What we have in house today is a system they believe has been designed to be as balanced a build as possible. High performance, sure, but more well-rounded and suited for a variety of tasks without blowing up the room temperature or the power bill in the process. The reasons behind some of the decisions they've made are laudable, but some of the others may be somewhat more nebulous. Read on for our analysis of the Avenger.

We're at Broadcom and Netgear's joint press event today, where both are announcing the commercial availability of the R6300 three spatial stream 802.11ac router which was announced at CES, and two new products: the two stream R6200 router and A6200 USB 2.0 adapter. 

As a reminder, the previously announced R6300 supports 802.11ac at speeds of 1300 Mbps by utilizing 80 MHz channels on 5 GHz, 256QAM, and three spatial streams. That particular router rounds out Netgear's high-end 802.11ac offering with Broadcom's solution inside. The news today is Netgear's mid-range product, the R6200, which includes 2 spatial streams and an 867 Mbps maximum bitrate. The R6200 one USB 2.0 port compared to the R6300's two, for file and printer sharing.

Gallery: Netgear R6200, R6300, A6200

Although MiniPCI Express 802.11ac adapters are coming for notebooks, those wishing to upgrade devices immediately can use the A6200 two-stream USB 2.0 adapter. The USB 2.0 adapter is built around Broadcom's BCM43526 solution. It's unfortunate the adapter isn't USB 3.0, given USB 2.0's 480 Mbps theoretical throughput limit, however BCM43526 only has a USB 2.0 host interface onboard. I'm told that Broadcom has a future USB 3.0 802.11ac solution for those wanting to see higher transfer rates not clamped by USB 2.0. 

The R6300 will be available on online retailers starting tomorrow. Netgear expects the rest of the products to be available on store shelves by the end of the week. Pricing for the R6300 will be $199.99, and $179.99 for the R6200, and $69.99 for the A6200 adapter. 

Update: We asked for more details about the SoC and WLAN controllers inside both the R6x00 series, and learned exactly what we wanted to know. Inside the R6300 is a BCM4706 for routing and 2.4 GHz 3x3:3, alongside the expected BCM4360 802.11ac 3-stream controller. The R6200 moves one tier down to the BCM4518 for 2x2:2 on 2.4 GHz, and a BCM4352 for 2-stream 802.11ac. This is exactly the combination that we suspected for the devices, but now have confirmed them with Netgear. In addition, the shipping firmware doesn't include beamforming, but will enable it in a software update soon after launch. 

AMD, and NVIDIA before it, has been trying to convince us of the usefulness of its GPUs for general purpose applications for years now. For a while it seemed as if video transcoding would be the killer application for GPUs, that was until Intel's Quick Sync showed up last year.

With Trinity, AMD has an answer to Quick Sync with its integrated VCE, however the performance is hardly as similar as the concept. In applications that take advantage of both Quick Sync and VCE, the Intel solution is considerably faster. While this first implementation of working VCE is better than x86 based transcoding on AMD's APUs, it still needs work:

Quick Sync's performance didn't move all users to Sandy/Ivy Bridge based video transcoding. One of its biggest limitations is the lack of good software support for the standard. We use applications like Arcsoft's Media Converter 7.5 and Cyber Link's Media Espresso 6.5 not because we want to, but because they are among the few transcoding applications that support Quick Sync. What we'd really like to see is support for Quick Sync in x264 or through an application like Handbrake.

The open source community thus far hasn't been very interested in supporting Intel's proprietary technologies. As a result, Quick Sync remains unused by the applications we want to use for video transcoding.

In our conclusion to this morning's Trinity review, we wrote that AMD's portfolio of GPU accelerated consumer applications is stronger now than it has ever been before. Photoshop CS6, GIMP, Media Converter/Media Espresso and WinZip 16.5 for the most part aren't a list of hardly used applications. These are big names that everyone is familiar, that many have actual seat time with. Now there's always the debate of whether or not the things you do with these applications are actually GPU accelerated, but AMD is at least targeting the right apps with its GPU compute efforts.

The list is actually a bit more impressive than what we've published thus far. Several weeks ago AMD dropped a bombshell: x264 and Handbrake would both feature GPU acceleration, largely via OpenCL, in the near future. I begged for an early build of both of them and eventually got just that. What you see below may look like a standard Handbrake screenshot, but it's actually a look at an early build of the OpenCL accelerated version of Handbrake:

As I mentioned before, the application isn't ready for prime time yet. The version I have is currently 32-bit only and it doesn't allow you to manually enable/disable GPU acceleration. Instead, to compare the x86 and OpenCL paths we have to run the beta Handbrake release against the latest publicly available version of the software.

GPU acceleration in Handbrake comes via three avenues: DXVA support for GPU accelerated video decode, OpenCL/GPU acceleration for video scaling and color space conversion, and OpenCL/GPU acceleration of the lookahead function of the x264 encoding process.

Video decode is the lowest hanging fruit to improving video transcode performance, and by using the DXVA API Handbrake can leverage the hardware video decode engine (UVD) on Trinity as well as its counterpart in Intel's Sandy/Ivy Bridge.

The scaling, color conversion and lookahead functions of the encode process are similarly obvious candidates for offloading to the GPU. The latter in particular is already data parallel and runs in its own thread, making it a logical fit for the GPU. The lookahead function determines how many frames the encoder should look ahead in time in the input stream to achieve better image quality. Remember that video encoding is fundamentally a task of figuring out which parts of frames remain unchanged over time and compressing that redundant data.

GPU usage during transcode in the OpenCL enhanced version of Handbrake

We're still working on a lot of performance/quality characterization of Handbrake, but to quickly illustrate what it can do we performed a simple transcode of a 1080p MPEG-2 source using Handbrake's High Profile defaults and a 720p output resolution.

The OpenCL accelerated Handbrake build worked on Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge as well as the AMD APUs, although obviously Sandy Bridge saw no benefit from the OpenCL optimizations. All platforms saw speedups however, implying that Intel benefitted handsomely from the DXVA decode work. We ran both 32-bit x86 and 32-bit GPU accelerated results on all platforms. The results are below:

*SNB's GPU doesn't support OpenCL, video decode should be GPU accelerated, all OpenCL work is handled by the CPU

While video transcoding is significantly slower on Trinity compared to Intel's Sandy Bridge on the traditional x86 path, the OpenCL version of Handbrake narrows the gap considerably. A quad-core Sandy Bridge goes from being 73% faster down to 7% faster than Trinity. Ivy Bridge on the other hand goes from being 2.15x the speed of Trinity to a smaller but still pronounced 29.6% lead. Image quality appeared to be comparable between all OpenCL outputs, although we did get higher bitrate files from the x86 transcode path. The bottom line is that AMD goes from a position of not really competitive, to easily holding its own against similarly priced Intel parts. 

