64001449
submission
MojoKid writes:
Dell's enthusiast Alienware brand has always stood out for its unique, other-worldly looks (sometimes good, sometimes, not so good) and there's such a thing as taking things to the next level, this might be it. However, there's more to this refresh than just shock value. It's actually a futuristic aesthetic with a rather purposeful design behind it. Today Alienware gave a sneak peek at their completely redesigned Alienware Area 51 desktop system. This refreshed system is unlike any previous Alienware rig you've seen. With a trapezoidal shape to its chassis, Dell-Alienware says you can place the Area-51 against a wall and not have to worry about thermals getting out of the control. That's because there's a controlled gap and a sharp angle to the chassis that ensures only a small part of the system actually rests near the wall, leaving extra room for hot air to escape up and away. This design also offers users easy access to rear IO ports. Despite the unique design, there's plenty of room for high end components inside. The retooled chassis can swallow up to three 300W double-wide full-length graphics cards. It also brings to the table Intel's latest and greatest Haswell-E in six-core or eight-core options, liquid cooled and nestled into Intel's X99 chipset. No word from Dell on the price but the new Area-51 is slated to start shipping in October.
63996025
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel has officially launched their Core i7-5960X Haswell-E desktop processor today. Unlike Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E, which maxed out at 6 cores (12 threads), Haswell-E is an 8-core machine (16 threads), featuring execution units based on Intel's latest desktop microarchitecture. The Core i7-5960X has a base clock of 3GHz with Turbo Boost speed to 3.5GHz and will have up to 20MB of shared L3 cache. It also features an integrated quad-channel memory controller with official support for DDR4 memory at speeds up to 2133MHz, although higher speeds are possible through overclocking. Haswell-E based processors also feature up to 40 integrated lanes of PCI Express Gen 3.0 connectivity. The chip has a 140W TDP, which is slightly higher than the 130W of Ivy Bridge-E based processors. Although it has the same number of pads (2011) as previous-gen Ivy Bridge-E processors, Haswell-E based processors will require new motherboards equipped with LGA 2011 v3 sockets and support for DDR4 memory. Cooler designs from the previous generation are compatible, however. In general, the Core i7-5960X is faster overall than the previous-gen Ivy Bridge-E based 6-core Core i7-4960X. In single threaded tests, where the Core i7-5960X's additional cache and memory bandwidth aren't fully utilized, the 4960X's higher clocks usually push it ahead. In multi-threaded tests though, the 5960X's two additional cores make it significantly faster. Gaming was also much better on the 5960X.
63973191
submission
MojoKid writes:
Twitch streamer and YouTuber Jordan "Kootra" Mathewson is the latest victim in a trend called "Swatting." People who tuned into The Creatures' Twitch channel this past Wednesday to watch Mathewson play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive witnessed SWAT officers enter the room and arrest Mathewson in response to a false report of an active shooter. Mathewson was live-streaming on The Creatures, a group of gamers who create content for YouTube, Twitch channel at the group's office building when SWAT busted in. Police received an anonymous call, via landline, that claimed there was an active shooter. Streamers watched for about six minutes as the police officers arrested Mathewson, searched him, and briefly questioned him before the stream was turned off. Police are still investigating the call that was made, which led to Mathewson's arrest, and are looking for the party responsible. In the meantime, a person that goes by @ScrewPain on Twitter has claimed responsibility on his account for the swatting prank.
63907167
submission
MojoKid writes:
Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
63837497
submission
MojoKid writes:
The Entertainment Software Association has just released its 2014 report on the state of the video game industry, and as the title of this post suggests, there have been some significant shifts since the last report. Let's tackle the most interesting one first: Females have nearly become the dominant gamer, claiming 48% of the pie currently. That's impressive, but perhaps more so is the fact that women over the age of 18 represent 36% of the game-playing population, whereas boys aged 18 and under claim a mere 17%. Statistics like these challenge the definition of "gamer". Some might say that it's a stretch to call someone who only plays mobile games a "gamer" (Candy Crush anyone?). Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
63755039
submission
MojoKid writes:
We're often told that having a kill switch in our mobile devices — mostly our smartphones — is a good thing. At a basic level, that's hard to disagree with. If every mobile device had a built-in kill switch, theft would go down — who would waste their time over a device that probably won't work for very long? Here's where the problem lays: It's law enforcement that's pushing so hard for these kill switches. We first learned about this last summer, and this past May, California passed a law that requires smartphone vendors to implement the feature. In practice, if a smartphone has been stolen, or has been somehow compromised, its user or manufacturer would be able to remotely kill off its usability, something that would be reversed once the phone gets back into its rightful owner's hands. However, such functionality should be limited to the device's owner, and no one else. If the owner can disable a phone with nothing but access to a computer or another mobile device, so can Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple. If the designers of a phone's operating system can brick a phone, guess who else can do the same? Everybody from the NSA to your friendly neighborhood police force, that's who. At most, all they'll need is a convincing argument that they're acting in the interest of 'public safety.'
