Intel’s Third Embarrassment of the Last Decade - Chapter II

With the Cortex A15 design, ARM has managed to find the holy grail of CPU design. This is something many seem to have not noticed during this pring. Sure we were bussy with Kepler's launch, AMD's Trinity leaks and Ivy Bridge, but none of these launches or expectations are as impressive as ARM's Cortex A15 design is. With the A15, ARM managed to achive three major goals of any CPU design team : a consecutive architecture (a) doubles the performance of the previous design while (b) consuming less power and actually (c) doubling the single threaded performance (IPC) rather than adding parallel processing power. Intel, AMD nor IBM have ever managed a feat just like this. ARM managed to find and requisition three "holy grails" if we may...

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First Single Slot GeForce GTX 670 Pictured

It appears that Nvidia has imposed little design limitations to its partners when it comes to the design of the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 670 cards. Galaxy’s custom GeForce GTX 670 reportedly got the digital camera treatment and pictures. The situation is much different with the GeForce GTX 690 dual GPU cards. There, Nvidia doesn’t seem to allow the partners to modify the reference design. The design of the single slot Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 video card is similar to Galaxy’s previously spotted single slot GTX 600 series card. We’re talking about the first single slot GTX 680 card ever pictured. The length of the PCB seems to be just 65% of the length of the reference design. The apparent length of the card is maintained...

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Script: TangoCMS

TangoCMS is a powerful blog engine and content management system (CMS) built on top of the Zula PHP framework. Open-sourced and free-to-use, TangoCMS represents a fast and at the same time versatile platform for creating and deploying a website. Tango CMS features an admin panel for managing the site, a graphic installer for easy deploying it anywhere, separation of content into blog posts and static pages (as WordPress), WYSIWYG editing, modules, themes, a specialized layout editor, users and groups management. Built from the start with a focus on security and standards compliance, TangoCMS won't disappoint advanced developers, as it neither would a person with lesser coding knowledge just looking to manage his site. A...

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Intel’s Third Embarrassment of the Last Decade - Chapter I

If anybody remembers Intel’s Atom launch, you’ll also remember how the company hoped that their chips will end up in everything from vacuum cleaners to fridges, cars and phones. With Intel’s “bribe” funds, incomparable R & D funds and unending monopoly of the x86 computing world, this was probably the only domain where everybody “knew” the giant won’t be able to succeed in if they keep on holding to the x86 ISA. The Medfield launch two weeks ago was a total success and we were all surprised. The x86 ISA has so much overhead that everybody thought and often stated that there will never be an x86 CPU cool enough to be used on large scale in phones. The CPU giant bragged about powering phones with x86 CPUs on yearly basis and...

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M Now in Eurocom PCs

Since NVIDIA's new graphics processors are running all over the place, Eurocom figured it may as well use one of them in its Racer 2.0 laptop.  The Racer 2.0 is one of the Eurocom laptops that have been receiving maintenance the most lately, as its maker has been experimenting with hardware and such.  Not long ago, it got the AMD Radeon HD 7970M and, now, it can be configured with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M.  For those who don't remember, the discrete GPU has 384 CUDA cores, a clock speed of 835 MHz and a texture fill rate of 30.4 billion per second.  2 GB of GDDR5 VRAm are present, on a 128-bit memory interface, a 2,000 MHz memory clock and a 64.0 GB/s memory bandwidth.  “NVIDIA's Geforce GTX...

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Details on Nokia Drive 3.0 and Nokia Transport 2.0 Emerge

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is moving closer to the release of two new applications for its Windows Phone devices, namely Nokia Drive 3.0 and Nokia Transport 2.0.  The company has already offered a preview of the new flavor of Nokia Drive at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, but hasn’t yet provided a specific release date for it.  However, the guys over at WP7Forum.ru have discovered additional details on the application, and have also come up with a series of screenshots of it in action.  One of the main new features that we should expect to make it inside Nokia Drive 3.0 would be its capability to learn driving habits based on user’s own “style,” thus becoming more efficient and personal.  Additionally,...

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AMD Trinity Architectural Preview - Part IV

Besides an enhanced IPC and generally, a more capable x86 core architecture, AMD is shooting for higher frequency on the desktop side and less power consumption in the mobile area. But all these don’t mean that AMD sees any advantage in a low yield 4.5 GHz part on 28 nm SOI rather than having a high yield 3.8 GHz APU on the bulk process. We’ve found out earlier this year, straight from the mouth of AMD’s Senior VP and CFO Thomas Seifert, under the guidance of newly appointed CEO Rory Read, that AMD will use bulk process for the 28 nm manufacturing step. “So with respect to SOI (Silicon On Insulator), we made statements that on 28-nanometer, all of our products will be bulk,” said Mr. Seifert during the conference call regarding...

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Watercool eK Presents Heatkiller GPU-X3 for GTX 680

German company Watercool eK has just launched the new HEATKILLER GPU-X, on its official website. This is a very good water cooling block that takes care of the GPU, but it also handles the heat from the memory chips. The water block is made of high-purity electrolytic copper and stainless steel. The terminal block is made of quality POM. In addition to the graphics processor and the memory chips, cooling is provided for the voltage regulators. The internal water channels are specially designed to keep the flow resistance very low. Large internal water channels also lead to a lower weight of the water block. The user will also receive thermal pads that are pre-cut to fit their specific location. The total weight is almost...

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GTX 680 Clocked at 1,442 MHz on Air Cooling

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 is already a beast of a board, but there will never be a shortage of people eager to push it towards and over its limits.  This time around, k|ngp|n showed just how far the card can go while using air cooling.  He previously overclocked the product to 1,957MHz, but he had to use rather extreme cooling measures.  On this occasion, though, he worked under tighter limitations but he still somehow drove the GPU from 1,058 MHz to 1,442 MHz.  The PC used for the test had an Intel Core i7-3960X (overclocked at just under 5 GHz) and 16 GB RAM (2,490 MHz). Upon running the 3DMark 11 test, the score was P12745.  The screenshot shows the voltage limit of 1.212V being fully exploited....

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Intel-Powered “Orange Santa Clara” Android Phone Coming Soon in the UK

The first Intel-Medfield Android smartphone has been recently launched on the market. Lava Xolo X900 is now available for purchase in India. However, Intel and Orange have teamed up to offer customers another device powered by an Intel processor, which goes by the name of Santa Clara. Orange Santa Clara is now listed on the carrier’s site, but no details on its availability or pricing options are known for the moment. The smartphone runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform and packs an Intel Atom single core processor clocked at 1.6 GHz.  Santa Clara sports a large 4.03-inch capacitive touchscreen display and embeds 16GB of internal memory, as well as an impressive 8-megapixel rear camera. According to Orange UK, there...

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Two Foxconn Nano PCs Spotted

Foxconn will soon launch a couple of barebone PCs called “Nano PCs” and priced at under $200 / 152 Euro. They are called AT-5300 and AT-5600 and use Intel and AMD processors, respectively. To be more precise, the former utilizes the Atom D2700, while the latter has an AMD E-450 “Brazos” APU (accelerated processing unit). Other than that, though, they are pretty similar, measuring 190 x 135 x 38 mm (7.67 x 5.31 x 1.49 inches) and sharing the same hardware configuration. While no memory and storage is pre-installed, 4 GB RAM and a 2.5-inch SSD can be added later. Connectivity and I/O are all covered though: two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a multi-card reader, Gigabit LAN, HDMI, D-Sub and 802.11n Wi-Fi. All this...

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