Thread: Anandtech News

ZTE just announced that it would be building a Tegra 4 based smartphone for the China market in the first half of 2013. Given NVIDIA's recent statements about Tegra 4 shipping to customers in Q2, I would expect that this is going to be very close to the middle of the year. ZTE didn't release any specs other than to say that it's building a Tegra 4 phone. 
Separately, ZTE and NVIDIA are also working on another phone that uses NVIDIA's i500 LTE baseband. 

More...

And I just read elsewhere that the HTC One won't, likely, be hitting VZW

Earlier this week NVIDIA announced their new top-end single-GPU consumer card, the GeForce GTX Titan. Built on NVIDIA’s GK110 and named after the same supercomputer that GK110 first powered, the GTX Titan is in many ways the apex of the Kepler family of GPUs first introduced nearly one year ago. With anywhere between 25% and 50% more resources than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 680, Titan is intended to be the ultimate single-GPU card for this generation.
Meanwhile with the launch of Titan NVIDIA has repositioned their traditional video card lineup to change who the ultimate video card will be chasing. With a price of $999 Titan is decided out of the price/performance race; Titan will be a luxury product, geared towards a mix of low-end compute customers and ultra-enthusiasts who can justify buying a luxury product to get their hands on a GK110 video card. So in many ways this is a different kind of launch than any other high performance consumer card that has come before it.
So where does that leave us? On Tuesday we could talk about Titan’s specifications, construction, architecture, and features. But the all-important performance data would be withheld another two days until today. So with Thursday finally upon us, let’s finish our look at Titan with our collected performance data and our analysis.

More...

Dell’s XPS line is for their premium consumer offerings, with some overlap between the consumer and professional users gravitating towards these systems. The XPS 12 Duo carries that “catering to a wider audience” mentality a step further with a flip screen display that allows you to transition between standard notebook and tablet modes.

Unlike some other companies, this is technically a second-generation Ultrabook, but since Dell more or less skipped the first-generation we still expect more from Dell this time around. The XPS 13 Ultrabook looked nice, though we found had some concerns with the temperatures we could hit under stress testing and the resulting noise. Here, Dell has pulled out all the stops and gone with a 12.5” 1080p IPS touchscreen. It’s definitely one of the more interesting designs to come out of late, but just how well does it work in practice?

More...

We managed to get in one more Podcast before Brian and I leave for MWC 2013 today. With the number of major announcements that happened in the past week, we pretty  much had to find a way to make this happen. On the list for discussion today are the new HTC One, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan, Tegra 4i and of course the Sony PlayStation 4. Enjoy!
The AnandTech Podcast - Episode 17
featuring Anand Shimpi, Brian Klug & Dr. Ian Cutress
iTunes
RSS - mp3, m4a
Direct Links - mp3, m4a
Total Time: 1 hour 9 minutes
Outline - hh:mm
HTC One - 00:00
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan - 00:20
NVIDIA's Tegra 4i - 00:42
Sony's PlayStation 4 - 00:52

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated. 

More...

This week saw the launch of NVIDIA's latest and greatest single GPU consumer graphics card, the GeForce Titan. Priced at a cool grand ($1000), the Titan isn't the sort of video card that every hobbyist and gamer can buy on a whim. Instead, NVIDIA is positioning it as an entry-level compute card (e.g. it's about one third the price of a Tesla K20), or an ultra-high-end gaming card for those who simply must have the best. We expect to see quite a few boutiques selling systems equipped with Titan, and indeed we've seen press releases from all the usual suspects.
This is as good a place as any to list those, so here's a short list, with estimated pricing based on a custom configured PC at each vendor. (I'm sure there are other vendors selling Titan as well; this is by no means intended to be a comprehensive list.)

• Maingear has a variety of desktop systems now available for configuration with Titan, with the GPUs adding $1090 each to the cost of the system.
• OriginPC has both Genesis and Chronos systems with Titan; Ryan previewed the Genesis earlier this week while the Chronos goes after the SFF market. They appear to be charging $1156 per Titan GPU, but they're also one of the first (if not the only) vendor with liquid-cooled Titan availabe.
• AVADirect includes Titan as an option in many of their custom desktop systems, with a price of $1106 per GPU.
• iBUYPOWER currently has the Titan in their Revolt SFF, which Dustin recently reviewed. Pricing is $1111 per GPU, because that's such a cool number I guess. Titan is also available in their custom configured desktops
• Falcon Northwest has Titan available in their SFF Tiki that Anand previewed this week, as well as their full desktop Talon and Mach V desktops. Titan adds $1095 per GPU to the cost of a FNW system.