63711761
submission
MojoKid writes:
AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it's probably not something you'd expect. It's not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD's new SSDs and you'll see OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance.
63700923
submission
Deathspawner writes:
Windows 8 brought a lot to the table, with one of its most major features being its app store. However, it's not a feature that Microsoft seems too intent on keeping clean. As it is today, the store is completely littered with misleading apps and outright scamware. The unfortunate thing is that to find any of it, all you have to do is simply open the store and peruse the main sections. Not so surprisingly, no Microsoft software seems to be affected by this, but many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost, or will lead the user to download a third-party installer. It's only a matter of time before malware sneaks its way in, if it's not there already.
63684313
submission
MojoKid writes:
Right on schedule, Microsoft rolled-out an onslaught of patches for its "Patch Tuesday" last week, and despite the fact that it wasn't the true "Update 2" for Windows 8.1 many of us were hoping for, updates are generally worth snatching up. Since the patch rollout, it's been discovered that four individual updates are causing random BSoD issues for its users, with KB2982791, a kernel-mode related driver, being the biggest culprit. Because of the bug's severity, Microsoft is recommending that anyone who updated go and uninstall a couple of the specific updates, or rollback using Windows Restore. You can uninstall these updates in much the same way you uninstall any app; the difference is that once you're in the "Programs and Features" section, you'll need to click on "View installed updates" on the left. While it's mostly recommended that you uninstall 2982791, you may wish to uninstall the others as well, just in case.
63523179
submission
MojoKid writes:
Ever since Nvidia unveiled its 64-bit Project Denver CPU at CES last year, there's been discussion over what the core might be and what kind of performance it would offer. Visibly, the chip is huge, more than 2x the size of the Cortex-A15 that powers the 32-bit version of Tegra K1. Now we know a bit more about the core, and it's like nothing you'd expect. It is, however, somewhat similar to the designs we've seen in the past from the vanished CPU manufacturer Transmeta. When it designed Project Denver, Nvidia chose to step away from the out-of-order execution engine that typifies virtually all high-end ARM and x86 processors. In an OoOE design, the CPU itself is responsible for deciding which code should be executed at any given cycle. OoOE chips tend to be much faster than their in-order counterparts, but the additional silicon burns power and takes up die area. What Nvidia has developed is an in-order architecture that relies on a dynamic optimization program (running on one of the two CPUs) to calculate and optimize the most efficient way to execute code. This data is then stored inside a special 128MB buffer of main memory. The advantage of decoding and storing the most optimized execution method is that the chip doesn't have to decode the data again; it can simply grab that information from memory. Furthermore, this kind of approach may pay dividends on tablets, where users tend to use a small subset of applications. Once Denver sees you run Facebook or Candy Crush a few times, it's got the code optimized and waiting. There's no need to keep decoding it for execution over and over.
63513877
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel's latest processor design and manufacturing effort marks a first for the semiconductor industry. No other semiconductor manufacturer is building chips at the level of Intel's 14nm process node. Today, Intel has offered more details on the processor they're rolling out for a first volume production vehicle at 14nm, code named "Broadwell" and now known officially as Core M. Broadwell and the Intel Core M family is what Intel refers to as a "tick" in their product design cadence, where a 'tick" generally marks a die shrink optimization. Intel is unveiling their first Broadwell-Y platform variant that will be available in a range of tablets and other ultra-mobile devices in Q4 this year. Broadwell-Y is the lowest power Broadwell processor, with a 3.5 Watt to 4.5 Watt TDP. There will be higher powered versions for all-in-ones and small form factor desktop designs, but these version won't start arriving until the first half of 2015. At a high level, Broadwell will offer a 5 percent IPC improvement at the CPU core, along with up to 20 percent more GPU resources on chip for better graphics performance. However, Broadwell-Y, with its ultra-low power operation, will be able to hit a 3.5 — 4.5 Watt TDP with 25-percent reduction in package area as well, making it suitable for tablet designs and 2-in-1 hybrids. This chip could really put Intel on the map in tablets, where previously Intel Atom-based designs have had a hard time competing with the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and NVIDIA.
