Knight's Corner gets a product name, will be for sale as Xeon Phi

Trace Hagan | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Jun 18, 2012 4:32 PM CDT

Take a quick stroll down memory lane and find Larrabee. Larrabee was Intel's failed discrete graphics creation designed to go head-to-head with the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. The Larrabee project was canned but Intel decided to continue the work with a change of focus. Instead of being a discrete GPU, Intel decided to target the HPC and supercomputing markets.

This new chip is an in-development chip known as Knight's Corner and is designed to be massively parallel. The product has clearly made significant progress as Intel has officially attached a brand name to the product. That brand name is Xeon Phi and will also be attached to future many-integrated-core (MIC) products.

Intel chose Xeon Phi as they wanted it to be part of the Xeon family. As for the Phi part, Intel says it's because it "evokes many concepts in science & nature including the 'golden ratio' in mathematics." Along with the brand name, Intel has released some technical details of the upcoming MIC chip.

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Intel acquiring 1,700 Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE patents from InterDigital for $375 million

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | Jun 18, 2012 2:27 PM CDT

Intel has agreed to buy 1,700 patents relating to Wi-Fi, 3G, and LTE from InterDigital. Last year, there were murmurs about a treasure chest of patents relating to those technologies being up for sale by InterDigital. The cost for these key patents? Only a cool $375 million in cash. Apparently, Intel has been after these patents for a while.

Intel's Senior Vice President, Doug Melamed, had this to say about the transaction: "These patents will support Intel's strategic investments in the mobile segment. The addition of these patents expands our already large, strong and diverse portfolio of intellectual property."

Interestingly enough, InterDigital refers to these as only a small portion of its overall collection of patents. How much more value is included in the other patents that they have? Senior Executive Vice President at InterDigital, Scott McQuilkin, had this to say about the upcoming transaction:

Continue reading: Intel acquiring 1,700 Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE patents from InterDigital for $375 million (full post)

Apple is set to become most profitable public company ever

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | Jun 18, 2012 1:27 PM CDT

Let's face it, Apple has more money than they know what to do with. Before their stock buy-back program, they had right around $100 billion in cash. Apple already has the record for most profitable quarter among technology companies, so what is next for the giant? One analyst believes they could become the most profitable publicly traded companies.

"In CY12, we believe Apple is poised to generate the highest annual net income of any publicly traded company ever," White wrote. "On average, we estimate Apple's net income in CY12 will be over 6x higher than the three tech companies on an individual basis (when at a $500 billion market cap) or 1.9x the aggregate profit of these three companies combined. When including all five companies, we estimate Apple's net income in CY12 will be 4x higher than the average."

So why the huge increase in value? White is citing a new iPhone with a 4" screen launching in the third quarter, an "iPad mini" that is set to launch sometime in September, and an upcoming HDTV made by Apple. White has confirmed his buy recommendation along with a price target $1,111, which is about double the current price of $572 (as of opening bell Monday).

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Verizon updates FiOS to FiOS Quantum, increases prices and speeds

Trace Hagan | Internet & Websites | Jun 18, 2012 12:33 PM CDT

If you thought Verizon's FiOS internet was fast, then brace yourself for Verizon FiOS Quantum. Verizon has announced today the pricing and new name for their updated FiOS internet service. The speeds, as we previously reported, have effectively doubled or tripled across the board, but at the time we didn't know the pricing.

We can now officially report the pricing and tell you that the cost will be about $10-15 higher a month for at least double the speed. That is, unless you are on the bottom tier. The Lowest 15/5 tier sees a $10 price increase without any increase in speed. Prices range from $65-210 a month for speeds ranging from 15/5 all the way up to 300/65.

Existing customers won't have to fork over an upgrade fee, but will see their bill go up, depending on bundles and such. If you are willing to sign a two-year contract, prices will drop by about $5 a month, something that's probably not worth being locked into a two-year contract for. Most people probably can't even utilize their current FiOS connection, let alone these massive new speeds.

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ASUS Nexus 7 shows up online in the form of a camera

Trace Hagan | Mobile Devices, Tablets & Phones | Jun 18, 2012 10:32 AM CDT

The rumored ASUS Nexus 7 has shown up online in the form of two pictures uploaded to Picasa. The two photos, which measure 1280 x 960, were uploaded on June 7 and June 13. The photos could have been scaled down, so don't take that as indicative of the camera's performance. The two pictures are linked to Google+ user Somit Bh.

Furthermore, the geo-location data place the pictures as having been taken in Google Building 44. Of course, this information is fairly easy to fake, but a look as Google+ user Somit Bh's profile offers reason to believe otherwise. His circles contain many people who are affiliated with Google which means this could be legit.

Just two years ago, the Nexus S was revealed in the exact same way. The "Nexus Tablet" has been rumored for a while now, including the portion that ASUS is going to be the one making it. The rumor also said that the tablet would cost between $149-199 and would go on sale this July. It's likely that an announcement is just around the corner.

