Thread: Anandtech News

In its annual tradition at MWC, ASUS held a press conference off-site to introduce some of its mobile devices. The introductions are always interesting and typically unique in the marketplace. This year was no different. 
To kick things off, ASUS introduced the Fonepad: a 7-inch Android 4.1.2 tablet that also serves as a phone. Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 8.0 earlier this week with a similar capability. While I don't expect many folks to want to hold a 7-inch tablet up to their face, having the ability to combine both tablet and smartphone functionality into one can be tempting. I can see the Fonepad being compelling if you don't make calls all that often but would rather carry a small tablet than a large smartphone, or if you are fine using a Bluetooth headset. 

The device is pretty much a Nexus 7 but with a nice metal back. The dimensions are near identical to the Nexus 7 at 196.4mm x 120.1mm x 10.4mm with a weight of 340 grams. The display resolution remains 1280 x 800 and the IPS panel is LED backlit.
In a curious change of pace, ASUS integrated Intel's Atom Z2420 SoC (single-core + HT, 1.2GHz 32nm, PowerVR SGX 540). I'm curious to see how the single core, low-clocked Atom SoC does compared to Tegra 3 in a tablet. Driving all phone functionality is Intel's XMM 6265 baseband, with support for 850/900/1900/2100MHz WCDMA and 850/900/1800/1900MHz EDGE/GSM bands. There's support for 802.11b/g/n and BT 3.0.

The Fonepad features 1GB of LPDDR2 memory and 16GB of NAND on-board, with a microSD slot for additional storage expansion (a notable absence from the Nexus 7). There's an integrated 16Wh battery (like in the N7) and the device will be available in titanium gray and champagne gold (like the Transformer Prime).
The big selling point of the Fonepad is its price: $249. That's a pretty impressive deal for a full featured smartphone and 7-inch tablet in one. It's a bit of a quirky product, but I can definitely see the Fonepad filling a niche.

Next up is the ASUS PadFone Infinity. For those of you who aren't familiar with the PadFone concept, it's pretty simple. Take a phone that can dock into and power a tablet display and you have PadFone. The tablet part is strictly a display + battery, all compute and connectivity is driven by the phone element.

The PadFone Infinity takes a 5-inch 1080p Snapdragon 600 based smartphone running Android 4.2 and pairs it with a 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 tablet dock (the PadFone Infinity Station). The phone weighs 141g and features an integrated 2400mAh battery, while the tablet dock weighs 530g and comes with a 5000mAh battery.
The phone integrates 2GB of LPDDR2-1066, and will come in both 32GB and 64GB versions. ASUS claims support for 802.11b/g/n and 802.11ac with WiFi Direct, BT 4.0 and NFC. Thanks to Qualcomm's baseband, there's full DC-HSPA+ and UE category 3 LTE support. 

The PadFone features a 13MP rear facing camera with f/2.0 aperture lens and a 2MP front facing camera. When in tablet mode, the rear camera remains unimpeded while the front camera is replaced with a 1MP module.
Video out is supported via a Mobility DisplayPort interface (MyDP) that runs over the standard micro-USB port on the PadFone.
Gallery: Hands on with the ASUS Fonepad, and ASUS PadFone Infinity

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Vendors are always very quick to send us their biggest, best, and brightest. Rosewill's own top-selling Blackhawk Ultra has been with us for a little while, but while we rework our testbed for high end cases, we thought it might be worth looking at one of the workhorses in Rosewill's stable. Looking at enthusiast kit is fun, but it's interesting to see what's floating around in the budget sector, too, as many of us are often on the hook to build and maintain desktops for family and friends. With that in mind, we requested the micro-ATX Rosewill Line-M.

While the Line M is worth checking out in its own right as a compact, $55 case with USB 3.0 connectivity, it also highlights a disparity in the current industry: Micro-ATX motherboards are still incredibly common, but case designs are stratifying within two extremes. Full ATX and larger cases are going stronger than ever, but the smaller case designs have largely been usurped by Mini-ITX. There's still a place in the world for a good Micro-ATX client, though, and we think the Line-M might just help deliver it.

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Earlier this morning we stopped by ST-Ericsson to talk about their SoCs and modem platforms, and took a look at their new Thor M7450 baseband which includes both support for 10 MHz + 10 MHz carrier aggregation to realize full category 3 and 4 speeds, and of course category 4 support. M7450 is built on a 28nm LP bulk process, though I'm told that there will be future parts also supporting FD-SOI similar to the new L8580. This is the same IP block integrated into ST-E's L8580 SoC, and includes support for both TDD and FDD LTE alongside WCDMA/HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, and GSM, all the 3GPP suite. ST-E believes its modem architecture in M7450 is very different from traditional designs, as it leans more towards being an SDR than most.

