Saturday, January 15, 2011

IT News HeadLines (AnandTech) 15/01/2011


AnandTech
ASRock ION 3D - A Next Generation ION HTPC
ASRock has yet another Mini PC in its lineup, this one makes use of an Atom dual-core processor and NVIDIA ION Graphics. In this review we will attempt to see if the ION 3D is capable of keeping up with its bigger brothers the Vision 3D and the 100HT-BD in the role of Home Theatre PC.

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Dell U3011 Review: Dell's New 30-inch Flagship
There's something special about 30" displays. They're the biggest, the baddest, and the spiritual flagship for each respective display maker. It's where manufacturers pull out all the stops on visual quality, inputs, build quality and features. We reviewed HP's updated 30-incher, the ZR30w a few months ago, and now it's Dell's turn to refresh and update their own 30" display - the U3011.
How does it stand up to the competition? Read on for the full review.

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Nokia N8 Review: Nokia's New Flagship
I remember one of the first mobile phones I ever used being a Nokia 5110i. It was among Nokia’s earliest of devices that packed an easy to use and straightforward interface in a supremely well-built package. Since we didn’t have as many phone launches each month back then as there are stars in the sky, the 5110i served me very well for more than three years without showing any signs of aging. That was in the mid to late 90’s. Fast forward to the end of this decade and we see Nokia’s current flagship, the N8-00, continuing to hold on to the Nokia tradition of building what are arguably some of the best constructed mobile devices on the market.
In many ways, with the Nokia N8-00 (referred to as the N8 from here on) it seems as though Nokia let its hardware and industrial design teams have a field day; this phone feels almost over engineered when held in your hands. While the current flagship demonstrates Nokia’s engineering prowess quite well, previous models seemed to epitomize what I felt was the company’s philosophy; build the software around the hardware. This worked just perfectly for as long as mobile phones were just that, devices used to make and receive calls and/or texts. Sometime in the last decade, Apple, Google, Palm and Microsoft redefined mobile experiences, and as a result old flaws have slowly become gaping holes in the Finnish device manufacturer’s proverbial armor.
Does the N8 smooth over those problems? Read on to find out.

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Westinghouse Brings LED & Netflix Enabled TVs to Budget Conscious Consumers
At CES 2011, Westinghouse introduced flat screen TVs ranging from 26" to 60" in size. All the models are targeted towards the budget conscious customer, implying probably lowest cost in that particular class. With a good retail presence in the US, the targeted consumers are going to find it easy to purchase one from their favourite big box stores. Further, the warranty and return grace period provided by retailers like Costco should help cautious consumers.
The new CFL model flat screens are perfect for consumers who are still in the CRT age and those that have taken advantage of the recent DTV box program. Westinghouse is the only value brand which doesn't buy the whole display module, but just the panels and adds the backlighting and other circuitry themselves. The new LED backlit models come with either red or silver trims.
The 26" model is perfect for hooking up notebooks in dorm rooms or other similar situations. Netflix and Vudu (currently planned) only available on one of the 46" models which runs on the Zoran chipset. Other models of larger size running on the Zoran chipset are also capable of Netflix, and are planned for enabling based on demand. Smaller sized models dont get Netflix because there is not enough margin in the smaller TVs to compensate for the licensing costs. Consumers with smaller TVs also run some other Blu-Ray player or media streamer capable of Netflix, so this is not much of a concern.
Other than Zoran, Broadcom DTV chipsets are also being used in the Westinghouse TVs. Both the Broadcom and Zoran chipsets enable a decent level of video postprocessing such as noise reduction, 3:2 pulldown support etc. which are quite necessary in the consumer market segment towards which the models are targeted.
Pricing and full lineup details in the press releases linked below:
Westinghouse - 46 LED Press Release
Westinghouse - CES 2011 Lineup Press Release

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Understanding the Verizon iPhone 4 Announcement
Earlier today Verizon did what has been rumored for a while now and announced a partnership with Apple beginning with the CDMA iPhone 4.
Device pricing remains unchanged from the AT&T iPhone 4. The 16GB model retails for $199.99 while the 32GB will set you back $299.99. There is no white version available.
 
Hardware specs, both internal and external, remain unchanged. Apple is also quoting the same battery life as the AT&T version of the iPhone 4, although battery life is very dependent on signal strength so it will vary depending on network coverage where you use the phone. 
 
So what is new? Read on to find out.

