Yeston Works on Dual-GPU Radeon HD 6850 Graphics Card

Chinese graphics card maker Yeston, has already accustomed us to its highly customized graphics cards, so it comes as no surprise that the company is now working on developing a new Radeon HD 6950 dual-GPU solution. The card in question is still a prototype, but judging by the pictures provided by Expreview website this appears to be in the latest stages of design as the PCB layout seems to be complete and ready to enter mass production. In order to pack two Cayman Pro cores on the same printed circuit board, Yeston had to redesign its graphics card from scratch and it decided to go with a total of 12 phases for powering the components installed on the card. Each one of the two Radeon HD 6950 cores installed get their own 6-stage VRM, which...

Read more »

AMD Invests in BlueStack to Bring Android Apps to Windows Devices

AMD announced just earlier today that it has invested in BlueStack, a company that builds a special software which enables Windows-based devices to run applications designed for Android in a full-screen mode. The Sunnyvale chip maker said that the two companies will collaborate to optimize the BlueStacks App Player for Windows to run on tablet and notebook PCs powered by AMD accelerated processing units (APUs). None of the two companies have said if these optimizations also rely on the compute possibilities of the integrated Radeon graphics core used in AMD's APUs, but they did mention that the player will be able to run more than 200,000 apps currently available in the Android Market. “Bluestacks is a visionary software company that is, seamlessly,...

Read more »

Asus Transformer Tablet Will Receive Ice Cream Sandwich Update

Asus' original Eee Pad Transformer Android tablet will receive an official update to the fourth iteration of Google's mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, confirmed an Asus official a short while ago. "Transformer will be getting update to ICS - but we can’t provide a schedule at this stage," told Pocket Lint an Asus employee who wanted to remain anonymous. From what we know at this point in time, Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to arrive in a couple of weeks after the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which seems to be scheduled for the start of November. If Google sticks up to its schedule, this could mean that the update should go live by the end of the year. Asus' Chairman, Jonney Shih, revealed just recently that the...

Read more »

Abee Acubic M20 PC Case Is a Small Aluminum Cube

People who were wondering how long they'd have to wait before a new HTPC case showed up need wait no longer, as Abee Corp. has stepped forth to assuage that need. The new case that Abee, a company based in Japan, put together is called acubic M20 and will start shipping soon, if it hasn't already, in Europe. The price of the product is 239.90 Euro, which is more or less the same as $328.71, according to exchange rates. Then again, when, if ever, the item makes it to the US, the chance isn't very high that the price will reflect this. Regardless, the acubic M20 has quite a few things to justify the price, even though, in the end, it is still a fairly high-end product. After all, not many people are willing to pay that much for a case of any...

Read more »

Intel Says Both Dell and HP are Working on Ultrabook Designs

Dell and HP are some of the few major notebook makers that haven't announced any plans to introduce ultra-thin notebook following Intel's specifications for Ultrabooks, but both of these companies are currently working on such designs which will be ready the next year. "All the major brands. Going into next year, you'll see new designs come out from Dell and HP," said Intel's CEO Paul Otellini in an interview cited by Cnet. "And then when we introduce Ivy Bridge, our next processor, there's 60 more designs [that] are coming out," continued the company's CEO.  Rumors regarding Dell and HP's plans to introduce Ultrabooks have been circulating around the Web for quite some time now, but this is the first time that these have been confirmed...

Read more »

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Goals

Mark Shuttleworth wrote today, October 20th, on his blog, about the impending new Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) that will be launched next spring, April 26th. As Mark has already said, Linux distributions have tried to prioritize items to backport, but that puts the stability of known-good configurations very much at risk. Rick Spencer and his team from Canonical are working hard to prepare the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release for hardware challenges of the next few years.  Mark Shuttleworth also pointed out what goals the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) need to be: Adjusting the cycle to allocate more time for resolving issues; Introducing minimal new infrastructure or platform-visible change; Goal-driven and continuously benchmarked...

Read more »

RIM Sued Over BBX Trademark

Research in Motion future appears gloomier than ever, as the company is hit with legal actions against the BBX trademark and possibly for the last week's BlackBerry outage. More and more disgruntled enterprise customers are determined to take legal actions against RIM, unhappy by the company's compensations, which were announced a few days ago. If that wasn't enough, BASIS International, a company that claims the ownership of the BBx trademark is now suing RIM to protect its trademark. Unveiled two days ago, RIM's BlackBerry BBX is based on the QNX OS and aims to unify smartphones and tablets platforms in a single universal operating system. However, according to BASIS International, the company has loads of product licenses installed worldwide...

Read more »

Flashback C Trojan Goes for Mac OS X Defense Mechanism

Security researchers at F-Secure have found a new variant of the Flashback Trojan masquerading as an Adobe Flash installer package, this time its purpose being to disable the actual XProtect  defense mechanism in Mac OS X tasked with stopping such attacks. “There's something new brewing in Mac malware development (again),” say the people at F-Secure in a blog post. “Recent analysis has revealed to us that Trojan-Downloader:OSX/Flashback.C disables the automatic updater component of XProtect, Apple's built-in OS X anti-malware application,” the company writes. The original variant of Flashback was discovered by Austin, Texas-based Intego in September. Intego deals exclusively with Mac malware. The team of researchers at F-Secure has found...

Read more »

HIS Unveils Limited Edition 6950 IceQ with Deus Ex & Dirt3 Bundle

Almost two months after Eidos officially unveiled Deus Ex: Human Revolution, HIS has announced a special version of its 6950 IceQ graphics card that comes bundled with the game as well as with the Dirt 3 rally racer. The limited edition 6950 IceQ is available exclusively through Overclockers UK and carries a retail price of £229.99 (263 Euros or $361 US). Outside of the special bundle, the card doesn't differ in any way from the non-limited edition counterpart as it employs the same IceQ custom cooling solution that relies on four heatpipes for drawing the heat away from the core and into an aluminum heatsink. This covers most of the printed circuit board (PCB) of the Radeon HD 6950 and HIS claims it can deliver both improved cooling performance...

Read more »