Latest News - Page 2874

During the Consumer Electronics Show 2014 in Las Vegas, iBUYPOWER showed off some GPU coin mining systems that were powered by AMD's Radeon R9 290X GPUs. These systems are used purely to mine digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Litecoin.

iBUYPOWER's Vice President and co-founder, Darren Su, talks about the new GPU coin mining PCs from his company: "iBUYPOWER prides itself for being on the edge of technology, and as the world changes, we want to be at the forefront. Coin mining and high-compute systems are one of the few new areas that we have interest in. We're thrilled to be part of revolutions, and crypto-currencies are definitely on the hot-list."

The new GPU coin mining systems from iBUYPOWER start from $999, and can be configured in many different ways, depending on what you want to spend. The new coin mining PCs can be configured with up to three AMD Radeon R9 290X for some serious compute power.

EA announced today that it would be adding a long awaited offline mode to SimCity nearly a year after the games launch. EA originally required the game to have an always online connection to contact EA's authentication servers. This requirement caused many issues with the game launching and rendered it unplayable for many.

The issues with the always online requirement caused many users to call for its removal, but EA refused to budge on the matter, but less than a year later, the company is saying that it will be issuing an update to bring an offline mode to the game. Unfortunately offline mode may have came a little to late as many of us have forgotten about the game entirely.

Since November, the tech world has been buzzing about Nokia releasing an Android-powered smartphone alongside its Lumia line of Windows Phones. @evleaks even posted an image of the top-secret project code named "Normandy," but until today all we have seen is an image of a Lumia-like device with a black screen.

Today, Twitter user, Picturepan2, posted what he says is an engineering prototype of the Nokia Normandy Android-based smartphone. The user interface definitely looks like some form of Android, but the phone appears to only feature a back button and not the typical back and home button combo. Further more, the device is pictured with what appears to be dual SIM cards based on the dual signal meters in the notification bar.

Other reports out today suggest that project Normandy is just part of a refreshed Asha line and will be running a heavily modified version of Android. The Android implementation will be modified to incorporate features from both Windows Phone 8.1 as well as Android, in what could become the Asha line's official OS. Sources say that we can expect to see this mysterious phone debuted just before or during the 2014 Mobile World Congress.

Network hardware company Cisco Systems focused on the Internet of Everything (IoE), setting the landscape for people connected to mobile devices, smart buildings, transportation networks, data and other processes on a wide scale. The number of estimated connected devices is 15 to 25 billion by 2015, which will propel up to 50 billion by 2020.

"Cisco has led customers through every Internet transition over the last 30 years," said Blair Christie, Cisco Senior VP and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "The Internet of Everything is perhaps the most promising of these, creating unprecedented opportunities for organizations, individuals, communities and countries to realize dramatically greater value from networked connections between people, processes, data and things."

Cisco has been forced to adapt to a changing environment in which employees are largely embracing the 'bring your own device' craze. However, the IoE blows that out of the water, with service users able to benefit from long-form content, location-based and profile data, home/control/automation features, and sensor-collected data in the home and workplace.

Tactus Technology has shown off some impressive technology, a morphing touchscreen which creates physical buttons from your buttonless touchscreen. Tactus' technology works by providing "application-controlled, completely transparent physical buttons that rise up from the touch-screen surface on demand."

When the buttons are enabled, they pop up onto the screen, when disabled they recede back into the screen, leaving your once smooth and flat touchscreen back in its original state. Tactus enables the Tactile Layer, which is called microfluidics. These microfluidics are small channels that are routed throughout the Tactile Layer, allowing fluid to expand the top polymer layer, which creates physical buttons.

It sounds impressive, but it'll be more impressive once we see Tactus' technology built into the devices we know and love, and use.

Consumers searching for high-definition TVs have a lot of affordable choices to choose from, though organic LED (OLED) technology will still take a few more years of development for prices to drop. The technology has looked quite impressive due to a higher resolution and is brighter than rival TV formats, but the technology is still too expensive to roll out in mass production.

"I'm really, really terribly sorry to say this, but it will take more time... I believe it will take around three to four years," said HS Kim, Samsung VP for visual display, during a recent interview.

During the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), HDTV and 3DTV technologies were on full display all over the Las Vegas Strip. Many companies demoed impressive OLED technology, but most product launch dates and price tags will keep casual customers thinking of other options. However, as Kim predicts, a lower price tag and further technology advancements over the coming years will help drive demand in the future.

4K was a huge draw card to this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and one of the company's standing proud with Ultra HD was Samsung. The South Korean giant is confident in the high-resolution TV business.

The executive vice president of the company's visual display business, HS Kim, has said that pricing on 4K TVs will drop, and consumer adoption will rise much quicker than we think. This time last year, Samsung had three 4K TVs, but now the electronics giant has 10 models ranging from 50 inches, to an insane 110 inches.

