Thread: Anandtech News

Intel never quite reached 4GHz with the Pentium 4. Despite being on a dedicated quest for gigahertz the company stopped short and the best we ever got was 3.8GHz. Within a year the clock (no pun intended) was reset and we were all running Core 2 Duos at under 3GHz. With each subsequent generation Intel inched those clock speeds higher, but preferred to gain performance through efficiency rather than frequency.

Today, Intel quietly finishes what it started nearly a decade ago. When running a single threaded application, the Core i7 2600K will power gate three of its four cores and turbo the fourth core as high as 4.1GHz. Even with two cores active, the 32nm chip can run them both up to 4GHz. Mission complete.

Unlike Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge isn’t just about turbo (although Sandy Bridge’s turbo modes are quite awesome). Architecturally it’s the biggest change we’ve seen since Conroe, although looking at a high level block diagram you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Read on for our full, in-depth review!



More...

Ever since the Sandy Bridge preview, we’ve been waiting to see what Intel’s new architecture could do for mobility. No longer would quad-core notebooks require discrete graphics solutions, and performance would improve as well. While many of the desktop parts make do with a trimmed down graphics controller, nearly all of the mobile Sandy Bridge processors are packing a full set of 12EUs. Combine the improved efficiency of Intel’s new HD Graphics solution with double the clock speed of Core 2010’s IGP, and you have a recipe for mainstream graphics that may finally move out of their parents’ basement. We’ve been vigorously testing our Sandy Bridge notebook for the past couple of weeks, throwing everything we had available at it. Processor and graphics performance are markedly improved over Arrandale and Clarksfield, and battery life shows promise as well. Sandy Bridge may be a nice upgrade on the desktop, but for laptops and notebooks it’s nothing short or revolutionary. Read on to find out why!

More...

The launch of the Sandy Bridge platform today brings Intel’s newest socket, the new LGA-1155 platform, into the hands of the consumer. Pre-release information across the internet has heralded this new platform for its per-clock performance, and the reduction in complexity when it comes to overclocking. Through the ASRock P67 Extreme4 motherboard, let us examine some of the new features Sandy Bridge has to offer, and see whether this board is worth the $150 projected price point.

More...

Intel's Sandy Bridge processor architecture is upon us, and with it a freshly minted gaming PC courtesy of CyberPowerPC: the Gamer Xtreme 4000. If you read Anand's preview of Sandy Bridge (along with our review), you should already know it's the fastest processor clock-for-clock that money can buy. So what happens when a boutique like CyberPowerPC overclocks it from the shop and ships it to you strapped to 4GB of DDR3 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570? That's what we're going to show you today.

More...

With CES 2011 upon us, we must acknowledge that 2011 could well be the “Year of the Tablet”. Everyone—Motorola, Dell, HP, HTC, Acer, you name it—is releasing a tablet or three. If you’re ASUS, you’re announcing four different tablets today. If you are ASUS, I’d like to offer my congratulations and best wishes for this full-on assault of the tablet market. Chances are though, you’re not ASUS, so here’s the rundown on the four new devices.

Three of them are Honeycomb-based tablets, joined by a traditional Windows slate. Looking at the Android-based Eee Pads, we have the MeMO, a 7” Snapdragon slate, the Transformer, a 10” Tegra 2 slate with an optional keyboard docking station, and the Slider, a 10” convertible tablet with a sliding, tilting keyboard. The Windows tablet is called the Eee Slate EP121 and features a 12.1” display with an active Wacom digitizer and Core i5 UM power. It’s a pretty impressive looking bunch, so read on for more details and analysis.



More...

Here’s a little deja vu for you. At last year’s Storage Visions (a small storage show that precedes CES) Micron announced its first 6Gbps SSD, the RealSSD C300. Although met with its fair share of growing pains in the form of firmware issues, the C300 ended up being a competent performer throughout most of 2010.

This year, once again at Storage Visions, Micron announced its next generation SSD: the RealSSD C400. Based on the same architecture as the C300, the C400 is a combination of IMFT 25nm NAND, a slightly tweaked controller and a significant improvement in firmware.

Read on for more details!



More...

We're going to be touring pre-CES and CES show floors looking for interesting things to make note of, and already found something that piqued our attention. While walking around CES Unveiled, one device which caught our eye was the Parrot Asteroid, a single DIN sized head unit for vehicles - that's nothing out of the ordinary, except the Asteroid runs Android.

Read on for more about this interesting new application for Google's open source platform.

More...

Brian and I are currently at LG's press conference where the company announced, as expected, the LG Optimus 2X - the world's first dual-core Cortex A9 smartphone based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC. While NVIDIA announced Tegra 2 at last year's CES, it has taken this long to even get to the point where we can talk about products that will soon be shipping.

The 2X uses NVIDIA's Tegra 2 AP20H with both of its two Cortex A9s running at 1GHz. We'll have more details on Tegra 2 later today during NVIDIA's press conference. I'd expect the Optimus 2X to ship sometime in Q1.

LG also announced its thinnest smartphone: the Optimus Black. The phone is 9.2 mm thick (weighs 109 grams) and uses LG's ultra bright 4-inch NOVA display (it's not AMOLED). LG claims a brightness of 750 nits, which if true is at least 23% brighter than the brightest smartphone display we've tested thus far (BlackBerry Torch) and 30% brighter than the iPhone 4.

Lastly, LG announced an LTE USB dongle, the VL600, based on its own L2000 LTE chipset. It's Verizon branded in the photo, so we'll probably see it again soon.



More...

Anand and I rushed from the LG press conference over to AT&T's, where CEO Ralph de la Vega has just announced the carrier's LTE plans for the future. Some 20 LTE devices, including tablets, modems, smartphones, and hotspots are coming throughout 2011.

First up, AT&T has completed its HSPA+ deployment in the US, and will continue to expand backhaul - roughly 2/3rds of traffic is already being transacted over expanded backhaul, with speeds of 6 megabits/s being possible. I've seen speeds around 6 or 7 megabits/s in the best coverage areas on AT&T without touching an HSPA+ baseband, so it's likely that once more AT&T-band-compatible HSPA+ devices come we'll see even faster speeds. AT&T's LTE deployment will be completed by 2013.

Newly christened Motorola mobility is launching the Motorola Atrix 4G, which it claims is the world's most powerful smartphone. More on that in Anand's article.



More...

Motorola just announced its flagship Tegra 2 based smartphone: the ATRIX 4G. Running Android 2.2, the ATRIX 4G has a pair of Cortex A9s running at 1GHz inside NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC (similar to the LG Optimus 2X that was just announced earlier today). The SoC has 1GB of memory on package, putting it at twice what you get in most high end smartphones today. The phone is 10.9mm thick and will ship with 16GB of internal NAND storage and a beefy 1930mAh battery.

The real killer feature for the ATRIX is Motorola's webtop application. Motorola will be offering a netbook chassis with a ATRIX 4G dock on it. When your phone is docked, the ATRIX 4G will drive the netbook's 11.6" display and use its 36Whr battery. You get a full keyboard in the 13.9mm thick chassis.

When docked the ATRIX 4G will give you up to 8 hours of battery life (seems a little low given the huge battery). Finally, when docked you'll browse the web using a full blown ARM compiled version of Firefox.

You're looking at the smartphone's first steps into the realm of the PC.



More...