Thread: Anandtech News

While iOS 5 seems to be a groundbreaking release on several fronts, one of it’s lesser documented features is the ability to configure new Airport Extreme/Express and Time Capsule devices right from your iPhone or iPod touch.
The process is mostly automated and leaves very little room for human error. While it doesn’t let you mess around with the plethora of settings normally available on the Airport Utility, it’s a no-nonsense way to quickly get access to the Internet without having to use a computer.
I tested this on my iPhone running iOS 5 Beta 4 and a 5^th Generation Airport Extreme (MD0311LL/A). If you’re running a beta version of iOS 5 and have any luck setting up an older Airport Extreme, Airport Express or Time Capusule, do let us know in the comments!
For more information on what's changed, be sure to check out Brian’s review of the new Airport Extremes and Time Capsules here!
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AMD's website suggests that the company will be entering the RAM market soon with their own RAM modules. The modules will be branded as Radeon, just like AMD's GPUs. At first, AMD will launch three series: Entertainment, ULTRA PRO Gaming and Enterprise. All three will have the same density of 2GB and are based on the DDR3 standard, but the speeds will vary. The Entertainment series is 1333MHz and the ULTRA PRO Gaming series is 1600MHz. Timings are 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 respectively. All three series also share the voltage of 1.5V. The speeds of the Enterprise series are to be announced. Obviously, AMD claims that their memory is the most ideal for their APU and CPU systems but at least the specifications are no different from other manufacturers' RAM.
The more interesting fact is that the actual DRAM chips are also made by AMD. AMD hasn't been into the DRAM business before (or if they have, they have been very quiet about it), so this is a surprise. However, it is possible that the chips have just been rebranded and thus been manufactured by another company, but unfortunately we don't know any details at this point.
Pricing and availability are unknown, but the Entertainment series modules are already on sale in Japan (hence the pictures).
Source: Akiba, AMD


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Apple today updated its education store with a new iMac for especially price-conscious schools: for $999, you can buy a 21.5" iMac with a 3.1 GHz dual-core Core i3, 2GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, a Radeon HD 6750M with 256MB of RAM, and a Mini DisplayPort connector - that's right, there's no Thunderbolt port in this iMac, though the computer is otherwise identical to the base-model Sandy Bridge iMac released earlier this year (which costs $1,149 for education customers).
This continues Apple's tradition of offering discontinued and cut-rate Macs to education-only customers - note that in this case, "education-only" doesn't refer to the Education Store accessible by the students, faculty, and staff members at most colleges and universities, but the special Apple Store available only to people purchasing computers on the behalf of their institution. Apple also offers these purchasers the white unibody MacBook and an early 2009-model 20" Core 2 Duo iMac, each for $899.
I don't really understand what the market for this thing is supposed to be - to save a meager $150, you lose half your processor cores, half your graphics RAM, half your regular RAM, half your hard drive space, and your Thunderbolt port, and the only part upgradeable when purchasing is RAM (4GB will set you back $90, mostly negating your savings over the base model, and 8GB costs an exhorbitant $270).
There are some very, very limited-use cases in which a Mac is needed and every dollar counts (think kiosk computers or basic computer lab machines), but to me this seems like a poor choice for your money - stay away from this thing unless you have a really good reason not to.


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Earlier this year at Qualcomm's annual Uplinq conference, HTC announced that it was going to open up parts of Sense to devleopers and launch HTC OpenSense. HTC OpenSense is a collection of SDKs which will allow developers to leverage hardware and software specific to HTC phones.

Today HTC is making good on that promise, starting by launching its S3D (Stereoscopic 3D) SDK and Pen SDK. The former is a collection of tools and frameworks that will allow developers to both leverage the autostereoscopic 3D display on the HTC EVO 3D, and easily capture using the onboard 3D camera. The latter is the Pen SDK which allows the same level of access, but to the HTC Flyer and View 4G's Scribe pen technology. Things like the the pressure-levels will be accessible, in addition to essentially all the other parts of HTC-specific pen functionality. Documentation, sample code, and all the frameworks are now available on HTCdev.com. The SDKs will snap into the Android SDK and AVD Manager just like other third-party add-ons. More SDK components will launch in time as well. HTCdev.com will also be the new home for kernel source code and other similar tools currently hosted at developer.htc.com. The next part of HTC's news today is that HTCdev.com will be the home of instructions and the tool used to unlock bootloaders on HTC devices. HTC isn't announcing the availability date quite yet, and it isn't launching today, but we're told the site and instructions will launch before the end of the month.

