NETGEAR has introduced their latest 4×4 MIMO wireless bridge device designed specifically for video data. This isn't an area where we've focused a lot of time in the past, but let's will see how well the NETGEAR 3DHD stacks up to a couple other wireless bridging solutions. Can you reliably transmit high bitrate data and video over a wireless connection using the equipment?

More: continued here

For the past six months I've been working on research and testing for the next major AnandTech SSD article. I figured I had enough time to line up its release with the first samples of the next-generation of high end SSDs. After all, it seems like everyone was taking longer than expected to bring out their next-generation controllers. I should've known better.

At CES this year we had functional next-generation SSDs based on Marvell and SandForce controllers. The latter was actually performing pretty close to expectations from final hardware. Although I was told that drives wouldn't be shipping until mid-Q2, it was clear that preview hardware was imminent. It was the timing that I couldn't predict.

A week ago, two days before I hopped on a flight to Barcelona for MWC, a package arrived at my door. OCZ had sent me a preproduction version of their first SF-2500 based SSD: the Vertex 3 Pro. The sample was so early that it didn't even have a housing, all I got was a PCB and a note:

Read on for our full, in-depth preview of OCZ's Vertex 3 Pro.

More: continued here

On Day 0 of this year's Mobile World Congress Samsung and NVIDIA announced that the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 will come to market with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 (T20) SoC. At the same time, the two quietly announced they would be working on a new superphone together also based on Tegra 2. At Samsung's press conference however all we saw was the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy S II, the latter using Samsung's own Exynos SoC.

So what happened to the NVIDIA based smartphone and why would Samsung bother with using Tegra if it already had an Exynos based smartphone? To understand why we need to look at the Galaxy S. At its MWC press conference Samsung mentioned that it sold 10 million Galaxy S phones in 2010. The Galaxy S II should sell at least as much, if not more, once it's officially introduced.

Exynos however is a brand new SoC, with a brand new GPU for Samsung. Meeting demand for the Galaxy S II in all markets across the world with an SoC that Samsung has never shipped is risky at best. If you saw our benchmarks yesterday you'll note that NVIDIA's Tegra 2 is a near equivalent in terms of CPU performance and notably better in GPU and Flash performance. In other words, Tegra 2 isn't a bad alternative.

Meet the GT-I9103:

The GT-I9100 is the normal Exynos based Galaxy S II, the I9103 is the Tegra 2 edition. As one of our readers (thanks sarge78), Samsung lists its own dual-core Application Processor in the Galaxy S II as not being used in all regions. It's too early to tell if that means that we'll get Tegra 2 or Exynos depending on physical region.

I suspect Samsung didn't want to confuse users by announcing both a Tegra 2 and an Exynos based superphone at MWC. An unknown user managed to benchmark the GT-I903 at MWC and submitted the data to the GLBenchmark database. The GT-I9103's performance looks comparable to the Atrix 4G, meaning it's going to deliver the same experience we've seen in our Optimus 2X and Atrix 4G articles.

More: continued here

Anyone who has shopped for a power supply lately has likely come to the conclusion that 80 Plus Gold certification is only for expensive PSUs rated at more than 500W. While that is true in the broad sense, there are a few exceptions. SuperFlower for instance has a 350W 80 Plus Gold unit, and FSP Group even has a 250W model. Today, we have an interesting alternative from HuntKey rated at 300W. While the name may not be as familiar to most of our America audience, HuntKey is one of the five largest PSU ODMs in the world, with offices in Europe and Asia. They also have customers like Dell and Lenovo.

With a goal of creating a low-cost, high-efficiency PSU that doesn't sacrifice quality, we may start to hear more about HuntKey. Today we're looking at their Jumper 300W power supply. Read on to find out why HuntKey is more than just a purveyor of cheap products in China.

More: continued here

We first met LucidLogix (now just Lucid) 2.5 years ago at IDF. The promise was vendor-agnostic multi-GPU setups with perfect performance scaling. The technology was announced at a very important time. Intel and NVIDIA were battling out support for SLI on Nehalem motherboards. NVIDIA didn't want SLI enabled on any non-NVIDIA chipsets, and Intel wasn't about to let NVIDIA build any chipsets for Nehalem. Lucid's Hydra technology seemed to be exactly what we needed to get around the legal holdup that kept Nehalem users from enjoying SLI.

