PUMA Phone Brings The Cat (And A Solar Charger) To The Smartphone World
High up on the list of companies we never expected to make a cell phone is PUMA. Yes, that PUMA. The PUMA that you see on the bodies of athletes competing at the highest level in sports, and the PUMA that may be on something within your very closet right now. The clothing outfit has realized that the smartphone market is exploding, and if Armani can get their own phone, why not PUMA?Sagem Wireless, a smaller company that isn't known so well in America, has teamed up with the outfitter in order to reveal the
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Active Media Products Launches Aviator-2 External USB 3.0 SSD
Active Media Products has been a slow but steady force in the solid state storage market, and while it has been months on end since the company has publicly introduced a new drive, they're making a big splash with this one.As USB 3.0 takes off in popularity, Active Media Products is making sure they're at the very front of the push. Today, the company launched the Aviator-2 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external 2.5-inch SSDs, which offer a 400% performance gain compared to USB 2.0 external HDDs. And to think, we can't
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HBO Go Is The Pay-Model Hulu Has Been Searching For
We've heard for quite some time that Hulu was considering pay-for-content subscription models, which is quite different from how things are today. Currently, users are able to watch anything on Hulu (which includes a vast majority of today's most popular television shows) for free so long as they watch advertisements. It certainly generates money for the company (and NBC Universal), but we're sure that content executives are always looking for more.HBO might just have their answer. Home Box Office has always
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Corsair Unleashes Second Generation Flash Padlock Secure USB Flash Drive
Corsair announced the new Flash Padlock 2 secure USB flash drive. As the second generation of the Corsair Flash Padlock drive, the new Flash Padlock 2 uses two security technologies to help protect your data. First, the drive employs a user-definable PIN. In order to unlock the drive and access data on it, you must enter the correct PIN using the drive's integrated keypad. Second, the contents of the drive are encrypted with 256-bit AES data encryption. In addition to 256-bit AES hardware encryption, the drive
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Beceem & Motorola To Combine WiMAX & LTE In A Single Chip
When it comes to 4G technologies, there are two competing standards: WiMAX and LTE. While LTE has potential to be more prevalent long-term once Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile all deploy the technology, Sprint and Clearwire's WiMAX offering has a head start since it's already available. Thanks to a new chip that's being developed from Beceem and Motorola, however, you may never have to choose one type of technology over the other. Beceem makes the WiMAX chips inside "every device in Clearwire's network."
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OCZ Lets Loose Speedy Vertex Limited Edition (LE) SSD
Is there any other company more active in the solid state drive space than OCZ? Probably not, and to keep the momentum going, OCZ today announced the newest member to its SSD lineup, the Vertex Limited Edition (LE).The Vertex name should look familiar by now to anyone who's been following the SSD scene, so what makes the Limited Edition different from previous versions? According to OCZ, "cutting-edge new architecture." Put more plainly, the new Vertex LE ups the performance ante by delivering up to 270MB/s
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AT&T Finally Gets Android: Motorola BACKFLIP Coming March 7
Are you ready for this, AT&T users? And by "this," we mean "the carrier's first-ever Android phone." As Mobile World Congress winds down in Spain, AT&T has just announced some sort of backup plan for when they will (possibly) lose exclusivity on Apple's iPhone. We're halfway kidding, but having a Google-based phone on the network certainly isn't a bad idea when you consider that Android has already permeated the other three major operators in America.Beginning on March 7th, interested users will be able
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AMD Releases New Catalyst Drivers; Reveals Upcoming Features of Catalyst 10.3
Generally speaking, driver updates are rather staid affairs whether you prefer yours red or green. It's been years since the release of a driver series that could be expected to boost performance more than 10-15 percent or so in nearly any game. The benefits of a driver upgrade tend to be more specifically focused on adding new features these days, but that's a trend, not a fact. With its new Catalyst 10.2 and upcoming 10.3 drivers, AMD is baking in a range of new functionality that should both improve
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Kingston Ships 256GB DataTraveler 310 USB Flash Drive To U.S.
