Thread: Anandtech News

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.



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Late last year, we covered the first part of AMD’s HD 7000M product lineup, the 7400M, 7500M, and 7600M. Today, the other shoe drops as we get the high-end parts, and unlike the other 7000M chips, these will all be running AMD’s GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. As is customary for mobile GPU launches, we don’t have any hardware in hand to test, and we’ve previously reported some of the details for the chips. Now we have complete specs to discuss, so let’s get to it.



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A couple of weeks ago we ran a call for questions as I got word that ASUS would be paying me a visit in NC. JJ from ASUS sat down with me and we had a discussion about Ivy Bridge, the 7-series chipset, ASUS' lineup and more. As promised, we also answered some of your questions in the video itself. Questions that didn't get answered in the video will be answered in the comments thread of the original post.

The part I didn't mention was that ASUS is also giving away four 7-series motherboards from its lineup to AnandTech readers. The boards ASUS is giving away are listed below:
ASUS ROG Maximus V Gene (micro-ATX)
ASUS Sabertooth Z77 (ATX)
ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe (ATX)
ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe (mITX)

We're giving them all away starting today. Ranging from the insanely compact mini-ITX P8Z77-I Deluxe to the thermal armor equipped Sabertooth Z77. If you were on the fence about the move to Ivy Bridge, this may be what pushes you over.
Read on for full details on how to enter the giveaway!


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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




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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 availale 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



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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



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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



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While NVIDIA doesn’t publically announce most of their OEM desktop graphics cards, they do update their website with the specifications of these cards, which is how we usually find out about them. Today has been no exception, and after NVIDIA's latest site update a bit of digging has unearthed the fact that NVIDIA has released their first Kepler cards for the desktop market. There are 5 new OEM desktop cards, composing a mix of both Kepler and Fermi: the GT 645, the GT 640, and the GT 630.

	GT 645	GT 640	GT 640	GT 640	GT 630
Stream Processors	288	384	144	384	384
Texture Units	48	32	24	32	32
ROPs	24	16	16	16	16
Core Clock	776MHz	950MHz	720MHz	797MHz	875MHz
Shader Clock	1552MHz	950MHz	1440MHz	797MHz	875MHz
Memory Clock	3.828GHz GDDR5	5GHz GDDR5	1.782GHz DDR3	1.782GHz DDR3	1.782GHz DDR3
Memory Bus Width	192-bit*	128-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Frame Buffer	1GB	1GB/2GB	1.5GB/3GB	1GB/2GB	1GB/2GB
GPU	GF114	GK107	GF116	GK107	GK107
TDP	140W	75W	75W	50W	50W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm

If this product stack looks familiar, it should. It’s generally the same product stack as the GeForce 600 series Mobile lineup, except with higher clockspeeds. As with their mobile parts, NVIDIA is going to be mixing 40nm Fermi parts and 28nm Kepler parts into their desktop product stack, leading to a hilariously frustrating selection of video cards.
At the top of the new product stack we have the GT 645, which is a GF114 Fermi rehash. GT 645 has 288 CUDA cores enabled and paired with what’s listed as a very crippled 128bit memory bus. However considering the memory bandwidth NVIDIA lists for the card (91.9GB/sec) and the fact that they already have a very similar card in the GTX 560 SE, we’re confident that the 128bit bus in NVIDIA’s specs is a typo and that it’s actually a 192bit bus, and we are listing it in our charts accordingly. In any case you’re still looking significantly less memory bandwidth the GTX 560 is typically paired with.

The next card is the GT 640, the GT 640, and the GT 640. Just like the GT 640M LE, NVIDIA is mixing Fermi and Kepler here in a very odd manner. We have a GT 640 that’s a full GK107 (384 cores) with GDDR5 memory and a fairly high clockspeed, a GT 640 that’s a binned GF116 (144 cores) with DDR3 memory, and a GT 640 that’s a full GK107 (384 cores) with DDR3 memory and lower clockspeeds. Not even the TDP or form factor is consistent among these cards; the GK107 DDR3 card is a low-profile 50W card, while the other two are full-profile 75W cards.

The final card is the GT 630, which is another GK107 part. This is also a full GK107 (384 cores), paired with DDR3 memory and a mid-range clockspeed, with a TDP of 50W. The most interesting part? It’s clocked 10% higher than the equivalent GT 640 and should have better performance as a result, though memory bandwidth is the same between the two.

It’s safe to say that at this point the OEM desktop video card market has turned into a similar mess as the OEM laptop market, and this latest round of video cards serves to cement that fact. As with the laptop market we’ve reached a point where it’s nearly impossible to tell which video card a product actually uses based on computer specs alone, and that’s worrisome. Accordingly, our best advice for buying an OEM desktop is the same as buying an OEM laptop: make sure you research what you're getting if you want faster GPU performance. It may not be possible to tell what video card is in use until a product has been reviewed.
Oh a final note, it’s interesting though not surprising that NVIDIA is releasing desktop GK107 cards to OEMs first. They did the same thing with the GT 200 series, which were NVIDIA’s first 40nm cards, and while these GT 600 cards don’t have the same distinction, the root cause – a lack of sufficient GPU supply – is the same. On a positive note however, this launch means that retail GK107 desktop cards can’t be too far away; we’d speculate a few months at the most. So budget desktop users shouldn’t be waiting too much longer for the 28nm generation to hit their market segment.
Source: SH SOTN, NVIDIA



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For Intel, the road to their first real competitive smartphone SoC has been a long one. Shortly after joining AnandTech and beginning this journey writing about both smartphones and the SoC space, I remember hopping on a call with Anand and some Intel folks to talk about Moorestown. While we never did see Moorestown in a smartphone, we did see it in a few tablets, and even looked at performance in an OpenPeak Tablet at IDF 2011. Back then performance was more than competitive against the single core Cortex A8s in a number of other devices, but power profile, lack of ISP, video encode, decode, or PoP LPDDR2 support, and the number of discrete packages required to implement Moorestown, made it impossible to build a smartphone around. While Moorestown was never the success that Intel was hoping for, it paved the way for something that finally brings x86 both down to a place on the power-performance curve that until now has been dominated by ARM-powered SoCs, and includes all the things hanging off the edges that you need (ISP, encode, decode, integrated memory controller, etc), and it’s called Medfield. With Medfield, Intel finally has a real, bona fide SoC that is already in a number of devices shipping before the end of 2012.

In both an attempt to prove that its Medfield platform is competitive enough to ship in actual smartphones, and speed up the process of getting the platform to market, Intel created its own smartphone Form Factor Reference Design (FFRD). While the act of making a reference device is wholly unsurprising since it’s analogous to Qualcomm’s MSM MDPs or even TI’s OMAP Blaze MDP, what is surprising is its polish and aim. We’ve seen and talked about the FFRD a number of times before, including our first glimpse at IDF 2011 and numerous times since then. Led by Mike Bell (of Apple and Palm, formerly), a team at Intel with the mandate of making smartphone around Medfield created a highly polished device as both a demonstration platform for OEM customers and for sale directly to the customer through participating carriers. This FFRD has served as the basis for the first Medfield smartphones that will (and already are) shipping this year, including the Orange Santa Clara, Lenovo K800, and the device we’re looking at today, the Lava Xolo X900. Future Medfield-based devices will deviate from the FFRD design (like the upcoming Motorola device), but will still be based loosely on the whole Medfield platform. For now, in the form of the X900 we’re basically looking at the FFRD with almost no adulteration from carriers or other OEMs.
Read on for our review of the very first Intel x86 based Android smartphone!


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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.
Source: Exynos 4 Quad Minisite, Korea Newswire



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