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.

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.

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.

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.


 

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

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. 

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.

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.

As the lights came up on Thorston Heins opening remarks at BlackBerry World 2012, expectations were... well, low. There was always the possibility that we would hear of some huge shake-up that would drastically alter RIM's course; say, switching to a services model and opening their BlackBerry Enterprise Server offerings to the competition. Or, we could hear talk of the impressive results of the hard work of a talented team of engineers and designers, and hopes and assurances that we'd love it. We've heard this kind of talk from struggling giants, including a year ago this past February when Jon Rubinstein introduced us to the Palm Pre 3 and TouchPad. Though Heins remarks included a hint at the kind of course correction we might have speculated on, he quickly transitioned to a preview of the QNX-based BlackBerry 10. And though it's familiar, it's nothing like 7.

Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM's Head of Software Portfolio, lead our preview and focused on two key areas, app flow and input, and threw in an impressive peek at the camera app. BlackBerry 7 did little to alter the way you use a BlackBerry. The PlayBook's OS is the basis for what we're seeing here, and is fundamentally what's running in the BlackBerry 10 Developer Alpha hardware being handed out at the event today. The PlayBook's multitasking echoed the scheme we saw in WebOS, cards that can be quickly swiped between. BlackBerry 10 introduces a scheme that stacks cards that have been opened in succession, and allows a drag to the left to peek at the stack underneath. This paradigm borrows much from WebOS 3.0, though it's unclear what's changed in terms of app switching. If it's anything like the PlayBook's multitasking method, it'll be a huge improvement over BlackBerry 7. 

A brief peek at the home screen showed large panels reminiscent of Windows Phone's Live Tiles but with a less minimalist design. Having used the icon buffet of iOS and the widget explosion that Android can become, I can see a benefit to a focused but informative home screen that emphasizes a few key tasks while deprecating other tasks to an app launcher or notification bar. BlackBerry users that move to this from any prior BlackBerry will find themselves in very unfamiliar territory. 

So if BlackBerry OS has been such a drag for so long, what kept users so attached to their devices? For some it was security concerns. Others fell in love with the BlackBerry Messengers features. Above all else, though, users loved their keyboards. RIM's portrait QWERTY keyboards are legendarily easy to use and comfortable for even longer typing sessions. As adept as I've become typing on on-screen keyboards of all sizes, I will never approach the typing speeds nor accuracy I acheived with my old 8830. But the design isn't for everyone, and RIM is designing BlackBerry 10 with these users in mind.

Users of Swype on Android will find something familliar in the demo RIM showed of its new soft keyboard. The keys look large and well spaced, and much mention was made of the predictive text engine constantly learning from a users behavior (likely sourced from SwiftKey). But instead of offering suggestions within the text field or in a bar above the keys, the suggested word is overlaid just above the next key the software thinks you might press. Often, even with longer words, once you've become adept at using a particular soft keyboard, you can complete the typing of a word faster than it would take you to recognize that a correct suggestion has been made and move your thumb from the keys to the suggested word. This solves that issue by putting the suggestion in the natural path of your thumb. This strikes me as such an obviously good idea that I want it on every device. But success here is, as always, in the execution. If the prediction engine consistently picks the wrong word then you'll do no better than with any other keyboard. 

The  last demonstration focused on the camera app, and one particular feature we might see crop up in other OSes. Having taken a picture, say where someone blinked, the user can tap on an area of the picture, such as a face, and is presented with a loupe over that area and a shuttle with which they can advance forward or backward amongst a cache of images taken just before and after the shutter release. This has been done with the entire image in phones from Android OEMs with their ICS camera apps, but RIM purports to do this with isolated areas of the picture. Technically, this seems like a good example of how far mobile computing has come. Taken within the context of mobile devices though, this seems like a really handy feature, that I'm unlikely to use very often. 

Heins and company were unwilling to discuss future hardware except to stress that the Dev Alpha devices were NOT final hardware. A few things can be inferred from the Alphas, though. If you imagine what a shrunken PlayBook would look like, you're awfully close to what you'll find if you acquire a Dev Alpha. The display is actually higher resolution than the PlayBook's at 1280x768, and at 4.2" makes it a rather dense display at that. The general design is very reminiscent of the 7" tablet with a matte black body and somewhat squared edges. The internals are most likely the same (TI OMAP 4430) though that's unconfirmed; what is known is that the device has 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of on-board storage along with microSD, NFC and quad band HSPA+ connectivity. 

