Lenovo loves its red mousing nipple, Apple digs its aluminum and IBM adores those light pulses. Nearly two full years after we heard this very company touting breakthroughs in science thanks to a nanophotonic switch, in flies a similar technique from Yorktown Heights that could “greatly further energy efficient computing.” As the story goes, gurus at IBM have figured out how to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that chat using pulses of light. The device is called a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, and according to Dr. T.C. Chen, this kind of embedded optical interconnection makes the “prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level” something that could be seen in the not-so-distant future. Reportedly, the avalanche photodetector demonstrated by IBM is the world’s fastest device of its kind, able to receive optical information signals at 40Gbps and simultaneously multiply them tenfold. We know that’s over some of your (read: our) heads, but there’s a sufficiently nerdy video after the break that gets right down to the whos, whats, whys and wheres.
Continue reading IBM keeps light pulse bandwagon rolling, uses ‘em for chip-to-chip communication
IBM keeps light pulse bandwagon rolling, uses ‘em for chip-to-chip communication originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Oops. Over the weekend, it seems as if 300 or so unlucky individuals were shipped a counterfeit processor from the normally reliable warehouses at NewEgg, and Hard|OCP has the images (and video) to prove it. Vincent Waller couldn’t have possibly been more eager to receive the Core i7-920 that he had ordered, but upon unboxing it, he realized that he had received a well-disguised fake. After a fair bit of digging, it seems as if one of NewEgg’s “long time partners” (D&H Distributing) got ahold of 300 fakes in a batch of 2,000, though not everyone’s buying the “it was an honest mistake” line — especially when you consider that said company has already issued cease-and-desist letters to the sites who published the news. At any rate, NewEgg has already arranged for an authentic CPU to be rushed to Mr. Waller, and it’s purportedly working around the clock in order to make things right with any other negatively affected customers. Hop on past the break for a look at the knockoff, particularly if you just took delivery of a shiny new Core i7.
Continue reading NewEgg sells 300 counterfeit Core i7-920 CPUs, KIRFers pump their fists
NewEgg sells 300 counterfeit Core i7-920 CPUs, KIRFers pump their fists originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Hot Hardware | Hard|OCP | Email this | Comments
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AMD has officially announced the successor to its
790GX chipset, and the kids at
Hot Hardware have not only put it through its paces but have been kind enough to let us in on their results. Apparently the two 890GX they tested should at least perform “on par” with previous AMD platforms, although the integrated Radeon HD 4290 graphics (performing at a none-too-shabby 700MHz, according to the company) were found to be “superior to any other AMD IGP,” even surpassing the performance of Intel’s HD Graphics solution in a number of tests. If that ain’t enough for you, the Radeon HD 4290 natively supports DirectX 10.1 — but not DirectX 11. That’s what we call “tough love.” But that ain’t the whole sordid tale, not by a longshot: check out the plethora of links below if you dare, or simply peep the PR after the break.
Continue reading AMD’s new AMD 890GX HD chipset announced, reviewed, lauded
AMD’s new AMD 890GX HD chipset announced, reviewed, lauded originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Extreme Tech | Hot Hardware | Email this | Comments
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Although early erroneous reports placed Apple’s custom A4 chip at the leading edge of ARM-based design, things are slowly falling back to earth. First, we learned that the graphics subsystem was almost certainly the same PowerVR SGX component found in the iPhone, and now Ars Technica reports that the actual CPU is the familiar single-core Cortex A8 also found in Apple’s handset. That makes the A4 seem an awful lot like an tightened-up, overclocked iPhone 3GS chip, which makes sense, seeing as it was actually in production in September of last year. So why the need for a custom part? The answer may well be efficiency and power savings: by cutting out extraneous Cortex A8 features and I/O that go unused in the iPad, Apple can further reduce the A4’s size and energy draw — which could be why Steve Jobs said the iPad’s chips “use hardly any power.” That might not make a huge difference when tied to a large LCD in a device like the iPad, but Ars speculates that this strategy combined with some of P.A. Semi’s dynamic power optimization tech could result in a hyper-efficient chip for the iPhone somewhere down the line. That would certainly be interesting in the future — but right now we’ve got the A4, and we can’t wait until the end of the month to properly put this thing through its paces.
Apple’s A4 chip: less is more? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Intel’s existing line of Core chips just not potent enough for your tastes? Sicko. For those who just can’t sleep without longing for the next best thing, it seems that said “thing” is just a few days away from a proper reveal. Germany’s own Alternate has already listed Intel’s six-core Core i7-980X Extreme Edition chip for sale, enabling moneyed consumers to snap up a piece of Gulftown for the princely sum of €1,049 ($1,430). Yeah, that’s a stiff premium for a six-core chip that’s ready to do more than sit snugly within some under-appreciated server box, but do you have any idea how much more bodacious you’ll be than your dual- and quad-core owning contemporaries? Way.
[Thanks, Peter]
Intel’s six-core Core i7-980X Extreme Edition ‘Gulftown’ chip goes on sale in Germany originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink PC Advisor | Alternate | Email this | Comments
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Intel’s existing line of Core chips just not potent enough for your tastes? Sicko. For those who just can’t sleep without longing for the next best thing, it seems that said “thing” is just a few days away from a proper reveal. Germany’s own Alternate has already listed Intel’s six-core Core i7-980X Extreme Edition chip for sale, enabling moneyed consumers to snap up a piece of Gulftown for the princely sum of €1,049 ($1,430). Yeah, that’s a stiff premium for a six-core chip that’s ready to do more than sit snugly within some under-appreciated server box, but do you have any idea how much more bodacious you’ll be than your dual- and quad-core owning contemporaries? Way.