Three things made Lucid's technology less interesting as time went on. Hydra took two years to come to market, NVIDIA enabled SLI on Intel platforms and single GPU performance got really, really good.

What made Lucid's Hydra tech possible was a software layer that intercepted OpenGL and DirectX calls from the CPU and directed them to a GPU of Lucid's choosing. While Hydra saw limited success, parts of the technology had another application.

Read on for our performance preview of Lucid's Virtu for Sandy Bridge platforms.

More: continued here

It's fair to say the refreshes HP announced for their consumer computers earlier this month seemed fairly lackluster. While nobody can complain about improved notebook speakers and the triumphant return of dedicated mouse buttons, there wasn't anything else remarkably fresh or exciting about their spring line. When we got a chance to meet with HP representatives in San Francisco to see their new business lineup, however, we saw very nearly the complete opposite.

More: continued here

AMD just sent over a bunch of shots of an upcoming product that we may or may not be presently benchmarking: the Radeon HD 6990. Check out the gallery for the pics.

Update: AMD accidentally gave us a shot of the Radeon HD 6990 without the fan shroud attached. Apparently that image reveals a bit too much about the product and AMD asked us to remove it. Sorry guys

More: continued here

With the Cougar Point chipset glitch starting to fade away, we’re starting to get Sandy Bridge systems in for testing. ASUS sent us over an earlier version of their updated G73, the G73SW with i7-2630QM and GTX 460M—still with the B2 chipset stepping, but it won’t matter for our testing, and the B3 versions should be shipping any time now. If you’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on a new gaming notebook, there are a lot of fast, new offerings to choose from.

We’ve already looked at the G73 chassis twice now, and the latest version only makes a few minor tweaks other than the CPU/chipset. We’ve also previewed the same hardware combination with MSI’s GT680R. This is going to be a somewhat shorter review, then, but we did take some time to do a bit of extra stress testing, and we’re happy to entertain other requests at this point. Read on for the full rundown.

More: continued here

The last time we discussed CUDA and Tesla in depth was in September of 2010. At the time NVIDIA had just recently launched their lineup of Fermi-powered Tesla products, and was using the occasion to announce the 3.2 version of their CUDA GPGPU toolchain. And though when we’re discussing the fast pace of the GPU industry we’re normally referring to NVIDIA’s massive consumer GPU products arm, the Tesla and Quadro businesses are not to be underestimated. An aggressive 6 month refresh schedule is not just good for consumer products it seems, but it’s good for the professional side too. NVIDIA’s CUDA team seems to have taken this to heart, and so here we are just shy of 6 months later with NVIDIA preparing to launch the next version of CUDA: CUDA 4.0.

More: continued here

AMD has launched 5 new Opterons yesterday. The fastest "Magny-cours" is now called the Opteron 6180SE and runs now at 2.5 GHz, 200 MHz more than its older brother the 6176SE. That CPU won't be sold in large numbers however, as AMD indicated more than once that the 140W TDP SE CPUs are only a very small part of their sales.

The fastest SKU of the more popular 80W ACP (115W TDP) Magny-cours Opteron reaches 2.3 GHz (6176) instead of 2.2 GHz (6174).

Does this change the competitive landscape? In a dual CPU configuration, we found that AMD's best Opteron was slightly better in datamining and HPC, while Intel's Xeon X5670 was slightly ahead in OLTP, ERP, virtualization and rendering tasks. AMD's Opteron carried a slightly lower price tag than the Intel part, but the price advantage was more significant at the server level. These slightly faster Opterons have to face slightly faster Intel chips however. Intel bumped up their best 95W TDP Xeon from 2.93 (X5670) to 3.06 GHz (X5675) back in November 2010 yesterday (my mistake).

It is gets more exciting when we look at the quad CPU server market. You might remember that the four Magny Cours Opterons in the Dell R815 were able to offer 80% more performance at a pricetag that was only 20-30% higher than the typical dual Xeon machines. This kind of configuration has caught a lot of attention, especially in the HPC market.

The succes has encouraged the OEMS to come out with new quad opteron configurations. IBM has followed in Dell's footsteps with the X3755M3.