FInal hardware is likely to include a similarly high resolution screen; RIM wouldn't be asking developers to optimize for that screen if they were going to simply ship a 3" 320x240 LCD. NFC can certainly be expected, and though RIM seemed to have an almost Luddite fascination with outdated SoCs in some past devices, we can expect the silicon to be equivalent or better than the PlayBook's OMAP 4430. Despite the emphasis on soft keyboards during the presentation, RIM wouldn't abandon their portrait QWERTY's, and have even committed to implementing the same text prediction engine on those devices. 

Palm's gamble was a good one. Once the dominant player in mobile computing, the shift from Palm OS to WebOS was huge and, at times, terribly well executed. But where Palm faltered (performance, hardware and bugginess, notably), the deficits were too great to overcome the successes of Android and iOS. With WebOS defeated, RIM now prepares to take its gamble; and attempt to maintain their corporate customers while also growing amongst consumers. We'll hopefully not have to wait long to see how they fare. 

The launch of any new mobile processor line almost always precedes retail availability, but with Ivy Bridge mobile just previewed last week, we’re already seeing various companies ship updated laptop and notebook configurations. The biggest vendor to announce shipping IVB laptops/notebooks is Dell, in this case under their Alienware brand. All three currently shipping Alienware laptops are now shipping with mobile Ivy Bridge (along with some continued support for Sandy Bridge), and the GPU configurations are also being updated across the lineup. Here’s the full rundown of the CPUs, GPUs, and other configuration options supported on the Alienware notebooks:

The smallest of the bunch is the Alienware M14x, and along with Ivy Bridge the GPU option gets upgraded from GT 555M to the new Kepler-based GT 650M. We’ve pulled the specs for the GT 650M from NVIDIA’s site, and it’s possible that Alienware will use slightly different clocks, but it should still be a sizeable upgrade to the previous M14x model that used a GT 555M with DDR3 memory. Memory bandwidth goes up nearly 50%, and compute performance likewise gets a healthy shot in the arm: the 384 CUDA cores in the GT 650M should provide 66% more compute and texturing potential. Given the maximum 1600x900 resolution, the combination of GPU and CPU should be sufficient to handle most games at high detail settings—4xAA might need to be disabled on some titles, however.

Perhaps the more important change for the M14x will be the power draw of the new CPUs and GPUs. While there was plenty that we liked with the previous M14x configuration, there was one problem: the quad-core Sandy Bridge processors combined with GT 555M made for a rather noisy laptop under load. Both Ivy Bridge and Kepler have shown so far that they require less power to hit similar performance levels as Sandy Bridge and Fermi, so hopefully the revised M14x will be less of an ear-sore. PCI Express 3.0 is also present thanks to the CPU and GPU upgrades (at least with Ivy Bridge CPUs), but it’s unlikely the additional PCIe bandwidth will make a difference for a mobile GPU like the GT 650M. The GT 650M is also Optimus enabled, so battery life should remain around the 5-6 hours for light usage cases that we measured on the previous model.

The remaining specs are basically a rehash of what we’ve previously seen, with the only noteworthy update being the switch from Intel’s HM67 chipset to the HM77 chipset. Alienware already had a USB 3.0 controller with the HM67 version, but presumably HM77 allows them to ditch the extra controller chip and utilized Intel’s native USB 3.0 support. The third USB port is still limited to 2.0 speeds, but it does support charging of devices (e.g. iPods, Smartphones, etc.) while the laptop is powered off. Pricing of the updated M14x starts at $1099 with 6GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and a dual-core Sandy Bridge i5-2450M processor; the move to quad-core Ivy Bridge tacks on another $100, and we’d highly recommend upgrading to the 1600x900 display for $75 extra as well.

The Alienware M17x takes the previous model and again makes a few minor upgrades, largely sticking with the design that earned the M17x R3 our Bronze Editors’ Choice award. Our main complaint was with the configuration options at the time of our review, and the updated version looks like it’s corrected many of those concerns.

For the CPU, only the best will do: the M17x is now all quad-core 45W Ivy Bridge—and no, we’re not particularly concerned with the missing i7-3920XM, as Intel’s Extreme Edition processors have generally been far too expensive for the minor performance improvements offered, especially on the mobile side of the fence where the fully unlocked multiplier isn’t as important.

For the GPU, Alienware now offers the GTX 660M (an 835MHz GK107), the GTX 675M (a rebadged GTX 580M), or AMD’s new tour de force, the HD 7970M. Interestingly, the HD 7970M is actually priced cheaper than the GTX 675M, which based on initial performance reports is bassackwards—not that we haven’t seen similar pricing oddities in the past, as NVIDIA’s top-tier GPUs almost always cost more than AMD’s. Something else that isn’t indicated on the press release is support for switchable graphics technologies; we inquired with Alienware and are waiting to hear back (on the M17x as well as the M18x).

