Thread: Anandtech News

As we approach the holidays, Apple has launched a new iPad as expected. As one might expect from the name, the iPad Air 2 is more of an evolution of the original iPad Air than a clean-sheet design. This doesn’t mean that there’s little to talk about though, as Apple has gone a long way to improve every aspect of the iPad Air with this iteration. However, with this generation Apple seems to be under fire as Google attempts to push into the premium tablet space with the Nexus 9. To find out how the iPad Air 2 fares, read on for the full review.

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While we've written about Android's Camera2 API before, there was one notable aspect of the discussion that was missing. The missing piece was a discussion of the physical link needed to enable all of the controls that were previously discussed. This isn't necessarily complicated, but it does represent a potential pitfall for updates to current devices. In short, the current protocols for using an external ISP provide insufficient bandwidth to support the full feature set needed for the new camera API. This means that some of the interesting features, such as per-frame controls are impossible to enable. As a result, many devices that we've evaluated before such as the Galaxy S4, HTC One (M7) and One (M8) won't support per-frame controls and similarly bandwidth-heavy features. The Galaxy Note 3, S5, and Note 4 appear to only use the on-die Qualcomm ISP.
To understand why this is, we must understand the protocol that is used for communication. Today, the de facto standard for interfacing between the AP (application processor), ISP, and camera is MIPI's CSI protocol. By and large, CSI-1 and CSI-2 are the most common iterations of this protocol. While the transport protocol (D-PHY) that actually carries the images has immense amounts of bandwidth (up to 10 Gbps), the control protocol defined has almost no bandwidth in comparison. Instead, the control protocol relies on fast-mode i2c, which can only provide 400 kbit/s of bandwidth.
While this may be an issue now, it seems that in the future this won't be an issue. According to Arrow Devices, the MIPI CSI-3 protocol merges control and transport protocols into a single M-PHY bus for up to 18.6 Gbps of bandwidth. It's likely that the demand for 4K60 video and 20+ megapixel burst mode functionality will drive adoption of this newer protocol. However, even now the disclosure of such protocols is rare, so it's hard to say whether we'll see widespread adoption of CSI-3 any time soon.

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Not long ago the internet was abuzz with articles and posts about Apple’s issues with iMessage. Users were concerned about not getting texts from iPhone users if they switched to another device. The issue stemmed from how iMessage works on the iPhone. When a user enables iMessage on their iPhone the phone sends a silent text message to either an SMS short code associated with the carrier the phone is being used on, or to one of several phone numbers in the United Kingdom if the phone is on a network that does not officially support the iPhone and is using the ‘unknown’ carrier bundle. This phone number responds with an activation message that uses a protocol called Application Port Addressing to direct the message to a specific process on the phone. If this completes successfully the phone number is registered with Apple’s servers as a number linked to an iPhone and all iOS and OS X devices are able to send iMessages to that phone number. In addition, all iMessages directed at that phone number will be pushed to all devices associated with the Apple ID on the iPhone.
This is where the issue would arise for users that switch from an iPhone to a smartphone running another operating system. When switching to another device, if the user does not go to the messages section of the iOS settings application and deactivate iMessage other iPhones will be unaware that the phone number is no longer being used on an iPhone and that it should be messaged using SMS. This posed a serious issue for users who lose their iPhone or have it damaged in such a way that they are unable to use it to disable iMessage. To make matters worse, if the user has iMessage enabled on other devices like an iPad or a Mac they must also deactivate it on those devices as even after deactivating on their iPhone the phone number will still be listed as an iMessage receiving address on those devices. This causes messages that should be sent by SMS to the new device to be sent as iMessages which are never received by the new phone.
Although this issue had existed since iMessage was released with iOS 5, it only became widely publicized during the last year. Apple has finally released a tool that allows users who cannot access their iPhone to deactivate the iMessage registration of their phone number. By inputting your phone number into the field on the website, Apple will send you an SMS message with a confirmation code. This code can then be entered into the website which will deactivate the iMessage registration for that phone number. It's good to see that there is finally a solution for users suffering issues receiving text messages after switching from the iPhone, but it certainly did take a while.
Source: Apple via The Verge

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Taking place this week are Imagination Technologies’ Chinese idc14 and Imagination Summits developer events. While Imagination holds these events in multiple countries over the year, the Chinese event is in many respects the most important from a hardware standpoint. With the bulk of SoC GPU licensees headquartered in the Asia-Pacific region – firms such as Allwinner, Rockchip, and Samsung – Imagination’s Chinese event is perhaps their biggest customer event and consequently an important venue for product announcements. Again this backdrop Imagination will be using this week’s events to announce the next generation of PowerVR GPUs, PowerVR Series7.

