Google Nexus 7 Camera Photo Emerges Online, EXIF Data Shows

Google and Asus have been long rumored to plan the release of an appealing yet affordable tablet PC in the popular Nexus line, and some more proof on the matter has emerged. The EXIF data of a photo that was spotted recently on Picasa Web Albums shows that the Nexus tablet PC would be real, and that it was also packed with imaging capabilities. Of course, EXIF data can be manipulated, and we’ll have to take this info with a grain of salt until proved to be real. The device, supposedly called Nexus 7, is expected to become official this month at Google I/O. Rumor has it that, although it would pack the tablet with appealing hardware inside, Google would have it priced in the $150 - $200 (approx. €120 - €160) range, to...

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RED Camera Users Might Want to Look at HP's 820 Tower

Sometimes, it takes special equipment to perform certain tasks, equipment that a PC builder might not have. HP decided to make up for the problem by teaming up with another. The partnership we are going to show you today is one that Hewlett-Packard made with RED, for the use of the latter's optical drives and video accelerators. For those that aren't familiar with the hardware, the RED Rocket “provides real time, full quality playback, onto a 1080/2K/4K monitor or projector via DVI and HD-SDI through REDCINE-X.” Basically, it is a PCI Express add-in board that accelerates transcoding and playback of R3D files, in real-time. HP's 820 Tower RED edition will have one or more such adapters inside, right off the bat, in...

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AMD Powers 24 of the Top 100 Supercomputers

Today, June 18, 2012, is the day when the Top500 list is updated, so, naturally, every company with a stake in that segment will have its say. Thus, it comes as no surprise that AMD issued an announcement. This once, the company doesn't have anything massive to gush over, unlike in 2009, when the Jaguar, built by Cray, soared to the top. That very Jaguar now holds the sixth spot, which isn't really bad for a worldwide ranking, especially considering how old it is compared to the ones above it. Fifth place Tianhe-1A, from the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, entered use in 2010, while Sequoia (number 1) and K (number 2) both got launched in 2011. As for Mira (third spot) and SuperMUC (4th), they began work...

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NFS: Most Wanted Will Deliver a Much Better Experience Than The Run, EA Says

Electronic Arts has talked about its long running Need for Speed series and admitted that last year's iteration, The Run, wasn't as good as it could have been. The publisher does admit that this year's upcoming Most Wanted reboot will make things better and once again bring the franchise into the spotlight. The Need for Speed franchise has seen a few ups and downs in recent years as quite a few developers have had a go at the racing series, from action-oriented installments like Undercover or The Run by Black Box, to simulators like Shift 1 and 2 from Slightly Mad Studios, to more arcade experiences like Hot Pursuit from Criterion Games. While last year's The Run marked a return to story-based experiences by Black Box studios,...

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Intel's MIC Launch Part II: Cray's Cascade Xeon Phi Supercomputer

We have just brought you the launch of the Knights Corner many integrated core PCI Express compute accelerator and now we will cover the first (as far as we know) HPC application it will be used in. Intel and Cray signed a collaboration about two months ago. The time may not have been enough to affect the newest Top500 list much, but the companies will no doubt rock the next one. Speaking of which, Cray's CEO Peter Ungaro was present at the product briefing in which Intel revealed the Xeon Phi brand. There, he revealed the Cascade supercomputer, which takes the concept of adaptive supercomputing and runs with it. Essentially, adaptive supercomputers are energy-efficient and scalable HPC installations that can add new CPUs on...

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Lenovo LePad A2107, the First Dual-SIM Android Tablet

Lenovo has made official another highly interesting tablet PC powered by Google’s Android operating system, namely the Lenovo LePad A2107, the first dual-SIM slate. The device should make an official appearance on shelves in the coming weeks, featuring a 7-inch touchscreen display capable of delivering a 1024 x 600 pixels resolution. The tablet PC also sports a 1GHz Cortex A8 application processor complemented by 1GB of RAM. It is powered by a 3550mAh battery and sports a 3-megapixel photo snapper on the back, along with a 2MP camera on the front. Moreover, Lenovo packed the new LePad A2107with 16GB of internal memory, and with a microSD memory card slot with support for additional storage space. The tablet runs under Android...

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Intel's MIC Launch Part I: Xeon Phi Many Core Architecture Product Family

After months and months of information leaks, vague promises and deliberate hints, Intel has finally launched the Knights Corner many integrated core coprocessor, as well as a new brand. Many Integrated Core (MIC) is a multi-core computer architecture developed by Intel, based on the Teraflops Research Chip multicore research project, the Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer multicore microprocessor and, last but not least, the Larrabee graphics computing accelerator that never was. Larrabee was supposed to be a discrete graphics adapter based on the x86 architecture. Unfortunately, whether because of flawed design philosophy or other reasons, the whole project crumbled before anything became of it. The work was shelved though,...

