Hasta La Gadget!

Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple’s custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it’s clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple’s prior acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we’ve gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the extracting wizards over at iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it’s packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually inside of the A4 processor package, and we’re expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there’s still much debate on whether Apple’s own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm’s heralded 1GHz Snapdragon, the chip powering Google’s Nexus One among other things. AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it’s impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more — we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.

Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Six cores. Twelve threads. A new flagship processor in Intel’s stable. Here at GDC in San Francisco, the world’s most widely recognized chip maker is dishing out its latest desktop CPU, and to say it’s a niche device would be greatly understating things. We spoke to a number of Intel bigwigs at tonight’s media event, and everyone confessed that the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition was a low quantity, high performance device aimed specifically at gamers and content editors that simply refuse to live anywhere other than on the cutting edge. Intel’s planning on selling these in retail, standalone form for $999 (MSRP), while they’ll soon be available in a variety of gaming rigs from the likes of Dell, Alienware and whoever else wishes to keep with the times. As for Apple? The company stated that Steve and Company “sort of call their own shots,” and that we’d have to dig at Apple if we really wanted to know what their refreshed Mac Pro would hold. We chuckled, nodded in understanding, and then learned that this here slab of silicon is a bit ahead of the software out there, with Intel noting that only games optimized for 12-thread use and benchmarking utilities that did likewise would really demonstrate the performance boost. ‘Course, anyone who spends a great deal of time multitasking will appreciate the extra headroom, and power users can always find ways to make use of more horsepower. Oh, and for what it’s worth, the company stated that this will be its lead desktop chip for some time to come, and if you’re looking for a mobile version in the near future, you can keep dreaming.

As for the critics? Just about everyone with a benchmarking license managed to get one of these in-house, and everyone seems to feel (mostly) the same way. There’s no denying that this is Intel’s speediest consumer chip ever, but you won’t find 50 percent boosts just anywhere. Yet. When the software catches up, though, there’s no doubt that this chip will make even the other Core i7s look downright sluggish. 50 percent more cores and 50 percent more threads than the prior kings of the line leads to fantastic gains when serious number crunching is involved (audio and video editors, we’re staring at you), with some tests showing upticks in the 30 to 50 percent range. As a bonus, the power consumption here is also extremely reasonable, with the shift to 32nm enabling it to even use less power in some circumstances when compared to the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. Dig into the glut of reviews below if you’ve got a cool grand with “chip upgrade” written on it — you’ll be glad you did.

Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Techgage
Read – Computer Shopper
Read – Bit-Tech
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Neoseeker
Read – Hardcoreware
Read – TweakTown
Read – PC World
Read – TechReport
Read – Benchmark Reviews
Read – Hardware Canucks
Read – Overclockers Club
Read – Hexus
Read – Legit Reviews

Intel’s Core i7-980X Extreme Edition ‘Gulftown’ review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember when Western Digital picked up SiliconSystems for a song during the height of last decade’s Great Recession? Here we are a year later looking at the first fruit of that relationship, as WD has just introduced its first consumer-oriented solid state drive in the SiliconEdge Blue and its enterprise-ready SiliconDrive N1x. Both 2.5-inch families feature a native SATA 3.0Gbps interface along with read speeds as high as 240 – 250MB/sec and write rates peaking at around 140 – 150MB/sec, and the former has already hit the test bench on a number of occasions. For those considering the upgrade, you should probably dive into those links below — most everyone came away feeling that the SiliconEdge Blue was a wee bit underwhelming for the price, with Hot Hardware noting that the “Micron C300 and Intel X25-M were measurably faster overall,” and the lofty MSRP just left ’em looking for more. Here’s hoping for a price drop and / or a SiliconEdge Black, eh?

WD’s first SiliconEdge Blue SSD launches, gets reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If there’s one thing that bugs us about desktop component reviews, it’s that they tend to compare the latest hardware against the stuff immediately preceding it. Everyone wants to know what the improvements between generations are, but for many it’s also equally useful to know how 2010’s freshness compares to their own computers, which might have been bought or built a few years back. For those precious prospective upgraders, Tech Report have put together an extremely thorough benchmarking session which compares the venerable Pentium 4 670 and its silly 3.8GHz clock speed to a pair of new budget parts: the Core i3-530 from Intel and quad-core Athlon II X4 635 from AMD. Naturally, they’ve also included other contemporary parts like the high-end Core i7s and Phenoms, as well as a Core 2 Quad Q6600 from a couple of years ago to bridge the gap between the ancient 90nm Prescott and the 32nm young pretenders. It’s all quite fascinating in the geekiest (and therefore best) of ways, so why not hit that source link and get reading.

Pentium 4 takes on modern CPUs in a benchmarking showdown, suffers ignominious defeat originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hot on the heels of its first quarterly profit in three years (thanks to Intel, strangely enough), AMD is launching a new pair of desktop processors today that hit for under a buck twenty (amongst a few others). The $99 Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition is the company’s quickest dual-core desktop CPU to date at 3.2GHz, while the Athlon II X4 635 is expected to be one of the least expensive quad-core chips around. Both slabs of silicon hit the test bench over the weekend, and as you may expect, no one was particularly blown away. Of course, AMD never set out to shock and awe with this duo, but the performance-per-dollar ratio was downright beautiful. We’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details (all the bar charts you can handle are just below), but suffice it to say, these two are certainly worth a look if you’re fixing to build a low-end, low-cost tower for… um, your mother. Yeah, her.

Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Computer Shopper
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – Overclocker’s Club
Read – ExtremeTech

AMD launches new Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs right onto the test bench originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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