[Thanks, Peter]
Intel’s six-core Core i7-980X Extreme Edition ‘Gulftown’ chip goes on sale in Germany originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink PC Advisor | Alternate | Email this | Comments
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Feeling the post-MWC blues? Not enough smartphone hardware talk to get you through your Monday trudge? Fear not, we’ve grabbed a pair of Qualcomm demo videos from this year’s event in Barcelona that show off its MSM7×30 smartphone platform (first announced in November of last year). It has now made its way into some demo devices and its early performance points to a very happy future for all of us mobile media vultures. Equipped with the same CPU as resides inside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, this system-on-chip comes with an HDMI output and the ability to play back 720p video on both its host device and your nearest HDTV. There’s also some very welcome 3D gaming on show as well as YouTube playback using Flash 10.1 (smooth and silky), but our attention was captured by a nifty picture browser provided by Scalado. It allows you to view up to 1,000 images at the same time, zoom into each individual one, or sort them by name, color and other attributes. Being able to handle all that, with only minor perceptible lag, shows we’re looking at what’s shaping up to be a pretty beastly chip. Check it out after the break, and expect it to show up in a lust-worthy smartphone near you by the end of 2010.
[Thanks, TareG]
Continue reading Qualcomm’s 7×30 offers stellar 3D and multimedia performance, coming this year (video)
Qualcomm’s 7×30 offers stellar 3D and multimedia performance, coming this year (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | ARMdevices.net, YouTube | Email this | Comments
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pa rel=”lytebox” href=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/03/a4-apple-chip-top-1.jpg”img src=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/03/500x_a4-apple-chip-top-1.jpg” class=”left image500″ width=”500″ //aThere’s a lot of speculation about what’s inside the A4, Apple’s custom and ultra-power-efficient chip that powers the iPad. Nobody knows for sure because, like all their products, it’s ia seeeeeecret/i. Until now./p
pAccording to Jon Stokes’ well-trusted sources, there is ino/i a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5293270/cortex-a9-arms-multi+core-mobile-cpus”Cortex A9 dual-core/a inside Apple’s A4, but just a single Cortex A8 and a PowerVR SGX GPU. According to Jon, it’s probable that Apple has taken out a lot of the communication, image, and video blocks that the Cortex A8 uses, making it an extremely lean and efficient processor./p
pHe also says that the people from a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5466995/apples-pa-semi-might-notve-designed-the-ipads-a4-chip”PA Semi/amdash;which a href=”http://gizmodo.com/382929/apple-buys-itself-a-little-chip-company-known-for-super-efficient-processors”Apple acquired/a in 2008mdash;are probably building a custom ARM-based core for future products./p
pDo you have to care about this? No. As Jon says, the important thing about the iPad is not its specs and how many polygons it can push. That doesn’t matter to normal consumers, that just matters to feature-list-obsessed geeks. What would be important for consumers is that the iPad provides an smooth experience, a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5452501/the-apple-tablet-interface-must-be-like-this”using a user interface different from standard computing/a. [a href="http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/02/meet-the-a4-the-ipads-brain-not-quite-ready.ars"Ars Technica/a]/pbr clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
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This one slipped the net during the excitement that was MWC this year, but it’s such a promising development that we have to give it its due attention. ARM and Globalfoundries have announced plans to start building new systems-on-chip using the latter’s ultramodern 28nm high-k metal gate production process, with the resultant chips offering up to 40 percent greater computational power, 30 percent greater power efficiency, and a terrific 100 percent improvement in battery longevity relative to their current-gen siblings. Mass production of these Cortex-A9-based units is expected in the second half of 2010, which means they should be among the very first chips off Globalfoundries’ 28nm assembly line. The good news, though, is that the technology is described as “ready for high-volume implementation,” so there should be no shortages when things finally get rolling. Let the wild-eyed anticipation begin.
ARM and Globalfoundries partner up for 28nm Cortex-A9 SOCs, invite great expectations originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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That’s the moral of this NYT story about the bubbling war in mobile chips. They’re expensive to make. And, no one’s better at making them than Intel, whose manufacturing tech is years ahead of anybody else.
Until recently, foundries which manufactured chips on contract stuck to simpler chip designs because that’s what their tech was suited for. But now smartphones, and the chips inside of them, are a BFD, so competition’s ramping up, with $3 billion plants. GlobalFoundries, which was spun out of AMD, is one of the hot-and-heavy new guys, and about to open a massively advanced (and expensive) new plant in Germany. The first chips they’re making? For mobile devices.
Also expensive? Designing chips. The NYT pegs the cost of simply designing a chip at a billion dollars. (Exactly just how much “from scratch” they mean is debatable, since Apple’s A4 chip and Nvidia’s Tegra use off-the-shelf designs from ARM and others.)
Where things will get interesting is when these mobile chips, mostly ARM-flavored, finally start crossing the same line as Intel’s, since ARM chips are scaling up as Intel scales down, and the intersection’s not too far away. And that’s where Intel’s got a chance to really show what it’s made of, since they’re the last game in town that still designs and makes its own chips. [NYT]
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