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iOS 6 Features: the New Siri on iPhone and iPad

Siri is coming to additional iDevices this fall, and it brings along new abilities and language support, Apple has confirmed. Best of all, it even launches apps when you tell it to. Siri is shaping up to become the real personal assistant Apple envisioned last year with the debut of the iPhone 4S. In iOS 6, the digital assistant understands more languages, works in more countries, and is available on the new iPad with Retina display, “so you can get more things done in more places around the world.” It’ll do things like tell you what movies are playing at the cinema, or who won the football game last night, or even book you a table for two. “Want to know the latest scores and stats for your favorite teams and players?...

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Dev-Team Releases Redsn0w 0.9.14b1 for OS X and Windows

A new version of the redsn0w jailbreak utility is available from the iPhone Dev Team, according to MuscleNerd, the leader of the hacking pack. The new release includes a handy baseband downgrade option for those who are using the iPad’s 06.15 baseband on iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS handsets. MuscleNerd explains that people who unlocked with ultrasn0w and updated their iPhone baseband past 05.13.04 will “typically” have the 06.15 baseband. Even if the user never had 05.13.04 on their device before, redsn0w now makes it possible to downgrade specifically from 06.15 to 05.13.04. “This gives you the best of both worlds: ultrasn0w compatibility and a normal iPhone baseband with full GPS and the ability to use stock IPSWs again,”...

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Graphics Card Detailed

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 was a strong enough video card when it first emerged, but then NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 appeared, with a better performance and lower price to boot. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is AMD's response to that perceived challenge, and now we know exactly what the specs are. It so happens that the “GHz Edition” moniker is not perfectly representative of the card's performance. What we mean to say is that, instead of running at 1 GHz like the name would suggest, the board does even better, pushing the GPU to 1,100 MHz. Speaking of which, the graphics processing unit is called Tahiti XT2 and based on a refined design from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). For those who don't remember,...

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IBM Powers Fastest Supercomputer Ever, Sequoia

The grand day is finally here: Hans Meuer, Jack Dongarra and Erich Strohmaier have compiled the latest Top500 supercomputer list. The Top500 list is updated twice a year by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Previously, the K supercomputer, based in Japan and built by Fujitsu, was the world leader, with a performance of 10.51 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second). It has 705,024 Sparc64 processing cores and scored number 1 both times the top500 list was updated in 2011. Now, though, the top spot belongs to the Sequoia, whose 1.57 million...

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EA to Continue Dual Studio Strategy for Need for Speed

Electronic Arts will continue to have two studios working on its Need for Speed franchise, alternating between Black Box and Criterion Games every year. The NFS series was originally worked upon by a single studio, Black Box, but EA mixed things up in recent years, bringing in Criterion Games, the developer of the Burnout franchise, and Slightly Mad Studios, which specialized in simulators. Seeing as how this led to a resurgence in popularity for the racing series, EA has confirmed that it will continue alternating between studios, namely Black Box and Criterion Games, for all upcoming releases. "We're going to continue to pursue the dual strategy of alternating studios and that will always be the strategy, but we will optimize...

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Nokia Almost Confirms 808 PureView Event for Today

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia announced late last week that it planned on holding an event in the United States today, without offering info on what it would be all about. However, the company offered a series of hints on its Facebook page, suggesting that the event might have something to do with its 808 PureView behemoth, and the latest of them comes as a confirmation on the matter. On Sunday, the handset vendor posted on Facebook that there are “808 reasons to be excited about Monday.” Previously, the company confirmed that the 41MP camera phone would make an appearance on shelves in the US before the end of this year, and today’s event might represent the official launch of this smartphone in the country. Running...

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Galaxy S III Tastes CyanogenMod 9 Nightly Builds

Galaxy S III, the latest Android-based flagship device from Samsung, can now be customized with CyanogenMod 9 nightly builds. The CyanogenMod 9 ROMs are based on Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, but they do not feature the same TouchWiz UI that Samsung packed the device with. Through downloading and installing said nightly builds for the Galaxy S III, users will enjoy the vanilla flavor of Android, with a series of other improvements and optimizations throughout the platform. These are official CyanogenMod 9 releases for the smartphone, but they represent only early development stages of custom ROMs for the handsets, which means that users are certain to bump into various issues when running them. At...

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