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There are many ways to do something different in the motherboard space, especially with respect to functionality and design. In terms of the design element, we have seen many motherboards recently go for a black and red theme, but in the past we had yellow, pink, and all sorts of interesting combinations. Upon popular request, ASUS is releasing the ASUS Z97 Mark S, an arctic camouflage special edition version of the TUF Z97 Sabertooth Mark 1. We were lucky to get motherboard number #0001 for review.

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NVIDIA has updated their drivers to version 344.65 drivers and they're available now. These are Game Ready drivers for Assassin's Creed: Unity, and they're ready one week in advance of the game's launch. This is really a great way of doing things on the part of NVIDIA, as users can download the driver and be ready to play as soon as the game unlocks on Steam.
Of course this new driver comes less than a week after the previous update, which was for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The holiday gaming deluge is in full effect, and I suspect we'll see quite a few more "Game Ready" driver updates between now and the new year.
As usual, these drivers include all of the previous optimizations from the 343 series, including DSR support for Fermi and Kepler GPUs and Game Ready optimizations for Civilization: Beyond Earth, Lords of the Fallen, Elite: Dangerous, and various other gaming profile updates. The full release notes (PDF) are basically unchanged from the last update, with the exception of information on Assassin's Creed: Unity.
In addition to the new drivers, GeForce Experience also received an update this morning, bringing it to version 2.1.4.0. The release notes on the download page indicate this is a relatively minor update, but news that support has been added for streaming to SHIELD devices running Android Lollipop indicates that we are that much closer to the promised Android 5.0 update rolling out to SHIELD.

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It has been a while since the official Nokia smartphone acquisition was completed, but to date all of the current Lumia phones have carried the Nokia brand alongside Lumia. Microsoft has been busy going through the Nokia apps over the last while, and updating them to be Lumia apps, and as of today, they have now done the same with the latest Lumia smartphone to be announced. The Microsoft Lumia 535 will be the first official Lumia smartphone to drop the Nokia name. With this being a 5xx series of Lumia, it is aimed at the value conscious end of the market.
Microsoft is calling the Lumia 535 their 5x5x5 proposition. The first of the fives is five free integrated Microsoft experiences with the company listing Skype, Office, Cortana, OneDrive, and Outlook. Astute readers will recognize that these free experiences are available on all Windows Phones though. The second five is a five megapixel front facing camera which is one of the latest trends in “Selfie” cameras, which is good to see regardless of if you take selfies or not. Horrible front facing cameras have been a staple of most smartphones for too long. The final five is a five inch display, but this time with a qHD (960x540) resolution.

The press release does not include full specifications for the phone, but as a 5xx series we can expect it to be fairly low end parts. The 530 is powered by a Snapdragon 200 with quad-core Cortex A7 CPUs at 1.2 GHz, so it would make sense for the 535 to offer the same. The Lumia 530 is only equipped with 512 MB of RAM, but hopefully the 535 bumps that to 1 GB to allow the entire Windows Phone app store to be available to this device. Storage on the 530 is only 4 GB of internal NAND with microSD expansion up to an additional 128 GB which would fall in line with the low cost of this device.
Update: The full specifications are now available. It is indeed a quad-core Snapdragon 200, but included is 1 GB of memory and 8 GB of storage. The battery is a 1905 mAh 3.7 volt part, for just over 7 Wh of charge. Although the front camera is indeed 5 MP, it can only record FWVGA resolution video (848 x 480). For a complete listing of specifications please check here.
There will be two versions of the Lumia 535 with both a single SIM and dual SIM model to be made available. As is often the case with Lumia phones, there are colors aplenty with bright green, bright orange, white, dark grey, black, and making its return to the Lumia fold, cyan. The 535 will be available in “key markets” beginning in November, with an expected price of around 110 EUR before taxes and carrier subsidies.

