IT-Code-News: IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 10/11/2013

Friday, October 11, 2013

IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 10/11/2013

AnandTech

Maingear Prepping R9-290X Desktop Systems

During the past week, AMD revealed their new R7 and R9 desktop GPUs, which mostly consist of rebranded 7000-series parts (e.g. the R9-280X). The one exception is the R9-290X, which uses the Hawaii core. Full details are not yet public, but Maingear is now taking preorders for their Shift and F131 systems that use the GPU. They also include a few pieces of information about the cards. For one, the R9-290X will ship with 4GB GDDR5 (along with TrueAudio and 4K resolution support), and second, the estimated ship date on the Shift and F131 is 10/23/2013.
As part of the offer, pre-ordering will also get you a copy of Battlefield 4 along with Battlefield 4 branded cases and hardware. These are “limited edition” systems, but that appears to be mostly related to the BF4 branding elements – and of course, Battlefield 4 will be one of the first games to support AMD’s Mantle API. The Shift is a CrossFire setup coming standard with two R9-290X cards and supporting up to three cards, with either the FX 9370 or 9590 CPU; pricing starts at around $3789. The F131 comes standard with a single R9-290X and supports up to two cards, and it uses an FX 8350; pricing begins at $2199 (depending on options).
Both systems are expensive and Maingear is known for relatively large markups, so it’s difficult to say how much each card will cost. The systems are also using AMD FX CPUs and motherboards, and while there are areas where AMD is still competitive, it’s pretty clear that overall Intel is well ahead in most areas of CPU performance. I suspect we’ll see Intel systems with R9-290X show up around the same time from other vendors, but we’ll wait for the full review before coming to any final recommendations.

Hands on with the MOBO Edition 18ct Gold HTC One

Gold seems to be on every device maker's mind right now. Recently we saw Apple introduce the Gold iPhone 5S, and then Samsung countered with a gold Galaxy S4, today we got a chance to hold and look at a special edition Gold HTC One. I stuck my gold iPhone 5S alongside the gold HTC One to compare the two gold phones.

The special edition HTC One is electroplated with 18 carat gold by Goldgenie for the 18th anniversary of the MOBO Awards. One of the devices will be given away to the winner of the best newcomer category at the MOBO Awards.

HTC is only making 5 gold HTC Ones, and the device we got hands on with is a test designed for getting the plating right and doing testing, so it isn't quite as flawless as the end devices will be. There's a clear coating on top of the gold to prevent scratching or flaking, of course gold itself has native properties that resist the formation of an oxide. Oddly enough the clear coating seemed to be the cause of most of the visual scratches which are suspended above the mirror finish gold plating. The front metal inserts of the HTC One are also gold plated. This gold version weighs 4 grams more than a normal HTC One as well, and HTC says its valued at 2,750 GBP, or roughly 4,400 USD.
Whereas the gold iPhone 5S is more of a champagne color, the gold HTC One is a much more vibrant color owing to the native color of the gold plating. The plastic regions are black on this gold edition as well, as an aside I wish Apple had a black and gold combination rather than the white and gold available now, as gold and black is visually much more striking.
HTC says the special edition gold HTC One has passed all the necessary RF testing, in spite of being plated. Antenna attenuation is of course still a concern even if the gold edition of the HTC One is ornamental.

Gallery: Hands on with the MOBO Edition 18ct Gold HTC One

A Look at Altera's OpenCL SDK for FPGAs
FPGAs offer the promise of reconfigurable computing: Reconfiguring the hardware to match your application needs. This reconfigurable approach is often more efficient than general purpose processors such as CPUs. However, programming FPGAs has traditionally been hard and usually required expertise in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs). Altera has introduced an OpenCL SDK for FPGAs, making them accessible to a much larger software community and a potential alternative to other accelerators such as GPGPUs. We take a look at Altera's offering, explain how it works and provide analysis about how using OpenCL for FPGAs compares with alternatives such as GPUs.