Nearly everything else remains the same or similar to the M17x R3, but Dell’s website now includes several additional options for storage configurations, including HDDs with mSATA SSD caching (presumably via Intel’s Smart Response Technology), single SSDs, or HDD + SSD configurations. Pricing starts at $1499 for the base model with an i7-3610QM, GTX 660M, 6GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and 1600x900 LCD. The 1080p LCD upgrade is somewhat steep at $150, but we’d still recommend paying for it, and if you’re mostly interested in gaming performance the HD 7970M looks to be the fastest current mobile GPU available for $200 extra. That puts the total at $1850 for a potent gaming notebook, though if you want to add an SSD or more RAM you can easily spend more.

Rounding out their Ivy Bridge lineup, we have the Big Kahuna of gaming notebooks, Alienware’s M18x. This is one of the largest notebooks around, and it’s also one of the few places you can get dual-GPU configurations for maximum gaming performance. Right now, the M18x R2 configuration pages only list NVIDIA GPUs, but the Radeon HD 7970M should be available sometime in the coming weeks. The only other notebook we know of that supports dual HD 7970 or GTX 675M GPUs is the Clevo P270WM, which is an update to the X7200 chassis that swaps out socket LGA1366 support for LGA2011 and up to hex-core Sandy Bridge-E CPUs. These are true desktop replacements, with a starting weight of nearly 12 pounds for the single-GPU, single-HDD model. (They’re also a great way to give your mobile geek some strength training!)

On the CPU side, the options are all once again quad-core Ivy Bridge, but Alienware now adds the “missing” i7-2920XM Extreme CPU. There’s also a $250 upgrade that will raise the maximum Turbo Boost clocks of the i7-2920XM from 3.8GHz to 4.1GHz, though the required setting for the overclock should be in the BIOS even if you don’t pay extra. Storage options are also similar to the M17x R4, except that there’s now support for a third HDD/SSD, and Alienware offers three-way RAID 0 configurations with 256GB or 512GB SSDs.

Pricing for the M18x R2 starts at $1999, but that’s a little deceiving as the base model only includes a single GTX 660M GPU. If you’re buying a huge notebook like this, you’re almost certainly after maximum graphics performance—otherwise why bother? The upgrade to dual GTX 675M costs $600, so the current minimum cost for an SLI-equipped M18x R2 is $2599—for the same price you can get the mid-tier model that also bumps the RAM to 8GB and doubles your storage space with a second 500GB HDD in RAID 0. If on the other hand you want to max out all the components, the top-end M18x upgraded to an overclocked i7-3920XM, 32GB DDR3-1600, 3x512GB SSDs, Windows 7 Ultimate, and a 4-year warranty and you can push the price over $7250. Yowza! Not that we’d recommend doing so unless you have a lot of money burning a hole in your pocket.

AlienFX Updates

Besides all of the other updates, Alienware has also released a new update to their AlienFX software in their ongoing collaboration with Electronic Arts. The zoned lighting can now tie in to your onscreen action and adjust colors accordingly, providing a “more personal experience”. The PR blast also mentions player health lighting effects, suggesting you’ll be able to tell just by looking at your keyboard how close you are to dying. Fun, right? As far as we can tell, the AlienFX update should be available for other Alienware laptops and desktops that feature the zoned lighting technology.

If there was any doubt after Saturday night as to what NVIDIA's prybar was for, this should put it to rest. FedEx just dropped off the prybar's companion, the venerable wooden crate.

Top: Caution, Weapons Grade Gaming Power

Side: 0b1010110010 [690]
BT-7.080
G08-H86-A000

Applying the prybar in a slightly more civilized manner than we would in most video games, we find the GeForce GTX 690 inside. (ed: If this was a 90's video game, then according to the Crate Review System NVIDIA is already doing very well)

That's all we can show you for now. We'll have more on Thursday.

Eurocom is a company that we’ve seen a few times over the years. Mostly, their focus is on the high-end mobile workstation market, though they also sell plenty of consumer-oriented laptops and notebooks. What we haven’t seen from them before is a high performance gaming-worthy system stuffed into a small chassis; they’ve had some business-class ultraportables and tablets, and they’ve had 15” and larger gaming notebooks, but there’s nothing in their past ten years even remotely similar to the Monster 1.0. In fact, the only other laptop we’ve ever seen that targeted this category is Alienware’s M11x, a small gaming laptop sporting ULV CPUs with moderate GPUs.