People looking for a new flagship Windows Phone from Microsoft will have to wait a bit longer. Microsoft has clearly targeted the low cost segment of the smartphone market, but they now have an almost dizzying array of devices for different regions. The Lumia 535 joins the already launched 530, 630, 635, 730, 735, and 830 as low cost devices. Not all devices are sold in all regions, and it appears Microsoft is happy to continue with the multitude of devices to serve different markets much like Nokia was doing.

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The rise of USB 3.0 as a high speed interface for PCs and the increasing affordability of flash memory has led to some very interesting products. USB flash drives are a dime a dozen, but there is scope for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. We have already looked at the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX, which brought in a Phison controller into the flash driver market. Despite the presence of a USB 3.0 - SATA bridge chip, the unit supported all the important SSD functionalities such as TRIM and overprovisioning. Prior to the Corsair's Voyager GTX introduction, Mushkin actually demonstrated and brought a SSD controller-based USB 3.0 flash drive to the market in the Ventura Ultra series.
Gallery: Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 120GB and Atom USB 3.0 64GB Flash Drives


The Mushkin Ventura Ultra series is based on the Sandforce SF-2281 controller. SSDs based on that controller have been in the market for quite some time. The firmware is quite mature now. The bridge chip used in the drives is the ASMedia 1053E. Mushkin also tagged along a 64 GB Atom USB 3.0 drive (that we briefly saw at CES earlier this year) with the Ventura Ultra review sample. The rest of the review will present the DAS (direct-attached storage) benchmark numbers from our evaluation of the two devices, along with a few observations.
Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with USB 3.0 connections (such as the Ventura Ultra and Atom flash drives being considered today), we utilize the USB 3.0 port directly hanging off the PCH.

AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration
Motherboard	Asus Z97-PRO Wi-Fi ac ATX
CPU	Intel Core i7-4790
Memory	Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY32GX3M4A2133C11 32 GB (4x 8GB) DDR3-2133 @ 11-11-11-27
OS Drive	Seagate 600 Pro 400 GB
Optical Drive	Asus BW-16D1HT 16x Blu-ray Write (w/ M-Disc Support)
Add-on Card	Asus Thunderbolt EX II
Chassis	Corsair Air 540
PSU	Corsair AX760i 760 W
OS	Windows 8.1 Pro
Thanks to Asus and Corsair for the build components

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below:

• Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GB USB 3.0
• Mushkin Atom 64GB USB 3.0
• Corsair Voyager GTX 256GB USB 3.0
• LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB (SSD version, over USB 3.0)

Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO and CrystalDiskMark

Mushkin claims read and write speeds of 445 MBps and 440 MBps respectively for the 120GB Ventura Ultra. These are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. The Atom version claims read and write speeds of 120 and 20 MBps. We don't see anywhere close to those numbers in ATTO, though some of our other benchmarks (detailed further down) do come a bit close. Unfortunately, the numbers provided by ATTO are not directly applicable to most real-life scenarios. It must be noted that the SF-2281 drives tend to perform well with compressible data (as the controller does on-the-fly compression and de-duplication to reduce NAND wear). The data used by ATTO for testing can't be configured and might turn out to be compressible, tending to favor the SandForce SF-2281 controller more.

Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBMushkin Atom 64GB

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 14 MBps for the Ventura Ultra for 4K random accesses. The less said about the Atom drive here, the better it is. In any case, the Atom is not being marketed for its transfer rate capabilities.

Mushkin Ventura Ultra 120GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBMushkin Atom 64GB

robocopy and PCMark 8 Storage Bench

Our testing methodology for DAS units also takes into consideration the usual use-case for such devices. The most common usage scenario is transfer of large amounts of photos and videos to and from the unit. The minor usage scenario is importing files directly off the DAS into a multimedia editing program such as Adobe Photoshop.
In order to tackle the first use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:

• Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
• Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
• BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)

The 500 GB LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt wins all benchmark hands down. However, as we shall see further down, it is also the costliest of the lot. The form factor also doesn't match up to those of a typical flash drive. Between the Ventura Ultra and the Voyager GTX, there isn't much separation in the write benchmarks. However, the reads present a different story - the Ventura Ultra lags by quite a bit. We also see the 64GB Atom provide 100 MBps+ read speeds for some workloads.
For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8's storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.