Industry experts estimate that we will see under 500,000 4K sets sold this year, versus just 60,000 last year. Kim noted that the TV upgrade cycle is around six years right now, but his company wants to bring more value to its TVs, so that consumers will be tempted to replace them every 4-5 years instead.

AMD's Mantle is coming, and when it comes, it should really shake up the performance for Radeon users in Battlefield 4. AMD have said it'll drive 45% more performance in Battlefield 4 when compared to DirectX 11.

AMD said at CES 2014: "It's up to 45% faster than the original version on this same hardware." The big thing we have to take away from this is, if AMD can deliver a 45% performance improvement from Mantle, what is NVIDIA going to do? You can rest assured, as soon as the Mantle update is released, I'll be re-running my SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290X Tri-X GPUs in CrossFire at 4K, and my triple 1440p setup (4320x2560 and 7680x1440).

The last we heard on Intel's Broadwell CPUs is that they would feature 18 cores, but the release date on them was Q4 2014, now we're hearing dates of Q3 2014.

The new Broadwell CPUs will usher in a refined 14nm process, and three-gate transistors, the first CPUs to be made on the new tech. The new Broadwell architecture will be close to the company's on-the-market Haswell processors, but will see reduced power consumption, as well as increased performance. We should also see more advanced integrated graphics on Broadwell-based CPUs, too.

We should expect Intel's Broadwell CPUs to be released in Q3 2014, but the big problem here is that Intel will be competing with its Haswell-E CPU. Unleashing two new CPUs, that will overlap each other in some markets, might be hard for Intel. We should see some more concrete information, specs and prices toward Computex in June.

There were more than 9.7 million Sony PlayStation 4 video games sold to support the impressive 4.2 million consoles sold before the end of December 2013. Sony officials "couldn't be more thrilled" with the early success of the PS4, and it will be a great battle to see the PS4 compete with Microsoft's Xbox One game console.

The global demand for the PS4 is outpacing the Xbox 360, as Microsoft finds success in the U.S. market, while overseas shoppers tend to jump onboard with Sony. Both Microsoft and Sony will battle to control the next-generation gaming market, though it looks like Sony has the initial international upper hand.

Video games were on full display during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo showed off their latest product innovations. Sony's PlayStation Now streaming game service, which is scheduled for launch this summer, will be a cloud-based game streaming service for PS4 gamers.

Global PC shipments continued to slide during the fourth quarter of 2013, according to research group Gartner, as the industry continues to look for stability. Overall, the market shrank 10 percent, as expected, though still shipped 315.9 million units in the 12-month period.

Lenovo remained the No. 1 global PC manufacturer, shipping 18.1 percent of all PC shipments in the last quarter. Ironically, China remains a tough battleground for Lenovo, though showed strong growth results in all other regions.

"Although PC shipments continued to decline in the worldwide market in the fourth quarter, we increasingly believe markets, such as the U.S., have bottomed out as the adjustment to the installed base slows," said Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner Principal Analyst, in a statement.

Television manufacturer IZON quietly showed off its own 3D high-definition TV capability during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), preparing consumers for glasses-free 3DTVs. The company unveiled 32-inch, 47-inch, and 55-inch 3DTVs that won't require glasses, which will be available to consumers sometime in the first half of 2014.

"IZON 3D TVs without glasses received an unprecedented response to its product line," said Joseph DiFrancesco, CEO of 3D Future Vision, which develops IZON TVs, in a press statement. "We experienced nothing but praise for the unparalleled picture quality of our products and look forward to executing our plans for a global roll-out during the coming year and beyond."

IZON used its HyperMix3D rendering technology to enjoy the hardware benefits of multi-core GPUs, and made sure to include a full 3D experience with minimal eyestrain.

CES 2014 - Ford's Global VP/Marketing and Sales, Jim Farley, had some scary news to share during the Consumer Electronics Show. He talked during a panel about data privacy at CES.

The exec said that thanks to the GPS units installed into Ford's vehicles, the carmaker knows when you're speeding, and where you are when you're doing it. Farley was describing just how much data the company had on its customers, trying to point out that the company uses very little of it, so that he didn't trip privacy meters in customers' heads.

He said: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone." He did come up with a good defense - something I agree with - that the data might one day be used to anonymously (or not) to help marketers with traffic-related problems.

K, one of the world's fastest supercomputers based in Japan, is capable of 8.162 petaflops of performance, thanks to its insane 82,944 processors. The supercomputer is capable of driving 1016 billion operations per second, but even then, it is still hard pressed to compete with the brain in your head reading this article.

It took K around 40 minutes to simulate just 1 single second of human brain activity, even with all of its performance prowess. The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses, with every virtual synapse containing 24 bytes of memory.

NEST was used on the software side of things, which is a simulator for spiking neural network models that focuses on dynamics, size and structures of neural systems, versus exact morphology of individual neurons.