The Monster 1.0 (which uses a Clevo w110er chassis) isn’t just about stuffing the latest and greatest parts into a small form factor. Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processor is socket compatible with Sandy Bridge chips, and since there are no dual-core IVB offerings right now Eurocom offers the Monster with either dual-core SNB or quad-core IVB—though you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the quad-core IVB option it seems. Since it uses the updated HM76 chipset, you also get native USB 3.0 ports. Let’s run through the supported components and options just to give you a taste of what Eurocom has to offer.

Okay, seriously, that is a metric ton of performance stuffed into a relatively small chassis. We’re obviously not looking at something in the ultrabook category, and the 0.51” thickness at the front is misleading as it looks more like a 1.1” height (the front narrows to a small wedge over the last inch or so of the palm rest), but for a <4 lbs. laptop with up to quad-core 45W CPUs I’m not going to complain.

On the CPU front, even dual-core Sandy Bridge is plenty fast for most users, and what’s more Eurocom uses full voltage CPUs. That means even the minimum i5-2410M ought to give Alienware’s M11x a run for the money. (Granted, we haven’t seen any news on the M11x since the R3 version, and while we can still find it on Dell’s site, it’s a bit odd that it doesn’t show up at Alienware’s laptop page.) Looking at the heart of any gaming system, it’s the GPU that’ll really determine what will run well and how high you can crank the settings. With the Monster, NVIDIA’s Kepler GK107 chips look ready for mainstream gaming at the very least.

Pricing isn’t bad either for what we could see; the base model should perform reasonably well, especially if all you want is a petty gaming laptop; the only real upgrade we’d make for sure is on the RAM. We’d also look into the LCD upgrade, but $136 extra for what may or may not be a substantially better panel is a tough pill to swallow. If you need more CPU performance, you’ll have to wait for the Ivy Bridge options to show up, and we’d guess the i7-3720QM will be at least a $300 upgrade, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Given everything listed above, the Monster 1.0 should certainly live up to its name. We’ve requested a review unit and hopefully we can report on the overall experience in the near future. Eurocom did release some preliminary benchmarks, and it looks like the GT 650M DDR3 with a full voltage CPU should improve on the early GT 640M we tested in the Acer TimelineU ultrabook by 30-50%. Eurocom also quotes battery life of up to 410 minutes (though they don’t say what sort of test they used), which should be sufficient for non-gaming use. In the meantime, fans of gaming ultraportables have something new to look forward to.

Gallery: Eurocom Monster 1.0: Gaming with Quad-Core IVB and Kepler at 11.6”

Clearwire has been talking about deploying TDD-LTE (Time Division Duplexing, as opposed to FDD) on its 2.5 GHz spectrum for some time now, and has announced some more launch details today, including initial markets and a rough timeline. Clearwire is focusing on upgrading "hot zones" in urban markets first, which probably means its most actively used cell sites.

In its earnings report, Clearwire notes that it has already completed the first phase of its network overlay on 8,000 such "hot zone" cell sites, primarily ones where it can offload for future compatible Sprint and Cricket devices. Some 5,000 of such cell sites are in major markets which it is targeting for early 2013 launch, including New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. Clearwire is planning to launch its TDD-LTE network in 31 total markets by mid 2013, though it notes that it will name the specific other markets at a later date. 

As an addendum, Clearwire has been trialing and demonstrating 20 MHz FDD-LTE in Phoenix, AZ for a while now on its 2.5 GHz spectrum (LTE band 41). I would fully expect to see Clearwire take full advantage of band 41's size and run 20 MHz TDD-LTE here, and implement carrier aggregation with LTE-A in the future.

Source: Clearwire (1), (2)

Just a week before its Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012 event where it will announce "the next galaxy smartphone," Samsung has officially announced what SoC will be inside. The answer is Exynos 4 Quad, which is no doubt the Exynos 4412 we've heard about before. Exynos 4 Quad is built on Samsung's 32nm HKMG process and consists of 4 ARM Cortex A9s running at up to 1.4 GHz. Samsung reports 20% lower power with Exynos 4 Quad over Exynos 4 Dual (4210), though it doesn't say at what clocks or workload. In the past, Samsung has claimed 40% lower power on 32nm HKMG compared to their 4xnm process.

