Latest News - Page 3047

Earlier on today we were invited to the GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei where we were told we would see the Taiwanese motherboard maker and its in-house professional overclocker HiCookie try to set a new world record for the Intel Core i7 3770K processor.

Overclocking was done on the upcoming GA-Z77X-UP7 motherboard that is due to be released this coming Monday - GIGABYTE at the time of writing were not prepared to comment on pricing as it is yet to be 100% confirmed. However, you can expect the price to be fairly high as this is a board designed for overclockers and it has plenty of top notch features to help overclockers around the world set new performance records. In the video above I mentioned that the Z77X-UP7 is much like a Formula One car in its design theory. Every little tweak has been included and high-end components such as 32 CPU phases are included to help set said new records.

Besides the massive amount of power phases and its all-digital power system, GIGABYTE has included some new handy switches this time around. There are two switches at the southern end of the motherboard. One is to control which BIOS is used (master or backup) since this board like all other GIGABYTE boards support Dual BIOS. The second switch disables the Dual BIOS function as sometimes overclockers get into a kind of loop issue that has the motherboard looping between both BIOSes to figure out which one to use.

Apple and Samsung may be at each others throats in the US courts, but in South Korea, a court has ruled that Samsung didn't violate on Apple's iPhone design. A judge at the Seoul Central District Court said:

The judge also cited that it is difficult to say that consumers would confuse the iPhone with the Galaxy, considering they both sport completely different logos on the back of each model. Consumers also factor in operating systems, brand, applications, price and services when buying a smartphone.

FMS 2012 - SMART Storage has been making waves lately in the enterprise SSD space with an entire line of drives for every type of application.

The focus at the Flash Memory Summit was on the Optimus SSD, which sports a dual SAS connection. This allows this SSD to pull off 1GB/s in sequential read speed and 500 MB/s in write speed.

A closer look reveals that the SSD has two SAS connectors connecting into the device, which allows the high power of the SSD to be unleashed. This also allows for several types of enterprise features, such as failover and multipath data access.

FMS 2012 - Marvell has revealed their new DragonFly NVRAM solution for servers at the Flash Memory Summit.

As we can see this card comes in a small package and sports a PCIe Gen2x8 connection to the host.

Getting down under the cover we can see some of the components that allow the DragonFly to reach its impressive specifications of 200K+ IOPS, 3.2GBps and .22us latency. The DragonFly connects to SSDs via a typical SFF connector, and acts as a front end for the attached storage. The data is cached to the DRAM chip that is located towards the top right of the card. The battery near the bottom is used to write the data cached into ram to the NAND, on the rear of the card, in the event of power failure.

This week, Galaxy device maker, Samsung, opened their first retail "experience" store in Sydney, Australia. The design of the store is quite swish, featuring the company's blue look, right down to the t-shirts on its employees backs.

There's a dedicated customer support desk that is run by "Samsung Smart Tutors", that mimics Apple's Genius Bar. There's also a group demonstration bar, displays, and more products than you can find stars in a... galaxy.

Some have said that Samsung's new store looks too much like an Apple Store, but Samsung's corporate color is blue. Last time I checked, Apple haven't got the patent on the color blue. As for the design of the store itself, there's only so many ways a store can be laid out when showing off smart devices, too.

FMS 2012 - HGST today demonstrated their new 12Gb/s SAS Enterprise SSDs. These are the first 12Gb/s SSDs in existence, and they are in an unbranded case.

We can see the performance improvement between a current tech 6Gb/s SSD, which is pulling down 547 MB/s in sequential read, and the 12Gb/s SSD that is providing 995 MB/s from one device! Nearly 1GB/s of sequential speed from a single SSD is simply unheard of with today's interface.

The 6Gb/s, in the foreground, and the 12Gb/s SSD are both of similar size, so the performance increase does not involve a larger device.

Everyone mostly hears about movie and music piracy, thanks in part to the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to spread awareness. There's not a group of app developers, at least not yet, lobbying the government to attack this problem, so it's rather interesting that the government has taken the initiative to attack app piracy.

The US government, through the use of the FBI and seizure warrants, has smacked down three different app piracy sites in one swoop. The sites in question are applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com and now visiting any of these three sites gives you the message above. It likely also logs your IP address as a potential pirate.