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Google sees 'alarming' level of government censorship

Trace Hagan | Internet & Websites | Jun 18, 2012 9:05 AM CDT

Google continues to be an open company when it comes to censorship and the like and has released its biannual Global Transparency Report which details take-down requests by people. In the past six months, Google said it saw an "alarming" number of Government requests, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 for the period.

"Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different," Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, said in a blog post. "When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not."

Google said that they received 461 court orders for the removal of 6,989 items, of which they agreed to 68% of those orders. They also received 546 informal requests and agreed to remove content from 46% of those. The study leaves out Iran and China who block Google content without notification to the search giant.

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Facebook CTO leaves, heads for unnamed startup

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Jun 18, 2012 1:31 AM CDT

Bret Taylor was Facebook's chief technology officer, but won't be for much longer. The CTO was in charge of both platform and mobile development at Facebook. Once he's gone, two of his underlings will take over his two posts, with Mike Vernal taking on platform development and Cory Ondreijka going after mobile.

Taylor is an ex-Google employee, too, leaving the company in 2007 where he founded FriendFeed. Facebook acquired FriendFeed in 2009, and two years later he was donned as CTO of Facebook. Taylor spoke to AllThingsD saying that the time he spent with Facebook "has been among the most fulfilling times of my career".

With the troubled IPO and problems the social networking are having at the moment, one would think this is quite a bad time for Taylor to leave, but his departure is no surprise to Facebook management. Taylor has always said that he "had always been upfront with Mark [Zuckerberg] that I eventually wanted to do another start-up, and we felt now is the best time after the IPO and the launch of some recent things for me to do that".

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Linus Torvalds calls NVIDIA 'the worst company ever', also says "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!!"

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Jun 17, 2012 11:28 PM CDT

Creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has slammed NVIDIA for their lack of drivers/support in a public presentation. During the talk, Torvalds called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended it in a positive note with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!!", I'm sure you know what are behind those *'s.

Torvalds made the colorful comments during a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland. Nearling the end of his hour-long speech, he was asked by one of the attendees about NVIDIA's hardware support and lack of open-source drive enablement/documentation, where he mentioned those colorful words. Torvalds did start off by stating that NVIDIA is an exception to Linux support, rather than the rule in terms of their lack of friendliness towards open-source drivers, and the Linux community.

Then things get better, Torvalds said he was happy to publicly point them out and their problems, where his statements toward NVIDIA continued. He said that NVIDIA is "one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers", continuing with "NVIDIA has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with". He ended his NVIDIA tirade with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!" and flipped them off toward the camera.

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Xbox 720 document leak points to $299 console, 2013 launch, 6x performance increase and much more

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jun 17, 2012 12:19 AM CDT

Thanks to a 56-page leaked document, more details of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox 720 have emerged. The presentation looks to be from quite sometime ago, August 2010, and is loaded with future improvements such as SmartGlass, a Metro dashboard and Xbox TV apps.

Microsoft list their clear vision for the Xbox 720, including Blu-ray, native 3D output, and glasses, concurrent apps, additional sensor and peripheral support. They've also teased us with a '6X performance increase', as well as mention of true 1080p output with full 3D support, as well as an "always on" state for the Xbox 720.

The document tells us that the Xbox 720 is designed to be scalable in the number of CPU cores and their frequencies, it seems that the Redmond-based company have been finding it hard to decide between six or eight ARM-based cores, or going down the x86 route, each clocked at around 2GHz each, with 4GB of DDR4 memory as well as some backward-compatible PPC cores clocked at 3.2GHz. Backwards compatibility will be a great selling point for the Xbox 720.

Continue reading: Xbox 720 document leak points to $299 console, 2013 launch, 6x performance increase and much more (full post)

Toshiba unleashes a 13" tablet on the world

Trace Hagan | Mobile Devices, Tablets & Phones | Jun 15, 2012 4:31 PM CDT

Toshiba has launched a 13" version of its Excite tablets and a few reviews have popped up online showing off a few issues. Thankfully, Toshiba didn't disgrace this tablet with a paltry 1366x768 screen and instead opted for a 1600x900 panel. It appears to be a TN panel as there is no mention of IPS, something usually added for marketing.

Some of the reviews we mentioned above have called out the screen as being rather dim, but that's the least of the panels problems. The Gorilla glass that covers the screen can stick to the LCD panel and create visible "puddles." Have no fear, though, as that can be alleviated by twisting the tablet like an ice cube tray.

The battery life is around 11 hours, at least according to one review. The device features a Tegra 3 SoC, a full-sized SD card reader, and Android 4.0. The tablet weighs in at a heavy 2.2lbs and isn't exactly cheap. The 32GB model runs about $650 and the 64GB model will run about $750. Both of those are more expensive than an iPad.

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