Intel is set to roll out its latest generation of processors later this year despite a minor setback affecting ultra low-voltage models — the ones destined for super slim notebooks. By normal standards, the launch should mark a new “tick” in the company’s product roadmap, but Intel is going beyond just shrinking the current 32nm Sandy Bridge processor by introducing some fundamental advancements along with its new 22nm process.
Johannes Kepler once wrote, “Nature uses as little as possible of anything.” Nvidia’s latest GPU, code-named Kepler after the German mathematician, looks to be inspired by that quote, as much as by the original Kepler’s mathematical prowess. The new GPU — the GTX 680 — offers superb graphics horsepower but requires only two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. It’s a big departure from the last-generation GTX 580, which was fast but power hungry.
Seagate’s latest hard drive has hit a milestone: it manages to squeeze in a data density of one terabit per square inch.
Though it’s not Apple’s most exciting announcement of recent times, the Apple TV received a big a boost in specs last week. Now a teardown by a forum member at XBMC.org shows exactly what’s changed.
The new iPad guts are nice, at last with 1GB of much-needed RAM to accelerate all that web browsing. But the most impressive thing is the new battery, which takes most of the space. It’s a gigantic 70 per cent larger!
With processors, it’s easy to get caught up in gigahertz and petaflops and the top-end specs. But blazing fast speed doesn’t mean all that much for, say, your refrigerator. ARM’s says its Cortex-M0+ chip will connect your dumb appliances to a smart grid, and offer “years” of battery life on some of them.
With the announcement of the iPad 3, came the announcement of a new processor: the A5x chipset with (presumably) a dual-core CPU and quad-core GPU. The A5x is more powerful to be sure, but should we think of it as a next-generation chip or merely a spec bump?
Facebook already built its own data center and its own servers. And now the social-networking giant is building its own storage hardware – hardware for housing all the digital stuff uploaded by its more than 845 million users.
We’ve been hearing for years that integrated graphics — meaning your computer doesn’t have its own, separate graphics card — won’t catch up to the beefier cards, but it’ll be good enough some day soon. Hasn’t happened yet. But these reported benchmarks of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors from CPU World look pretty promising.