Thread: Anandtech News

Intel has announced via several Product Change Notifications that it will be discontinuing a total of 19 Clarkdale, Lynnfield, and Sandy Bridge desktop CPUs across sockets 1366, 1156, and 1155. OEMs may no longer order the chips from Intel, and boxed CPUs will only be available while supplies last.
The complete list includes the Pentium G6950, G6960, G620, G620T, and G840; the Core i3 540 and 2100T; the Core i5 650, 660, 670, 680, and 2300; and the Core i7 860, 870, 930, 950, 960, 980, and 990X. Many of these processors have been around for over two years now, and with Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge E products available at almost all conceivable price points (and with Ivy Bridge just around the corner), the discontinuation of these processors is unsurprising.
More surprising is the cutting of several Sandy Bridge Pentium models, which were released only a few months ago. However, the models in question have already been replaced by slightly faster models (the G630, G630T, and G860, with the G850 apparently still available), and high competition in this market segment from both Intel's own Sandy Bridge Celerons and AMD's offerings is bound to lead to faster turnover.
Source: CPU World



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Hitachi has started shipping the world's first hard drive with 4TB capacity. There has not been an official press release from Hitachi yet, but a Japanese site Akiba has spotted the hard drive on sale. The hard drive carries model number HDS5C4040ALE630 and is branded as Deskstar 5K.
The brand suggests that it's a lower performance drive with rotational speed of 5900rpm (Hitachi calls this "CoolSpin"). The drive comes with 32MB of cache just like the 2TB and 3TB versions, and uses SATA 6Gb/s interface. The drive is priced at 26,800 Yen, which translates to $345. For comparison, the 2TB Deskstar 5K costs 19,780 Yen ($254), so the price per GB is very close. The drive appears to use five platters, so one more platter than the previous 4TB monster.
The release comes at an odd time because hard drive supply is still very limited due to the floods in Thailand. The components of this drive are manufactured in Thailand according to the product packaging, meaning that the supply may be very limited in the short term. There is no word on global availability, though.



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Recently I reviewed another monitor from BenQ that was designed as an all-in-one model to handle your computer use, as well as TV or video game usage. While the performance of the display was decent, the combination of everything wasn’t an ideal fit.

This new display from BenQ, the VW2420H, has a similar *VA panel and LED backlighting setup as the previous one, but this time it is just a normal monitor. Will it fare better without all the extra features?


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At the Spike TV Video Game Awards, BioWare announced it is working on Command & Conquer: Generals 2. A new BioWare studio, BioWare Victory, is developing the PC-exclusive real-time strategy game set for release in 2013.
The first C&C: Generals, released in 2003, was a bit of a departure for the franchise. It eschewed the series’ campy live-action cutscenes and instead attempted a more mature, modern story. It also changed up classic C&C gameplay by changing how resources were gathered and armies constructed.
BioWare Victory head Jon Van Caneghem told IGN that Generals “is actually the best-selling game in the series,” so it isn’t surprising that EA would revive it after last year’s underwhelming Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight.
Command & Conquer: Generals 2 will utilize EA’s Frostbite 2.0 engine, currently powering Battlefield 3. You can take a look at teaser footage in the trailer below.




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With all of the noise Intel and some of the OEMs are making about ultrabooks, it's easy to forget that as PC users we've already enjoyed thin-and-light and ultraportable notebooks for a while now. Were they sliver-thin? No, but the magical three pound point is something we've always been able to find. Netbooks, for better or worse, only made portability that much more accessible and affordable.

With that in mind, we have on hand Acer's TravelMate 8481T, a notebook that measures under an inch thick (without the battery) and sports an SSD and matte screen. If you were in the market for an ultraportable, this one may be worth your attention. It's not technically an ultrabook, but in some ways that's not necessarily bad.


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It appears that this is the season of inexpensive Android tablets, and with Christmas less than two weeks away, a well-discounted Honeycomb tablet is an interesting gift idea. When Honeycomb debuted, it came hitched to the $799 Motorola Xoom, a device that was a solid first effort but had buggy software and a pricetag that was too high by half. In the following months, Honeycomb became a more mature platform and the price of entry to the Honeycomb club lowered as more devices were released, eventually settling in the $4-500 range.
Recently during the holiday shopping season, we’ve seen retailers mark some of the lower-end Honeycomb tablets down pretty significantly. We’ve seen tablets like the original ASUS Transformer, the Acer Iconia Tab A500, and the Toshiba Thrive break the $300 mark, with the Thrive at one point going as low as $199. In the $250-300 range, a budget oriented Honeycomb tablet is a pretty tempting buy. Is it worth the 50% savings compared to a higher end tablet like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the new ASUS Transformer Prime? We decided to take a look at Toshiba’s Thrive to figure it out.