We told you that AMD was going to be popular again in the HPC market. The engineers at Dell seem to agree, as they made an insanely dense server. The C6145 packs two quad socket server nodes (Supermicro started this with their "Twin" series) and 24 2.5 inch drives in a 2U form factor. Each node can contain 48 cores, 256 GB of DDR-3, and and optional Mellanox 40Gb/s dual-port QDR IB adapter. Quite a few HPC people will fall in love in our humble opinion. More specs here…

Of course, it will take more to dethrone Intel in the server market than a few excellent HPC servers. AMD reports that their "Xeon killer", the Bulldozer server processors should reach "widespread availability" in the third quarter of 2011. The desktop versions will hit the market already in Q2. Interesting was also that "Interlagos", the 16 integer core chip will be able to boost its clock by 500 MHz when most of the 16 cores are not heavily loaded (and as a result, the chip still has some power headroom). When you run only a few heavy threads on this 16-core monster, and most of the cores are powergated, the CPU will boost the clockspeed even higher. 

More: continued here

Today NEC refreshed its 30-inch display offering with its latest and greatest, the MultiSync PA301w. We've been playing with and testing a production sample and have the full review ready to go. It's a serious P-IPS monitor aimed at professional use with a host of new features.

Read on for more!

More: continued here

Today, Steve Jobs took a sabbatical from his sabbatical to hop up on stage and tell us all about the iPad 2, the next revision of Apple’s wildly popular tablet PC.

The announcement concerned both hardware and software – the iPad 2 is coming to the US on March 11, and with it will come the iOS 4.3 update, iMovie for iPad, and GarageBand for iPad. It will launch at the same capacities and price points as its predecessor, will come in both black and white, and launches internationally on March 25. Read on for details.

More: continued here

HP's been on board AMD's ultraportable bandwagon since the chipmaker first shipped the underwhelming Congo platform, and HP continued to produce reasonably compelling not-quite-netbooks with the Athlon/Turion II Neo-equipped Nile platform. But now that AMD has made a concerted effort to dethrone Intel's Atom with Brazos, HP has been able to produce a true netbook competitor. We have the shiny new dm1z equipped with the AMD E-350 in our hands: is this the netbook we've been waiting for?

More: continued here

We covered the LG Optimus 3D during its launch event yesterday, and the device has continued to draw our attention. Today we decided to track down an LG Optimus 3D to get a better impression of its 3D capture and playback capabilities, and to run some benchmarks. 

Read on for more!

More: continued here

A huge thanks goes out to AnandTech reader Andrei and some very attentive Xtreme Systems forum members. I just got an email pointing me to this thread where one particular number from our OCZ Vertex 3 and Intel SSD 510 articles was called into question. The problem? The 4KB random read numbers for the Vertex 3 were supiciously high. The reality? They were incorrect. 

I was just alerted to the error and quickly powered up the SSD testbed to recreate the test. It looks like the original numbers were either run at a queue depth of 32 or accidentally copied from one of the runs of 4KB random write tests. Either way the number was incorrect and has been fixed in all affected articles.

The updated numbers don't change our conclusions. The Vertex 3 is still the fastest next-generation SSD we've tested thus far and it still maintains a random read performance advantage over the Intel SSD 510.

The integrity of our test data is something we all take very seriously here. Errors like these do you a disservice and hurt the reputation I've worked so hard over the past 14 years to build. I do hope this oversight hasn't negatively impacted your opinion of AnandTech – we aren't perfect, but we strive to be. I do apologize to all of you for the error and I will be restructuring how I run and record my Iometer tests to avoid this particular issue from cropping up again. 

My sincere thanks goes out to Andrei and the XS folks who helped track down the error and inform us of its existence.

More: continued here

Last week OCZ pulled the trigger and introduced the world’s first SF-2000 based SSD: the Vertex 3 Pro. Not only was it the world’s first drive to use SandForce’s 2nd generation SSD controller, the Vertex 3 Pro was also the first SATA drive we’ve tested to be able to break 500MB/s on both reads and writes. Granted that’s with highly compressible data but the figures are impressive nonetheless. What wasn’t impressive however was the price. The Vertex 3 Pro is an enterprise class drive, complete with features that aren’t exactly in high demand on a desktop. As a result the V3P commands a premium – the drive starts at $525 for a 100GB capacity.

Just as we saw last round however, if there’s a Vertex 3 Pro, there’s bound to be a more reasonably priced non-Pro version without some of the enterprisey features. Indeed there is. Contained within this nondescript housing is the first beta of OCZ’s Vertex 3 based on a SandForce SF-2200 series controller. The price point? Less than half of that of the V3P:

At an estimated $250 for a 120GB drive the Vertex 3 is more expensive than today’s Vertex 2, but not by too much nor do I expect that price premium to last for long. The Vertex 2 is on its way out and will ultimately be replaced by the V3. And SSD prices will continue to fall.