This truly is the holy grail for what AMD is hoping to deliver with heterogeneous compute in the short term. The Sandy Bridge comparison is particularly telling. What once was a significant performance advantage for Intel, shrinks to something unnoticeable. If AMD could achieve similar gains in other key applications, I think more users would be just fine in ignoring the CPU deficit and would treat Trinity as a balanced alternative to Intel. The Ivy Bridge gap is still more significant but it's also a much more expensive chip, and likely won't appear at the same price points as AMD's A10 for a while.

We're working on even more examples of where AMD's work in enabling OpenCL accelerated applications are changing the balance of power in the desktop. Handbrake is simply the one we were most excited about. It will still be a little while before there are public betas of x264 and Handbrake, but it's at least something we can now look forward to.

Unfortunately for AMD, they’ve never quite managed to reclaim the glory of the Athlon 64/Opteron launch. It took Intel a few years—and a scrapped Tejas architecture—but when they finally got things straightened out they struck back with a vengeance. Intel’s Conroe (Core 2) architecture turned the tables on AMD with the same double whammy of increased performance and reduced power, and since the launch in mid-2006, Intel has managed to hold onto the CPU performance crown. In fact, earlier this year AMD almost seemed to throw in the towel as far a high-performance CPUs are concerned, with their future strategy focusing on mainstream and value-oriented APUs. We’ve already seen some of that with their first APUs, Brazos and Llano, and today AMD brings out their third APU architecture: Trinity.

If you’re hoping to see a repeat of the Hammer launch back in 2003 with Trinity today, you’re going to be disappointed. AMD has made no claims or even hints that Trinity is going to go toe-to-toe with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E in processor benchmarks. Instead, the marketing material and reviewer’s guides are more about telling a story of good performance, balance, and flexibility with a price point that won’t have you looking for a loan. Sometimes the best way to take down a massive empire isn’t by lining up your heavy guns and trading blows until one side capitulates—in such battles, the larger/wealthier corporation almost always wins. Instead, it’s the plucky little ships that can outmaneuver the big guns that can sometimes come out ahead. Will Trinity be AMD’s X-wing to Intel’s Ivy Bridge death star? Read on for our full analysis.

Given what we know about the new AMD and its goal of building a Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), Manju’s position is quite important. For those of you who don’t remember back to AMD’s 2012 Financial Analyst Day, the formalized AMD strategy is to exploit its GPU advantages on the APU front in as many markets as possible. AMD has a significant GPU performance advantage compared to Intel, but in order to capitalize on that it needs developer support for heterogeneous compute. A major struggle everyone in the GPGPU space faced was enabling applications that took advantage of the incredible horsepower these processor offered. With AMD’s strategy closely married to doing more (but not all, hence the heterogeneous prefix) compute on the GPU, it needs to succeed where others have failed.

The hardware strategy is clear: don’t just build discrete CPUs and GPUs, but instead transition to APUs. This is nothing new as both AMD and Intel were headed in this direction for years. Where AMD sets itself apart is that it is will to dedicate more transistors to the GPU than Intel. The CPU and GPU are treated almost as equal class citizens on AMD APUs, at least when it comes to die area.

The software strategy is what AMD is working on now. AMD’s Fusion¹² Developer Summit (AFDS) in its second year, is where developers can go to learn more about AMD’s heterogeneous compute platform and strategy. Why would a developer attend? AMD argues that the speedups offered by heterogeneous compute can be substantial enough that they could enable new features, usage models or experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. In other words, taking advantage of heterogeneous compute can enable differentiation for a developer.

That brings us to today. In advance of this year’s AFDS, Manju has agreed to directly answer your questions about heterogeneous compute, where the industry is headed and anything else AMD will be covering at AFDS. Manju has a BS in Electrical Engineering (IIT, Bombay) and a PhD in Computer Information and Control Engineering (UMich, Ann Arbor) so make the questions as tough as you can. He'll be answering them on May 21st so keep the submissions coming.

There aren't too many Marvell SSDs on the market so the Performance Pro stole my attention immediately. When testing a SandForce drive, you pretty much know what to expect. Only Intel uses in-house firmware whereas the rest use the firmware that SandForce provides. That limits differentiation a lot. When it comes to Marvell, things are a lot more open and interesting. Firmwares are often proprietary and that's why you never know what to expect. Several readers pointed out the similarity between Corsair's Performance Series Pro and Plextor's M3 & M3 Pro. Maybe all Marvell drives don't carry an in-house firmware after all? Read on to find out if that's true and see how the Performance Pro fares in our tests.

At the 2012 CES, we reported on one of the first public 802.11ac technology demonstrations at the Buffalo Technologies booth. Fast forward a few months, and Netgear seemed to have stolen the march on Buffalo Technologies by announcing their R6300 802.11ac model on April 26th. However, Netgear's announcement turned out to be a paper launch. Today, Buffalo Technologies is announcing their first 802.11ac router model and also making it available for purchase right away. Coupled with their 802.11ac media bridge (also launching today), it enables consumers to take advantage of the 802.11ac's Gigabit Wi-Fi capability right away.

AirStation WZR-D1800H Wireless Router

The WZR-D1800H wireless router has 5 GbE ports (1 WAN (Internet access, connected to the modem) + 4 LAN (for the internal network)) and 1 USB 2.0 port with a physical eject button. The industrial design is also improved over the earlier AirStation models, with the sharp edges being replaced by the more pleasing rounded corners.

Internally, the router's 5 GHz band supports 1300 Mbps theoretical throughput  with 802.11ac, which is also backward compatible with 802.11n. The 2.4 GHz band is supported with a 3x3 802.11n radio for 450 Mbps of throughput. Simultaneous dual band operation is possible, and so, Buffalo Technologies advertises this as having a total throughput of 1750 Mbps across both the bands. Note that in the pure 802.11n mode, one can get 900 Mbps of total theoretical throughput (450 Mbps in 5 GHz and 450 Mbps in 2.4 GHz).

The absence of any PCs / computing devices with 802.11ac support might turn out to be a bit of a dampener for prospective consumers, but Buffalo Technologies is also introducing a 802.11ac wireless media bridge to enable consumers to take advantage of their 802.11ac router's full capabilities.