Samsung Galaxy Round, a Curved Note 3

Just recently, news broke that the Galaxy Round is being released for sale in Korea. While Samsung can claim that they are the first to create a commercially sold curved AMOLED display, Samsung has made phones with curved displays before, although such curves were achieved through curved glass, not curved displays. Smartphone OEMs are no strangers to curved glass, as such designs were extremely popular in 2012, because it made for no detectable ridge when swiping off of the screen, but came at the cost of increased susceptibility of the glass lens to damage.
While this Galaxy Round is not likely to suffer from such issues, this formfactor will likely carry a few idiosyncrasies. But first, the specs. The phone is almost undoubtedly running an MSM8974 SoC with the higher 2.3 GHz bin, as 8974AB seems to be confined to the Xiaomi Mi-3 for now, and the presence of LTE-A means MDM9x25. The back seems to be adopting the same design as the Note 3’s, with a faux-leather texture, although it appears the speaker has been moved to the back of the phone and the Wacom digitizer is gone, most likely due to volume constraints imposed by such a shape, as effective volume goes down compared to a conventional slate like that of the Note 3, which explains why the battery is now a 2800 mAh, 10.64 WHr unit instead of the 3200 mAh, 12.16 WHr unit found in the Note 3. Beyond these changes, the phone appears to be largely identical in hardware to the Note 3. Despite the curve, the AMOLED display should be largely identical in behavior compared to its flat counterpart.
Of course, Samsung has also released new software to take advantage of the rounded design, such as rocking the device to check glanceable information such as missed calls and notifications when the device is asleep. Various other motion features also take advantage of the phone’s design that allows it to roll left and right when placed on a table, such as music controls and gallery navigation. While currently unique to this phone, the Galaxy Round is far from the only smartphone on the market that behaves in a similar manner when placed on a table, with phones like the HTC One coming to mind. While a curved back makes for better ergonomics, such design is not limited to devices with curved displays, as evidenced by both the Moto X and LG G2.
Possibly one of the biggest issues that could happen with this phone is severe issues with screen protectors, cases, and other accessories due to its unusual curve, although it would only be a matter of market demand to find solutions to such problems. Although Samsung should be applauded for being the first to make a curved display, it is difficult to understand the utility of such a device, due to the lack of any killer feature in the device, which was a large reason for the success of the original Note line, as the Wacom digitizer feature arrived during the height of the Draw Something fad. While it will probably fit well in a pocket, and the motion features are neat, neither really justify the reduction in battery capacity nor the deletion of hardware present in the Note 3, which affects core experience for the sake of minor features. While the market ultimately determines what products are successful or not, the fact that this is only being sold in Samsung’s home market speaks volumes. This device seems to be a continuation of Samsung’s strategy of targeting as many formfactors as possible (as well as being an exercise in productizing internal Samsung technologies), in the same vein as the Galaxy S4 Active. It also seems to be that this device is most likely to end up in a similar situation as the Galaxy S4 Active, merely repeated in the Note line.

Synology Refreshes RackStation Lineup with RS2414+ and RS2414RP+

Synology launched two new 2U RackStations (the RS2414+ amd RS2414RP+) today. These are the first units with a full 12 bays available in the main unit itself (Their current flagship, the RS10613xs+ has 10 bays and two additional bays for caching drives). Both models can scale up to 24 drives with the RX1214 and RX1214RP RackExpansion units.

Gallery: Synology RackStation RS2414RP+

Gallery: Synology RackExpansion RX1214RP

Keeping affordability in mind (the RS2414+, RS2414RP+, RX1214 and RX1214RP have MSRPs of $1900, $2500, $1700 and $2400 respectively), the models don't come with Xeon-based platforms. They appear to have the same base hardware as the DS1813+ (with a 2.13 GHz Atom-class dual core CPU, four Gigabit NICs and 2 GB of RAM which is upgradeable to 4 GB). Enterprise features like high availability and MPIO are available. The software (DSM 4.3) carries all necessary certifications from the virtualization software vendors, ADS and LDAP support as well as SSD read caching and TRIM support.
Synology's decision to target the market for rackmount units with both Xeon and Atom-based models is interesting. Even though the Atom-based units are probably not powerful enough for models with a large number of bays, it should be good enough for applications where scalability and capacity are primary concerns, rather than raw performance.
Enterprise / SMB customers with an urgent need for scalable solutions would do little wrong in opting to go with the new models. For those who can wait a little, the Bay Trail-based solutions coming out next year are going to be a better choice in many respects (power consumption and encryption performance are just a few aspects in which we can expect considerable improvements).

The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
After being announced back at AMD's 2014 GPU Product Showcase, today AMD is finally launching the Radeon 200 series. Today we’ll be looking at the new series in detail – sans the yet be launched Radeon R9 290X – including both the feature sets and technologies that are arriving alongside the new 200 series cards, and several of the cards themselves. AMD is going to be saving their best for last, but they have a warm-up act that should at least capture the attention of video card enthusiasts everywhere.

NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 660, GTX 650 Ti Boost Price Cuts

Ahead of things to come this week, NVIDIA has announced a preemptive price cut for a couple of their mainstream GeForce products. As of today, the GTX 660 is getting an official price cut to $179, which is down from the $200 or so prices that it was at a bit earlier this year. Meanwhile the GTX 650 Ti Boost is getting a price cut down to $149 for the 2GB model, and $129 for the 1GB model.

Fall NVIDIA MSRPs
Video Card	MSRP
GeForce GTX 780	$649
GeForce GTX 770	$399
GeForce GTX 760	$249
GeForce GTX 660	$179
GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB	$149
GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 1GB	$129

Interestingly, NVIDIA did take the time to reiterate that these are the only price cuts that are taking place. The GTX 760 and GTX 770 are not getting price cuts and will remain at $249 and $399 respectively.

Some Thoughts on Smartphone Region Locking

Recently, reports of Samsung region locking the Note 3 came out via Clove UK, which posted on its blog that the Note 3 would be completely unable to use a SIM card from a carrier outside of the region, and would not ship any Note 3 devices with a region lock outside of Europe.
Of course, while unprecedented in the smartphone industry, this sort of business has been happening for a very long time in the automobile industry, which has effectively banned grey importing to the US. While that isn't common knowledge, some may know that the Skyline GT-R is effectively banned from the US, which is a direct result of a ban on grey imports. The reason for all of this was a push by Mercedes-Benz USA to protect its dealer network and its own margins. In short, the story behind all of this is that grey imports were cutting into profit margins, as importers could easily take advantage of fluctuating exchange rates, and when all was said and done, going through an importer could net thousands of dollars in savings, all of which was effectively taken from the OEM. As a result, MBUSA and a coalition of other OEMs successful lobbied Congress to pass laws that made grey importing effectively impossible, which completely killed that industry.
While there are other possible justifications for region locking devices, looking to the past, it is evident that this move is done for similar reasons, albeit implemented at the software levels rather than enforced by law. While at first such a move threatened to have severe blowback due to the lockout of foreign SIMs for those traveling outside of the region intended for use, Samsung moved quickly to quell such fears, stating that the lock would only be for initial activation and that any region locked device would be able to be unlocked by a regional service center, however it seems that based upon multiple user reports, unlocked devices in certain regions have been completely locked out from using foreign SIMs. Recent information suggests that this lock is also shipping on many other unlocked devices that we're manufactured after July 2013, and such locks may arrive via OTA update for some devices. Due to their enormous marketshare and mindshare, Samsung is best placed to execute such a strategy, and stands to greatly increase margins from this move.
Even though Samsung is the first to do this in the smartphone industry, it is hard to say that such a move would not be pushed by other OEMs, as all would stand to profit from such region locking. While the automotive industry achieved this through legislation, it seems that smartphone OEMs are well-positioned to implement such features in software. While initial SIM locks would be easily bypassed by resellers, forcing the need to acquire an unlock code from a service center in the correct region would be extremely effective at killing grey market imports in the smartphone market, especially if the lock flag were in a partition with signature checks enforced like many carrier locks. It remains to be seen, however, whether the smartphone OEM would move in such a direction. While the automobile industry is nothing to be emulated, it is possible that the smartphone industry will follow in its footsteps.

The GeForce GTX 760 Roundup: Gigabyte and EVGA Compared
Today we’re taking a look at our first customized GTX 760 cards, the GTX 760 OC Windforce 3X and GTX 760 Superclocked ACX from Gigabyte and EVGA respectively. Based on fully custom designs, Gigabyte and EVGA are pairing factory overclocks with their in-house coolers and software to add value to their cards and stand apart in a crowded market. With both cards similarly overclocked the real test will be who has the cooler cooler: Gigabyte or EVGA?

