Intel Haswell Comes with 128 MB On-Package Cache

Intel’s decision to keep DDR3 memory for Haswell is in the users’ best interests as the price of such memory is continuously falling. The problem for the company was ensuring a large enough bandwidth for the powerful iGPU. During this year’s IDF event in San Francisco, California, the company presented various aspects of the new architecture and an interesting bit of info is the fact that the chip will also benefit from a large on-package cache, AnandTech reports. This cache is Intel’s solution for keeping the Haswell GT3 iGPU well fed. The buffer will be 128 MB in size and on-package means that the memory will not be on-die like the usual cache is, but there’s no clear info on the way it is actually designed. Intel...

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GeForce GK106-Based GTX 660 Standard and AMP! Edition

Traditional Nvidia add in board (AIB) video card manufacturing partner, well-known company Zotac is officially launching today its own implementations of the new GK106 GPU that features 960 CUDA cores and it’s being manufactured in TSMC’s 28nm technology. The company’s “basic” GK106 card is the Zotac GeForce GTX 660 and this card has a slightly GPU overclock as the base frequency is rated at 993 MHz while the Boost option can up it to a high 1059 MHz. The second card launched today is the Zotac GeForce GTX 660 AMP! Edition that has its GPU clocked at high 1046 MHz base frequency right from the box. Zotac’s AMP! Edition features a custom cooling system that will certainly help when the card’s Boost option is activated and...

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Gigabyte AB24BT 24" Ivy Bridge AIO Barebone System

Gigabyte has come up with a very interesting concept. We’re talking about a barebone that becomes an AIO system once the user chooses how much RAM memory he needs and chooses an LGA1155 CPU along with an HDD or an SSD. The system supports Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge processors with a maximum TDP of 95 watts while the 2.5” HDD bay is actually a dock where the user can switch the drive with much ease. The official name of the product is Gigabyte AB24BT and it is built around Intel’s H61 chipset while featuring a nice 24” FullHD LED-backlit display with 2-point multi-touch support. Gigabyte’s barebone also includes two 5W speakers along with a DVD-RW drive unit and a 4 in 1 card reader. Gigabyte AB24BT...

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Zenithink N6 Arrive Soon as a 6-inch Android Smartphone

If you thought that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 was a large smartphone you should reconsider that. A new, 6-inch Android-based smartphone is reportedly headed to shelves in the not too distant future, namely Zenithink N6. GizmoChina has got the chance to have a close look at the device, and suggests that it is rather bulky, especially when you look at it as a smartphone that should offer one-handed operations and should also fit in your pocket. Unfortunately, no specific info on the phone’s hardware specifications has emerged so far, but more could become available next month or so. The device is only a bit smaller than the Google Nexus 7 tablet, yet it is certainly far larger than Apple’s new iPhone 5 model, which sports...

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Intel Successfully Ports Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to Its Medfield Chips

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, is now working on Intel’s low-power Atom chips code-named Medfield, PCWorld reports. Smartphones that are powered by Intel processors are already available for purchase around the world, yet they run under the Android 2.3 or Android 4.0 versions of the platform. There’s no telling on whether these devices will receive an update to Android 4.1, but it’s great news for Intel that they managed to successfully port the platform, as they are trying to gain more market share on the already crowded mobile space. Orange, ZTE, Lava International, Lenovo and Megafon are some of the vendors who have already launched Intel-based smartphones, and more of...

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Intel Core i7-4900 CPU Series Coming in Q3 2013

We reported here that there are strong chances Intel will not launch the top performing desktop version of the new Haswell architecture next spring and it seems like we were actually right about this. AMD’s lack of a worthy x86 performance competitor seems to be the reason behind Intel’s delay. Intel is the type of company that likes to charge its customers “and arm and a leg” for every tiny performance improvement that its products are offering. The only way this sometimes changes is by the means of a surprising competing architecture that forces the company to innovate and offer innovations not only for money, but also to win back customers or not to lose them in the first place. Intel is reportedly planning to launch...

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World’s Most Efficient Intel Xeon Server Ever Built is AMD SeaMicro SM15000

AMD’s SeaMicro server division is well known for their Freedom Fabric connectivity technology where the I/O, storage and processing units are all being coordinated through a silicon PHY implementation developed by the latter. SeaMicro used to build Intel-based servers, but once AMD acquired it, Opteron processors were also added to the list. Recently, AMD announced the SeaMicro SM15000 server and we’ve reported that here, but what we didn’t have were all the details and slides detailing the event. Hardware experts at Bridghtsideofnews.com have managed to get their hands on some interesting technological presentation slides that advertise what AMD calls “most efficient Inter Xeon server ever built.”, BSN reports. We...

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Intel Haswell-EP Will Follow Ivy Bridge-EP with 14 Cores and 4-Channel DDR4

There is now information on not only the next-generation high-end EP platform, but also on the processor range that will debut after it. All thanks to the Intel Developer Forum. These three days have been filled with announcements from Intel and the participants at its IDF San Francisco 2012 event, as well as attempts on AMD's part, and that of others, to distract people from that trade show. We doubt we'll find any sort of “counter-announcement” to the info that the folks at VR-Zone claim uncovered. The Intel Ivy Bridge-EP processor platform, scheduled for 2013, will succeed the Sandy Bridge-EP that, even now, hasn't been fully released. That was something we already knew, just like we knew that a 15-core Ivy Bridge EX...

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Intel 16nm Manufacturing Process to Became 14nm – Advanced 10nm Coming in 2015

Intel is apparently now solely focused on mobile technologies while high performance desktop processors with ever rising high frequencies are not the company’s top priority anymore. The semiconductor giant takes the ARM threat very seriously. We’ve reported here about AMD’s experiments with denser microchip designs and we’ve explained that you can make a design have a much smaller die and take up considerably less space on the wafer, but the frequency will not grow by much. We’re used to see that once a semiconductor company moves its designs on a more advanced and smaller manufacturing process, the frequency usually increases while the power consumption goes the other way around. The thing is that this is not an axiom,...

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Nikon D600 DSLR 24.3-Megapixel Camera

We have known that it was coming since April (2012), and an August leak provided the ETA, but we didn't actually expect Nikon's D600 DSLR to match even overpowered products like Sony's Cyber-shot RX1 and Alpha A99. Like those two, the Nikon D600 is designed with a 24.3 megapixel sensor, which means that images have 24.3 million pixels. In fact, every other asset of the camera is on par with those of the aforementioned competing products, as made clear by the product page. The ISO sensitivity is, naturally, among the most important things we have to mention: 100-6,400 is the “normal” range, but it can be extended to 50 – 25,600 when needed. The Multi-CAM4800 AF (autofocus) system, borrowed from Nikon’s D4, is another...

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