Read on for our full preview of the Vertex 3.

More: continued here

NVIDIA just dropped a bombshell. Not only is its third generation Tegra architecture, codenamed Kal-El, back from the fab but it's up and running Android after only 12 days. Kal-El will begin sampling soon and NVIDIA claims you'll be able to buy tablets based on it in August of this year, with smartphones following before the end of the year. 

The SoC race just got a lot hotter, read on to find out what we know about Project Kal-El.

More: continued here

When we reviewed the Clevo W880CU and, by extension, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M, we were perplexed. Certainly NVIDIA had reclaimed the mobile graphics crown and no one could dispute that, but at what cost? The 480M was a cut-down mobile version of the already dire desktop GeForce GTX 465M. We even begged the question: "Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops?" Today we have a better answer. AVADirect has been kind enough to send us a Clevo P170HM notebook outfitted with NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GF104-based GeForce GTX 485M.

More: continued here

The media streamer market is a highly competitive one, where you have the big players like Western Digital and Netgear, and the really small ones like Micca. None of these companies have media players as their sole product, because it is quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack in that market. We were surprised to learn of Nixeus, a Los Angeles based company, that was founded in 2010 with the purpose of bringing multimedia solutions to the market.

Nixeus introduced their first media player, the Nixeus Fusion HD, towards the middle of 2010. It made a big splash online, and there were many people on AVSForum singing its praise. The support was great, and reported bugs were looked into quickly. This encouraged us to get hold of a review sample. Read on to find out how the Nixeus Fusion HD fares in our stringent review.

More: continued here

You can't buy it from Sony's website. If you blinked you might have missed the news popping up on a couple of different sites about its existence. If you were on the phone with me when I called Jarred about it, you might even have shared his reaction: "Sony makes a budget AMD laptop?" But sure enough they do, and we have a  budget Sony EE34 notebook on hand that's liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Around $600 for a Sony Vaio AMD-based notebook with a Blu-ray drive standard? They make those?

More: continued here

The Microsoft keynote at CES last night reiterated a lot of what we already know about Windows Phone 7, and fleshed out the software giant's plans for its mobile phone operating system in 2011. Part of those plans include a much needed update bringing copy and paste, some dramatic performance improvements, and support for CDMA carriers stateside like Verizon and Sprint.

Read on for more. 

More: continued here

Twelve months ago NVIDIA stood on stage at CES and introduced its Tegra 2 SoC. It promised dozens of design wins and smartphones shipping before Spring 2010. That obviously did not happen.

What instead happened was NVIDIA lost a number of design wins, many of which we centered around mobile OSes other than Android. There were a number of Windows Mobile/Windows CE based designs that never made it to market, and a lot of efforts around earlier versions of Android that never went anywhere.

In the time since NVIDIA’s CES 2010 announcement, the company has shifted resources and focused its entire Tegra team on a single OS: Android. Choosing Android isn’t a hard decision to understand, of all of the available smartphone OS options it has the most momentum behind it.

Read on for more coverage of NVIDIA's Tegra 2 announcements at CES.

More: continued here

Brian and I are currently at LG's press conference where the company announced, as expected, the LG Optimus 2X – the world's first dual-core Cortex A9 smartphone based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC. While NVIDIA announced Tegra 2 at last year's CES, it has taken this long to even get to the point where we can talk about products that will soon be shipping.

The 2X uses NVIDIA's Tegra 2 AP20H with both of its two Cortex A9s running at 1GHz. We'll have more details on Tegra 2 later today during NVIDIA's press conference. I'd expect the Optimus 2X to ship sometime in Q1.

LG also announced its thinnest smartphone: the Optimus Black. The phone is 9.2 mm thick (weighs 109 grams) and uses LG's ultra bright 4-inch NOVA display (it's not AMOLED). LG claims a brightness of 750 nits, which if true is at least 23% brighter than the brightest smartphone display we've tested thus far (BlackBerry Torch) and 30% brighter than the iPhone 4.

Lastly, LG announced an LTE USB dongle, the VL600, based on its own L2000 LTE chipset. It's Verizon branded in the photo, so we'll probably see it again soon. 