21.5-inch iMac (Late 2013) Review: Iris Pro Driving an Accurate Display
I have a confession to make. For the past year I’ve been using a 27-inch iMac as my primary workstation. I always said that if I had a less mobile lifestyle the iMac is probably the machine I’d end up with (that was prior to the announcement of the new Mac Pro of course). This past year has been the most insane in terms of travel, so it wasn’t a lack of mobility that kept me on the iMac but rather a desire to test Apple’s new Fusion Drive over the long haul.
It’s entirely possible to mask the overwhelmingly bad experience of a hard drive in a high performance machine by only sampling at the beginning of the journey. When the OS is a clean install, the drive is mostly empty and thus operating at its peak performance. Obviously Apple’s Fusion Drive is designed to mitigate the inevitable performance degradation, and my initial take on it after about a month of use was very good - but would it last?
I’m happy to report that it actually did. So today’s confession is really a two-parter: I’ve been using an iMac for the past year, and I’ve been using a hard drive as a part of my primary storage for the past year. Yeesh, I never thought I’d do either of those things.
This year the iMacs get incrementally better. Displays and resolutions are the same, but silicon options are a bit quicker, 802.11ac is on deck and the SSDs all move to PCIe (including Fusion Drive). As tempted as I was to begin my first look at the 2013 iMac evaluating the impact of going to faster storage, it was the entry-level model that grabbed my attention first because of a little piece of silicon we’ve come to know as Crystalwell.

Firefox OS 1.1 Adds MMS, Saving Webpage Content, and Push Notifications
Mozilla's mobile contender is creeping closer to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone

Obama Administration Gives Apple its Blessing to Ban Older Samsung Products
Obama administration had denied a similar ban on Apple products for Samsung

Panasonic to Exit Plasma TV Business by March 2014
Workers in the division will be reassigned

Microsoft Awards First $100,000 Bug Bounty to Security Researcher
The same security researcher has earned the vast majority of all Microsoft payouts for bugs

10/9/2013 Daily Hardware Reviews -- AMD Radeon R7/R9 Edition
DailyTech's roundup of reviews from around the internet for Wednesday

Court Turns Down NYC's "Taxi of Tomorrow" Program
This could block the widespread launch of Nissan's NV200

Qualcomm Withdraws Previous Statements About Apple's 64-Bit Chip Being "Marketing Gimmick"
A spokesperson said the statements were "inaccurate"

Mankind Creeps Closer to Fusion Power Era as Calif. Lab Nearly "Breaks Even"
The energy released by the pellet of fuel exceeded the absorbed energy, but was less than the total energy used

Samsung Announces 2.3GHz Quad-core, 5.7" Curved Screen "Galaxy Round" Smartphone
@evleaks is at it again with a single picture of Samsung's latest smartphone

Nest Unveils "Protect" Smoke Detector for $130
It will be available in early November

Apple to Hold iPad Event on October 22, Looks to Steal Microsoft’s Surface 2 Thunder
Apple schedules its iPad event for October 22

AMD R9 260X, 270X, 280X Launch; NVIDIA Fills in GeForce 700 Series Ranks
For now AMD has the lead -- but will it last

Microsoft Introduces Azure-Based, Government-Only Cloud
There's no specific release date for the new government cloud, but Microsoft said it's coming soon

HTC Admits it Has a Communication Problem, Eyes Windows Phone Escape Route
HTC may have only sold 6 million smartphones in Q3, according to analysts; company posts its first loss

New $279 HP Chromebook 11 Available Now
It's a budget-friendly laptop with a lot of color

Ford Shows Off Self Parking Car Technology with Remote Control Option
Ford technology can park the car no human intervention

Red Cross Wants Punishments for War Crimes in Realistic Video Games
Bohemia Interactive is onboard with the idea

Google's Eric Schmidt Says Android is "More Secure Than iPhone"
Schmidt talks Android security and fragmentation

AT&T Wearable Device Helps Parents Keep an Eye on Kids
It allows for voice calling, direct messaging and location services

Microsoft Claims Xbox One Can Make Due With Faster GPU, Less Compute Units
Microsoft explains why it picked ESRAM/DDR3 over GDDR5; virtualization benefits; and why not all game are 1080p

Report: Patent Trolls "Play the Silly Game", Buy DC Lobbyists to Influence Congress
Dean Kamen blasts FTC probe, says he's a proud "troll"

Report: Russia Promises "Openness and Friendship", Wiretaps Olympic Village
Russian program of surveillance likened to a beefed up verge of the tech the NSA uses to spy on U.S. citizens

New $100 Bill Set to Circulate Starting Tomorrow
I has two new safety features aimed to reduce counterfeit versions

LG Display Announces World's First Mass-Produced Flexible OLED Panel for Smartphones
OLED panel expected to be available in November

Quick Note: Ads Arrive in Android's Gmail Update
They are sent directly to the Promotional folder

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