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(Updated: Video and Gallery) Apple's iPhone 4 Coming to Verizon Early Next Month, With Wireless Hotspot
Well, it's official - Verizon is getting the iPhone 4. The Apple/Verizon relationship developed over the last two years. The two companies began technical discussions starting in 2008 about bringing the iPhone to Verizon. The phone then spent a year in testing and design and starting early next month, the iPhone 4 will come to Verizon.
The Apple/Verizon relationship is formalized in a multi-year, non-exclusive agreement. However we have no additional details, including whether or not release schedules will be synchronized with AT&T.
At Verizon's press conference there's a lot of mutual respect sharing between the two companies. It looks like there's a desire to establish that these two companies want to work together and will continue to going forward. 
Existing VZW customers will be able to pre-order the iPhone 4 online on February 3rd, 2010. A week later, on February 10th, everyone will be able to order the Verizon iPhone 4 both online and in Verizon stores as well as at the Apple store (both online and at physical stores).
The phone will sell for $199.99 for a 16GB version, and $299.99 for the 32GB version. The Verizon iPhone 4 will feature wireless hotspot capabilities allowing you to connect up to 5 devices to it over WiFi. Verizon indicated that you wouldn't be able to use voice and data simultaneously, consistent with other CDMA devices on its network.
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More as we get it.

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BaseMark GUI from RightWare Launches: SoCs Benchmarked
Rightware, makers of MobileMark, BrowserMark, and other mobile benchmarking tools recently launched a new 3D benchmark for mobile devices named BaseMark GUI. BaseMark joins our growing suite of smartphone benchmarks and tests OpenGL ES 2.0 performance on Android and other platforms with an emphasis on 3D UI. We've run BaseMark on almost all the devices we've got on hand, and will do so in the future on other devices.
How does the current crop of SoCs perform in this test? Read on for more.

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What a Day: AMD's CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns
I don’t usually pay much attention to corporate executives and the hirings, firings and resignations thereof. It’s not that executives are unimportant, it’s that they’re not exactly what I’m passionate about. While I never pass up an opportunity to meet with an exec, I generally walk away more impressed after a conversation with a Fellow.
 
Today’s resignation of AMD’s former CEO Dirk Meyer seemed like reason to pay attention. It wasn’t a scandal or anything vile that led up to the resignation, just a good old fashioned differing of opinion. To quote AMD’s press release:
”However, the Board believes we have the opportunity to create increased shareholder value over time. This will require the company to have significant growth, establish market leadership and generate superior financial returns. We believe a change in leadership at this time will accelerate the company’s ability to accomplish these objectives.”
The implication being that Dirk’s plan for AMD wouldn’t result in significant growth, establish market leadership and generate superior financial returns. The question is what was Dirk’s plan and what direction does AMD’s Board of Directors believe it should be headed in instead?

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Intel Settles With NVIDIA: More Money, Fewer Problems, No x86
NVIDIA and Intel just released their respective PR announcements a bit ago, but after much rumor mongering it’s official: Intel and NVIDIA are the latest duo to bury the hatchet. This comes on the heels of 3 other major Intel actions in the past two years: the EU fining Intel (which is still under appeal), Intel settling with AMD (affirming GloFo as a legal venture), Intel settling with the United Stated Federal Trade Commission.
With the exception of the EU fine which is still under appeal, this is the final outstanding major legal battle for Intel over their actions of the first decade of the 21st century. Generally speaking someone is always suing Intel – or Intel is always suing someone else – but as far as normality is concerned this is a return to normal for Intel: they’ve now settled with every significant government and corporate entity and are no longer living under a cloud of allegations from a number of parties.
So what are NVIDIA and Intel burying the hatchet over? A lot of this has to do with the same matters we saw in the FTC suit, as part of the FTC’s case was built on NVIDIA’s complaints. As you may recall the FTC didn’t get everything they wanted, and this suit looks to resolve those outstanding issues along with settling NVIDIA’s chipset allegations, and providing NVIDIA with a sizable 1.5bil compensation package for their troubles.
 

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CES 2011: Microsoft Keynote
When Microsoft wrapped up its CES keynote on Wednesday night, they added fuel to a news-packed couple of days leading up to the start of CES. The software giant used the show to make a couple of big announcements, some regarding the future of Windows itself. Brian already looked at the Windows Phone side of the keynote and Anand will have a more in-depth look at the overall implications of the keynote later on, so we'll just give you a summary of the rest. Read on for our wrap up.

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Updated: The License Agreement: Intel to Pay NVIDIA $1.5 Billion
Update 2: Our full analysis of the agreement is now available here: Intel Settles With NVIDIA: More Money, Fewer Problems, No x86
In about 30 minutes NVIDIA will host a conference call to announce its 6-year $1.5 billion license agreement with Intel. Intel will pay annual installments totaling $1.5 billion over 6 years beginning January 18th.
We'll have full details after the conference call. The license agreement stems from the Intel/NV dispute over the right to build chipsets that interface with Intel CPUs that use DMI/QPI instead of the traditional GTL+ FSB.
After Project Denver and the Tegra 2 announcements at CES, it looks like NVIDIA is shaping up to have a good start to 2011.
Update: While we're still working on our full rundown of the agreement, there's been some speculation over at Ars Technica about what this agreement means for Intel; specifically claiming that NVIDIA GPUs will be appearing in Intel CPUs, on the basis of the fact that Intel is licensing NVIDIA technology. I'm not a lawyer (though I do play one on the Internet) however I disagree with this reading - Intel has to license NVIDIA technology to avoid running afoul of the company's large patent portfolio with their own IGPs. It's for all practical purposes impossible to build a desktop GPU without infringing on an AMD/NV patent. This agreement allows Intel to continue producing their IGPs, just as how the original 2004 chipset agreement allowed Intel to produce more modern IGPs in return for NVIDIA getting a chipset license. -Ryan Smith

