Intel X79 Boards Are Compatible with 2012 Ivy Bridge-E CPUs Says Report

Introduced just at the beginning of this week together with Intel's first Sandy Bridge-E desktop processors, the X79 chipset is expected to be compatible with the chip maker's 2012 high-performance CPUs based on the Ivy Bridge-E architecture. This information was provided by a user from the Chinese XFastest forum, who posted what appears to be an Intel slide which details the socket compatibility of the company's X79 chipset for LGA 2011 motherboards. According to this slide, users who buy an X79 Express powered board will still have a use for this after the release of the Ivy Bridge-E processors, which is expected to take place next year. While the slide doesn't go into details, it does list the current Intel DX79SI motherboard, which leads...

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Intel Answers Our Questions, Knights Corner Demystified

Intel made the official announcement of the Knights Corner parallel processing accelerator but some things weren't perfectly clear, so we reached out to Intel, who were able, and willing, to answer a few of our questions. To offer some context, Knights Corner is Intel's answer to the NVIDIA Tesla and all other GPU computing modules spreading across the HPC (high-performance computing) market. It claims to have a much higher performance than the strongest such PCI Express GPU-based adapter, in fact (1 TFLOPs or more compared to 665 GFLOPS). To that end, we e-mailed an Intel representative with some questions. The first thing we requested was for some clarity to be shed on the form factor of the product and its implications. The Knights Corner,...

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Intel 7-Series Ivy Bridge Chipsets Get Detailed

In the first quarter of 2012, Intel will unveil its next-generation Core-series processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture and together with these chips, the company will also release a new range of chipsets which have just been detailed in a series of leaked slides. Together with the Ivy Bridge CPUs, Intel's 7-series motherboard chipsets will form the Maho Bay desktop platform, and the chip maker plans to split this PCH range into two different groups. The first of these will target the consumer market and includes three platform controller hubs (PCHs) dubbed Z77, Z75 and H77, which feature similar specifications apart from some minor changes. The most feature rich chipset of the three, the Z77, will packs four USB 3.0 ports, two SATA...

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AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 CPUs Arrive in Penguin Computing Servers

Penguin Computing has just announced that AMD's recently launched Opteron 6200 and 4200 server processors based on the Bulldozer architecture are now available in the company's Altus systems and were also used in an early HPC cluster deployed at the University of Delaware. The Altus servers are available in various configurations containing between one and four AMD Opteron processors paired with as much as 32 DIMMs in order to provide a maximum of 512GB of system memory. No matter the Opteron processor chosen, Penguin Computing has both 1U and 2U rackable Altus servers on offer, the taller units also coming with support for up to eight HDD or SSD storage drives. The cluster deployed at University of Delaware is comprised of 200 compute servers,...

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Symbian Carla and Donna to Follow Symbian Belle Soon

Nokia is still committed to providing a better experience to those users who own devices running under the latest flavors of the Symbian mobile operating system.  Following the release of Symbian^3 last year and that of Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle earlier in 2011, the Finnish mobile phone maker is set to launch new flavor of the platform, to provide users with new features on their devices. Reportedly, the handset vendor will soon bring to phones two new versions of the mobile platform, namely Symbian Carla and Symbian Donna. A leaked screenshot that emerged over at Symbian Latino is responsible for bringing this info to the web, though it is a blurry one and not all details on it are as clear as one might have wanted them to be. According...

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Sparkle Calibre X550 and X560 Graphics Cards Now Bundled with 3D Glasses

Sparkle has just announced that its Calibre X560 and X550 graphics cards based on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 and GTX 550 designs come now in a special version that is bundled together with a pair of 3D glasses built by AP. The bundle will be available in limited quantities and the 3D glasses included are not active shutter glasses as most of us would expect from an Nvidia-based solution, but rather polarized glasses. Both the Calibre X550 and X560 use cooling solutions custom designed by Sparkle in order to deliver improved cooling and overclocking performance. In the case of the Calibre X560 this relies on two 8mm thick copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the GPU and into an aluminum fin array covered by two 9cm ball bearing fans. According...

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Netlist Develops 32GB RDIMM Memory Module with Planar-X Technology

Netlist keeps expanding the capacity of its HyperCloud series of RDIMM memory and recently announced that it has developed a new DDR3 module that has reached a whopping 32GB in capacity. The memory module uses the standard 4Gb DRAM that is found in other high capacity DDR3 memory solutions, but packs no less than 72 such chips on a single PCB. In order to achieve this feat, Netlist put to work two of its proprietary technologies, Planar-X which was used for packaging the chips on the printed circuit board and its patented rank multiplication technology. Rank multiplication allows for the four individual physical ranks of chips to the hidden from the memory controller hub, making it believe regular 2 vRanks memory is used. In next-gen dual-socket...

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Windows 8 Loaded on Nokia Tablet in June 2012

Windows 8 will certainly look great on tablet PCs when they become available for purchase in 2012 (in fact, it already appears to be great on the Samsung tablet that was showcased earlier this year) especially with a larger number of vendors committing to the launch of such devices.  One of them appears to be Nokia, a company that has just put up for sale its first device running under Windows Phone, and which reportedly confirmed plans to launch a Windows 8 tablet PC as well next year. In a recent interview with LesEchos, Nokia France head, Paul Amsellem, confirmed that the company was working on a tablet PC that would run under Windows 8 when made available for purchase in June next year. No specific details on the device itself have...

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Nokia Official Confirms Higher-End Windows Phone Devices [Update]

Following the release of Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710 with Windows Phone on board, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is gearing up for the release of a new set of handsets based on Microsoft's platform, and some of them will be even better spec'd than existing devices.  In a recent interview with French newspaper LesEchos, Paul Amsellem, head of Nokia France, confirmed that there will be more powerful Nokia Windows Phones set to hit the market soon. According to him, Nokia Lumia 800 can be compared to a BWM 5 series car, and the company is gearing up for the release of handsets that would fall into the 7 Series lineup too, as well as some in the 3 Series. Nokia has lost the battle at the high-end of the market a few years ago,...

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Gigabyte's Dual UEFI BIOS Looks Stunning

Q4 has brought a nice breakthrough in the world of PC BIOS: the eye-candy UEFI version, a very neat 3D GUI which seems to fill the gap between the unexperienced user and the – until now – rather abstract, and even scary BIOS screen. The new 3D BIOS from Gigabyte can run in two modes: the 3D and the Advanced mode, each boasting killer looks and improved functionality. While the 3D mode displays a picture of the actual motherboard you're working with, it also highlights the devices whose settings you're about to tweak. The Advanced mode sports the traditional list look, but with far better graphics than the old black/ blue and yellow/white scheme. Even more, the dual BIOS architecture brings two different ROMs sporting the second chip as a backup/ recovery unit for seamless and uninterrupted...

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Mach Xtreme 16 GB RAM Kit Doesn't Bash Wallets

Mach Xtreme didn't actually outright say what it was, but it promises that the price of the Urban Series Quad-Channel DDR3 memory kit will not be too hard on one's life savings.  Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processors have appeared and, with them, X79 motherboards with high aims for memory. Mach Xtreme is adding its name to the list of companies that unleashed a quad-channel DDR3 kit for these platforms. Not that there is anything shocking about this development, of course. After all, the high-grade Intel chips demand matching RAM to back them up, being enthusiast parts meant for overclocking. Mach Xtreme decided to, in a way, repeat what it did back in August instead of gunning for the greatest performance and capacity heights. As such,...

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