More: continued here

Ever since the Sandy Bridge preview, we’ve been waiting to see what Intel’s new architecture could do for mobility. No longer would quad-core notebooks require discrete graphics solutions, and performance would improve as well. While many of the desktop parts make do with a trimmed down graphics controller, nearly all of the mobile Sandy Bridge processors are packing a full set of 12EUs. Combine the improved efficiency of Intel’s new HD Graphics solution with double the clock speed of Core 2010’s IGP, and you have a recipe for mainstream graphics that may finally move out of their parents’ basement. We’ve been vigorously testing our Sandy Bridge notebook for the past couple of weeks, throwing everything we had available at it. Processor and graphics performance are markedly improved over Arrandale and Clarksfield, and battery life shows promise as well. Sandy Bridge may be a nice upgrade on the desktop, but for laptops and notebooks it’s nothing short or revolutionary. Read on to find out why!

More: continued here

The entities formerly known as AMD—namely, AMD and GlobalFoundries—are both here in Vegas for CES, and we had an opportunity to stop by and discuss their current and future technologies. 2011 is set to be a major year for both companies, with new process nodes, new CPUs, and new GPUs targeting all segments of the computing spectrum. Judging by the amount of AMD laptops scattered around the various booths, this could be something of a comeback for the “little” guys. Why the excitement, and what’s coming this year?

More: continued here

So I have a confession to make. The past few months I've been incredibly preoccupied with smartphones, so much so that the ASUS MS238H has been sitting on my desk for a very long time. The data's been largely taken, the display calibrated, but for whatever reason the review has endlessly been on my back burner – I'm sorry ASUS. The upside of this situation, however, is that I've spent a long time using the ASUS MS238 and feel like I know it inside and out, and it's a slim value performer. 

Read on for our full review.

More: continued here

Instead of the usual booth at CES, Netgear opted for private demo suites at the Marriot this time around. They also had a press conference on Tuesday, which I deliberately refrained from writing about because AnandTech is all about digging up the actual interesting news and doing the analysis right before getting it to the readers.

I had covered some Netgear press releases about their powerline networking products and the NeoTV 550 last August. At CES, we have some refreshes on top of that list, as well as some updates on the NTV 550 front (which has already found its way into the hands of a small number of US customers). Without further ado, onto the details!

More: continued here

Intel's Sandy Bridge processor architecture is upon us, and with it a freshly minted gaming PC courtesy of CyberPowerPC: the Gamer Xtreme 4000. If you read Anand's preview of Sandy Bridge (along with our review), you should already know it's the fastest processor clock-for-clock that money can buy. So what happens when a boutique like CyberPowerPC overclocks it from the shop and ships it to you strapped to 4GB of DDR3 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570? That's what we're going to show you today.

More: continued here

Today I was finally able to spend some time with Motorola’s Atrix 4G and its webtop dock. For those of you who don’t know, earlier in the week Motorola announced its first Tegra 2 based smartphone: the Atrix 4G. Motorola later announced another Tegra 2 based smartphone, the Droid Bionic, however the Atrix 4G is its flagship smart/superphone.

Equipped with a full GB of memory and 16GB of NAND, the Tegra 2 based Atrix 4G has one very unique feature: it can be docked into a custom ultra thin notebook chassis and used to drive the notebook. 

Read on for Anand's take on the setup.

More: continued here

Motorola just announced its flagship Tegra 2 based smartphone: the ATRIX 4G. Running Android 2.2, the ATRIX 4G has a pair of Cortex A9s running at 1GHz inside NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC (similar to the LG Optimus 2X that was just announced earlier today). The SoC has 1GB of memory on package, putting it at twice what you get in most high end smartphones today. The phone is 10.9mm thick and will ship with 16GB of internal NAND storage and a beefy 1930mAh battery.

The real killer feature for the ATRIX is Motorola's webtop application. Motorola will be offering a netbook chassis with a ATRIX 4G dock on it. When your phone is docked, the ATRIX 4G will drive the netbook's 11.6" display and use its 36Whr battery. You get a full keyboard in the 13.9mm thick chassis. 

When docked the ATRIX 4G will give you up to 8 hours of battery life (seems a little low given the huge battery). Finally, when docked you'll browse the web using a full blown ARM compiled version of Firefox.

You're looking at the smartphone's first steps into the realm of the PC.