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Seagate GoFlex Mac & Thin @ CES 2011
I met with Seagate briefly at the show and it gave me an update on additions to its drive lineup. Unfortunately there still are no updates to the Momentus XT. It remains as the only Hybrid HDD in Seagate’s lineup. I’m disappointed as I was hoping to at least see one update to the drive by now. As you may remember from our review the Momentus XT is easily the fastest desktop HDD on the market in real world usage, although it still can’t compete with SSDs.
The GoFlex Desk I reviewed not too long ago is officially coming to the Mac platform and Apple stores with the GoFlex Desk for Mac. There are only two differences between this version and what I reviewed. The first is the color of the chassis, the Mac version is a Mac-like silver vs. the standard black. The second difference is the drive will come formatted with a HFS+ partition, allowing Mac users to use it with Time Machine.

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CES 2011: Intel WiDi 2.0 Brings New Media Extenders
One major feature of mobile Sandy Bridge is support for Intel WiDi 2.0. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, WiDi 2.0 uses SNB’s Quick Sync engine to encode, in real time, the frame buffer and send it over 802.11n to a compatible WiDi receiver attached to your TV. The WiDi receiver decodes the content and displays your mobile desktop on whatever TV you have attached to the WiDi receiver, wirelessly. All you need is a SNB laptop with an Intel WiFi controller. Unlike wireless HDMI, the cost is much lower since you’re relying on the host CPU to do the video encoding. All you have to pay for is the cost of the WiDi receiver.
With the original WiDi, Netgear was the only company that made a WiDi receiver. The receiver was fine but generally it’s nice to see more than one company offering a technology. This time around Intel plans to have many more partners with WiDi receivers. At CES last week Intel had a D-Link WiDi receiver hooked up to a SNB notebook:
Sandy Bridge WiDi also supports HDCP and 1080p, so you can now stream Blu-ray content from a SNB notebook to a TV connected via WiDi.

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A Closer Look at the Sandy Bridge Die
Aside from a stack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, I snagged something else of interest at my Intel meeting at CES 2011: a shot of some exposed Sandy Bridge processor die. As a recap SNB is available in three different physical die versions today: quad-core, dual-core with GT1 graphics and dual-core with GT2 graphics. The die sizes and transistor counts are below:
CPU Specification Comparison
CPU Manufacturing Process Cores Transistor Count Die Size
AMD Thuban 6C 45nm 6 904M 346mm2
AMD Deneb 4C 45nm 4 758M 258mm2
Intel Gulftown 6C 32nm 6 1.17B 240mm2
Intel Nehalem/Bloomfield 4C 45nm 4 731M 263mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 4C 32nm 4 995M 216mm2
Intel Lynnfield 4C 45nm 4 774M 296mm2
Intel Clarkdale 2C 32nm 2 384M 81mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT1) 32nm 2 504M 131mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT2) 32nm 2 624M 149mm2
Now for the shot:
From left to right we have a dual-core GT2 die, a quad-core die and a 32nm Arrandale die with on-package 45nm HD Graphics GPU. There’s very little difference between the dual-core GT2 die and the quad-core die - each SNB core is fairly small at 32nm.
The comparison to Arrandale is also interesting as it makes dual-core SNB look pretty sensible. But keep in mind that we don’t know the full cost structure for manufacturing at 45nm vs. 32nm. Newer processes tend to be more expensive initially compared to older, more mature processes.

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CES 2011: Motorola Xoom & NVIDIA Tegra 2: The Honeycomb Platform
The two biggest announcements at CES 2011? Intel’s Sandy Bridge and pretty much everything NVIDIA talked about at its press conference (as well as the MS Windows 8/ARM announcement which I’ll discuss later).
NVIDIA finally got to talk about Project Denver as well as show off its first Tegra 2 based smartphones. The LG Optimus 2X, Motorola Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic will all be shipping in the next 2 months and all of them use NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 SoC.
The Android tablet market is another focus for Tegra 2. A little known fact is that Tegra 2 is the reference SoC for Honeycomb, the official Android release for tablets. Being selected by Google is another huge boon for NVIDIA’s Tegra business, although from the looks of it we’ll still see more Qualcomm based Honeycomb tablets than Tegra 2 solutions by the end of the year.