Samsung also notes that Exynos 4 Quad has power gating on all four A9s, in addition to per core frequency and voltage scaling. This is an interesting move away from the one frequency plane shared across all cores architecture of Exynos 4210, and to the aSMP (asynchronous SMP) architecture similar to what Qualcomm has so far exclusively used. Samsung doesn't note what GPU blocks are inside Exynos 4 Quad, however Mali400MP4 at higher clocks seems likely. Samsung notes that the Exynos 4 Quad is both package (12 x 12 x 1.37 mm) and pin compatible with the 32nm Exynos 4 Dual (4212). Lastly, Samsung Semiconductor hasn't updated its A9 series catalog page, however I woud fully expect the new SoC to pop up before day's end. 

Update: Samsung Semi has also uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating the Exynos 4 Quad and Exynos 5 Dual SoCs. Exynos 5 is shown powering a WQXGA display, and there are some clear shots of the Exynos 4 Quad running GLBenchmark Egypt.

Source: Exynos 4 Quad Minisite, Korea Newswire

Mozilla has just released Firefox 12 to the release channel, six weeks after Firefox 11. Version 12's chief addition to the browser is a new auto-updater for Windows users, which no longer requires administrative privileges to install updates - you'll be prompted once by the UAC the first time you install Firefox, and the browser will update silently after that. If you still want to be notified before updating, you can revert to the old behavior by unchecking "Use a background service to install updates" in Firefox's update preferences. The new auto-updater appears to be a Windows-only change, at least for now; the updater's behavior is unchanged in OS X and Linux.

The other major user-facing change is in Firefox's developer tools, which Mozilla claims introduces 85 improvements, including the addition of line numbers to the Page Source window. Other minor changes include a WebGL performance issue under OS X on certain hardware and a smattering of security fixes, a list of which can be found here.

More information on these changes, as well as on other fixed bugs and known issues, is available in the release notes linked below. Firefox 12 is available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, as well as OS X 10.5 (Intel), 10.6, and 10.7 and most Linux distributions.

Source: Mozilla

It's been what seems like an eternity since Google stopped selling the Nexus One directly through google.com. Google struggled with support and logistics involved with selling a consumer electronic, and shelved the concept, instead offering its next Nexus device, the Nexus S, through retail partners. In a surprise move today, the search giant has resumed selling devices directly, this time with the Galaxy Nexus GSM/UMTS unlocked model.

The smartphone (which we've reviewed) is the same GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus variant which has been on sale before, and is being sold through the Google Play store for $399 unlocked with free two day shipping in the US. That's not bad at all considering other retailers have been pricing the same device at $400 or up (a quick check puts it at $450 at newegg currently). As a reminder, the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus works with HSPA+ on both T-Mobile AWS (1700/2100 MHz) and AT&T (850 / 1900 MHz) in the USA. This time around, Google is prepared to deliver support and handle all the logistics involved with directly selling smartphones to users online. 

Source: Google Play, Google Mobile Blog

Google has officially announced Google Drive, its long-rumored cloud storage solution that will be competing with Dropbox, Microsoft's SkyDrive, and other cloud sync and backup services. The service, which gives you 5GB of storage for free, is now (or soon will be) available to anyone with a Google accoun, including Google Apps users.

The Google Drive client, which is currently available for PC, Mac, and Android devices (with iOS support coming soon), works similarly to Dropbox: it creates a single folder on your computer that syncs your data with Google's servers and with your other synced devices. Storage upgrades are available starting at $2.49 a month for 25GB, $4.99 a month for 100GB, and so on all the way up to $799.99 a month for 16TB - the full list of price points is available here. Upgrading to a paid account automatically gets you 25GB of Gmail space, and will let the Picasa image storing service use your expanded Google Drive storage pool rather than the 1GB of space available for free.

The advantage that Drive has over Dropbox for heavy Google users is deep integration with Google's existing services; if you've already got documents in Google Docs, they will automatically appear in your Google Drive. Sharing, collaborating, and commenting on files is also built-in, as is a robust search engine that can actually scan images and PDFs for keyword matches using OCR.

You can find more information about Google Drive here. While the service looks promising, whether it can make headway against entreched competitors like Dropbox (or competitors with deep OS integration, like iCloud and the recently upgraded SkyDrive) remains to be seen.

Source: Google

Microsoft has announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, a near-final build of the upcoming operating system, will be available to the public in the first week of June. The announcement, made onstage at Microsoft's Windows 8 Developer Days conference in Japan, confirms that Microsoft is sticking to the schedule it established during the Windows 7 development cycle: a public beta early in the year, a public release candidate in the middle of the year, and a public release in the fall.