• Adobe Photoshop (Light)
• Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Illustrator

Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don't involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. Note that the same testbed is being used for all DAS units. Therefore, comparing the numbers for each trace should be possible across different DAS units.

In these benchmarks, the Ventura Ultra and Voyager GTX are more evenly matched, trading honors depending on the workload. It must be remembered that the toss-up between the Ventura Ultra and the Voyager GTX is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison because of the difference in the capacities.

Concluding Remarks

Coming to the business end of the review, the Ventura Ultra keeps up Mushkin's claims of being one of the fastest flash drives in the market. The icing on the cake is the presence of a real SSD controller in the form of the SandForce SF2281 inside.
The performance of the drive leaves us with no doubt that it would be a great portable OS drive, even though Mushkin doesn't advertise it for that purpose. The Atom series, on the other hand, is nothing great when it comes to performance. However, the miniature size is the main selling point here.
Minor points of concern include Mushkin's refusal to divulge the flash memory configuration being used (as these could potentially change in future production runs) and the inability to recognize and take actions on the drive based on S.M.A.R.T features such as TRIM. That said, it is not really clear whether TRIM on SF2281 drives is really worth the trouble. In any case, there is inherent over-provisioning in the drive and the typical flash drive use-case rarely fills up the drive enough to cause extensive performance degradation.

The pricing aspect is the final item on the table. The LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is obviously costly because of the availability of dual interfaces (both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt). The Atom comes in as the cheapest of the lot (after all, it is a typical flash drive). The Ventura Ultra, on a per-GB basis, is definitely more attractive than the Corsair Voyager GTX. However, long-term performance consistency for heavy use-cases (not the typical flash drive usage scenario) may be in favor of the Corsair unit (thanks to TRIM support). Over-provisioning can be configured for the Voyager GTX also.
In terms of absolute pricing, the Mushkin Ventura Ultra is available for $70. The 64GB Atom drive retails for $29. A typical SF-2281-based 120GB SSD in a 2.5" bus-powered USB 3.0 enclosure retails for around $90. The form factor of the Ventura Ultra, fortunately, doesn't carry a premium. This makes it easy to recommend it to users looking for a flash drive that can take full advantage of USB 3.0 speeds.

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When it comes to high-end gaming notebooks, there are only a few real competitors: Alienware, ASUS, Clevo (under various brand names), and MSI are the main options, with a few others like Razer and Gigabyte offering second tier performance (e.g. not the 880M or 980M, but instead dropping one step to the 870M and 970M). The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M officially launched in the first half of October, and while we’ve provided a performance preview with the MSI GT72 as well as a detailed look at BatteryBoost, it’s now time to bring it all together with a full review. There’s little doubt that the GTX 980M is currently the fastest mobile GPU, but how does the MSI GT72 handle other tasks, and is this finally an MSI notebook we can recommend without any reservations? Read on for our in-depth review.

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Last week HTC launched their new HTC Hot Deals website which offers deals on HTC products every Tuesday. The first deal was an offer that put their newly released Nexus 9 tablet on sale for 50% off of its normal retail price. A combination of limited quantities and technical issues left many users frustrated, which led HTC to apologize and commit to fixing the issues with the website in time for the next deal. Now Tuesday has arrived, and HTC's latest deal is about to begin.
The deal for this week offers the first 200 buyers the HTC One (M8) for $299, which is a $350 savings off the original price. After the first 200 units are sold, the next 300 buyers will pay $499, which is still $150 in savings. The deal will begin in 15 minutes at 9:00 AM PT, and end at 9:00 PM PT, but any users who wish to take advantage of the offer should expect the number of units to sell out long before the actual end time. The link to HTC's Hot Deals page is in the source below.
Source: HTC Hot Deals

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