WLI-H4-D1300 Wireless Media Bridge

The AirStation AC1300 / N450 is a 4-Port Gigabit Dual Band Wireless Ethernet Bridge intended to extend the capabilities of wireless networks. It makes for an ideal companion to the WZR-D1800H router because of its ability to extend 802.11ac wireless signals to wired devices.

The device has two wireless radios to support 802.11ac and 802.11n in the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz spectrums. The 802.11n network is dual band (450 Mbps / band), and the wired ports are all Gigabit. We have backward compatibility with 11a, 11b, 11g and 11n.

Buffalo Technologies indicated that both of these products would carry a street price of $179.99. They are available for purchase starting today at Fry's, Frys.com and Newegg.

Intel and its partners' response was swift; USB 2.0 came on the scene in 2000. Its 480 Mbps theoretical peak bandwidth, coupled with Intel's refusal to integrate FireWire support within its core logic chipsets, doomed FireWire to niche status in spite of the subsequent emergence of the 800 Mbps IEEE 1394b variant.

Yet as anyone who's used a USB 2.0 hard drive or flash drive knows, the external bus's read and write performance still leave a lot to be desired, especially for video and other large-file-size material. eSATA attempted to address the issue, but its storage-centric focus left OEMs unwilling to adopt it en masse, from both incremental-cost and incremental-connector perspectives. What the industry wanted was an equally versatile but speedier successor to USB 2.0...

...and now it's got two. Yep, another standards war - except not in the traditional sense, as these two are complementary. The USB 3.0 specification was released in late 2008, with first products available beginning one year later. Designed primarily as a replacement for USB 2.0, it delivers 4.8 Gbps transfer speeds, along with discrete transmit and receive data paths. And courtesy of Intel's Ivy Bridge integration, USB 3.0 will soon become pervasive in a diversity of PC platforms and form factors. But more than a year ago, Intel and partner (and customer) Apple productized a copper-based version of an Intel-proprietary interface called Thunderbolt, formerly known as Light Peak.

Each Thunderbolt port handles 40 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth, consisting of two pairs' worth of distinct 10 Gbps transmit and receive lanes. Thunderbolt isn't so much about enabling the connection of discrete storage devices (although it has been used for just that by many early peripherals), but new PC form factors instead. If you have to give up GigE, Firewire 800 and a gigantic screen to build a sleek Ultrabook, Thunderbolt will give you access to those things via an external display. Did I mention that Thunderbolt carries DisplayPort as well as PCIe? 

To date Thunderbolt has mostly only appeared on Macs, but the Apple exclusivity period is now over. This year we'll see the emergence of more affordable second-generation controller ICs, resulting in Thunderbolt showing up in a diversity of PC platforms and form factors.

Anand has done several in-depth Thunderbolt peripheral reviews so far. And today we've got two more products up for evaluation; Seagate's 2 TByte GoFlex Desk HDD coupled with the company's just-in-production Thunderbolt Adapter, and Western Digital's two-HDD Thunderbolt Duo. Let's have a look, shall we?

Read on for our review.

Co-developed by Apple and Intel, Thunderbolt is a tunnel that carries both PCIe and DisplayPort traffic to the tune of 20Gbps per channel (10Gbps up and down). In the past, whenever you wanted to add a PCIe device (LAN, audio, high-speed storage, etc...) you needed to physically install that device in your system either via an ExpressCard slot on a notebook or via a PCIe slot on your desktop. Thunderbolt acts as a decoupler for PCIe devices, allowing you to put controllers that would traditionally lie inside your system outside of it, or even inside another device like a display. That's where the DisplayPort support comes in.

Apple's Thunderbolt Display is the perfect example of what Thunderbolt can be used to do. Take a DisplayPort panel, integrate Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, audio and USB controllers and you've got Apple's Thunderbolt Display. In theory, you could connect a system that had none of these things, and the functionality would be provided exclusively by the display. Decoupling hardware like this allows OEMs to build thinner and/or smaller form factor machines (think Ultrabooks/MacBook Air), while allowing for full functionality when connected to a display. By carrying DisplayPort over the same cable, you can have a single cable that both extends functionality and connects your small form factor machine to a larger monitor. Thunderbolt enables the modern day dock for notebooks.

For all of last year, Thunderbolt was an Apple exclusive. This year, starting with the launch of Ivy Bridge, Thunderbolt is coming to PCs. We'll see it on notebooks as well as some desktop motherboards. Today we have the very first desktop motherboard with Thunderbolt support: MSI's Z77A-GD80.

Read on for our full preview of the first Thunderbolt PC motherboard.

As earning season wraps up NVIDIA has released their earnings report for Q1 Fiscal Year 2013 (Feb-April 2012).

For the first quarter of FY2013 NVIDIA booked $924M in revenue, with a net income of $60M. This is compared to $962M in revenue with $135M in net income for Q1 of FY2012, meaing for a year-over-year basis NVIDIA’s revenue is slightly down while their net income has taken a larger hit.

Looking at NVIDIA’s revenue breakdown, the biggest hit was to NVIDIA’s consumer GPU business (GeForce), where revenues declined by $58M. Otherwise the professional solutions group (Tesla/Quadro) and consumer products (Tegra) were both up slightly compared to last year.

So why have revenues and profit margins fallen since Q1 FY2012? The biggest change for NVIDIA is that the next product cycle for the GPU side of their business started more than 15 months after the previous cycle. For example while the GTX 580 launched in November 2010, the GTX 680 didn’t launch until March of 2012. Consequently while NVIDIA was in the midst of selling a number of new GTX 500 series cards by Q1 FY2012, they got a late start with the GTX 600 series.

NVIDIA sells GPUs year-round of course, but outside of holidays their strongest periods are the months following major product launches, while their weakest periods are the months immediately preceding a major product launch as customers hold off for the next generation of cards. NVIDIA is also at the mercy of Intel and AMD to some extent for the same reason; the launch of Ivy Bridge was good for NVIDIA’s sales, but because of Ivy Bridge everyone in the PC industry saw lower sales in the first part of the year before Ivy Bridge launched.

At the moment the biggest cloud hanging over the head of NVIDIA’s GPU business is supply issues. As we’ve seen from the launch of the GTX 680 and GTX 690, NVIDIA’s partners have been unable to keep their latest generation of video cards in stock due to a lack of GPUs, and that’s only finally started to break with the launch of the GTX 670 yesterday. In their earnings call NVIDIA updated their investors on the status of 28nm production over at TSMC, and while the situation is improving it’s still not great.