We had a chance to see M7450 demonstrating both UE Category 4 speeds and carrier aggregation on a number of different band combinations, interestingly enough 4 + 17 (AT&T), 4 + 13 (VZW), and 2 + 17 (AT&T) in addition to a few others. M7450 of course supports 5+10 and 5+5 aggregation as well. 

Anand and I also got a chance to check out M7450 doing a VoLTE voice over IMS call running AMR-WB on the platform, which touts power consumption on a VoLTE call at levels equal to or less than a WCDMA call. There was a visualization showing the platform performance on the current VoLTE call versus WCDMA (for the same platform) which was at the same level or below basically the entire time. M7450 is currently sampling and expected to be in devices by the end of the year.
Gallery: A Look at ST-Ericsson's THOR M7450 Category 4 LTE Modem with Carrier Aggregation

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We don't necessarily cover gaming as a primary focus, but I know there are tons of people out there that love games, and perhaps one of the most beloved franchises of all is Blizzard's StarCraft series. Blizzard sent out a notification last night that the latest trailer will go live in about five minues on Twitch.tv (12PM Pacific), so if you're looking for something to do on your lunch break (or you're East coast and are getting bored at the end of the day), grab a bowl of popcorn and pull up a chair; the show is about to start!
Besides the official reveal, there will be a live discussion with Blizzard developers Chris Metzen, Dustin Browder, and Jeff Chamberlin, along with Community Manager Kevin Johnson. Viewers will be able to participate in the discussion segment by sending questions via Twitter or Vine (#Vengeance). Hopefully this time, we'll see the engine use more than two CPU cores.

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The "dirty" secret of PC peripherals is that the word "gaming" can often mean any combination of two things: robust quality and gaudy design. Most mechanical keyboards tend to be geared towards gamers, and likewise, most high quality mice tend to be pointed in the same direction. It's not unusual for digital illustrators to use one of the single-hand gaming keyboards for Photoshop shortcuts, and a good mechanical keyboard like the Corsair Vengeance K90 pretty much sells itself the instant a regular user feels the keys.

Yet sometimes these peripherals don't feel like they were actually designed with human hands in mind. I've tested a few gaming mice that were definitely reasonably comfortable, but still clung resolutely to my aging Logitech G500. ROCCAT sent me two gaming mice to test, though, and I walked away seriously impressed. With the Kone XTD and Kone Pure, ROCCAT has two mice that are surprisingly comfortable and incredibly full-featured. Have I finally found a reason to retire my G500, and should you be looking for these?

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Yesterday we stopped by Broadcom to look at their newly announced BCM21892 LTE baseband, which we saw teased previously at CES doing a VoLTE call. If you're not famliar with the details of Broadcom's first LTE baseband, it's a 3GPP Release 10 modem supporting all the 3GPP air interfaces (GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, LTE) with Category 4 LTE support, support for 10+10 MHz carrier aggregation, integrated 8 port transceiver into the baseband package, and built on a 28nm HPm process.

Broadcom's LTE Baseband
 	BCM21892
Air Interfaces	GSM/EDGE, WCDMA, LTE-A, TD-SCDMA
3GPP Release	Rel. 10 (LTE-A)
HSPA+ Category	Cat. 24, DC-HSPA+ 42.2 Mbps
LTE	Cat. 4, LTE-A 150 Mbps Downlink / 50 Mbps Uplink 2x2 MIMO
Voice	VoLTE, CS WCDMA/GSM voice
Process	28nm HPm
Package	Plastic(?) with integrated DRAM and 8-port Transceiver
Extra	External PMIC, "35% smaller required implementation area," envelope tracking supported

There's nothing new about the feature set, but it was nice to see BCM21892 silicon working and demonstrating all of the available features we heard about in the announcement working. I recorded a video of the entire demo walkthrough which I'd encourage you to watch if you're interested. The booth contained both BCM21892 working on a few demo boards, as well as integrated with their own platform form factor reference design which runs the full house of Broadcom silicon - WLAN/BT Combo, SoC, and GPS. 
Broadcom demonstrated both full 150 Mbps UE Category 4 rates on a cabled up demo, 10 + 10 MHz carrier aggregation on Band 17 and 4 (AT&T's configuration) switching in and out the band 4 carrier, and envelope tracking support working on the BCM21892. 
Gallery: A Look at Broadcom's BCM21892 LTE Baseband at MWC

