full of complaints from people that are having reception problems with the iPhone 4. The solution to the problem is actually rather simple; don’t touch the lower left side of the phone.
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Jun 24, 2010

Monster announces universal 3D shutter glasses

Works with all 3D HDTVs

3D GLASSES AND 3D TVs have proven to be something of a problem when it comes to interoperability, but now it appears that a solution is on the horizon thanks to Monster Cable. Its new Monster Vision Max 3D glasses are mean to be a universal solution that works with any and all 3D TVs that rely on LCD shutter glasses, but is it really that simple?
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Jun 24, 2010

The Epic Debate Part 5: Weapons unsheathed

Tim Sweeney vs Andrew Richards on graphics and programmability

THE SECOND TO last part of the Epic debate/casual conversation between Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards gets a bit testy at times, to the point of making the camera man nervously pan to the provided weapons. The two also talk about tech as well, and in the end, no one dies, that has to wait for Part 6.
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Jun 24, 2010

AMD aims the Opteron 4100 at the clouds

Socket C32 is finally out in the open

TIS THE WEEK for cloud products, and AMD is not one to miss the opportunity to attach lots of new Opteron 4100s to the cloud. The chip itself is half of a Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100, but the cloud is where AMD thinks they will sell the most units.
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Jun 23, 2010

The Epic Debate Part 4: Does Cell unfail?

Our heroes go over how to thread an engine for beginners

IN THE LATEST chunk of the GDC chat with Tim Sweeney of Epic and Andrew Richards of Codeplay, the topics are Cell and the cost of threading. If you want to know what the coders and engine guys think of many cores, here you are.
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Jun 23, 2010

MSI outs its first Athlon II Neo not(net)ebook

12-inches of Atom competition

LOOKING FOR SOMETHING a little bit more powerful than a netbook, but don’t have a lot of cash to spend? Well, it looks like MSI’s new Wind12 U250 is just what you’ve been waiting for as this AMD Athlon II Neo based notebook is about to give the best netbooks a good run for their money at what we’d expect to be a very similar price point.
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Jun 23, 2010

New SD card speed classification system arrives

For high-performance SDHC and SDXC cards

THE SD ASSOCIATION has announced new high-speed symbols for SDHC and SDXC cards which are once again meant to make our lives easier. The old Class 2, 4, 6 and 10 ratings will be kept for older memory cards that don’t meet the new UHS or Ultra High Speed SD card standard. The new UHS speed classifications as plenty of room to grow, especially as we’ve only hit the first generation of SDXC cards.
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Jun 23, 2010

Tilera gets into the cloud server business

512 cores in 2U, 10,000+ in a rack

TILERA MAKES CPUS that have lots of cores and a fairly unique multi-mesh interconnect fabric that live happily in embedded devices from AV equipment to Deep Packet Inspection (boo hiss) devices. Today, the company is entering a market that I never expected to see them in, cloud compute servers.
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Jun 22, 2010

Google Voice Opens Up To All U.S. Residents

Space-Time Continuum Suffers

Gas up the Delorean (premium Libyan plutonium only please), make sure you have enough road to get up to 88 MPH, and get ready to see some serious shiitake mushrooms with bacon sauce.  In a blog post from the future (seriously), Google announced that today officially marks the public opening of its Voice service (formerly Grand Central) to any life form with a Google account currently living in the U.S.  So if you’re a fan of time-travel and (mostly) free stuff, you can get started right here, right now.
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Jun 22, 2010

Toshiba working on boosting SSD write speeds to 4.2Gbps

Using a boost converter

WITH THE INTRODUCTION of SATA 6Gbp, SSD drives got a much needed, faster interface, but it appears that we’ve hit another “wall” when it comes to performance of SSD drives, at least higher density drives. SSDs with more than 16 NAND Flash memory chips on them will have power issues in the near future which prevent them from reaching optimal write speeds. The good news is that Toshiba is already working to solve this problem with the help of a Japanese research group headed by Ken Takeuchi.
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