Motorola 18.5” Android Cloud Computer

Motorola has apparently designed and manufactured the world’s first “cloud computer.” The device itself is an ARM powered tablet with a generous 18.5” display that also comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard. The huge tablet was designed for a Chinese cable TV company and the official naming is Motorola HMC3260. Motorola’s new system is running the famous Android operating system and it is powered by a single-chip solution that’s designed by Freescale. The Freescale i.MX535 is based on ARM’s Cortex A8 architecture and runs at a modest 1 GHz. The RAM memory is only 1 GB while the storage is handled by 4 GB of flash. Motorola’s HMC3260 sports a touchscreen with a basic 1366 by 768 pixel resolution while the Android...

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Intel Knights Corner Burns 258W at Idle

Intel may claim that its Xeon Phi GPU compute accelerator cards are powering the world’s most efficient HPC data center, but the reality is that the efficiency is not coming from the Knights Corner architecture at all. During this year’s IDF event in San Francisco, California, the company has displayed a few systems powered by the new architecture and the power consumption numbers are not rosy at all. We’ve detailed here that the efficiency in data centers is mainly dependent on intelligent cooling systems as well as on an efficient computing architecture. Intel’s new x86 based Xeon Phi is just as efficient as AMD’s old VLIW GPU computer cards and the company itself is stating this in its presentations as we reported here. We...

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Intel Clover Trail Stacks LPDDR2 Memory

Intel decided to increase the level of integration in the new Clover Trail platform, but the company is now also allowing stacking LPDDR2 memory chips on top of its Atom CPU and offers a unique package to the tablet maker. In a very interesting move, the world’s largest semiconductor company is now offering the first x86 CPU with integrated LPDDR2 memory although the memory is not mounted by Intel itself. The main thing to remember is that this is not on-die integration, but on-package integration, therefore Intel is not manufacturing the memory nor is it selling it to the tablet maker. Practically the memory chips are stacked on top of the CPU crystal and the goal is top reduce the PCB complexity, the scale of PCB routing and...

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Intel Clover Trail Reference 10” Windows8 Tablet Is 8.7mm Thin

Intel is seriously banking on Windows 8 tablets and the company clearly wants a serious piece of the tablet market pie that is going to weigh just as much as the whole PC market weighs today. The 2012 PC market is roughly estimated to have sales reaching an impressive 390 million units while the tablet market will probably reach 100 million by the end of the year. In three to four years, the tablet market sales will reach the 400 million mark and Intel surely wants to be the beneficiary of such a development. Right now, the company’s chips are present in less than 1% of the tablets sold worldwide and this is not a likeable scenario for Intel. Once Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system will be launched during the...

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Acer 11” Core i3 Windows 8 Tablet

Acer has demonstrated the Iconia W700 tablet back at Computex 2012, but the design has suffered some changes and not all of them bring good news. The initial design originally also included a ThunderBolt port that is now missing. During this year’s IDF event in San Francisco, California, Acer has again displayed the updated W700 design. We’re very happy that tablet makers are building such powerful producs as we’re passionate about real performance and less interested in marketing gimmicks like some battery life figure that doesn’t correspond to real life measurements. Acer’s new Core i3 powered tablet is 972 grams (2.14 pounds) heavy and almost 12 millimeters (0.47”) thick, but the company has reportedly decided against...

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SK Hynix 20nm DDR3L-RS DRAM with Reduced Standby Power

One of the conundrums on the DRAM market is that companies have no other way of encouraging sales than launching better and better technologies, and this, in turn, causes existing products to pile up. SK Hynix hasn't found a solution to this problem, so it is going ahead with this “last resort” tactic. The newest press release introduces the DDR3L-RS DRAM based on 20nm manufacturing technology, The memory maker is quite bold in its assumptions, expecting and hoping that DDR3L-RS will become the best memory solution for Ultrabooks and tablets. For our part, we see a high chance of this happening. The RS in DDR3L-RS does, after all, stand for Reduced Standby power. As all DDR3L DRAM, this latest memory type runs on...

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