Facebook Interested in Acquiring BlackBerry [Wall Street Journal]

Facebook is the last player in the BlackBerry acquisition saga, as execs of both companies reportedly met last week to discuss on a potential buyout offer.

According to Wall Street Journal, both BlackBerry and Facebook declined to comment on the matter, so it's unclear if Facebook is still interested in placing a bid after the said meeting. BlackBerry has already accepted a buyout offer from Canadian consortium Fairfax Financial, which is expected to finalize in early November if no other bids are placed on the handset makers assets.

Several companies expressed their interest in acquiring BlackBerry, including Lenovo and the company's ex-CEO Mike Lazaridis, but neither placed any bids on the company. If nothing happens until next week, BlackBerry may go private and start focusing on business and government customers, as the Canadian company announced a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.

BlackBerry logo
Image credits to BlackBerry

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Prerelease (Engineering Sample) AMD Kaveri APU Closes In on Intel's Haswell Heavyweights

It's still unclear when, exactly, Kaveri APUs will debut, whether this year or in 2014. On the other hand, we now actually know what the chips can do.

Kaveri will be the first accelerated processing unit utilizing the Steamroller CPU architecture and the GCN (Graphic Core Next) GPU Architecture. Chinese websites like China DIY have managed to get a hold of an engineering sample and some “Near Production Samples” of the chip. There wasn't an exploration of the graphics side, but the CPU cores were examined quite closely. On the surface, it looks like a trade-off in performance, because of the 1.8 GHz clock and measly 2 MB cache that limits the Floating Point performance to 85% of AMD FX Bulldozer and Piledriver.

The Kaveri dominates in integer count though, being 30-32% better than its predecessors. In layman terms, this means that, if not the next-generation Intel CPU, the AMD Kaveri will be able to match the Intel Haswell Core i7-4770K somewhat.

Kaveri APU early samples tested
Image credits to China DIY

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BBM Adds 20 Million Users in Less than Two Weeks

BlackBerry has just announced it has added more than 20 million BBM users since the launch of the Android and iOS applications on October 21.

With the latest achievement, the Canadian company confirmed it now has more than 80 million monthly active users on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Currently, BBM for iOS and Android is available for download via Google Play and App Store in all countries, but it has been slowly rolled out since launch, so not all users were able to download it since day one.

Although neither application features BBM Video, BBM Voice, and BBM Channels, BlackBerry said these capabilities would be added in the coming months via updates that will be announced closer to launch. Stay tuned for more info on the matter.

Download BBM for iOS (iTunes AppStore link)

Download BBM for Android (Google Play link)

BBM logo
Image credits to BlackBerry

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