How close the build will be to the release version of Windows 8 is unclear, though it's probable that the core OS and most important Metro apps will be more or less finalized by this point - WIndows 7 was actually released to manufacturing in July of 2009 and made available to OEMs and volume license customers not long after that, meaning that final code for Windows 7 was in some customers' hands much earlier than the October public launch. An RTM build won't be far behind the Release Preview, and as such it will be Microsoft's last opportunity to make changes in response to feedback elicited by the Consumer Preview.

We'll continue to deliver new details about Windows 8 as they are made public. In the meantime, be sure to catch up on our extensive coverage of the new operating system and its changes.

Source: Microsoft

It’s not often that we cover marketing teasers, but then it’s not often that we get crowbars in the mail either…

Earlier this afternoon the following crowbar unexpectedly showed up on our doorstep courtesy of NVIDIA. The crowbar reads “For use in case of zombies or…” and has the right half of the NVIDIA logo at the end of the sentence.

Meanwhile over at GeForce.com NVIDIA has posted a teaser countdown page, announcing that they will be making an announcement at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China, at 7:30pm PDT on Saturday the 28^th.

So what does a crowbar have to do with anything? At this point we haven’t a clue. And while crowbars happen to be the signature weapon for Valve’s Half-Life series, we’re rather confident that a black crowbar has nothing to do with Half-Life. This leaves us with opening crates… and that’s all we have so far.

It looks like we won't get our answer until Saturday night, so until then stay tuned.

Late last week word began circulating that AMD would be dropping driver support for their DX10 generation GPUS – HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 – based on a Phoronix article discussing the future of driver support for those GPUs under Linux. As Phoronix correctly observed, AMD tends to drop support for a GPU under Linux and Windows simultaneously, so there was reason to believe that a similar retirement would indeed be coming for AMD’s DX10 GPUs under Windows.

Today AMD put out a statement clarifying the future of driver support for their DX10 GPUs, and as it turns out Phoronix was correct.

Starting with Catalyst 12.5 (May’s Catalyst release), AMD will be moving the HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 series from mainstream to legacy status. This means that those products will move from receiving monthly driver updates to quarterly driver updates, and at the same time AMD will shift away from working on further performance improvements and new features for those cards, and instead working solely on bug fixes and other critical updates. AMD believes they’ve gotten all they’re going to get from their DX10 GPUs from a performance standpoint, so now their focus is going to be on any driver bugs that may crop up with future games.

As you may recall, this is the same legacy driver development model that AMD moved their DX9 GPUs to back in 2009, when Catalyst 9.3 was the last mainstream driver to support those GPUs. If that transition is any kind of reliable guidance, that means we should expect another year of driver updates for AMD’s DX10 GPUs. Their last driver release for those GPUs was 10.2 back in February of 2010, roughly a year after they moved those GPUs to legacy status. With that said, given the slowing pace of graphics API development – we’re not even to Direct3D 11.1 yet – I wouldn’t be surprised (or at least will be hopeful) that AMD will continue legacy driver updates for more than a year. New DX9 games are still extremely common, never mind games that work on DX10.

At the same time this cements the status of AMD’s DX10 GPUs under Windows 8. As those GPUs could never fully support WDDM 1.2, it has been clear for some time now that those GPUs would not be at parity with AMD’s DX11 GPUs under Windows 8. Officially AMD will not support Windows 8 with their legacy drivers, however Windows 8 will include a version of AMD’s legacy driver for their DX10 GPUs and any newer releases of AMD’s legacy drivers should be installable on Windows 8 with little-to-no fiddling. So with official support or not, nothing has really changed in this regard.

AMD’s full statement is below.

AMD will be moving the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series of products to a new driver support model.  We will continue to support the mentioned products in our Catalyst releases, but we’re moving their updates to a quarterly basis, whereas our AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products will continue to see monthly updates. The Quarterly Catalyst releases will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates. The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective. The 8.97 based driver, released in May 2012 will be the first driver for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series under the new support model; it is an extremely stable and robust driver branch for these products and will be the baseline for our quarterly updates.

Our main development and testing efforts will now be focused on the AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 and later products. This is the best use of our resources, as the AMD Radeon HD 5000, AMD Radeon HD 6000, AMD Radeon HD 7000, and future products have the greatest potential for further performance and feature enhancements.

Also with regards to Windows 8 support for the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, 3000, 4000 Series of products; the In-the-box AMD Graphics driver that ships with Windows 8 will include support for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 Series, and it will support the WDDM 1.1 driver level features. The AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products (AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later).

With the One lineup (particuarly the One X and One S), HTC really ratched up its focus on design. The One X is easily one of the best looking Android smartphones on the market today. The problem is that the majority of consumers prefer to use cases on their phones, which ultimately hides a lot of the design work that HTC and other companies put into their devices. There's also the problem of determining what color to launch with a device. You can't have an infinite number of colors and the trend lately has been towards putting out fairly conservative colors. This further amplifies the customer use of cases, which once again hides a lot of the design work that HTC and others put into their devices.

