Thread: Anandtech News

Here at AnandTech, we’ve been talking for a considerable time about Intel and Nokia’s joint collaboration in the mobile space on the MeeGo mobile operating system. Today, the two companies have announced another partnership aimed at improving MeeGo’s potential for competing against Android and iOS - a joint research program tasked with creating new mobile user experiences.

Intel and Nokia have chosen the University of Oulu’s center for internet excellence to be the host of this newly formed 'joint innovation center.' The University of Oulu is credited for being the home of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the open source VR platform realXtend, among other things, and no doubt Nokia already has strong ties to this large Finnish university.

University of Oulu

Starting immediately, some two dozen researchers from the university’s community will collaborate towards creating “compelling mobile user experiences.”

Though the center’s goals are focused on 3D mobile interfaces, Intel and Nokia also noted that development time will be devoted towards crafting new interfaces for virtual worlds - but get this, for use in a mobile environment. The two talked about extending CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment - think holodeck) type interfaces into the mobile realm.



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Almost all CE devices sold in the market today have some sort of connection to the Internet as well as the home network. The consumers' need to trasnfer data back and forth between various locations in their residences has led to wireless routers becoming ubiquitous in every home connected to the Internet. However, wireless networking is not a worry-free solution for everyone. The real world performance of wireless networks heavily depends on the layout and construction of the house, as well as the nature of other CE devices operating simultaneously. Running an Ethernet cable around the house is a very good option, but is not worth the hassle and cost for many. Given this situation, the electrical network inside the house looks like an unexploited part of the equation. The HomePlug AV standard aims to take advantage of the electrical wiring inside the house to network various computers and various CE products.

In today's review, we will look at Western Digital's first foray into the HomePlug AV market, the WD Livewire. The company claims that the intent of the product is to deliver the Internet to various locations in your house, including the place where the TV and devices like the WDTV Live are placed. Does the WD Livewire succeed in this respect? Read on to find out.



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Yesterday we published our coverage of AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer architecture disclosures. If you haven't had a chance to read the piece or haven't been following AMD for the past few years: Bobcat is AMD's new low power architecture, while Bulldozer is targeted at high end desktops and servers. Both are due out sometime in 2011 and both promise a lot.

Now that AMD has completed its presentation at Hot Chips 22 we're allowed to share with you the contents of those presentations. There's not much in here that we haven't already covered in yesterday's article, but if you'd like the full slide deck head over to the AnandTech Galleries.



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The first half of 2010 saw Netgear get started on their AV Series product line. Their intent was to create a set of products to enhance the consumer's home theater experience. The first few products appeared to be just rebranded versions of already existing units. A case in point is the WNDR3700 802.11n Gigabit router which was apparently rebadged as the WNDR37AV a couple of months back. Rebadged products never generate much enthusiasm, even though Netgear may claim them to be designed with superior performance and features aimed at the home theater market. With Netgear's strength in the networking space, it is no surprise that all the products announced in the AV series so far have been aimed at making sure that the components of a home theater can talk in a satisfactory manner with the Internet, as well as the other components in the home network. However, can any home theater product line ever be complete without a media streamer? Is there any networking methodology (short of running Cat6 cables all over the house) reliable enough for streaming the highest quality Blu-Ray videos?

All this is set to change in the coming months, though. Netgear is slated to bring out a slew of press releases for the upcoming products towards the end of August 2010. In typical AnandTech fashion, we have the official scoop on the details which you are unlikely to find in the press releases. Read on to find out more about a few of the exciting products about to be announced by Netgear in the home theater space.



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With the recent rise in the number of triple-slot cards, we have a few different cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes an interesting direction with the triple-slot concept.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex Edition is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 5770 with a unique feature: an adjustable height fan. By default the fan sits flush against the heatsink of this double-slot card, but with a twist of the fan it can be raised roughly 9mm. PowerColor says that doing can improve the cooling beyond what a pure double-slot card can achieve by reducing backflow, and today we set to find out if that's the case.

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Usually when we get to the 17"-class notebooks here, we're dealing with machines designed almost exclusively for gaming. The problem is that these machines also tend to be prohibitively expensive, owing in no small part to the healthy premiums their gaming graphics often command. So what about the users for whom gaming isn't the biggest priority, the ones major manufacturers like HP and Dell tend to target? In Dell's case, there's the Studio 17 offering targeted to media enthusiasts, and that's what we're here to investigate.

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NVIDIA’s ION brought a tremendous appeal to mini-ITX last year, but over the past six months Clarkdale has established itself as the natural and more capable choice for small form factor builds. Zotac are today attempting to reinvigorate appeal for ION by teaming up Intel’s CULV processors with NVIDIA’s aging GF9400 chipset. We take a look at the IONITX-P-E, and aim to find out how it fits into the HTPC landscape.



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Every two years Intel is committed to introducing a new microprocessor architecture. It's a part of the whole tick-tock strategy that Intel hatched back in 2005 - 2006. Thus far, every tock has been a knockout - with no competitor able to touch it. It started with Conroe in 2006, continued with Nehalem in 2008 and early next year we'll meet Sandy Bridge - the third tock in Intel's cadence. Correction, you'll be able to buy it next year, but you'll get to meet her today.

Sandy Bridge is a unique part for Intel. Not only does it address the neglected quad-core CPU market by moving it to 32nm and giving it a healthy performance boost (10%+ clock per clock, 23%+ compared to similarly priced parts) but it also brings Intel's integrated graphics on die. And I hate to ruin surprises, but it's actually not half bad.

For the first time, Intel's integrated graphics is actually performance competitive with low end discrete GPUs. You're not going to want to throw away your GTX 460, but if you were going to spend $40 - $60 on a GPU before, you may not need to after Sandy Bridge.

Want to see how it performs?



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Four years ago AMD did the unthinkable: it announced the 5.4 billion dollar acquisition of ATI in a combination of cash and stock. What followed was a handful of very difficult years for AMD, an upward swing for ATI and the eventual spinoff of AMD’s manufacturing facilities to GlobalFoundries in order to remain profitable and competitive.

In the years post acquisition, many criticized AMD for blowing a lot of money on ATI and having little to show for it. Even I felt that for $5.4 billion AMD could’ve put together its own competent graphics and chipset teams.

Despite the protest and sideline evaluations, good has come from the acquisition. The most noticeable is the fact that AMD’s chipset business is the strongest it has ever been. AMD branded chipsets and integrated graphics are actually very good. And later this year, AMD will ship its first Fusion APUs (single die CPU/GPU): Ontario using Bobcat cores and an AMD GPU. Ontario will be the first tangible example of direct AMD/ATI collaboration since the acquisition.

Just as we’re about to see results from the acquisition AMD is announcing that it will retire the ATI brand later this year. Save those boxes guys, soon you won’t see an ATI logo on any product sold in the market.



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For quite a while now one of the largest obsticles for using Eyefinity in budget scanrios has been an issue of connectivity. Eyefinity video cards are cheap and large TV-derrived monitors are fairly cheap, but cheap monitors rarely have the DisplayPort connectivity required for the 3rd monitor in an Eyefinity configuration. The previous solution has been to use an active dual-link DVI adaptor capable of converting the DP signal to DVI, but at around $100 for these adaptors the cost was as much as some video cards.

Next month this situation will largely be resolved with the release of active single-link DVI adaptors. These adaptors still convert a DP signal to DVI, but by only generating a signal for a single-link port they're cheaper to build and no longer require external power. At $30 each they should go a long way towards making Eyefinity cheaper for gamers and non-gamers alike.

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