As far as 28nm yields go things are looking decent. NVIDIA has said that they believe that TSMC’s 28nm process is probably the best of any new node that TSMC has ever done. Like any other process yields will continue to improve over the lifetime of the process of course, but as it stands what NVIDIA is reporting is nothing like the teething issues that 40nm went through in 2009/2010.

The real problem for NVIDIA right now continues to be overall capacity. They have been rather straightforward in stating that they need more 28nm wafer allocations and they need them yesterday. As it stands NVIDIA is expecting to be supply constrained at the wafer level throughout the end of the year, slowly becoming less constrained as capacity improves. For at least the next quarter however this means NVIDIA will be unable to meet channel demand and will have no problem selling everything they can get. This also means that the shortage of GTX 680 and GTX 690 cards may very well continue for another quarter.

Consequently NVIDIA’s dip in GPU revenue is being attributed to this shortage. High-end desktop sales in particular were the biggest contributor here; in spite of a general decline in desktop sales, desktop GPU sales are still such a large part of NVIDIA’s GPU revenue that the lack of 28nm GPUs there is adversely affecting NVIDIA’s bottom line. NVIDIA has used their limited capacity to launch their premium notebook and desktop GPUs first, and even then NVIDIA says they could have shipped many more GPUs if they had them. Kepler GPUs have higher margins on them than the aging Fermi lineup, so it’s in NVIDIA’s best interests to shift as much over to Kepler as quickly as possible. To that end NVIDIA is expecting 30% of their GPUs to be 28nm this quarter, with that improving in the future.

As for NVIDIA’s other major businesses, NVIDIA’s Tegra group has done better than expected, which is a big part of the reason that the consumer products group has seen revenue grow over last year. Although the first Tegra 3 products technically shipped at the end of last year, NVIDIA is still fairly early into Tegra 3’s lifecycle as the first Tegra 3 phones just now being released. So NVIDIA is hoping that they’ll be able to continue to grow their market share this year on strong sales of Tegra 3, particularly in overseas markets where there’s greater demand for quad-core SoCs and LTE isn’t as prevalent.

Speaking of market share, as it stands today nearly half of all Tegra SoCs are going into tablets. That’s going to shift some as more Tegra 3 phones are released (and again when WinRT is released), but it’s a good reminder of just how much traction NVIDIA has gained in the tablet market in very little time. And unlike the GPU space NVIDIA shouldn’t have any supply issues here; since Tegra is still on TSMC’s 40nm process supplies are plentiful and yields are high.

OCZ announced yesterday via their Twitter profile that a 64GB version of their Vertex 4 will soon be available. Vertex 4 is based on a second generation OCZ/Indilinx controller, named the Indilinx Everest 2. However, it was later revealed that the hardware is actually from Marvell. We reviewed the 256GB and 512GB Vertex 4 SSDs about a month ago and came away very pleased with how the drives performed. The Vertex 4 product page has also been updated with specifications for the 64GB model, which we've summarized in the table below:

As expected, there is a decline in performance when moving from a sixteen package design to an eight package design. Random write unsurprisingly takes the biggest hit but 50K IOPS is still great for a 64GB drive. For comparison, a 60GB Vertex 3 is rated at 60K IOPS and a 64GB Plextor M3 at 40K IOPS. Overall the 64GB Vertex 4 is at the upper spectrum of ~64GB SSDs and it presents very promising performance figures.

OCZ did not announce any specific availability other than "soon", but I contacted OCZ and will update this article once I receive a reply. Pricing is also unknown as of now. We will try to get our hands on a review sample as soon as possible, and Anand also has a 128GB sample in the house, so keep your eye on our SSD Bench section if you're in the market for a new drive.

Cubitek, on the other hand, has seen fit to employ it for an entire new line of cases under the "ICE Series". Five enclosures all using an almost entirely aluminum chassis and finish, ranging from the Mini-ITX "Mini ICE" all the way up to the grandaddy of them all and the enclosure that we have in for review today: the "HPTX ICE." The Cubitek HPTX ICE is as big as it gets and is able to support the biggest motherboards on the market, every spec from Mini-ITX all the way up to EATX and HPTX, and it has a supersized price tag to boot. But is it worth it?

But this year things aren’t so typical. GK104 wasn’t the typical high-end GPU from NVIDIA, and neither it seems is there anything typical about its launch.

NVIDIA has not been wasting any time in getting their complete GK104 based product lineup out the door. Just 6 weeks after the launch of the GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 690, their dual-GK104 monster. Now only a week after that NVIDIA is at it again, launching the GK104 based GeForce GTX 670 this morning.

Like its predecessors, GTX 670 will fill in the obligatory role as a cheaper, slower, and less power-hungry version of NVIDIA’s leading video card. This is a process that allows NVIDIA to not only put otherwise underperforming GPUs to use, but to satisfy buyers at lower price points at the same time. Throughout this entire process the trick to successfully launching any second-tier card is to try to balance performance, prices, and yields, and as we’ll see NVIDIA has managed to turn all of the knobs just right to launch a very strong product.

Today, MIPS is introducing a range of new processor IP cores in the Aptiv lineup, similar to ARM's Cortex. The members of this lineup range from small microcontroller cores to triple dispatch superscalar ones. By introducing a member at each performance level to compete directly with offerings from ARM, MIPS has made its move in the processor IP battle. Read on for our analysis of the announcement and the processor  architectures.

The most important products of the lot are the new Envy ultrabooks and sleekbooks. Sleekbook is just a marketing term to describe notebooks that don't meet all of Intel's criteria for ultrabook classification due to CPU and storage component selection, but are otherwise identical to the ultrabook line, including sharing the same 19.8mm thick chassis.

Both of the model lines are available in 14" and 15.6" sizes, and feature Beats audio, glass trackpads with multitouch and gesture support, and optional backlit keyboards. The lid and palmrest are brushed aluminum, while the bottom of the notebook is a soft-touch plastic material. There are two color options - silver metal/black plastic, or a much more visually arresting black metal/red plastic model. The ultrabook lines are based on Intel's 3rd generation Core ultra-low voltage processors, similar to other ultrabooks, while the sleekbooks come with normal Ivy Bridge processors in the 14" or AMD"s Fusion APUs in the 15.6". The entire lineup has battery life quoted in the 8-9 hour range (depending on screen size and CPU choice). I suspect that the ultrabook and sleekbook versions of the will be mixed up very often (I saw some HP product managers confuse the different demo units more than once here in Shanghai), but what gets lost is that effectively, they're all just different flavors of the same notebook.