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As regular Anandtech readers will know, OpenCL is a standard by Khronos group that allows you to access the computational power of parallel devices such as multicore CPUs and GPUs in your system provided the hardware and drivers support the API. Companies such as AMD, Intel and Nvidia have been shipping OpenCL drivers on the desktop for some time now. On the mobile side, vendors such as ARM,  Imagination, Qualcomm, Samsung and TI have been promising OpenCL on mobile and often show off demos using OpenCL. Drivers from vendors such as ARM, Qualcomm and Imagination have also passed official conformance tests, certifying that they do have working drivers in at least development firmwares. However,  none of the vendors have publically announced whether or not they are already shipping OpenCL in stock firmware on any device. ARM and Qualcomm have both maintained that licensing and shipping the OpenCL driver is upto the handset makers and have not issued any documentation confirming which handsets or tablets do ship with OpenCL. Google has also always maintained that Renderscript Compute, and not OpenCL, is the official parallel computing API for Android.
However, recently we have seen several stories that OpenCL drivers are in fact present on both Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 stock firmware. I first became aware of the presence of OpenCL for Mali T604 on Nexus 10 stock firmware through a tweet from Kishonti who were able to run their CLBenchmark test on the Nexus 10. Then, posters on several forums (such as bearon on Beyond3D forum ) posted instructions on how to get access to OpenCL on Nexus 10. Matthew Scarpino has also posted some instructions for Nexus 10 on his blog . Finally, posters on Qualcomm developer forums posted that Nexus 4 also appears to ship with OpenCL drivers, and gave some instructions on how to get access to OpenCL on Nexus 4.
We have also been able to confirm that both Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 contain OpenCL drivers, though we have only tested very basic functions in the API so far. I have posted sample code here that appears to be working on both Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 and does not require you to pull any proprietary binaries from the firmware, unlike some other proposed solutions. I will keep updating the source code over time as I learn more.
It is not clear whether the shipping drivers are the conformant drivers referred to above, or some other internal build that may not have the full functionality of the API.  It is potentially risky for commercial apps to depend upon the libraries, as they may be buggy or unstable, and may also disappear in future firmware versions. However, it is still an exciting development for developers and tinkerers, as it opens up the way for developers to explore the potential of OpenCL on mobile/low-power platforms.
 

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BitFenix has historically been fairly reliable at producing reasonably priced cases that have their own aesthetic flair and solid performance. They've been exactly daring enough with designs like the extremely popular Prodigy, and been able to produce great value with less expensive builds like the Merc series. For the most part their midrange has been fairly well-covered by the Shinobi, but for users looking for something with a little more pep and a little different design, today we have on hand the Raider.

The Raider seems like a fairly basic ATX mid-tower, but there's some secret sauce at work here. BitFenix includes a pseudo-removable drive cage and, almost surprisingly, no side ventilation. No window, no side fan, nothing but two solid side panels. There's also a trio of BitFenix's silent Spectre fans, and that signature attractive soft-touch plastic finish. It sounds like the Raider has a lot going for it, but does it hold up?

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Philips sent out a review sample of their new Hue lighting system, a set of three Hue lights with the Hue Bridge that allows you to remotely control the lights. Besides being able to turn the lights on or off, the big claim to fame of the Hue is that you can set the lights to a variety of colors, or you can even program them to cycle through colors.

Home automation systems are often proprietary and can be quite expensive, so the entry of Philips into this market (albeit in a limited fashion) with their Hue lighting system has the potential to shake things up a bit. The lights have colored LEDs, and while the initial pack only includes three of the Connected Bulbs, you can potentially add up to 50 lights throughout your house/property. One thing that hasn’t changed yet however is that pricing is quite high: the initial kit will set you back $200. But how does the Philips Hue work in practice, and might it be worth the cost of entry?
We also have a new writer for this review, so say hello to Ashu Joshi.

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Aside from Gigabyte’s gaming motherboards (the G1 Series) and its channel motherboards (such as the UP4 TH, MX-D3H), there exists the OC Oriented series of motherboards.  The first participant in this specific range was the X58A-OC, a stripped down LGA1366 motherboard for Gulftown CPUs to focus on the top overclocking scores with up to 4-way GPU action.  The latest in the line the Z77X-UP7, a strike at the heart of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs, which we are testing today.  With a fuller feature set than the X58A-OC, our black and orange UP7 is designed to take world records by extreme overclockers, while perhaps still being a motherboard for the high end enthusiast with a deep wallet.

 

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