Apple took matters into its own hands with the bumpers for the iPhone 4 - providing some protection while not obscuring too much of the design. Nokia is similarly well known for doing this with its phones for a while now. HTC is following suit and will be shipping its own minimalist cases for the One X. 

These things don't offer any protection for the screen, but they snap on the back of the One X while still allowing some of the design to shine through. The cases will be available a variety of colors and designs, but we got some hands on time with an orange and blue case. No word on pricing or availability. 

Gallery: HTC One X Cases: Taking Protection into HTC's Hands

We've just started work on our HTC One X/One S testing, however HTC was kind enough to give us a demo of one of the coolest accessories that was first announced at Mobile World Congress: HTC's Media Link HD.

The small dongle features a USB port for power and an HDMI port for output. The device acts as a WiFi hotspot that your HTC One X/S connects to (the WiFi radio on the phone can also be connected to a WiFi AP while working with the Media Link HD). Once paired, you can use a three finger swipe gesture on the phone to either mirror or use any HDMI display attached to the Media Link HD as a secondary screen. HTC has an API that it will make public at some point in the future, allowing 3rd party devs to take advantage of the dual-screen feature of the Media Link HD. 

Similar to other wireless display technologies, you're actually sending an encoded stream of the phone's framebuffer to the receiver where it's decoded and sent over HDMI. No word on pricing or availability of the Media Link HD.

Although this sounds a lot like WiFi Direct/WiFi Display, the link is similar but proprietary to HTC. Eventually HTC will support WiFi Display but we're still several months away from that being the case (at the earliest), and it's unclear as to whether or not the Media Link HD will be updated to support it or if you'll need a new receiver.

Gallery: HTC One Media Link HD Demo

It’s the middle of April and that means it’s once again earnings season for the prior quarter.

Late yesterday AMD released their earnings report for Q1 2012, and it turned out to be a bit of a doozy. For the quarter AMD brought in $1.59 billion in revenue, with a net loss of $590 million. This is compared to $1.61B in revenue and a $510M net profit in Q1 of 2011, meaning AMD’s revenue is slightly down on a year-over-year basis, while their net income went well into the red.

Overall, while things have been going modestly well for AMD lately thanks to the strength of their product lineup, their stake in Global Foundries has continued to drag down the company’s profits. In Q4’11 AMD had to take $209M charge that drove them into the red then, and Q1’12 has not fared any better.

As you may recall, last month AMD fully divested themselves of Global Foundries, eliminating their 8.8% share of the company. This divestment was part of a larger revision of AMD’s wafer agreement with GloFo, which saw AMD giving up their share in the foundry as part of a larger payment to GloFo in order to get out of a previous exclusivity agreement with GloFo that had entitled them to production rights on some 28nm APUs. Altogether AMD has taken a $703M charge, composed of cash and and their GloFo stake, in order to get out of using GloFo's 28nm process; and that's every bit as bad as it sounds.

The good news of course is that AMD’s GloFo-related financial troubles are almost at and end now that they no longer hold a stake in GloFo, with the bad news being that there are still a few more payments to go until they’re fully freed. On top of the $703M charge for Q1, AMD owes a further $275M to GloFo over the next year, with AMD choosing to write all of this off in their $703M charge for Q1. However once they’re paid off next year, that’s it – AMD will have no further financial ties to GloFo, with the only remaining ties being the contract fab work GloFo does for AMD.

In any case, not counting their problems with GloFo, AMD’s non-GAAP net income for Q1’12 would have been $92M, which is a small but notable increase over their non-GAAP net income of $56M in Q1’11. Even though revenues were down, AMD’s operating income from both GPUs and CPUs is up versus 2011, reflecting the higher gross margin attached to AMD’s latest generation of products.

In particular, on the CPU side of things the average sale price for AMD CPUs has held steady, but overall costs have come down slightly, making it a net win for AMD. CPU revenue for Q1’12 was $1.203B with an operating income of $124M, versus $1.2B and $100M for Q1’11. All things considered Bulldozer doesn’t seem to have lit a fire under AMD, and the lack of new APUs to replace Brazos isn’t helping, but at the very least AMD is holding their ground.