As per the standard operating procedure for sites such as these, the servers were located overseas so this take down required cooperation between the FBI and foreign law enforcement. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breur explains just why this is such a growing problem for the United States:

Facebook has finally updated its aging app to improve its performance. Unfortunately, this update only takes care of iOS users as there has been no announcement regarding Android. However, if you are an iOS user, this update should make you significantly more happy with the Facebook app as it is quite a bit faster.

According to the Facebook post, "Facebook 5.0 for iOS is twice as fast as the previous version when launching the app, scrolling through news feed and opening photos in feed." This speed increase is due to the app being completely rewritten from the ground up. A quick update and you'll be able to see for yourself just how much better it is.

The changes are as follows:

A logo, not that big of a deal, right? Just come up with something creative at the start of your company and continue using it. Well, that wasn't good enough for Microsoft. No, for the first time in 25 years, they've decided to change their logo and the new logo makes much more sense than the old one. Take a look:

The whole push with Windows 8 is to maintain a similar UI that features a common look and feel across desktops, tablets, and smartphones and this logo extends this idea. It appears to draw heavily from the updated UI that is being used in Windows 8: that UI that Microsoft no longer calls "Metro."

I've never really been a believer in hybrid hard drives as they've never been competitive to SSDs when it comes to speed. Today at the Flash Memory Summit 2012, Toshiba had a demo showing just how wrong I could be. They had three identical laptops set up, one with a 19nm NAND SSD, one with a 5,400RPM drive, and one with an undisclosed hybrid drive.

The demo was booting from a completely powered down state into Windows and then starting a movie playing. Some of the results were shocking, to say the least. The traditional 5,400 RPM hard disk of course came in last as you would expect. However, the hybrid drive and the SSD were locked in a dead heat to the finish.

While the SSD finished before the hybrid drive, it couldn't have taken the hybrid drive more than 2 seconds longer. This result is quite a bit different from what I have seen in the past with regards to hybrid drives. When pressed, Toshiba wouldn't say when we would see this hybrid drive on the market or really give us any info. The best I could get from them is that it is a demo showing what is possible. All of a sudden hybrid drives are looking a whole lot more attractive.

I got a chance to run around the Flash Memory Summit 2012 today and managed to find this gem among the rest of the rather non-interesting happenings. Western Digital has decided that they don't want to be left behind the times and are now looking to hire a team of solid-state drive engineers to build them a product.

I went in for a chat and managed to snag the person in charge of staffing the new solid-state department. We chatted for a little while about why they are out hiring engineers when they had already acquired a company. The response actually makes really good sense.

The reasoning behind Western Digital hiring a new team of engineers is rather simple in design, but not always the way things are done as it can be tough on the bottom line. The basic reasoning behind it is so that the engineers can make their own mistakes rather than cleaning up the ones made by another team.

Just announced at the Unite conference that is currently being held over in Amsterdam, Unity Technologies have officially announced that they will be supporting both Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8. What does this mean?

This means that developers are not going to have to do much work in order to port high-quality, graphics-intensive games to Windows Phone 8 from the iPhone. The news was confirmed by Edge-Online.com, where it was also revealed by Unity Technologies' CEO, David Helgason, that 53% of mobile game developers already use the Unity3D engine. Helgason said:

Apple are still seeding out OS X 10.8.1 to developers, where they'll hopefully address some of the bigger issues with the initial release of Apple's latest OS, Mountain Lion. But, it looks as though some users have received notifications telling them that Apple are preparing to seed builds of OS X 10.8.2 for testing.

Apple seem to be moving pretty quick from OS X 10.8.1 to OS X 10.8.2, meaning that they're looking to clamp down on issues found not only in the original OS X Mountain Lion release, but 10.8.1. The issues in the OS X 10.8.1 are probably not that big to begin with, but it's good to see Apple moving quickly with updates.

According to a report by Reuters, LG Display have officially kicked off the start of mass-production on the new displays that are said to get baked into the new iPhone. Apple's media event to unveil the new smartphone is only three weeks away, which is beginning to make sense that the Cupertino-based company will definitely announce a new iPhone within the month.

Han Sang-beom, chief executive of LG Display, has said "we just began mass production and we don't expect any disruption in supplies". The new display is said to feature in-cell technology to embed touch sensors directly into the display, which should make the new iPhone a little slimmer than the current iPhone 4S model.