63512905
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel's latest processor design and manufacturing effort marks a first for the semiconductor industry. No other semiconductor manufacturer in the world is building chips at the level of Intel's 14nm process node. Today, Intel has offered more details on the processor they're rolling out for a first volume production vehicle at 14nm, code named "Broadwell," and now known officially as Core M. Broadwell and the Intel Core M family is what Intel refers to as a "tick" in their product design cadence, where a 'tick" generally marks a die shrink optimization. Intel is unveiling their first Broadwell-Y platform variant that will be available in a range of tablets and other ultra-mobile devices in time for the Q4 holiday shopping season. For reference, Broadwell-Y is the lowest power Broadwell processor, with a 3.5 Watt to 4.5 Watt TDP. There will be higher powered versions for all-in-ones and small form factor desktop designs, but these version won't start arriving until the first half of 2015. At a high level, Broadwell will offer a 5 percent IPC improvement at the CPU core, along with up to 20 percent more GPU resources on chip for better graphics performance. However, Broadwell-Y, with its ultra-low power operation, will be able to hit a 3.5 — 4.5 Watt TDP with 25-percent reduction in package area, making it suitable for tablet designs, as well as ultra-light 2-in-1 products. This chip could really put Intel on the map in tablets, where previously Intel Atom-based designs have had a hard time competing with the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and NVIDIA.
63393711
submission
MojoKid writes:
China seems to be on a mission to isolate itself from the world, at least in terms of technology. After banning Windows 8 on government PCs and raiding several of Microsoft's offices in China as part of an anti-trust investigation, Chinese officials have now prohibited to purchase of several Apple products for government use. The list of banned Apple products include the iPad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and half a dozen other items, all of which were left off of a final government procurement list distributed in July. This is a potentially big hit to Apple, which generated around 16 percent of its $37.4 billion in revenue last quarter from China. Apple saw its iPad sales jump 51 percent and Mac sales boosted 39 percent in China.
63272779
submission
MojoKid writes:
AMD updated its family of Kaveri-based A-Series APUs for desktop systems recently, namely the A10-7800 and the A6-7400K. The A10-7800 has 12 total compute cores, 4 CPU and 8 GPU cores, with average and maximum turbo clock speeds of 3.5GHz and 3.9GHz, respectively. The A6-7400K arrives with 6 total cores (2CPU, 4 GPU) and with the same clock frequencies. All of the new Kaveri-based APUs launched have configurable TDPs, and support for AMD proprietary technologies like TrueAudio and Mantle, and they have HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) features as well. The AMD A10-7800 APU's performance is somewhat mixed, though it is a decent performer overall. Its Steamroller-based CPU cores do not do much to make up ground versus Intel's processors, so in the more CPU-bound workloads, Intel's dual-core Core i3-4330 competes favorably to AMD's quad-cores. And in terms of IPC and single-thread performance Intel maintains a big lead. Factor graphics into the equation, however, and the tides turn completely. The GCN-based graphics engine in Kaveri is a major step-up over the previous-gen, and much more powerful than Intel's mainstream offerings. The A10-7800's power consumption characteristics are also more desirable versus the Richland-based A10-6800K.
63243233
submission
MojoKid writes:
Last week, NVIDIA officially announced the SHIELD tablet (powered by the Tegra K1 SoC) and its companion SHIELD wireless controller. The SHIELD tablet's specifications include NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC (clocked at up to 2.2GHz), paired to 2GB of RAM and an 8", full-HD IPS display, with a native resolution of 1920x1200. There are also a pair of 5MP cameras on the SHIELD tablet (front and rear), 802.11a/b/g/n 2x2 MIMO WiFi configuration, GPS, a 9-axis motion sensor, and Bluetooth 4.0 LE. As it turns out, early units are shipping now to the press and initial benchmark testing shows the SHIELD Tablet and NVIDIA's Tegra K1 performance to be very strong. In fact, it could very well be the fastest Android tablet on the market currently, hands down, especially with respect to gaming.
