AMD to Increase CPU Performance by 10-15% Every Year

Today's launch of the FX-Series processors hasn't been the success that everybody has hoped for and AMD knows that, so in the following years the company plans to improve the speed of the Bulldozer cores by 10 to 15 percent with each new generation that arrives. This information was made public by AMD itself and the chip maker states that the performance increase will come from a series of improvements to the architecture's IPC, timing and frequencies. Energy efficiency should also get better with each new core, which definitely seems like the right thing to do considering the high power consumption of the current FX-Series CPUs. The first Bulldozer-derived core to get these new improvements is Piledriver, which is going to be used in the 2012...

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AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPUs Will Use Liquid Chamber Cooling

At the AMD Fusion 11 Taipei conference that took place at the beginning of this month, AMD has disclosed additional details about its next-generation Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards, including the fact that high-end solutions will come with a new liquid chamber cooling solution. AMD had on display such a cooler during the conference together with a slide that detailed the main differences between its cooling technology and the one utilized by its competitors in vapor chamber designs. The technology is going to be used by all of AMD's partners who follow the reference design set by the chip maker for the Radeon HD 7900 series graphics cards. As most of you know, AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7000 graphics card series will be comprised of low-...

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Intel X79 Is 50% More Expensive than the Z68, Brings Almost No New Features

The pricing of Intel's X79 chipset for the LGA 2011 motherboards has been uncovered, and although this doesn't bring almost any new features when compared with the Z68 it does come with a 50% higher price tag. When motherboard makers buy the X79 PCH from Intel they have to shell out $73 (€53) from their pocket, according to Fudzilla, compared with the $48 (€34.8) Intel asks for the Z68. Despite this huge increase in price, the X79 doesn't bring any new features when compared with its LGA 1155 counterpart as Intel has moved most of the hardware logic that was traditionally found in the chipset inside its Sandy Bridge-E processors. This includes the quad-channel memory controller and the PCI Express controller, which makes the X79 a simple PCH...

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Nokia 800 Spotted in Leaked Poster in India

It should not be too long before Nokia unveiled to the world their first smartphones running under Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, and some more proof that one of the first such handsets will be called Nokia 800 has just emerged.  The smartphone was spotted into the wild before, being presented to the world a few months ago as the Nokia SeaRay, and is expected to make it to shelves in the next several weeks.  Recently, the upcoming mobile phone made it in a series of leaked ads, one of which even suggested that it might be called Nokia 800, and a new shot of promo materials for the new device has just made an appearance.  We're referring here to an image of a Nokia 800 banner from Airtel, which should be the carrier...

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Text Writing on Nokia N9 Explained on Video

Nokia N9, the first smartphoene from the Finnish handset vendor to arrive on the market with the MeeGo operating system on board, features an all-touch design, which means that there are no hardware keys on its front.  This means that all the typing will have to be made using the handset's 3.9-inch AMOLED screen, which might prove difficult in some cases.  However, there are a few tips that could ease the typing on the Nokia N9's screen, as you can learn from the video attached to this piece. The soft keyboard on N9 might not be Swype, but it will still enable fast typing if used properly.  Those who are not accustomed with typing on the screen of mobile phones will certainly find the said tips very welcomed, though others will also be able to appreciate the...

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Asus Starts Selling 18-Inch Notebook with Desktop HDD Support

Asus has just started selling another desktop replacement notebook in Europe, the X93SV, which is built around an Full HD 18.4-inch display and was designed to support 3.5-inch desktop hard drives. Under the bonnet, the X93SV sports some serious horsepower as its based on Intel's second generation Core processors, also known by the code name of Sandy Bridge. Users have the option of choosing between three such chips, the Core i3-2310M, Core i5-2410M and Core i7-2670QM, the latter of which includes four processing cores working at a base frequency of 2.2GHz. The fast Intel processors can be seconded by up to 16GB of DDR3 system memory (four SODIMM sockets are available) and by a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics card. This comes equipped...

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Asus UX21 and UX31 Zenbook to Reach Europe in November

Recently launched by the notebook maker in the US, Asus UX21 and UX31 Ultrabooks won't become available in Europe until November of this year and their starting price will be set at 999 Euros. In the US, Asus has said that its two Ultrabooks will reach retail today, but a quick Google search and e-tailer scan hasn't managed to find any of these notebooks on sale. The main difference between the UX21 and UX31 ZenBook is the diagonal of the screen used, as the first one carries a 12.1-inch display while the latter is slightly larger measuring 13.3-inch (1600x900 resolution). Despite this difference, both designs use a thin and light anodized aluminum uni-body chassis that measures no more than 17mm at its thickest point, with an all-aluminum...

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AMD Bulldozer Is Finally Here, but Performance Disappoints

After what can only be described as a long wait, AMD has now finally launched the first FX-Series processors built using its Bulldozer architecture, but despite the high expectations the chips mostly disappoint as they are only marginally faster than previous Phenom II X6 CPUs. The Bulldozer architecture AMD's FX-Series is based upon is a major departure from all of the company's previous cores, and at its heart stands the Bulldozer module. Each such module features two integer cores and a shared floating point core paired together with individual L1 cache, a shared L2 cache and a common front end. The latter includes the fetch and decode logic that is shared by the two integer cores and each module is now capable to fetch and decode up to...

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Motorola DROID HD (Droid RAZR) Emerges in Leaked Shots

Mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility is getting ready for the release of new handsets running under Google's Android operating system, and the Motorola DROID HD might be one of them.  The handset has been spotted into the wild a few times before, and was also seen as the Droid RAZR or the Spyder.  Now, the handset has made an appearance into the wild in a series of leaked shots, available courtesy of Engadget, which confirm the fact that it will become available on Verizon.  Moreover, the mobile phone can be seen in those photos with the 4G LTE logo next to Verizon Wireless' logo, which should confirm the fact that it will be released at Big Red with support for the carrier's 4G network.  The new device is expected to be...

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BlackBerry Network Outage Hits Day 3 - 10/12/2011

Starting Monday when BlackBerry owners were unable to access their emails, BBM services or any other application that requires data connectivity, the BlackBerry network started goind down and up in most regions of the world.  Even though at first the outage affected only Europe, Middle East and Africa, as of yesterday it expanded to South America, Canada and the small parts of the United States. Services were temporarily restored in some countries on October 11, but then BlackBerry services have started to drop in countries that were not affected initially. I reached out to RIM for official statements regarding the outage but at first their replies were little more than apologies and, later on, confirmations that its services were fully...

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