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Data Storage

Submission + - Micron's P320h Native PCI Express SSD Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io, still rely on SATA or SAS-based NAND controllers to interface on the backend of the device to the NAND array. PCIe cards from OCZ, Intel, LSI and others use controllers from LSI SandForce or the like. Fusion-io was the first company to introduce a true native PCI Express to NAND Flash controller-processor, though Micron has also been cooking up their own native PCIe SSD technology for some time now. The Micron P320h is a PCI Express SSD that Micron partnered with IDT, a veteran semiconductor manufacturer out of San Jose that specializes in high speed serial switching and memory interface technology, for co-development of the product. The Micron P320h is a half height, half length design that employs a 32 channel NAND Flash storage processor with a native PCI Express X8 interface. Performance-wise, the card shows considerable strength in high IO queue depths, especially for Reads."
AMD

Submission + - AMD's Hondo Z-Series APU Challenges Intel's Atom In Windows 8 Tablet Market (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "AMD is launching its first tablet-optimized APU today, in a bid to challenge Intel's de facto dominance of the Windows 8 tablet market. Code named Hondo, AMD's new Z-60 SoC draws less power than any Brazos-based part AMD has launched before. Hondo is a new spin on the original Brazos design. AMD took its first-generation APU and removed all the I/O blocks that a tablet wouldn't need, and optimized the chip's layout to target an even lower thermal dissipation envelope. Re-architecting the chip has paid off. Hondo pairs a dual-core 1GHz Bobcat processor with an 80-core Radeon GPU at 276MHz. Video decoding is handled by UVD3, and the chip is powerful enough to handle 720P decode seamlessly. Power consumption, however, is much improved. The original Bobcat had a 9W TDP, Desna managed 5.9W, and Hondo comes in at 4.79W, tops. AMD's documentation implies that consumers should see a real-world TDP of 3.9 — 4.5W."
Intel

Submission + - Intel's Game Changer: One Size Fits All Haswell (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Intel's next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Haswell, puts heavy emphasis on reducing power consumption. Pushing Haswell down to a 10W TDP is an achievement, but hitting these targets requires collaboration. Haswell will offer finer-grained control over areas of logic that were previously either on or off, up to and including specific execution units. These optimizations are impressive, particularly the fact that idle CPU power is approaching tablet levels, but they're only part of the story. Operating system changes matter as well, and Intel has teamed up with Microsoft to ensure that Windows 8 takes advantage of current and future hardware. Haswell's 10W target will allow the chip to squeeze into many of the convertible laptop/tablet form factors on display at IDF, while Bay Trail, the 22nm, out-of-order successor to Clover Trail (Atom), arrives in 2013 as well. Not to mention the company's demonstration of the first integrated digital WiFi radio. Folks have been trading blows over whether Intel could compete with ARM's core power consumption. Meanwhile, Santa Clara has been busy designing many other aspects of the full system solution for low power consumption and saving a lot of wattage in the process."
Intel

Submission + - Intel Impresses with Digital Radio and Spring Meadow Demos at IDF (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "Last winter, Intel made waves by demonstrating a number of cutting-edge technologies it believed could drive the next-generation of lower power devices. In addition to its pioneering work with Near Threshold Voltages, the company showed off Rosepoint — a prototype SoC that combined a dual-core 32nm Atom with an all-digital radio. Current radios use a mixture of analog and digital circuitry, with the analog side of the equation consuming disproportionately more power and board real estate. Today, Intel demo'd Rosepoint in functional hardware to prove that the hardware is functional and capable of transmitting and receiving data. The second major update Intel gave today was on the company's Smart Connect Mobile Technology, codenamed Spring Meadow. Unlike Rosepoint, which is still an early phase product, Smart Connect is already baked into a number of Intel products and is expected to roll out with Haswell next year."

Submission + - First consumer USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) implementation tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "When USB debuted in 1999, it offered maximum throughput of 12Mb/s. Today, USB 3.0 offers 4.8Gb/s. That's not surprising. What is surprising is that modern USB 3 controllers use the same Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) protocol that first debuted in 1999. Before the advent of USB 3, relying on BOT made sense. Because hard drives were significantly faster than the USB 2 bus itself, it didn't really matter if the bus supported certain features; the HDD was always going to be waiting on the host controller. USB 3 changed that. With 4.8Gbits/s of throughput (600MB/s), only the highest-end hardware is capable of saturating the bus. That's exposed some of BOT's weaknesses. UASP, or the USB Attached SCSI Protocol, is designed to fix the problems, and bring USB 3 fully into the 21st century. It does this by implementing queue functions, reducing command latency, and allowing the device to transfer commands and data independently from each other. And Asus is the first manufacturer to have implemented UASP in current generation motherboard, with good effect. As this article shows, transfer speeds can be improved significantly."
Android

Submission + - Asus Transformer Pad Infinity Launched, 1920X1200 10-inch Android Slate Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Asus has been rolling out new versions of their Transformer series of Android tablets with companion keyboard docks as of late and their recent edition finally offers a little competition for pixel snobs that fell in love with Apple's retina display on the new iPad. The new Transformer Pad Infinity offers an impressive 1920x1200 Super IPS+ display with 600nits of brightness as well as some goosed-up internals with a faster NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC (System on a Chip) at 1.6GHz, higher speed DDR3 1600MHz system memory and improved camera performance. The good news is Asus didn't jack the price up for all these upgrades and the new tablet drops in at the same price point as the previous generation Transformer Prime."
Data Storage

