Nintendo Wii U Will Be Present at CES 2012

Nintendo has confirmed that it will be showcasing the Nintendo Wii U at the upcoming CES 2012 conference, but don’t expect the company to allow anyone to try it out, as the Nintendo mentioned that it will be available only for media members and no new content, besides the things shown at E3 2011, will be present. The Nintendo Wii U was originally announced back in summer at E3 2011, when the Japanese company finally presented its new console, which should put it on equal footing with the likes of Sony or Microsoft, and their PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, respectively. Since then, however, we haven’t heard lots of other details, besides a confirmation that the ‘final version’ of the device will be presented at E3 2012, leaving rumors about its...

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Llano Production Shortages May Be Over for AMD, Says Analyst

Ever since AMD has released its first A-Series APUs based on the Llano architecture, the chip maker has been facing production shortages that affected the market availability of these processors, but an analyst believes that these troubles are now over for AMD. What makes the analyst believe that the shortage may be over is the fact that AMD has recently announced a new series of APUs that feature slightly higher operating frequencies than the parts they will replace. "The new parts are basically speed bumps, and I am taking the fact AMD can ship faster versions of A-series chips as an indicator they may be able to improve their availability," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of Insight64 who was cited by EETimes. "Retailers such as Newegg...

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ASRock Readies New Fatal1ty Motherboard Using Intel X79 Chipset

Not wanting to leave the Intel X79 gaming motherboard market entirely to Asus and Gigabyte, ASRock is developing a new Fatal1ty-series board for Intel’s LGA 2011 processors which is expected to come out in the next few weeks. The motherboard in question is called the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional and was developed in order to include features that will appeal to gaming fans all over, such as a Fatal1ty mouse port and support for 4-way CrossFireX and SLI setups. As it’s the case with most other motherboards based on the Intel X79 chipset, ASRock’s Fatal1ty model also comes equipped with four DIMM sockets supporting quad-channel memory with speeds up to DDR3-2400. Right to the left of the DIMM slots, users will find no less than four properly...

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Benchmarks Make Appearance, Easily Surpasses GTX 580

Just a few more hours are left until AMD makes official the Radeon HD 7970, but for those of you not wanting to wait for the first reviews of the card to arrive you can now check out AMD’s own benchmarks for this GPU, which were just recently leaked on the Web. The results are taken straight out of AMD’s “Benchmarking Guide” for the HD 7970 that is provided to receivers together with their test sample, and cover the performance of the card both in single and in CrossFireX setups. This is then compared with the results achieved by the previous generation HD 6970 as well as to those of Nvidia’s GTX 580. Needless to say, the Radeon HD 7970 comes out on top in all of these tests and even manages to provide palyable frame rates in the HD3D mode...

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NVIDIA Enables ARM Supercomputers With Carma DevKit

NVIDIA did make it fairly clear it was going to milk the ARM cow for all it was worth and, sure enough, it now has what it claims will enable ARM supercomputers.  The idea of ARM supercomputers may not be particularly appealing, but some sorts of computations could definitely do with a more energy efficient means of being carried out.  Certainly, ARM chips don't support x64 (yet), but that does not mean that companies behind it aren't going to find some uses for it anyway.  NVIDIA is one of those companies and has made its support crystal clear now that the Carma exists.  Carma is a development kit for the easy creation of HPC applications that want both ARM computing prowess and parallel processing.  It uses the...

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Nokia Belle UI Arrives on Existing Phones in February 2012

Two months from now, a wide range of Nokia mobile phone users will enjoy a new UI on their devices, the Nokia Belle, previously known as Symbian Belle.  The Finnish mobile phone maker has just made the official announcement on this, and also confirmed the handsets that will receive it: Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia E6, Nokia X7, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7, and Nokia Oro. The Nokia Belle user interface will be made available for download for these devices in February 2012, the company has just announced.  Moreover, the leading handset vendor announced that the new platform UI will start shipping on new units of smartphones that are already available on shelves.  “Launched earlier this year with Nokia 701, Nokia 700 and Nokia 603 smartphones,...

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AMD Radeon HD 7900 Will Get Cheaper PCB Soon

Not all video card makers may want to stick to the precise design of the rapidly approaching video cards from Advanced Micro Devices and, luckily, AMD is already developing an alternative.  AMD hasn't released the Radeon HD 7900 graphics card series. That will only happen tomorrow (December 22, 2011).  That didn't stop leaks from revealing what the board and the PCB (printed-circuit board) looked like, though.  In fact, we have already written about the matter in whatever detail we could, here.  What is now coming to light are pictures of yet another PCB, belonging to the same cards.  Specifically, it might end up belonging to the HD 7900 series as soon as it is finished and sent to AMD's partners.  The photos...

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU and PCB Pictured

With less than one day separating us from AMD’s release of its Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, the first pictures showcasing the PCB as well as the Tahiti XT GPU used for the HD 7000 series found their way online. The pictures show both of the card’s printed circuit board as well as the cooling solution employed by AMD, which on the first look seems to resemble pretty much the setup that the company used to chill the HD 6900 series. There are however a couple of differences that are supposed to improve the airflow provided to the GPU and make the whole setup quitter, but for the most part the two are pretty similar. Moving to the PCB, the images provided by PC In Life reveal that the card will get its power through a 5+1 phase VRM that is...

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