More: continued here

While most of the desktops we've received so far have been fairly affordable (read: south of two large), we haven't really had a chance to take a run at the cream of the crop. We're talking the big ticket items—the expensive, beastly gaming machines. That all changes today with our review of the DigitalStorm BlackOps. The stock model starts at $1,776, but the demon we have on hand tips the scales at $3,624. That's no small amount of cash to drop on a gaming tower, but the BlackOps Assassin Edition comes with an overclocked Intel Core i7-950 and SLI'd GeForce GTX 580s. The only question that remains: is it worth it?

More: continued here

HTC CEO Peter Chou just announced the HTC Inspire 4G. Details about the HTC Inspire 4G's hardware stack are relatively scant, but the 4.3" screen begets a platform likely similar to the HTC EVO 4G, and will run Android 2.2. The Inspire 4G also appears to include HSPA+ support, not LTE.

The HTC Inspire 4G's real new feature is that it will be the first HTC phone with the new HTC Sense experience. HTC Sense brings a host of new enhancements, including context-aware ringtones – leave your phone in a purse or handbag, and the ringer will be appropriately louder, but silence itself when removed.

The New HTC Sense will also come with a web component, HTCsense.com, which provides remote wipe, lock, and ring functionality similar to what Windows Phone 7 and iOS offer. The version of HTC Sense on the Inspire, while new stateside, appears to be similar to if not the same as what's offered on the HTC Desire HD and Z in European and Asian markets.

More: continued here

With CES 2011 upon us, we must acknowledge that 2011 could well be the “Year of the Tablet”. Everyone—Motorola, Dell, HP, HTC, Acer, you name it—is releasing a tablet or three. If you’re ASUS, you’re announcing four different tablets today. If you are ASUS, I’d like to offer my congratulations and best wishes for this full-on assault of the tablet market. Chances are though, you’re not ASUS, so here’s the rundown on the four new devices.

Three of them are Honeycomb-based tablets, joined by a traditional Windows slate. Looking at the Android-based Eee Pads, we have the MeMO, a 7” Snapdragon slate, the Transformer, a 10” Tegra 2 slate with an optional keyboard docking station, and the Slider, a 10” convertible tablet with a sliding, tilting keyboard. The Windows tablet is called the Eee Slate EP121 and features a 12.1” display with an active Wacom digitizer and Core i5 UM power. It’s a pretty impressive looking bunch, so read on for more details and analysis.

More: continued here

ASUS and Intel are putting together a webcast that they've invited me to attend. The topic of discussion? Sandy Bridge. The webcast will air after Intel's official announcement of Sandy Bridge at 9AM PST on January 5, 2011 at CES.

The discussion will be a conversation between myself, Gary Key (former AT Motherboard Editor, current ASUS Technical Marketing Manager), and Michael Lavacot, an Intel Consumer Field Application Engineer. 

If you have any questions you'd like to see me answer on air or that you'd like me to grill ASUS and Intel on, leave them in the comments to this post and I'll do my best to get them addressed.

Of course we will also have our full review of Sandy Bridge around the same time. 

Update: Intel posted some of the videos from this webcast on its YouTube channel. I tried to answer as many of the big questions you guys asked as I could in the video or in our Sandy Bridge review. 

I'll add links here for more videos as they get posted:

• ASUS Quick Sync Demo
• ASUS UEFI Walkthrough/Demo
• Starcraft II Performance Demo
• Intel WiDi 2.0 Demo
• Discussion with Intel, Anand & ASUS

More: continued here

Today Motorola unveiled 4 new Android based devices during their press conference at CES today; three smartphones and 1 tablet.  We were able to get some limited hands on time with these devices at the end of the conference today.  

More: continued here

The iPad started shipping in April, and since then it has basically had the tablet market to itself. Literally, in the six months after the iPad’s release, it didn’t have a single direct competitor. Dell launched the Streak shortly after the iPad, but the Streak was a 5” unit that was significantly smaller than the iPad. In the 7-11” tablet market, Apple has been the only real player.

But that all changed when Samsung launched its 7” Galaxy Tab last month. On paper, the Galaxy Tab is essentially a jumbo-sized implementation of the Galaxy S smartphone platform. You’re looking at the same A8-based 1 GHz Hummingbird processor and PowerVR SGX 540 graphics chip, the same 512MB RAM, the same lightweight plastic build, and pretty similar industrial design. The screen has been upsized, from the 4” WVGA unit in the Galaxy S to a 7” WSVGA panel. As the first Android-based slate to come from a major manufacturer, it’s a very important device, and not just to test Android’s viability as a tablet platform.