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The debate over the potential (or not, depending on your perspective) for cellular handsets to supplant dedicated portable gaming consoles was already at the 'dull roar' stage when Steve Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPhone in January 2007. Successive iPhone iterations, along with iOS ecosystem expansion to the iPod touch and iPad, have upped the argument amplification a notch or few, as have competitive offerings based on the Android, RIM, WebOS and Windows Mobile (now Windows Phone) operating systems.
Sony's multi-phase approach to addressing the standalone-versus-cellphone debate is, if nothing else, intriguing. One key product in the company's plan, Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play gaming cellphone, is the subject of this particular writeup:

The mythical 'PlayStation Phone' had been rumored for several years, but when it finally appeared in late March in 11 countries (not then including the United States), it was curiously absent any explicit 'PlayStation' branding. Sony Ericsson's initial U.S. carrier partner was Verizon, who began selling the handset in late May subsequent to its first official U.S. unveiling, a commercial which ran during February's Super Bowl. More recently, AT&T picked up the handset in mid-July. One week later, Verizon dropped the Xperia Play's contract-subsidized price to $99.99, from $199.99 at introduction. Was Verizon's action a competitive response to AT&T's entry, a reaction to poor Xperia Play sales, or some combination of these and/or other factors? Verizon's not saying, but let's see how well (or not) the handset performs to get a sense of its degree of market appeal.


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Coenciding with the start of SIGGRAPH 2011, Khronos has released version 4.2 of the OpenGL specification. Khronos routinely updates the OpenGL specification to add new features to the API for existing hardware and this update is no different, coming a little over a year after the release of the OpenGL 4.1 specification. As with 4.1 this is primarily for use with DX11 class hardware (GeForce 400/500, Radeon HD 5000/6000), however NVIDIA's developer site mentions that some features can be made available as extensions to work with hardware as old as OpenGL2/DX9 class hardware.
Notable new features in OpenGL 4.2 include:

• Enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
• Capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
• Modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
• Packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

Currently NVIDIA has released their first OpenGL 4.2 drivers for developers, while AMD is expecting to release beta drivers soon.
Source: BusinessWire


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Supergiant Games’ Bastion, which kicked off Microsoft’s exclusive Summer of Arcade promotion on July 20^th, will get its PC release on August 16^th. It will cost $14.99 and is currently available for pre-order on Valve’s Steam platform , though it will come to other digital retailers later this year.
Bastion, published by Warner Bros. Interactive, made a splash earlier this year at PAX East and hype snowballed as the year wore on. Former GameSpot executive editor and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 producer Greg Kasavin penned the story, which centers on a young boy, The Kid, out to restore life to his barren world. Players control The Kid in an isometric perspective, hacking and slashing through enemies with a variety of weapons - all while a grizzled voice fills in the story with narration that dynamically responds to your actions.
The PC version of Bastion will support gamepads, but Supergiant's also taken the time to tune the game for mouse and keyboard controls. "We want to make sure folks playing with a mouse and keyboard have a very good experience," Kasavin told Eurogamer. Bastion's hardware requirements are modest: a 1.7 GHz dual core processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 512MB DirectX 9.0c compatible video card with shader model 2.0.
So far Bastion has performed well. It topped the Live Arcade sales charts in the week of its release and came in second the week after. Supergiant currently has no plans to release Bastion on PlayStation Network.


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As you may recall, streaming music service Spotify leaped across the pond to American users last month with the blessing of the major music labels. For those of you who don't recall, Spotify is trying to do for music what Netflix Instant did for streaming video: instead of a Pandora-style system that lets you listen to music that an algorithm chooses, Spotify gives you access to all the songs in its cloud to organize into playlists and listen to as you please.
Well, the numbers are starting to come in, and so far things look promising: the US version of Spotify has racked up 1.4 million registered users in spite of the free tier's invite-only status. Of those users, roughly 175,000 are paying users, a conversion rate of 12.5%, though this figure doesn't distinguish between the two different pay tiers ($5 a month gets you unlimited streaming and no ads, $10 allows you to play songs on your mobile device, both allow you to use Spotify without an invitation).
While cloud music services like iTunes in the Cloud, Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music still rely on you, to some extent, to purchase and populate your online library yourself, Spotify's all-streaming a la carte option can be more appealing to people who want to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want.
Source: AllThingsD


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Lenovo today announced yet another addition to it’s M-series enterprise class all-in-ones with the new M71z. The new AIOs are aimed specifically at large businesses, schools and government institutions looking for cutting-edge performance without compromising on space.
The new M71z’s feature second-generation Intel^® Core™ processors with optional touchscreen displays and video conferencing, with select models offering solid-state drives for blazing-fast boot times. Other features include a DVD burner, optional Wi-Fi, 6 USB (2.0?) ports, a chassis intrusion switch and a DisplayPort for adding an additional monitor. The M71z is also quite environmentally friendly, boasting Energy Star 5.2, TCO Certified Edge and EPEAT Gold certifications.
The M71z starts at $599 with availability slated for October. If you’re itching to upgrade that school lab, or the conference room the wait might be worthwhile. The closest rival from HP is either an Omni series AIO or a TouchSmart series AIO. However, we'd need to see the prices and specs of the individual SKUs before we can start drawing any comparisons.
Source: Lenovo – ThinkCentre M71z All-In-One


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