Kingston's DataTraveler 300 offered customers 256GB of flash storage on a single pen drive, but it was never officially offered in the United States. Today, Kingston is finally satisfying the capacity dreams of Americans with the introduction of the DataTraveler 310. What's wild is that 256GB is large even when you're talking SSDs; to see this size in the palm of your hand in the form of a USB drive is almost unbelievable.It's Kingston's first-ever 256GB Flash Drive to ship in the U.S., and it replaces the DataTraveler
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Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review
Initially, only a couple of companies laid the foundation for storage processors when solid state drives first arrived, now we have a broad range of options to choose from. Intel, Samsung, JMicron, Indilinx, and Sandforce, all make SSD controllers, just to name a few. Today we're going to show you yet another new SSD based on a new controller from a long-time player in PC storage, Marvell. The Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 controller at the heart of the Micron RealSSD C300 we're going to show you today, affords the
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Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review
Looking at current solid state drive market, it's easy to draw some parallels with the early days of 3D on the PC. When 3D graphics cards first hit the scene (before the term GPU was coined), there were only a few major players, i.e. 3dfx, Tseng Labs, S3, etc. As the technology was more accepted by consumers, however, numerous other manufactures, like NVIDIA, ATI, 3DLabs, Matrox, Rendition, Number 9 and many others, wanted a piece of the pie as well and they all entered the fray with 3D processors of their own.
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AMD Releases New Catalyst Drivers; Reveals Upcoming Features of Catalyst 10.3
Generally speaking, driver updates are rather staid affairs whether you prefer yours red or green. It's been years since the release of a driver series that could be expected to boost performance more than 10-15 percent or so in nearly any game.آ The benefits of a driver upgrade tend to be more specifically focused on adding new features these days, but that's a trend, not a fact. With its new Catalyst 10.2 and upcoming 10.3 drivers, AMD is baking in a range of new functionality that should both improve performance in existing games, reduce GPU power consumption, and introduce new features and capabilities.Set and Spike: Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3
A fair number of the goodies we'll discuss today won't be available until Catalyst 10.3 drops in March, but several key ingredients are already integrated into Catalyst 10.2, which is available for download over here. These improvements include:
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- Crossfire Support for Eyefinity: Up until now, Eyefinity mode could only be driven off a single video card, which limited its usefulness considering how much horsepower it takes to drive 2-3 displays simultaneously. In 10.2, this limitation is lifted; CrossFire configurations can now split the strain of Eyefinity rendering.
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- Power Reduction: 10.2 improves AMD's power management system when a GPU or GPUs are idling. AMD claims a drop of around 12W; we check this below.
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- Crossfire Profile Updates: This is a feature that sounds great on paper but we'll have to wait to see how well it works in practice. Up until now, AMD has always eschewed NVIDIA's SLI profile system in favor of once-monthly updates delivered with each new driver release and invisible to the end user. This strategy hasn't served the company particularly well; Crossfire has developed a certain reputation for supporting fewer games and delivering less performance from the addition of a second GPU. Starting with driver 10.2, AMD will deliver XML profile updates as needed over at game.amd.com. By decoupling the process, AMD believes it can update Crossfire support much more quickly and make the changes available immediately rather than waiting for a driver to drop. Those of you hoping for an NVIDIA-like experience, however, will still be disappointed. While this new system will allow AMD to roll out updates more frequently, the profiles themselves will not be user-editable and there will be no option to create your own game profile.
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- DisplayPort Audio: If you're one of the six people who own DisplayPort-compatible monitors and actually the standard, congratulations. You may now stream audio data directly into your display's lousy speakers.
آ - CrossFire Rearchitected: We don't know exactly what this means yet, but AMD has indicated it will enable better compatibility between upcoming Llano devices and various discrete video cards.
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- Improved 3D Stereoscopic Support: Primarily applicable if you're one of the dozen gamers regularly playing in 3D. Consolation prize: You're twice the size of the gamers using DisplayPort and can actually raid a 10-man instance in World of Warcraft without pugging any of those loser 2D people.
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- Mobile Driver Support: All we can say is finally. With 10.3, ATI will release OEM drivers for mobile products based on the HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 products. This is supported by "most" OEM/ODM manufacturers—we'll have to wait to see just how comprehensive the list actually is. Since most OEMs update their driver packages at a pace best described as 'glacial', this could be very good news for anyone frustrated by their GPU's performance.
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- Display Bezel Compensation: This is pretty cool. As the image below demonstrates; bezel compensation allows you to seamlessly align an image over two or more displays. This feature should subtly improve multi-monitor gaming—properly implemented, it allows the eye to more easily ignore the break between two panels. Catalyst 10.3 will also allow users to individually set brightness and contrast per monitor.
AMD is pushing multi-monitor support at all levels and for both 2D and 3D use.
Power Reduction At Work:
Now let's switch gears and take a look at power consumption. Radeon 4000 cards were criticised in the past for not being particularly efficient in idle mode. Moving to 40nm technology has improved AMD's standing vis-أ -vis NVIDIA, but there was clearly room for improvement software-side. We used our dual-5970 Origin testbed for our power measurements, our original review of the system can be found here. We measured idle power at the desktop after waiting 15 minutes and used a Kill-a-Watt wall meter to record total system power draw.