The Wall Street Journal is also talking about Apple's plans for the in-cell technology that will hopefully be featured in Apple's upcoming iPhone:

It looks like Megaupload founder, Kim Dotcom, won't be extradited to the United States anytime soon, with the New Zealand high court ruling that the US must now hand over all evidence in its case against Dotcom before any extradition can happen.

New Zealand Justice Helen Winkelmann ruled without a review of the evidence against him, Dotcom would be "significantly constrained" defending himself, while giving the US Department of Justice a large advantage prosecuting him. Ira Rothken, Megaupload's lawyer, told Wired:

Intel and Toshiba have been hard at work on a social film project called 'The Beauty Inside'. It features some Hollywood talent, with Topher Grace narrating, Sundance award-winning Director, Drake Doremus, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead starring.

The first episode is above, for your viewing pleasure, and after watching it, I'm quite intrigued. The main character wakes up as a new person, every single day. Imagine that. You wake up and could be a thin, 20-something year old male, and in the morning, you're an overweight, 50-year-old woman. The changes in clothes, in body weight, aches, hair color, female/male body parts, would make your head spin.

The social film's first episode feels like an introduction to the world, and the advertising from Intel and Toshiba is subtle. It's there, but it's not forced into your face, which is nice. I expected it to jump out at me more, and was pleasantly surprised, as you really only see the advertisement when the characters use a notebook. Another great thing about The Beauty Inside, is this is just the first episode, there's more to come, and if you want to get a chance to audition for a leading role in an upcoming episode, you might want to click here.

We've all spilt liquids on our keyboards before, accidents do happen, you just have to not cry over spilt milk (or expensive scotch). But never fear, Logitech is here, with their latest Washable Keyboard K310. Logitech's latest keyboard can be hand-washed, and is capable of being submerged in up to 11 inches of water.

Logitech have used some drainage holes at the back of the K310 that allow for easy drying while key characters are laser-printed and UV coated in order to keep them from fading. Logitech have also featured the K310 with the ability of sustaining five million keystrokes, meaning that not only is the keyboard washable, it can also take years of typing, gaming, or more.

Sophie Le Guen, senior director of mice and keyboards at Logitech has said:

Google, in their grasp for browser domination, have unveiled Octane, a JavaScript benchmark suite. Octane is a browser benchmark that measures performance when running the "complex and demanding web applications that users interact with daily".

Google have noted that the previous JavaScript-based benchmarks run artificial tests that were "created on an ad-hoc basis to stress a specific JavaScript feature". Where Google have steered Octane is different, as it extends the former V8 Benchmark Suite with 5 brand new benchmarks created from "full, unaltered, well-known web applications and libraries". Google have given a run down on the new tests:

If you want to try out Octane, you can right here.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, music streaming service, Spotify, looks to be launching in Canada shortly, with a hint of an expansion into "countries in Asia and South America", too. The news comes from Spotify's annual accounts that were published this week.

A Spotify spokesperson talked to The Wall Street Journal, bu refused to discuss the Canadian launch plans, saying that Spotify "plans to launch in new countries". Spotify's tentacles only recently reached Australia and New Zealand back in May, and the latest news from the company was the unlimited free radio on Android for users based in the US.

Spotify now sports over 15 million active users, with 4 million being paid subscribers, myself included. Once Spotify begins launching in other countries, these numbers should only increase.

Android Central have quite the exclusive today, where they've revealed that the international Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-i9300) will receive its Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update next week, after Samsung's Mobile Unpacked event which is being held in Berlin, Germany.

Android Central report the news from "sources familiar with Samsung's plans" that the firmware for the S III is in the "final stages of testing". We should expect the JB update to arrive within days of the Mobile Unpacked event, which starts next Wednesday, August 29. We should also expect Samsung to unveil their Galaxy Note II at the event, which means it should be quite the explosive event once things get underway.

After Mobile Unpacked, Android Central report that the update should roll out to several countries, including the UK. There's currently no information on whether the LTE-capable Snapdragon S4-powered Galaxy S III will receive Jelly Bean updates, but we should expect Samsung to give the same JB love to their US-based customers, too. More information as it happens.