Thread: Anandtech News

It's tradition for AMD to have an off-site meeting place during IDF week and this year is no exception. I headed over to AMD's suite to talk about servers, desktops and the imminent mobile Fusion launches. We've talked about AMD's three new microprocessors in great detail before. Bulldozer is targeted at the high end desktop and server markets, due out sometime in 2011 (sampling in Q4). Llano will arrive at the end of Q2 2011 and feature multiple 32nm Phenom II derived cores paired with a very beefy AMD DX11 GPU. What I'm most excited about however is the parts that will begin shipping in Q4 2010: Zacate for mainstream notebooks (18W TDP) and Ontario for netbooks (9W TDP).

Both APUs will have a pair of low-power Bobcat cores and an AMD DX11 GPU. AMD isn't publicly confirming how many cores the GPU side will have but both will share the same die manufactured on TSMC's 40nm process. The package is extremely compact:

AMD let us have some benchmarking time with an early Zacate platform. For a low end/mainstream notebook platform, the GPU performance looks very good. Read on.



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In IDF’s technology showcase, we got a chance to catch up with OpenPeak, makers of the OpenTablet 7, a 7” Android tablet running atop the Moorestown Atom Z6xx SoC. The OpenTablet 7 is a reference design created for ODMs to rebrand and customize as they want. It will be on sale later this year as an AT&T branded product bundled with their 3G connectivity and also serves as the basis for Cisco’s Cius business-centric videoconferencing tablet.

We’ve seen the OpenPeak before, having played with an earlier prototype at CES in January, but the real story is that we got performance benchmarks from the Moorestown-based tablet. Read on to see our preliminary findings on what Intel’s new SoC can do.



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A few weeks ago we previewed the performance of Intel’s next-generation microprocessor architecture, codenamed Sandy Bridge. We came away impressed with our early look at performance but honestly had very little explanation for why the chip performed the way it did. For the first time in years we knew the performance of an Intel processor without knowing much about its underlying architecture.

Today, that all changes. Read on for our full analysis of Intel's Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.



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Not to outdone by Intel’s IDF and AMD’s counter-meeting this week, NVIDIA’s GPU Computing group has their own announcement this week ahead of their GPU Technology Conference next week.

Next week NVIDIA will be releasing the first major update to their GPGPU programming toolchain since the Fermi-based Tesla series launched earlier this year. Specifically, they will be releasing Parallel Nsight 1.5, and version 3.2 of the CUDA Toolkit.

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Since I reviewed my first SSD, three things have happened. 1) Controllers have improved significantly. My personal favorite, SandForce’s SF-1200, can outperform the original X25-M by more than 3x in random write speed. 2) Consumer capacities have tripled. While the majority of SSDs sold are still under 100GB in size, you can now get 240GB and even 480GB consumer drives. 3) Prices have dropped. The first SSD I reviewed was Intel’s 80GB X25-M and it carried a $595 MSRP. OCZ will sell you a 120GB Vertex 2 for about half that today.

As a result of prices dropping, SSDs are being used for more than just expensive boot/application drives. Personally, I use a couple of old SSDs connected to Apricorn SATA-to-USB adapters as Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 install discs. Using an SSD instead of a DVD drive speeds up OS install time considerably. I can install Windows 7 from one of these SSDs to an SSD in just under 3 minutes (timed from the moment it starts installing to the first reboot).

OCZ was the first to produce an interesting SSD for external use but Kingston has since delivered a lower priced alternative. Read on as we look at both options.



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Intel just announced its CE4200 (Groveland) SoC, the successor to the CE4100 used in devices like the Boxee box.

The CE4200 is based on Intel's 45nm Atom architecture and features a H.264 encoder. Presumably this is the same architecture as Intel's Moorestown SoC which added a 720p H.264 encode engine.

Intel didn't disclose any additional details about the CE4200 but we'll be asking around at the show to find out what we can.

ADB, Samsung, Sagemcom and technicolor are all announcing products in development with CE4200.



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Dell just demonstrated its upcoming 10-inch Inspiron Duo convertible netbook/tablet. Based on the dual core Atom N550 the Inspiron Duo runs Windows 7 Premium. The system can work as a tablet:

Although the demo seemed quite slow and touch screen very unresponsive (typical of Atom running Windows 7 on netbook hardware). When you need a full keyboard however the tablet can open up, screen swivel around (the bezel remains in place) and you get a standard netbook:

I actually played with a prototype of the Inspiron Duo earlier this year and the conversion mechanism felt pretty solid. Dell expects it to be shipping by the end of this year.



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Earlier this year Intel unveiled its Moorestown architecture, branded as the Atom Z600 series for smartphones and handhelds. Moorestown focused on a significant reduction in idle and active power, the former enabled by completely ditching the PCI bus. While this well for getting Atom into smartphones, the missing PCI bus means that you can't use Moorestown in Windows.

Intel made an alternate version of Moorestown to address this shortcoming. Oak Trail takes the Lincroft SoC (CPU + GPU + memory controller) and pairs it with a new PCH, codenamed Whitney Point. Whitney Point adds PCI support, enabling Windows support.

Just a few minutes ago Intel demonstrated its first Oak Trail platforms, both shipping in 2011. The first was a conventional looking tablet:

But the second was the OCS1 handheld Windows gaming device running Oaktrail. Intel didn't tell us much about the system but it has a sliding keyboard and a pair of d-pads.

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Out of Germany comes the WeTab, the first shipping MeeGo-based tablet, running Intel’s new open source operating system on top of the venerable Atom N450 processor. It’s a fairly standard Atom based tablet, pretty similar to the Exo PC and others, with the netbook internals, an SSD, and an 11.6” WXGA screen.



Neofonie’s skin on MeeGo consists of a number of tiles on the homescreen, and scrolls through the application tiles with a thumb-based navigation on the sides of the screen. All of the settings and controls are also located on the sidebars, making both navigation and changing options pretty simple. While it’s not the most intuitive UI to pick up immediately, once you get used to it, I can see it being pretty efficient to use. The keyboard is definitely better than the stock Windows 7 keyboard, but not quite iPad quality, since the keys are pretty small. Overall, the experience isn’t as impressive as some of the skinned Windows UIs like the ExoPC, but it’s quick and MeeGo is definitely noticeably more responsive than the Windows-based Atom tablets.

The claimed battery life of 6 hours suggests a 4 cell battery inside with around 32 Wh in capacity. Build quality is pretty good, with a solid chassis and a good feel in hand. At 1.8lbs, it’s a bit heavier than the iPad, but since it’s larger, you don’t feel it as much.

Unfortunately, the screen is a pretty big letdown on the WeTab. The 11.6” WXGA panel has a decent resolution, producing crisp images, but the viewing angles are pretty bad and the responsiveness was not very good. There were pretty frequent missed presses throughout our hands-on experience with the WeTab, and it really puts a downer on the otherwise decent UI. For a device that is shipping next week, that’s pretty disappointing, though it is possible that we were using an earlier prototype. If WeTab can figure out the touchscreen responsiveness, it could really push the MeeGo platform for tablets and carry the OS until the tablet-specific build of MeeGo is released early next year.



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At the end of this morning's keynote at IDF 2010 intel announced the Atom Processor E600 series. It's a Moorestown-like SoC designed for embedded applications.

It's pretty obvious what the E stands for in E600 - embedded. Read on for more info.



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