Meanwhile on the GPU side of things this was the first quarter where AMD’s new Southern Islands GPUs were shipping, which is both good news and bad news for AMD. Traditionally quarters where major new GPU architectures are introduced see lower revenue as customers hold off on purchases, and with the launch of Southern Islands early in the year this was no exception. However new GPUs also launch at higher prices, which pushes margins up. The net result is that while revenue takes a step back profits increase, which is exactly what AMD needs at the moment.

Altogether AMD booked $382M of GPU revenue in Q1’12 with an operating income of $34M, versus 413M in revenue with an operating income of only $19M in Q1’11. The increase in operating income over Q1’11 is thanks in large part to AMD’s nearly quarter-long 28nm product lead, combined with AMD’s conservative pricing. Q2’12 should see revenue improvements as AMD will have been shipping desktop SI GPUs for the entire quarter along with introducing mobile SI GPUs, however as we saw earlier this week AMD’s conservative pricing has already eroded due to a need for price cuts, meaning that AMD’s margins will likely be going down.

Moving forward, Q2’12 is widely expected to see the launch of AMD’s Trinity APU, which should give their CPU business a shot in the arm. At the same time we’re expecting AMD to finally launch Southern Islands products for the mobile market, which will be important for AMD as their mobile GPUs are high volume products.

Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years. 

The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.

Thecus announced a partnership with McAfee at CeBIT 2012 to bring antivirus technology to their lineup. On April 16th, Thecus announced that that Thecus NAS systems would start shipping with McAfee antivirus technology. We also covered the release of Thecus's TopTower lineup, where it was briefly mentioned that McAfee's anti-virus module would be part of the shipping firmware. Today, we have more details.

Antivirus Technology in NAS Systems - A Brief History

NAS vendors have realized that anti-virus technology is fast becoming one of the must-have features in their firmware and antivirus vendors have only been too eager to spread out their reach. Users of some of Netgear's ReadyNAS solutions have been able to run the open source ClamAV antivirus since 2008, but it has never been an official feature.

Symantec, one of the leading antivirus vendors, has restricted its offerings to enterprise NAS systems, leaving the fast-growing SMB and SOHO NAS markets free for other vendors to enter. Trend Micro was one of the first to have an antivirus solution for SMB NAS systems. Buffalo Technology adopted them for some of their NAS models. QNAP was next with the open source ClamAV solution becoming part of the TurboNAS v3.5 firmware. Last month, Synology delivered the first Antivirus Essential pack for users running firmware version DSM 4.0 or later. Antivirus Essential internally uses the ClamAV engine. Thecus is the latest to join the list of NAS vendors with an antivirus solution as part of their firmware.

Thecus and McAfee Join Hands

Thecus's partnership with McAfee brings a host of things to the table.

As per the press release, the following features are worth mentioning:

• Comprehensive detection so threats are isolated before they can spread
• Removal of viruses, worms, and other malicious code
• Reliable and accurate detection, without a costly false-alarm problem
• Effective scanning of compressed, archived, and packed files
• Support for a wide range of platforms
• Scan engine SDK for easy integration into third-party applications

Of course, AnandTech readers are interested in the aspects which are not mentioned in the official PR. We contacted Thecus for some clarifications, and got the following information:

• Despite the fact that Thecus advertises all NAS systems shipping after April 16th as having the McAfee antivirus module, it is only Intel-based NAS systems with firmware version v2.02.x and above that will support it. In terms of bundling, only the N6/8/10 series will have it as part of the firmware. The McAfee module will become available for users of other supported NAS systems to download towards the end of this month.
• Unlike Buffalo Technology's subscription based model for the Trend Micro engine and antivirus definitions, the McAfee antivirus is offered free of charge to Thecus's customers. However, virus definition updates are available only for 3 years per bundled system.
• Thecus assures us that the McAfee module has very limited impact on NAS performance as specific folders can be targeted for scheduled scanning. It is not clear whether this means that real time protection is unavailable.
• Compared to ClamAV v0.96, Thecus claims that the McAfee module on a similarly spec-ed NAS system is 12x more efficient in terms of time spent in scanning a given file. A higher virus recognition rate (99% to ClamAV's 68%) is also claimed. Thecus also indicated that the McAfee module could scan files of upto 8 GB in size, while ClamAV could scan files of upto 2 GB in size only (though I haven't been able to confirm independently whether ClamAV's StreamMaxLength parameter is restricted to 2 GB only).

On the whole, the tie-up between Thecus and McAfee is quite interesting. It remains to be seen whether McAfee would be interested in getting their engine ported over to other NAS platforms (ARM / PowerPC based) and vendors. The fact that McAfee is now part of Intel might play a role, but that also provides some scope for deeper integration with Intel's NAS platforms in the future.