We've heard about the Threshold a few times, but now we have Microsoft insider Paul Thurrott reporting that the software giant will unveil its new "Threshold" OS as Windows 9, which will be released next year.

What will Windows 9 include? Well, Thurrott believes that we'll see Microsoft discuss its next-gen OS at its upcoming BUILD developer conference being held in April. Thurrott believes that Microsoft will shift away from the Windows 8 name after all of the problems associated with it, and will drop the Windows 8 branding in favor of Windows 9 - this could change, but right now this is what he believes will happen.

Thurrott also reports that development on Windows 9 will begin in late-April, with no build of it being teased or given out at the BUILD conference in April. He also reports that we should see something he is calling "Metro 2.0", that would be a major focus of Windows 9. He doesn't know what will be changed, but we should see the desktop be centered again, versus the company going all-touch as it did with Windows 8.

CES 2014 - NVIDIA was showing off an amazing Origin Genesis PC that was heavily customized, pumping out Project CARS onto three 65-inch 4K TVs with 4-way GeForce GTX Titans.

Project CARS is one of the best-looking games being developed, with Slightly Mad Studios' coding abilities being shown off at CES 2014. It shows that Project CARS scales unbelievably well, all the way up to 12K (if that's even a thing) - or 4K Surround as NVIDIA would put it. The four GTX Titan's are going to cost you $4000 on their own, so imagine the total cost of this PC and the TVs... yes, it's for the PC master race, that's for sure.

We saw a tease of twelve Steam Machines at CES 2014, but according to Marc Whitten, the Xbox Chief Product Officer, he isn't worried about Steam Machines taking over gamers' living rooms.

During an interview with Engadget at CES, Whitten said he's "not sweating" over Valve's push into the living room, stating that "there's room for both." Whitten continued: "I personally don't know how to think about Steam Machines yet. I'm not knocking it or whatever. I continue to think that PC gaming - the sort of uber configuration and I can change everything and I can mod - that's an important thing and there's a lot of people that wanna do that."

Whitten did add that when a device is in the living room, gamers want to be instantly entertained. He said that gamers don't want to fiddle with settings or anything else, where he wrapped up with: "When you get into that living room environment, you don't want to spend any of your brain cells doing anything but being entertained. I don't want to work on it; I don't want to feel like I have to know how it works. I would like to be blowing things up now, or watching a thing now. That's the fundamental thing that you want to do."

CES 2014 - It's always fun to find a few diamonds in the rough at CES, and luckily this year held a few as usual. Kingston was demonstrating a whopping 384 GB's of its new DDR4 running in a blacked-out server. For those in the know, there currently isn't a publicly released CPU/chipset combination that supports DDR4 memory.

In order to recieve clearance for this demo, Kingston had to black out key areas of the chassis, which means essentially everything other than the heat sinks and DDR4 sticks. We speculate this is Grantley-EP and Wellsburg PCH. If so, the server supports Thunderbolt and features DDR4 speeds of 2400 and 3200MHz. However, these specs are pure conjecture.

Of course we tried to 'play the angles' to get a view underneath at the new unnannounced chipset. Unfortunately, Kingston delivered on their promise to Intel by making a more detailed analysis of the chipset impossible through use of the large black covers underneath the plexiglass cover.

CES 2014 - Even though I wasn't at CES 2014, I kept in touch with DisplayLink's Director of Marketing, Andy Davis, all the way from my house in Australia, where he bought me up to speed on some of the technologies his company was showing off at CES 2014.

One of the more important things Displaylink showed off was its new DL-3950 USB 3.0 docking chipset. The new chipset contains fully integrated dual-head video, which can support two full 2560x1600 displays. Not only that, but we also have Gigabit Ethernet, 5.1-channel sound, and DisplayLink's magic: dynamic compression.

DisplayLink also unveiled its new DL-5000 family of chips, with the DL-5500 launching at CES 2014. The DL-5500 allows users with existing DisplayLink-enabled setups to add a 4K monitor to their setup. This helps immensely going into the future, with 4K being a massive dot point of this year's CES. DisplayLink can run this technology over USB 2.0, which goes to show just how impressive its technology really is.

CES 2014 - Seagate displayed a reference tablet design that capitalizes on the new 5mm HDD design and houses a 500GB HDD. Currently, 5mm-thick HDD's only come in the typical platter design, but common sense dictates that soon we will see 5mm SSHD's, which provide SSD-like performance but HDD capacity. Seagate also displayed a new laptop and convertible with an HDD in the keyboard.

The tablet design has a large screen, and runs Androids latest OS. This reference design is suprsingly light, considering there is an HDD inside. The design will allow manufacturers a quicker time to market with this flavor of tablet.

Of course, the resulting design is somewhat thicker than tablets currently on the market, but can come at a cheaper price point with a tremendous amount of capacity. As the process and design matures we expect to see this slimmed down considerably.