HP has always chosen to design its volume platforms as highly modular systems, with consumers and retailers able to chose from a variety of screen sizes, Intel or AMD processors, and a variety of storage/memory/graphics options. For the first time, we're seeing that mentality hit the ultrabook-class of device. HP has designed the new Envy as a single platform with two screen sizes, a range of Intel and AMD processors, a choice of mechanical, solid-state, or hybrid storage options, and optional AMD dedicated graphics (for the Intel models - the AMD models have onboard graphics that are deemed good enough to not merit a dGPU option). If you tick the right combination of boxes (Intel ULV CPUs and hybrid or solid-state storage), the Envy can meet Intel's spec to be classified as an ultrabook. If not, HP calls it a sleekbook. It's a bit confusing, especially in HP's relatively vague press blast, but upon explanation, the new term makes sense.

The Envy devices are pretty nice, with an attractive design (particularly the red and black one) and solid build quality. THe interesting thing here is that the AMD-based Envy 6 (the 15.6" Envy) starts at $599, making it a pretty great value for that price point considering the premium design and features. The base Envy 4 starts at $699, while the ultrabook-spec Envy 4 (essentially the same system, except with a 32GB mSATA caching drive to suplement the mechanical storage) goes for $749. The Intel-based Envy 6 starts at $799 and comes standard with the caching drive, thus meeting the ultrabook spec as well. The AMD-based Envy 6 will be available on June 20, while the rest of the Envy systems are available now.

HP is also expanding the premium Envy Spectre line with the Envy Spectre XT. Unlike the Spectre 14, the Spectre XT has a 13.3" display and is made entirely of anodized brushed aluminum. The very attractive all-metal design goes in a different direction than the Spectre 14, which was the first notebook to be made primarily of glass. While innovative, the Gorilla Glass chassis led to the Spectre 14 being a bit expensive, as well as thicker and heavier than most ultrabooks tended to be. The Spectre XT, on the other hand, has much more petite dimensions and measures 14.5mm thick at the thinnest point, along with a 3.07lb weight (1.395kg). The Spectre XT certainly feels like a step up in design and build from the Envy, but it's not as unique or as immediately stunning as the Spectre 14. The Spectre XT will hit market on June 8th, with a starting price of $999 with Intel's Ivy Bridge ULV processors and solid state storage. The Spectre XT is aimed squarely at the Samsung Series 9 ($1399) and other premium ultrabooks, so HP seems to be pricing their new portables relatively aggresively. It's a good sign, one that means we'll likely see the entire ultrabook market go more mainstream in terms of price point going forward.

In other ultrabook news, HP announced their first ultrabook meant specifically for the corporate world - the EliteBook Folio 9470m. The 9470m has a 14" screen and weighs a scant 3.6lbs. It squeezes a number of enterprise-centric ports and features into its 19mm thick frame, including VGA, DisplayPort, a full-sized Ethernet port, Smart card reader, fingerprint scanner, embedded TPM security chip, and Intel's vPro security technology. It will come with Ivy Bridge mobile processors and an optional SSD, and is expected to be available sometime in October 2012.

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2012) is around the corner (May 14-17), and Supermicro has indicated that their GPU-Enabled X9 server and workstation solutions would be showcased at the event.

The X9 series based on the Xeon-E5 class of processors was launched by Supermicro in March. The latest GPU-enabled solutions based on the X9 series are targeted towards HPC (High Performance Computing) applications, with support for up to 256 GB of memory in servers and 512 GB in workstations, PCI-E 3.0 connectivity, 10 GbE and 4x QDR (40 Gb) Infiniband support in a non-blocking architecture.

Supermicro claims to have the highest GPU computing density available today. They also suggest combining the units with the Kepler GPUs (which currently seem to be skimping on compute performance), to obtain green computing solutions.

Without further digression, let us take a look at the systems being launched:

1027GR-TQF:

This system has support for up to 4 GPUs in a 1U configuration. While Supermicro was not very forthcoming on the details of this system, it looks to be likely based on the 1027GR-TRF. The 1027GR-TRF has 4 x PCI-E 3.0 slots, with one of them being low-profile and operating in x8 mode. Any likely updates in the TQF model are probably related to this aspect because the model offers up to 4 double-width GPUs for maximizing compute density.

2027GR-TRF / 2027GR-TRFT:

The only difference between the 2027GR-TRF and the 2027GR-TRFT is related to the networking aspect. While the TRF model comes with a Intel i350 Dual-Port GbE Controller, the TRFT has a Intel X540 10GBase-T Controller. Both of them have 1800W redundant power supplies with 80Plus Platinum level ratings for more than 94% efficiency. There is support for up to 6 GPUs in this 2U form factor system. Four of the PCI-E 3.0 slots are x16, while we have one x8 PCI-E 3.0 in a x16 slot and one x4 PCI-E 2.0 in a x8 slot.

SBI-7127RG:

This GPU SuperBlade system packs 30 GPUs in a 7U form factor, and is claimed by Supermicro to have the industry's highest compute density.

7047GR-TRF / 7047GR-TPRF:

The 7047GR-TRF is an enterprise-class X9 SuperWorkstation with NVIDIA Maximus certification. Design and visualization tasks are accelerated with an NVIDIA Quadro GPU while compute intensive tasks are powered using up to four Tesla C2075 GPUs. The TPRF model is being announced on paper (Coming Soon!) and supports passively cooled GPUs. Instead of the FC475/409 4x NVIDIA C2075/C2090 GPU cards in the TRF model, this one comes with FM407/409 4x NVIDIA M2070/M2090. The specifications are otherwise identical to the 7047GR-TRF.

Supermicro's GPU-enabled solutions can be seen at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, May 14-17 in GTC Booth #75.


 

Today our first set of reviews begin with the ASRock Z77 Extreme4, the ASUS P8Z77-V Pro, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H, and the MSI Z77A-GD65.  Read on for the full reviews.

Apple just pushed out an update for iOS, bringing the version number up to 5.1.1. The update thus far appears to be primarily bugfixes including tweaks to HDR from the lockscreen camera shortcut, stability switching between 2G and 3G on the new iPad, and other issues. The release notes are below from the update information. 

We're grabbing the OTA update on our devices (for the 4S the update is around 54 MB, for the 4 the update is around 48 MB) in addition to the full ipsw. As usual the links to the update images directly can be found at the awesome iOS-e-lite page for the impatient. We'll update with any notes about major changes beyond what's in the notes above. 

Gallery: iOS 5.1.1

Can the Vision 3D 252B live up to the expectations created by its predecessor? Are the updates revolutionary or evolutionary? How much difference does the next-generation CPU and more capable GPU make to the system? Read on for our review.