Obviously that's a higher cost per GPU at every one of the above vendors, and if you've already got a fast system you probably aren't looking to upgrade to a completely new PC. For those looking to buy a Titan GPU on it's own, Newegg is now listing a pre-order of the ASUS Titan at the $999 MSRP. The current release date is listed as February 28, so next Thursday. We expect EVGA and some other GPU vendors to also show up some time in the next week, and we'll update this list as appropriate.

More...

 
I'm not entirely sure I understand the point of MWC this year if everyone is going to pre-empt the show with announcements of their own (or in the case of the Galaxy S 4, wait until after the show to announce). Samsung does join the list of companies that are unveiling announcements prior to the show with the disclosure of its TV Discovery service. 
 
Samsung is in a very unique position in that it is not only a SoC, NAND, display and DRAM maker, but also a significant player in the smartphone, tablet and TV space. If any company is well positioned to understand the needs of the market, it's Samsung.
 
With its fingers in many pots, Samsung quickly recognized a strong relationship between smartphone/tablet usage in conjunction with simply watching TV. This lead to Samsung outfitting many of its devices with an IR emitter, like with the Galaxy Note 10.1. If your tablet is out while you're watching TV, you might as well use your tablet to control your TV as well.
 
To increase available synergies between smartphone/tablet and TV, Samsung launched its TV Discovery service. Samsung's TV Discovery is a combination of software and hardware that simply lets you get a good feel for what content you have available to watch on TV as well as aggregated from online streaming sources such as Netflix and Blockbuster. Like many other attempts at TV/PC or TV/gadget convergence, TV Discovery attempts to solve the problem of having tons of content spread across many services by presenting it all in a single app on your smartphone or tablet. 
 
TV Discovery will also have a personalization component as well, to suggest content for you to watch based on your preferences.
 
The software side isn't anything super unique, as we've seen many attempts at this before.  I don't know that another software aggregation service is going to dramatically change anything, but before we reach perfection there are always many iterations of attempts that we have to live through.
 
Devices equipped with an IR emitter will be able to serve as universal remote controls, just as before. 
 
What is most unique about Samsung's TV Discovery service however is the integration with Samsung TVs. With all 2013 SMART TVs, Samsung is promising the ability to stream content from your TV Discovery enabled smartphone/tablet to your TV and vice versa. Getting content from your smartphone or tablet onto your TV is nothing new, but we haven't had a good way of getting TV content onto your mobile device. Obviously you'll need a Samsung TV for this to work, as well as the Samsung smartphone/tablet, but it's an intriguing leverage of Samsung's broad device ecosystem.
 
You can expect to see the TV Discovery app ship on 2013 Samsung mobile devices as well as 2013 Samsung SMART TVs.
Gallery: Samsung's TV Discovery Service Enables TV to Smartphone/Tablet Streaming

More...

Now that we’ve seen the HTC One camera announcement, I think it’s worth going over why this is something very exciting from an imaging standpoint, and also a huge risk for properly messaging to consumers.

With the One, HTC has chosen to go against the prevailing trend for this upcoming generation of devices by going to a 1/3.0" CMOS with 2.0 micron pixels, for a resulting 4 MP (2688

More...

Recently I was asked to give a presentation about smartphone imaging and optics at a small industry event, and given my background I was more than willing to comply. At the time, there was no particular product or announcement that I crafted this presentation for, but I thought it worth sharing beyond just the event itself, especially in the recent context of the HTC One. The high level idea of the presentation was to provide a high level primer for both a discussion about camera optics and general smartphone imaging trends and catalyze some discussion.

For readers here I think this is a great primer for what the state of things looks like if you’re not paying super close attention to smartphone cameras, and also the imaging chain at a high level on a mobile device.
Read on for the full presentation!
 

More...

During our visit to CES 2013, we had a chance to meet with Deepcool, a deceptively large Chinese company that has been producing heatsinks for OEMs for some time now. Deepcool is striking out with their own line of heatsinks targeting enthusiasts in the PC space, and they sent us a hefty box full of accessories and more importantly, a massive stack of heatsinks to test.

Tower coolers are pretty much the way to go these days if you're going to air cool your CPU, and Deepcool has a substantial number of them on offer. They also have availability virtually everywhere in the world except the United States, an issue they're fast ameliorating. The problem these coolers are going to face is a doozy, though: the heatsink industry already has a tremendous amount of competition. Does Deepcool have what it takes, or are they going to need to bring something more aggressive to the table?

More...