Submission + - WD's Velociraptor Hits 1TB Capacity with Sizable Performance Gains (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Western Digital has launched a new higher performance, higher capacity Velociraptor hard drive this morning. The WD VelociRaptor 1TB WD1000DHTZ model shown here conforms to the standard 3.5" form factor, but the actual drive mechanics are housed in a 2.5" HDD with a 15mm z-height, similar to the original VelociRaptor. The drive itself is mounted in what is essentially a large heatsink, which helps wick heat away, while also adapting its connectors to fit in any standard 3.5" bay or backplane. At 10K RPM and because they are physically smaller than standard 3.5" drives, the VelociRaptor is able to access and transfer data much more quickly than full sized, 3.5" offerings. The new 1TB Velociraptor also has 64MB of data cache, a high-speed controller with newly tweaked firmware and caching algorithms, and a SATA 6Gb/s interface. Performance-wise, in the benchmarks, this new 10K RPM 1TB hard drive appears to be one of the fastest consumer class SATA hard drive offerings to date. Though pricey for a hard drive, at around .31 per GB, it's far less expensive than an SSD, though not in the same league from a performance standpoint."

Submission + - The Definitive Diablo III Preview -- Written By A Diablo 2 Modder (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by Dputiger
Dputiger writes: I've written a substantial preview of Diablo III that includes a substantial consideration of how the game's underlying mechanics and mathematical models have evolved since Diablo II. I was a major modder back when D2 was new and our mod team spent a huge amount of time fixing the balance flaws and bugs in the game's first releases.
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Launched, Kepler Debuts (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "We’ve been hearing about NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture since about September 2010, when company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang first publically disclosed that Kepler would offer massive performance per watt improvements previous-gen architectures and that GPUs based on Kepler would arrive in 2011. That launch date has obviously slipped, but the first product based on Kepler has just been announced. Kepler is NVIDIA's first 28nm GPU architecture, with the current high-end chip sporting 1536 CUDA cores at a base clock of 1.06GHz, with a 256-bit memory interface at an effective 6.08GHz. The first performance reviews of the new GPU, its architecture and the new GeForce GTX 680, show it to firmly outpace AMD's latest Radeon HD 7970 series high-end card across the board. In addition, mobile variants of the chip show impressive performance and power efficiency as well with NVIDIA's Optimus dynamic power gating technology powering down the GPU when it's not required."
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - Retro Carts Relive the Old Days of Gaming (dcemu.co.uk)

Submitted by
YokimaSun
YokimaSun writes: "Emulators of game consoles are great but nothing beats playing on the real hardware. Today has seen the release of a new Flash Cartridge for the Snes which will enable you to play all the homebrew and your favourite games from the Super Nintendo Days. Recently there has been a surge of new cartridges released for systems such as the Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis/32X, PCEngine and even one for the Master System. Even the Dreamcast got a new SD Adapter to relive the golden days easier. How long before Nintendo etc get these carts off the market?"
Data Storage

Submission + - Intel Enterprise-Class SSD 710 Series Benchmarked (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Intel recently launched a new enterprise-class SSD that is designed to offer the reliability and performance of their original SLC NAND-based X25-E, but at higher capacities and a lower cost per GB. That solid state drive is the Intel SSD 710 series. There are a number of differences between the Intel X25-E and SSD 710 series, including the move from SLC NAND to "compute-quality" (to use a term coined by Intel) MLC NAND Flash memory. This lowers costs significantly, but in traditional solid state drives, MLC NAND isn’t nearly as durable. Intel has a few tricks up its sleeve to address the issue of durability with the SSD 710 series, however, and according to Intel, the out-of-the-box write endurance for the 200GB SSD 710 is up to 1 petabyte; higher if over-provisioned. Performance-wise, the new Intel SSD doesn't light up the benchmarks over its 3Gbps SATA interface but it's still pretty competitive and of course will decimate any standard SAS or SATA hard drive."
Security

Submission + - 19 Most Maddening IT Security Questions (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Users and organizations alike continue to make the same mistakes and use the same unreliable technologies and practices, writes InfoWorld's Roger Grimes. 'I've been immersed in IT security for more than two decades, and I've learned a lot along the way. Yet for all the knowledge I've soaked up, several questions still baffle me. Some of them pertain to end-users who seem to fall for the same sorts of scams year after year. Others, though, relate to security technologies and practices that organizations continually embrace, though they don't work as well as they should — if at all.'"
Intel

Submission + - Asus Shows Off Intel 7-Series Motherboards for Ivy Bridge (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "With Intel's 3rd generation Core series processors (code named Ivy Bridge) right around the corner, a few of the major motherboard manufacturers are beginning to offer sneak peeks at their lineup of motherboards based on Intel's upcoming 7-series chipsets, including the flagship Z77. The upcoming 7-series chipsets will feature support for next-gen processors, native USB 3.0, lower power, and somewhat more flexible overclocking capabilities. Seen here, is Asus’ entire family of motherboards for Ivy Bridge, along with explanations of a number of features coming to the new platform."
AMD

Submission + - AMD's Piledriver To Hit 4GHz+ with Resonant Clock Mesh (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to use resonant clock mesh technology developed by Cyclos Semiconductor to push its Piledriver processor architecture to 4GHz and beyond, the company announced at the International Solid State Circuits Conferences (ISSCC) in San Francisco. Cyclos is the only supplier of resonant clock mesh IP, which AMD has licensed and implemented into its x86 Piledriver core for Opteron server processors and Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Resonant clock mesh technology will not only lead to higher clocked processors, but also significant power savings. According to Cyclos, the new technology is capable of reducing power consumption by 10 percent or bumping up clockspeeds by 10 percent without altering the TDP."

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