AnandTech has been covering the Home Theater PC space since those halcyon days when Windows XP Media Center was rolling out, and the era of dual-core Pentiums promised tolerable playback of DVD-quality AVI files. Despite our, and your, enthusiasm, Microsoft dropped hints throughout the product’s various iterations that Media Center’s role in Windows 8 was minimal. As the Building Windows blog was updated we saw promises that Media Center would be there, but with little in the way of details. And in their latest post, the Windows 8 team reveals the new face of Media Center. 

Yeah. We know. The new Media Center is the old Media Center, wholesale. In the post regarding SKUs, the Windows 8 team announced that Media Center would not be included in any of the Windows 8 releases, but would be available for Windows 8 Pro users as an add-on. The add-on will be the same experience found in Windows 7, with no apparent additions. Why take such an apathetic approach to Media Center? Usage.

In data Microsoft published last year, Media Center was launched by 6% of Windows 7 users. For a feature to have such low usage, 10 years after it was first introduced, means that whatever efforts to gain traction have failed, and further efforts are unlikely to have great success. So, deprecating Media Center to the level of a near-orphaned feature is not surprising in the slightest. What was unexpected was the deprecation of audio codecs and DVD playback to the Media Center Pack as well. Codec licensure is something the public can generally ignore, but it’s the reason DVD players will never cost a penny, and why the original Xbox required a dongle for playback. Since Windows XP Media Center, users have been paying for MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital decode support. With Vista, the audio side was bolstered with Dolby Digital Plus, and this was maintained in Windows 7. Windows 8 will not have DVD playback out of the box, though with the addition of the Media Center Pack will gain the appropriate licensure. 

mage courtesy of WinSource

News isn’t all bad on the media front for Windows 8, though MPEG-2 for the DVD containers is omitted, it is included for H.264 decoding, alongside Dolby Digital Plus support; all this intended to extend video streaming support. In the era of Ultrabooks and tablets, optical drives are on the decline, so omitting support for DVD-Video playback, and entirely ignoring BluRay support, is sensible. 

We had been considering doing a quick “State of the HTPC”-style piece, with a focus on the state of MCE and what changes to expect in Windows 8. Now we know, there’s not much to expect. So, instead we’ll plan to explore what competing software has been able to accomplish, particularly MythTV; and how well the latest CableCARD experience pans out. Don’t be surprised, though, if our HTPC software of choice remains Windows 7, well into the future. 

What's different with the $399 iPad 2 is that Apple used it as a vehicle to introduce a new hardware platform, or more specifically, a new SoC.

Read on for our analysis of the new 32nm iPad 2,4.

SGS3, SGS2, iPhone 4S

Read on for our full preview!

Earlier today Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S III, at the heart of which is Samsung's new Exynos 4 Quad SoC. Fortunately we got a ton of hands on time with the device at Samsung's unpacked event in London and are able to bring you a full performance preview of the new flagship, due to be shipping in Europe on May 29th.

The Exynos 4 Quad is an obvious evolution of the dual-core Exynos in many of the Galaxy S II devices. Built on Samsung's 32nm high-k + metal gate LP process, the new Exynos integrates four ARM Cortex A9s running at up to 1.4GHz (200MHz minimum clock). Each core can be power gated individually to prevent the extra cores from being a power burden in normal usage. Each core also operates on its own voltage and frequency plane, taking a page from Qualcomm's philosophies on clocking. There is no fifth companion core, but the assumption is  Samsung's 32nm HK+MG LP process should have good enough leakage characteristics to reduce the need for such a design.

The GPU is still ARM's Mali-400/MP4, however we're not sure of its clocks. Similar to the dual-core Exynos, there's a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory controller that feeds the entire SoC. The combination should result in performance competitive with NVIDIA's Tegra 3 (and a bit higher in memory bandwidth limited scenarios), but potentially at lower power levels thanks to Samsung's 32nm process.

While we won't know much about the power side of things until we get a review device in hand, we can look at its performance today.

Gallery: Samsung Galaxy S III Performance Preview

Browser & CPU Performance: Very Good

As always, we start with our Javascript performance tests that measure a combination of the hardware's performance in addition to the software on the device itself. Sunspider performance is extremely good:

While we thought we hit a performance wall around 1800ms, the One X from HTC, the Lava XOLO and now the Samsung Galaxy S III have reset the barrier for us. In this case the performance boost is likely more due to software than hardware, but the combination of the two results in performance that's better than almost anything we've seen thus far. The obvious exception being Intel's Medfield in the X900.

BrowserMark is another solid js benchmark, but here we're really able to see just how much tuning Samsung has done in its browser:

The Galaxy S III is significantly faster than anything else we've ever tested thus far. The browsing experience in general is very good on the SGS3, and the advantage here likely has more to do with Samsung's browser code and the fact that it's running Android 4.0.4 rather than any inherent SoC advantage. We know how 1.4GHz Cortex A9s should perform, and this is clearly much better than that.

Once again we turn to Qualcomm's Vellamo to get an idea for browser and UI scrolling performance:

Although (understandably) not as quick as the Snapdragon S4 based One X, the SGS3 does extremely well here - likely due in no small part to whatever browser optimizations ship in Samsung's 4.0.4 build. As Brian put it when he first got time with the device: it's butter.

GPU Performance: Insanely Fast

While we don't know the clocks of the Mali-400/MP4 GPU in the SGS3, it's obviously significantly quicker than its predecessor. Similar to what we saw when the Galaxy S II launched, Samsung once again takes the crown for fastest smartphone GPU in our performance tests. 

The onscreen GLBenchmark Egypt and Pro results are understandably v-sync limited, but if you look at how much headroom is available thanks to the faster GPU it's clear that the Galaxy S III should be able to handle newer, more complex games, better than its predecessor.

What's particularly insane is that Samsung is able to deliver better performance than the iPhone 4S, the previous king-of-the-GPU-hill in these tests.

The performance advantage isn't anywhere near as staggering if we look as BaseMark ES 2.0, however as we've mentioned before this benchmark is definitely showing its age at this point. Despite the aggressive tuning Qualcomm has done for these benchmarks, Samsung is actually able to remain competitive and even pull out a slight win in the Taiji test. Both benchmarks are v-sync limited on the fastest platforms however.