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CES 2011: Corsair Performance Series 3 SSD Benchmarks
Corsair has traditionally been a very conservative player in the SSD space. It started by selling Samsung based drives and eventually moved to Indilinx (although far later than its chief competitors). With SandForce Corsair narrowed the time to market gap, but it was still late. Not this time however.
As Dustin mentioned in his CES coverage, Corsair has a new drive that it announced at the show: the Performance Series 3 SSD. Based on the same Marvell controller as Micron’s C300/C400 but with what Corsair tells us is a different firmware, the P3 is supposed to be very quick.
Corsair had a pair of the 6Gbps drives on display at CES running on a Sandy Bridge platform. In RAID-0, the two 128GB P3 drives posted some impressive scores:
Peaking at 878MB/s reads and 430MB/s writes, assuming linear scaling that would put the speed of a single P3-128 drive at 439MB/s and 215MB/s for sequential reads and writes, respectively. Real world performance obviously depends on much more than just raw sequential read/write speed, but this is a good start.
The next wave of high end consumer SSDs will begin shipping this month, and I believe Corsair may be the first out the gate. Micron will follow shortly with its C400 and then we’ll likely see a third generation offering from Intel before eventually getting final hardware based on SandForce’s SF-2000 controllers in May.

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Intel Insider: Sandy Bridge Gets 1080p High Bitrate Streaming
In an attempt to ultimately raise its stock price, Intel is trying to shock and surprise investors by keeping details scarce on unannounced products. We saw the first example of this last year with Sandy Bridge. Intel was very late in disclosing architectural details, and it took a leak to even find out about Intel’s hardware transcode engine - arguably one of the biggest, tangible features of Sandy Bridge. I’m not a financial analyst nor do I have any influence on stock price, but this seems to be a strategy that ultimately won’t work. It’s not Apple’s withholding of information that results in its very healthy stock. If Intel wants to raise its share price it will ultimately have to do two things: 1) release killer technology, 2) put said technology to good use right away without waiting on its partners to do so.
We are seeing examples of this in the market already. Intel’s Wireless Display technology leverages Intel hardware with Intel developed software. Intel Insider, is another, more recent example.

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Robocalled at 4:30 in the Morning? There's an [Internet] App for That
Angry parent takes matters into his own hands after getting an early wakeup call
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1/14/2011 Daily Hardware Reviews
DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Friday
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NASA Reports 2010 to be the Warmest Year on Record
Record heat ties 2005 -- the previous hottest year on record
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Leak from Microsoft Russia Indicates Windows 7 SP1 Could Air Saturday
Microsoft has never done a weekend service pack release before, release could be to OEMs only
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British Researchers Look to e-ink to Camouflage Military Vehicles
System is like a cloak of invisibility
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Scientists Create Latex "Supermolecules"
Supermolecules utilize colloid spheres as building blocks instead of atoms or molecules
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Smartphone Manufacturers Withholding Android Updates
Source says Samsung won't release Vibrant OTA for fear it would hurt Vibrant 4G sales
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Intel Dismisses ARM's Chances in Notebook Market, Reports Earnings
Is Intel overconfident about ARM? Maybe, but it doesn't think so
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Comets May Be Responsible for Water's Origins on the Moon
New theories suggest water may have always had a presence on the moon due to its materials colliding with comets
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1/13/2011 Daily Hardware Reviews
DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Thursday
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T-Mobile Blasts Verizon, AT&T, and iPhone in Latest Commercial
"How do you tell them apart?" -- T-Mobile chick
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Researchers Make Stretchable Electronics Breakthrough
Silicon nanowire coils can stretch 104% of original length
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U.S. Army Halts Development of Another Future Combat Systems Program
Boeing program in jeopardy
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Microsoft Prepares to Destroy WP7 Unlocking, Unlockers Plead Their Case
"The more you tighten your grip... the more [smart phones] will slip through your fingers"
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Human Brain Predicts/Shifts Visual Attention Before Eyes Even Move
Study shows that the brain helps improve accuracy in identifying object by shifting visual attention before our eyes even move
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Report: AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Was Outed Over Tablets, Smartphones
Board thought CEO wasn't pursuing developing mobile CPUs aggressively enough
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Google Abandons h.264 Codec Support in Chrome, Apple and Microsoft Still Onboard
Says it will only support open and free codecs
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Study Shows Adding Silicon to Titanium Dioxide Creates Efficient Virus Killer
Silicon increases titanium dioxide's effectiveness in killing viruses and bacteria by more than 3 times
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Microsoft Takes on Apple "App Store" Trademark
Challenges Apple's claim to "App Store"
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UPDATE: Chinese J-20 Stealth Fighter Makes Maiden Flight, Video Posted
Further ahead indeed...
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