So in the first of our Android tablet reviews, we have Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Read on to find out how it stacks up against the iPad and whether it can put a dent into Apple’s current domination of the tablet market.

More: continued here

CES 2011 has kicked off in a major way and the talk on a lot of vendors lips is Sandy Bridge: what it means, what it brings to the table, and yes, how to capitalize on it. But Sandy Bridge isn't the only big thing going on here; we had a chance to sit down with Corsair, Kingston, Zalman, Zotac, Patriot, A-Data, Thermaltake, and Cooler Master to see what they had on the horizon. These are some of the trends and noteworthy products we came across.

More: continued here

Rounding out the devices AT&T has announced this morning is the Samsung Infuse 4G, which packs a huge 4.5" Super AMOLED plus display. We're not certain what plus adds to super beyond even better sharpness and outdoor visibility. It's possible that super AMOLED plus includes a different subpixel pattern with greater density than Pentile, however we're not entirely certain yet. 

The device is 9mm thin, which AT&T claims is its thinnest smartphone – sure enough, the iPhone 4 is just 0.3 mm thicker. The 4.5 inch display is the largest we know of as well.

It appears that AT&T is taking a nod from T-Mobile and calling HSPA+ 21 Mbps devices "4G," something that while technically is kosher now by ITU standards, really isn't as exciting or fast as LTE. Details about the Infuse 4G are scant beyond it including an 8 megapixel rear facing camera and 1.3 megapixel front facing camera, and running Android 2.2 as well. The Infuse 4G also includes a Hummingbird SoC clocked 1.2 GHz.

More: continued here

If you read our Sandy Bridge Review you’ll know that we were very excited about Intel’s Quick Sync hardware transcode engine. It easily offers at least twice the performance of existing GPU based transcoding solutions without sacrificing image quality. There’s just one little problem: you can’t use Quick Sync you're using a discrete GPU, you need to use Intel's processor graphics.

Lucid presented a potential solution to the problem at this year’s CES. Through software alone, Lucid is able to copy the frame buffer from a discrete PCIe GPU to the frame buffer of SNB’s HD Graphics in main memory. The result is that you can hook a single monitor up to your motherboard’s video output and use a discrete GPU when you want it. Lucid’s technology would enable switchable graphics on the desktop, without any hardware requirements (it still obviously won’t work on P67, shame on Intel).

To demonstrate the technology Intel ran an H67 motherboard with a GeForce GTX 480. Lucid’s software was installed which allowed for the GTX 480 to run and its frame buffer output to be copied to main memory and sent out via Intel’s Flexible Display Interface through the DVI port on the back of the motherboard. 

At the same time, Intel demonstrated that it could run a Quick Sync enabled transcode in Cyberlink’s Media Espresso 6 – all thanks to Lucid’s software.

Lucid expects that there will only be a 1 – 3% impact in performance (although that’s something we’d have to see for ourselves), but there’s no firm date on when the driver will be available. I’m expecting a beta version of Lucid’s software in the coming weeks however.

Motherboard manufacturers could bundle Lucid’s solution with their boards to avoid upsetting end users thanks to Intel’s Quick Sync oversight. There’s still no getting around the fact that you can’t overclock your CPU on H67 motherboards. You’ll still have to wait for Z68 to fix that problem.

More: continued here

NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang just announced Project Denver – its first CPU architecture design ever, based on ARM's ISA. This is a custom design done by NVIDIA in conjunction with ARM and targeted at the high performance computing (HPC) market.

This is a huge announcement from NVIDIA, but not entirely unexpected. Prior to Project Denver NVIDIA licensed ARM IP but developed its own IP everywhere else for use in Tegra. Going forward, NVIDIA is turning into a full fledged SoC architecture company. This is a huge step in NVIDIA becoming a major player in the SoC evolution going forward.

Update: NVIDIA provided some more details on the announcement. Project Denver is targeted at everything from PCs to HPC/servers. This is completely a high end play going after the x86 stronghold. Project Denver ties in completely with Microsoft's announcement to bring Windows 8 to ARM next year.

NVIDIA also announced that it will be licensing ARM's Cortex A15 core, presumably for use in lower end devices (e.g. smartphones). I wouldn't be surprised if NVIDIA eventually moves to its own architecture based on ARM across the board.

More: continued here