Final Words

Our first interactions with Samsung's Exynos 4 Quad are promising, but there's still much more to understand. Samsung clearly used 32nm as a means to higher GPU clock speeds, which in turn gives us much better GPU performance. The big unknown, as always, is power consumption. Based on what we've seen thus far from Samsung's 32nm LP process in Apple's iPad 2,4 (review forthcoming), Exynos 4 Quad should be a pretty good step forward in the power department as well.

As soon as we can get our hands on final hardware you can expect a full review of the Galaxy S III, including power and battery life analysis.

Initial reactions to the Galaxy S III announcement seemed almost disappointing, however stay tuned for our hands on impressions of the device as well as even more depth/detail on the hardware platform - you may be surprised. 

We're at the Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012 event in London, where Samsung just officially announced the Samsung Galaxy S 3. We're going to have hands on with the device soon along with some impressions of the device. 

One of the major things Samsung said it wanted to address with the SGS3 launch was availability closer to announcement. It looks like they're making good on that promise, at least with the international 3G HSPA+ version, which will be available May 29th. Launch markets will start with Europe, then move on to Russia, the middle east, and Latin America. The 4G LTE version for the USA and other regions will be available later this summer - off the bat it looks like there will be likely be a region based split in what SoC makes it into what device. 

We'll follow up with specs and impressions shortly.

Gallery: Samsung Galaxy S III Press images

Dubbed the Galaxy S III, the latest Samsung flagship device brings updated internals and many software additions to the Galaxy line. The 8.6 mm thick slate features a 4.8" HD SAMOLED display pushing 1280x720 pixels, on an RGBG stripe. The body is curvy and smooth and comes in Pebble Blue or Marble white, and appears to be metal in appearance (Ed. note: the images seem a bit ambiguous, we'll update when we get hands-on). There's more to unpack than was even included in the announcement, so let's get to it. 

The display is going to undoubtedly be a point of contention for some of you. Indeed, before any of you have read down this far, I suspect the first comment has appeared below bemoaning the lack of a '+' at the end of the display's nomenclature. Yes, the 4.8" 1280x720 AMOLED display is of the Super variety, but lacks the RGB stripe of the Plus variety. We'll crunch some numbers and consider the likelihood that anyone will be able to suss out individual subpixels later. Aside from that we'll reserve judgment till we have a review unit in hand to sort out display quality. The 4.8" display only stretches the width of the device another 1.5 mm or so, so users comfortable with these larger phones should have no issues. Those of us still skeptical about this screen size might hesitate. 

The design is oddly reminiscent of the iPod touch, but with gently curved surfaces across the front and back of the device. There is a familiarity to the design and doesn't step boldly away from the language first seen in the original Galaxy S. We'll know more about the tacticle experience after our hands-on. For now, peep the gallery and stay-tuned for a hands-on and an overview of the software aspects being introduced today. 

Some of what we know today wasn't leaked, but was formally announced by Samsung earlier. Samsung Semiconductor, designers and fabricators of their Exynos family of ARM silicon, anounced that the next Galaxy phone would include their Exynos 4 Quad, previously known as the Exynos 4412. Like NVIDIA's Tegra 3, the Exynos 4 Quad features four ARM Cortex-A9 cores, though no companion core is put to use for powersavings. Each core can be power gated individually, just like Tegra 3. The big news here is the Exynos 4 Quad is built on Samsung's 32nm high-k + metal gate process, which should provide for a sizeable decrease in leakage and an overall improvement in power consumption compared to previous 45nm desgins.

That's not the only SoC we'll be seeing in the latest Galaxy devices, though. Like the Galaxy S II devices, LTE is limited to devices running Qualcomm SoC's, so US variants on Verizon, AT&T and Sprint will likely be sporting our latest favorite SoC, the Snapdragon S4. We can expect a lot of this, as it's not just necessary to move the performance bar with each generation, users expect battery life to see a respectable improvement as well. In our HTC One X (AT&T) review we noted just how much better battery life is with Qualcomm's 28nm radios, this is the kind of generational leap we want to see. Now, we're not sure why we're not seeing their 28nm radio-only parts, the MDM9x15. These basebands will include the same LTE Cat. 3 performance, but at much lower power consumption. We've never seen its predecessor the MDM9x00 paired in a phone with anything other than Qualcomm silicon, but we have seen it in data-only situations paired with the likes of the Apple A5X in the iPad 3 and within mobile hotspots and data cards. 

None of this was mentioned during the event, but our man Brian Klug is hard at work pressing Samsung for confirmation on these details and we'll update as we learn more. Notably, is this statement from Samsung: 
Samsung Mobile is planning a U.S. version of Galaxy S III, optimized for the fastest LTE and HSPA+ networks in the U.S., which will be available in the summer of 2012.  Exact timing and retail channel availability is not being announced at this time. We believe the Galaxy S III is the most anticipated product in the 20-year history of Samsung Mobile; therefore, we will continue to share information as it becomes available. 
So, without committing to anything, they're admitting that additional work will go into the S III before it appears on these shores.  

Packing a pair of high clocked, fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA was targeting GTX 680 SLI performance in a single card, the kind dual-GPU card we haven’t seen in quite some time. GTX 690 would be a no compromise card – quieter and less power hungry than GTX 680 SLI, as fast as GTX 680 in single-GPU performance, and as fast as GTX 680 SLI in multi-GPU performance. And at $999 it would be the most expensive GeForce card yet.

After the announcement and based on the specs it was clear that GTX 690 had the potential, but could NVIDIA really pull this off? They could, and they did. Now let’s see how they did it.

We provided a full overview of Eurocom's Monster 1.0 last week. For the interested, the same Clevo W110ER chassis used in the Monster 1.0 is available with a variety of configuration options from several other vendors as well. AVADirect has their Gaming Laptop Clevo W110ER (no obfuscation of the ODM necessary, thank you very much), there's the Sager NP6110, and companies like Mythlogic, ProStar, Origin, and XoticPC (and probably others) are also selling their own branded variants of the same core laptop. If you're interested in a small gaming laptop, it may pay to shop around a bit.

In the continuing deluge of Intel 3^rd Generation Core i-Series product announcements, Dell has released details on their XPS and Vostro desktops, along with their Inspiron laptops. For now, we have one product each for the Vostro and XPS desktop lines, with two Inspiron Special Edition (“R”) laptops. We’ll start with the desktops.

