Hasta La Gadget!

We’d all heard the rumors—the many, many rumors—but it’s finally official. Apple has just announced a new, alterna-iPhone that’s coming to you in a rainbow of colors for (slightly) less money. But the real question is what’s lying beneath those pretty colors—something we actually haven’t heard too much about. And as it turns out, the 5C is just a dressed up iPhone 5.

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AMD has already shown what its mobile Richland APUs can do, and it’s now ready to reveal their desktop equivalents’ potential. The company’s new, full-power A6, A8 and A10 Elite processors are more evolutionary bumps than overhauls, but they still have a few clear advantages over last year’s Trinity chips. Along with a bump in Turbo Boosted frequencies to between 4.1GHz and 4.4GHz (3.5GHz to 4.1GHz normally), the updates ship with Radeon HD 8000 video and can handle speedier DDR3-2133 memory (on the A10). Wireless is just as important as it is with the firm’s newest mobile processors: the desktop Elites improve streaming games to other devices using Splashtop, with relatively little lag when modern AMD processors are on both ends.

As for performance? AMD didn’t have the luxury of comparing against Intel’s Haswell chips at the time it gave us benchmarks, but it did claim big gains over Ivy Bridge in both general-purpose computing and gaming. A 4.1GHz A10-6800K is up to 3.3 times faster in OpenCL than a 3.2GHz Core i5-3470, and games like Bioshock Infinite are playable at 1080p (if barely) where they’re unusable with the HD 3000 graphics of Intel’s CPU. Performance boosts over Trinity are a more modest eight to 21 percent, however. If you want to know how well the Elite line fares in the real world, it won’t take much effort to find out. AMD is shipping its processors this month, at very frugal prices that range from $69 to $142.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops, AMD

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Source: AMD

AMD has been willing to tease its 2013 ultra-mobile APU (accelerated processing unit) strategy through PCs like the Acer Aspire V5, but today it’s spilling the beans in earnest. The headliner for many is the company’s just-shipping Elite Mobility line, or Temash: the A4 and A6 designs are built for tablets, like Hondo was, but their Jaguar-based system-on-chip designs should be faster in both CPU and graphics power without a hit to battery life. AMD estimates that the Radeon HD 8280G video core in an Elite Mobility A6 is about five times faster a Clover Trail-based Atom and twice as fast as Hondo, but lasts about 45 percent longer on battery than an Intel Core i3. And that’s while untethered — that Turbo Dock feature is still in place to boost speeds by over 30 percent when a dock is around for extra cooling.

The E1, E2, A4 and A6 mainstream APUs based on Kabini, meanwhile, are all about tackling the Pentium and Core i3 chips that go into entry-level laptops. AMD reckons that the dual-core (E-series) and quad-core (A-series) parts are up to 88 percent faster overall than their ancestors, and can even punch above their weight class: the E1’s Radeon HD 8000-level graphics are up to 66 percent faster than those of a much thirstier, Trinity-era A4 chip. Battery life is a specialty as well, with up to 10 hours when idle and 9 hours of web use. That’s typically 2 to 3 hours more than Kabini’s Brazos ancestor could manage. AMD wasn’t specific on when these mainstream APUs would first ship when we were briefed, but we had the opportunity to benchmark an A4-based reference laptop. Read on past the break for the scores and some early impressions.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, AMD

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Source: AMD

According to Bloomberg Apple is considering a move away from Intel chips for its cherished Mac line. The move would be the third major CPU shift for the brand which has previously relied on Motorola 68000 and Power PC chips. The move away from Intel could also mean a move away from x86 as Apple has been heavily invested in its own ARM-based chip designs in recent years. Bloomberg’s sources suggest that Cupertino is actively working on a version of its tweaked ARM architecture that would run inside Mac PC, in particular its laptop products could stand to benefit from its battery sipping design.

The change will not happen immediately. In fact, the sources said such a move was years away, potentially not happening till 2017. But, as the gulf between “mobile” and “desktop” products begins to shrink and the boundaries blend, it would only seem to make sense that Apple would look to leverage its high-profile purchase of P.A. Semi to good use and inch ever closer to being a completely self-reliant corporate entity. We don’t think it’s any secret that Apple would, if it could, design and manufacture every component itself.

Filed under: Apple

Apple may ditch Intel chips in Macs, says Bloomberg originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple and Samsung depend heavily on one another, despite the fact that they’re also at each other’s throats in intellectual property legal disputes around the world. But Apple is looking to reduce Samsung’s role in the manufacturing and design side of its business, in a move that could have greater long-term repercussions for the Korean electronics giant than for the iPhone maker.

The Korea Times reported this weekend that Samsung will no longer be involved in any part of its chip business other than manufacturing, according to a Samsung official who spoke to the publication on condition of anonymity. Previously, Samsung has been somewhat involved on the design side, too, the official said, but now it’s operating strictly on a “foundry basis,” with Apple exclusively handling any and all design duties. That’s in keeping with what teardowns have shown of the chip, which seems to leverage Apple’s chip design-focused acquisitions to create its first truly in-house created system-on-a-chip with the A6 processor that powers the iPhone 5.

It’s also in keeping with another move Apple made recently; namely, the decision to drop Google from its platform as a partner for native apps like YouTube and Maps. Apple seems eager to reclaim control of its platform and hardware from its biggest rivals in the smartphone space, those being Samsung on the hardware side and Google in terms of mobile OS. Of course, cutting the cord has repercussions, as we’ve seen with the blowback from the maps debacle that led to a public apology from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Apple recently poached one of Samsung’s top chip designers, and the company has also been apparently grooming Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) for taking over more production of its processors following the A6. Apple has the resources to lift up Samsung’s chip foundry competition, but it’ll take time – Samsung is still one of the few companies in the world who can handle the kind of volume manufacturing Apple requires to keep its stock of mobile devices flowing to store shelves, and probably the only one that can currently handle its chip foundry needs.

Samsung sold around $7.8 billion worth of components to Apple in 2011, according to one report. And production of the A6 for the iPhone 5 will reportedly bring in more money for the Korean company than any of Apple’s previous processors, but necessity seems to be driving that continued relationship, and Apple is clearly looking for ways around its dependence on its biggest rival. Apple has the luxury of being able to wait until the time is right to switch elsewhere for its chipmaking needs, at which point Samsung will take a big cut in its supply-side business. Now that Apple’s taken the reins with chip design, we’ll see how long it takes for that other shoe to drop.