When testing under Catalyst 9.12, we found that removing the second Radeon 5970 altogether cut idle power consumption by 64W. When we switched to the 10.2 driver series and measured the single 5970 again, we saw an 11W improvement. This is within 1W of what AMD indicated we'd see. When we plugged the second card back in, however, things got interesting. When both cards were in the system and connected (but Crossfire was turned off in the 10.2 driver), the idle power draw was actually 275W. Enabling CrossFire in the driver actually reduced system power consumption by another 10W, bringing it down to the 265W we listed above. The "cost" of adding the second Radeon under Catalyst 10.2, in other words, is just 40W, or just 60 percent as much as what we saw under 9.12.
AMD is hitting these lower targets by aggressively downclocking a card's GPU and memory when it's not actively being used. According to the overclocking utility included in the Catalyst drivers, the primary display GPU runs at 137MHz (GPU) and 300MHz (memory). The other three GPUs are at least partially powered down. Your mileage will vary here depending on the type of card you have, but reductions in idle power consumption tend to have the greatest impact on device power use over time.
Conclusion:
AMD has put together an interesting suite of features in Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3. The new options won't necessarily bring immediate performance gains above and beyond the typical month-to-month tweaking we've seen in the past, but some of the multi-monitor and individual display customization options are quite attractive to anyone using more than one display. Overall, we're excited to see what AMD has coming in future driver iterations—hopefully the changes to Crossfire profiling will improve AMD's standing compared to NVIDIA when using multi-GPU configurations.
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OCZ Lets Loose Speedy Vertex Limited Edition (LE) SSD
Is there any other company more active in the solid state drive space than OCZ? Probably not, and to keep the momentum going, OCZ today announced the newest member to its SSD lineup, the Vertex Limited Edition (LE).The Vertex name should look familiar by now to anyone who's been following the SSD scene, so what makes the Limited Edition different from previous versions? According to OCZ, "cutting-edge new architecture." Put more plainly, the new Vertex LE ups the performance ante by delivering up to 270MB/s read and 250MB/s write speeds. And for you geeky types into the more hardcore stats, OCZ says you can expect up to 15,000 IOPS (4K random writes). On paper, it all adds up to one of the fastest consumer-level SSDs around.
"OCZ has an excellent reputation as a leader in solid state drives, and as new technologies become available, we are continually expanding our solution portfolio to bring enhanced performance benefits to the complete spectrum of our client's applications," commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "The new Vertex Limited Edition SSD is our fastest, multi-level cell (MLC), performance-based drive yet and delivers both exceptional speed and reliability for customers demanding a superior storage solution including intensive applications such as audio/video editing, mobile computing and even use in workstations."
Adding to its list of tricks, the Vertex LE also features TRIM support, a relatively new albeit important bullet point. By adding TRIM command support, SSD makers are able to side-step the performance degradation that plagued earlier flash drives after a certain amount of writes and deletes. Not to be undervalued, TRIM support should be at the top of any buyer's list when shopping an SSD.
The Vertex LE comes with a 3-year warranty. OCZ didn't say when it plans to start shipping the new MLC-based drive or disclose an MSRP, but did add it will come in 100GB and 200GB capacities. If we had to guess, we'd say pricing will probably start at $400 or higher.
Editor's Note:آ We're going to be updating our original Vertex 2 Pro article with numbers from this drive in just a matter of days, so stay tuned.آ Turns out the original Vertex 2 Pro wasn't quite ready for prime time but OCZ has more Sandforce-based drives coming soon.
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Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review
Initially, only a couple of companies laid the foundation for storage processors when solid state drives first arrived, now we have a broad range of options to choose from. Intel, Samsung, JMicron, Indilinx, and Sandforce, all make SSD controllers, just to name a few. Today we're going to show you yet another new SSD based on a new controller from a long-time player in PC storage, Marvell. The Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 controller at the heart of the Micron RealSSD C300 we're going to show you today, affords the drive a feature not yet offered on any competing product--SATA III support. This controller, in combination with some of Micron's leading-edge NAND flash, culminate in a drive that offered some of the best performance we have seen from any solid state drive to date.
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Looks like Nvidia might be in trouble
Word has it they are having trouble with Fermi. Looks like it will not appear in any quantities until winter 2010. I think Nvidia is imploding.
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Official Today....
I am now MCSA Certified!
Woooooo!!
Now i've just gotta work on those MCSE exams lol
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