Dell XPS 8500

Gallery: Dell XPS 8500 Revealed

At the top of their product stack, the XPS brand continues to be a high performance “do everything” desktop. CPU support for the XPS 8500 currently consists of the Core i5-3450 (4x3.1-3.5GHz, no Hyper-Threading, 6MB L3, 22nm, 77W) or the Core i7-3770 (4x3.4-3.9GHz, Hyper-Threading, 8MB, 22nm, 77W). Graphics options are not quite so high-end as the i7-3770, however, consisting of just the Radeon HD 7570 1GB at the low end or the Radeon HD 7770 2GB at the high end. Note that the fully configurable models apparently aren’t available yet, and the press release also lists the GeForce GT 620 1GB and Radeon HD 7870 2GB as (presumably future) GPU options. The XPS 8500 supports up to 16GB DDR3-1600, with 8GB standard on the base model.

Storage options are likewise somewhat limited right now, with either 1TB or 2TB drives in the pre-configured models and little option to change them. The $1300 model also includes a 32GB mSATA SSD caching drive, which appears one of the only major upgrades over the $1300 model The PR blast also mentions up to 3TB hard drives as an option we’ll see at some point. The $750, $900, and $1300 models come with a DVDRW drive while the $1150 configuration includes a Blu-ray/DVDRW combo drive.

All models ship with a standardized 460W power supply (no mention is made of 80 Plus certification, though we’d hope Dell uses at least a Bronze PSU for an XPS brand PC), 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, 4x USB 3.0 (two at the front) and 6x USB 2.0 (two on the top), and a media card reader. The mATX motherboard uses the H77 chipset and the chassis is a mini-tower available in white or black, with white only coming on the $1300 model. Overall, the systems look fairly nice and I’ve used XPS desktops in the past and been pleased with the overall experience. Still, there’s definitely a price premium with the XPS systems, as the chassis consists of higher quality materials. If we attempt to match the components of the $900 model, at Newegg we ended up at a total price of around $950, but that includes a substantially more potent Radeon HD 7750, as the HD 7570 is an OEM-only product right now. Overall, then, if you’re after a fast CPU with an anemic GPU in a higher quality chassis, the XPS 8500 looks like a reasonable option.

Dell Vostro 470

Gallery: Dell Vostro 470 Revealed

The Vostro 470 is focused more on the small business market, with appropriate components for the most part. The CPU options are the same i5-3450 and i7-3770 as the XPS 8500; meanwhile the graphics options consist of Intel’s integrated HD 4000 (which should be more than sufficient for most business users), GeForce GT 620 as a slight upgrade, or the Radeon HD 7570 as the highest-end option—so nothing really gamer-centric, not surprisingly, though that also means GPU-accelerated applications like Adobe’s CS5/CS6 suite also won’t benefit as much.

Memory and storage options take a hit as well, not surprisingly. RAM configurations include 4/6/8GB, with 12GB as an upgrade on the top-end SKU (oddly, 16GB is missing even though the system should support it). Hard drive sizes consist of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, and all of the systems are DVDRW only. SSD configurations will apparently be available in the future. All of the configurations use a 460W PSU—or a 350W PSU; it’s not clear as the press release lists 350W while the web site lists 460W. Again, there’s no indication if it’s an 80 Plus certified PSU or not. Other features include 4x USB 3.0, 6x USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, flash memory, and 7.1 audio support. The base unit ships for $550, with the i7-3770 model doubling the memory and storage and going for $950.

Dell Inspiron 14R and 15R

Gallery: Dell Inspiron 14R/15R Teaser

Wrapping things up, we don’t have many details on the Inspiron 14R and 15R. The press release states, “The Inspiron 14R Special Edition and 15R Special Edition laptops offering up to Intel’s 3rd generation quad-core processors are available today in select countries in Asia and will be available in more regions in the coming weeks. An expanded Inspiron line-up will be unveiled later this spring in time for the back-to-school shopping season.” Other than the fact that the 14R/15R will support Ivy Bridge processors, all we know for sure is that they also support SSD caching with mSATA drives (on select models, I’m sure). For pricing and US/Europe availability, we’ll simply have to wait until “later this spring.”

Intel has demonstrated a new form factor at PAX East and Intel's Platinum Summit. The form factor carries the name Next Unit of Computing, or simply NUC, and measures in at 4" x 4" (or 10cm x 10cm for metric people). For comparison, mini-ITX is 17cm x 17cm so in terms of area NUC is 65% smaller.

Intel's demo unit was based on Sandy Bridge, although the exact SKU is unknown. Given the size, it's most likely a ULV i3 or i5. In terms of other specifications, there are two SO-DIMM slots and two mini PCIe headers for WiFi for instance. Connectivity is fairly limited with one each for Thunderbolt, HDMI, and USB 3.0 ports, though especially Thunderbolt can support multiple devices using just one port.

There is one thing that goes unmentioned: Storage. Intel provided absolutely no info on what kind of storage NUC supports. In fact, it's not even sure if there is a SATA port since the photos that SweClockers posted are fairly restricting. The dimensions of a 2.5" drive are about 100mm x 70mm x 9.5mm, so fitting one inside a NUC might be a tight fit. An mSATA SSD would be more logical due to the space limits, but SSDs would of course increase the price and/or limit the capacity. It's good to keep in mind that Intel's unit is most likely a protoype showing the idea behind NUC and it's not necessarily a final design—plus OEMs can always do their own designs—so it's hard to speculate at this point.

As this is not a final product announcement, pricing is also unknown. Our rough estimation for a low-end model would be $200-300 since Core i3 CPU alone is at least $100 (though mobile i3s are OEM only so specific price is unknown). Without knowing the exact configuration, it's hard to say how much other components would add to the price but we should be looking at close to $100 with a decent amount of storage and RAM. Then add manufacturing and profits and a $299 price tag sounds somewhat realistic.

The constraints of NUC definitely shape its market niche. While it could be inexpensive, a real desktop can be had for about the same money but with more expandability. Intel claims that NUC is mainly aimed at digital signage and kiosks, and I can definitely see NUC being useful in such environments. NUC could also be a good low-end HTPC if it's configured properly but I can't see much other use for it in a home environment, as a tower desktop is better in almost every aspect other than size.

It seems that NUC is Intel's attempt at bringing the ultrabook idea to the desktop side, and while we have only seen a couple of pictures it's definitely an interesting concept. We have seen what small desktops can do nowadays by looking at Apple's Mac Mini and mini-ITX builds. Even low-end mobile CPUs are more than powerful enough for everyday use, so a full-size tower may not always be a necessity.

Intel is saying that first NUCs should appear in H2'12. It's unclear whether the first models will be Sandy Bridge based, but given that Ivy Bridge is socket and chipset compatible with Sandy Bridge it would seem the more useful processor. Hopefully we'll get some hands on time with NUC in the near future.