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When we posted about the launch of the Archos G9 Turbo, we mentioned that Archos was targeting a Q1 2012 release date for the G9's Ice Cream Sandwich update. Since then, Archos showed off a preview of the update, with an unfinished build of Android 4.0.1 running on the OMAP4-based G9. It's worth noting here that OMAP4 was the launch platform silicon for Ice Cream Sandwich, underpinning the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, so it's easy to believe that Archos will hit the target early next year. This preview build looks pretty far along, with the OS looking like it works quite well for the most part. Scrolling and animations appear to be relatively smooth, and hardware acceleration is supported at least in part. Features that still need to be completed include support for GPU-accelerated video decode, support for Samba and UPnP, support for the external 3G module, as well as the rest of the optimizations that Archos provides on its devices.
Source: Archos, ARMDevices



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Amazon will be releasing an over-the-air software update for its Kindle Fire tablet in less than two weeks, company spokesman Drew Herdener revealed to the New York Times yesterday. Most prominent in its list of fixes are improvements to both performance and multitouch navigation, two aspects of the Kindle Fire experience that most reviews of the device commonly mentioned. The last fix will allow users to edit the list of recent items on the device.
Our review of the Kindle Fire left us mostly impressed with the hardware, though sluggishness and stuttering in the UI were among our biggest gripes. Until it comes out, however, it's impossible to say the degree to which this software update will address these issues, or whether it will do anything to improve the somewhat lacking speed of the Silk browser.
The Kindle Fire uses a highly customized version of Android 2.3 that should improve steadily as Amazon refines it. The update doesn't have a set release date as of this writing, but "less than two weeks" strongly implies that the company hopes to release it in time to update any Kindle Fires sitting under Christmas trees right now.
Source: New York Times



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It has been expected for some time now that the fallout from Thailand’s well publicized flooding and resulting hard drive shortage would have wider ramifications than just impacting the businesses of Western Digital and Seagate and driving up hard drive prices, and now those other outcomes are finally starting to occur. Today Intel became the latest casualty of the shortage when they announced that they were reducing their Q4’11 earnings estimate from $14.7B in revenue to $13.7B due to the shortage and its impact on new computer sales.
Even though Intel is a moderately diversified business – they have their hands in everything from CPUs to NICs to SSDs – virtually everything Intel sells is tied to the sale of new computers. As the hard drive shortage has continued and existing stocks of hard drives have been emptied the lack of cheap hard drives has made them the de facto bottleneck in computer production, leading to the slowing the production of new computers for both the consumer and enterprise markets. This in turn is directly reducing the demand for Intel’s products, most notably CPUs, and is why Intel has had to revise their earnings estimate down.
Intel notes that Q4’11 computer sales are still up over Q3, which means sales are still rising as they traditionally do, but at this point the lack of hard drives is capping computer sales at a lower level than they would otherwise reach. After the final sales are tallied at the beginning of next year, Q4’11 sales will almost certainly be down versus Q4’10, representing an unusual contraction in an otherwise good year for the PC industry.
Intel’s own guidance suggests that the shortage will continue to dog the company through Q1’12, and only finally begin to abate in Q2’12. It may very well take longer than Q2 for hard drive production to recover, but Intel isn’t speculating out that far. Regardless, Q2 is widely expected to be the launch for their Ivy Bridge CPUs, so it will be in Intel’s best interest for the shortage to come to an end quickly.
Intel of course won’t be the only casualty, but by taking a $1B reduction in revenue (and shaving 0.5% off of their legendary gross margin) they’re among the largest. By the time the shortage ends we’re expecting to still see several more companies and industries take a hit; AMD is a likely candidate for the same reason as Intel, but also NVIDIA & AMD for their GPUs, and the DRAM industry is highly prone to boom/bust cycles – this being at a time where DRAM is already at record low prices. There are very few industries that can go unscathed when 25% of the global hard drive production capacity for Q4’11 disappears overnight.
In Intel’s case they are at least partially diversified against a hard drive shortage through their SSD business, and while Intel doesn’t provide estimates for specific businesses it’s likely to be one of their stronger units for the quarter. Still, SSDs are not great replacements for hard drives (in an economic sense) so strong SSD sales cannot compensate for the significant drop in CPU sales due to the hard drive shortage.
Source: Intel Investor Relations



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To say I liked the original Momentus XT would be an understatement. While Seagate had the lofty goal of negating the need for an SSD with its first mass-market hybrid HDD, the reality was the Momentus XT ended up being the best 2.5" hard drive on the market. In many cases, it was fast enough to be better than 3.5" desktop hard drives as well.

Seagate earned this praise by combining a small amount of of SLC NAND (4GB at the time) with a traditional 7200RPM 2.5" hard drive. A separate NAND controller was introduced to handle caching of frequently accessed data to the NAND. By acting solely as a read cache (only read requests to the drive are pulled into the cache), Seagate skirted the complicated issue of effectively building an on-board SSD by only caching reads from the hard drive and not writes to it.
Read on for our review of Seagate's second generation Momentus XT, now with twice as much NAND on-board and a larger 750GB capacity.


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