Hasta La Gadget!

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group teased us with the prospect of a 10Gbps USB standard back in January, and it now has something to show for its work: the alliance has finalized its specification under the USB 3.1 name. While little has changed with the port format in half a year’s time, its completion lets AMD, Intel and others start work on chipsets that offer twice the bandwidth of USB 3.0 while preserving support for USB 2.0. There’s no public roadmap for the first USB 3.1 devices, although the first related developer sessions will begin on August 21st. Not that the Promoter Group is necessarily in a rush — while Intel’s Thunderbolt 2 will hit an even quicker 20Gbps this year, the new USB format is more likely to receive broad support.

Filed under: Peripherals, AMD, Intel

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Via: The Register

Source: USB Implementers Forum (PDF)

Gateway may live in the shadow of its parent company Acer, but it’s getting the spotlight today with refreshed versions of its entry-level PCs. New versions of its 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch NE Series laptops are slimmer than their ancestors, carry Kabini-based AMD A4 and A6 processors and offer up to 1TB of storage. Desktops remain largely the same on the outside, but there’s a few welcome tweaks on the inside. Although the small SX Series isn’t radically different, regular DX Series towers now have the option of a Haswell-era Intel Core i5 alongside recent AMD A-series chips; there’s also a new entry-level version of the One ZX all-in-one that puts a 3GHz Pentium behind the 21.5-inch LCD. Gateway is now shipping the two NE portables at baseline prices of $380 (15.6-inch) and $450 (17.3-inch), while the DX, SX and One Z lines respectively start at $298, $398 and $530. A KX Series of desktop displays is shipping at the same time, starting at $99 for a 19.5-inch screen.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, AMD, Intel, Acer

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Source: Gateway (1), (2), (3)

AMD‘s flagship 5.0 GHz processor, the AMD FX-9560, has gone on sale, though the chip won’t be available as a standalone part for some time. The company will instead offer the new processor through various PC builders, including iBUYPOWER and Maingear, for those who want to be able to tell their friends they have the first commercially-available 5GHz chip.

Back when it was first announced, in June, the FX-9000 series prompted no small amount of questions as to the necessity of such a high clock speed. Whereas, at one time, the gigahertz race was an integral part of AMD and Intel’s battle for computing dominance, in recent years the focus has evolved to consider more real-world relevant tasks.

That’s gone hand in hand with GPU-accelerated processing, where chips that would normally be used for rendering high-resolution games are instead turned to parallel crunching through huge sets of data. AMD itself is experimenting with the idea, as part of its Heterogeneous Computing push.

In contrast, the FX-9560 is about raw speed. That’s still going to appeal to some users, with AMD hoping they’ll head down to AVADirect, Canada Computers, CyberPower, iBUYPOWER, Digital Storm, Extreme PC, Maingear, Memory Express, NCIX, Origin PC, Puget Systems, or Velocity Micro, which are all signed up to use the new processor.

Under the hood the chip has eight of AMD’s Piledriver cores, and comes unlocked for easy overclocking; AMD even supplies the software to do it. However, gamers shouldn’t get too carried away: if they break their processor with an ill-advised overclock, they won’t be covered by AMD’s warranty.

AMD FX-9560 5GHz CPU hits shelves in gaming PCs is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Contact lenses are great if your only issue is near or farsightedness, but for those struggling with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness among older adults, those flimsy little lenses ain’t going to cut it—or at least not the kind of contact lenses you’re used to. But soon, AMD-sufferers could see their vision vastly improving thanks to a slim, adjustable telescope that sits right in the middle of their eye.

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It’s hardly a secret that AMD has stepped out of its x86 comfort zone to develop an ARM-based server chip, but now we know a little more about it. Going by the name of “Seattle” and scheduled for launch in the second half of next year, it’ll be built around ARM’s 64-bit Cortex-A57 in either 8- or 16-core configurations, which will likely be clocked at a minimum of 2GHz. In an apparent acknowledgement of ARM’s superiority at low wattages, we’re told that this design has the potential to deliver 4x the performance of AMD’s current Opteron X processors, with improved compute-per-watt. There’s a clear limit to AMD’s reliance on ARM, however, as it’ll use Seattle to up against Intel’s little Atoms, but will continue to sell its own x86 designs for higher-power applications. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on something more interesting from this union, which might be an ARM CPU paired with a Radeon HD graphics processor in some sort of mobile-class SoC. Guess we’ll just have to be patient.

Filed under: Networking, Internet, AMD

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