Feb 20
Google Now, the helpful and occasionally creepy notification center for Android and iOS, is now available on the desktop via Chrome.
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Jan 27
Often when you find someone using a piece of computer hardware from the 1980s, they’re doing it ironically. Mechanical keyboards — also known as clicky keyboards due to the distinctive sound and tactile feedback they produce — are a notable …
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Nov 29
If you’ve been mulling the latest Apple gizmo but wince at the prices, today could be the day to act. That’s because Cupertino’s offering UK discounts of up to £81 on the latest and greatest iMac or MacBook models and £31 off of the iPad Air. Other iPad models are discounted too, and you can score a deal on the iPod Touch or accessories like the Parrot AR drone. As for the US and Canada, gift cards are being handed out in lieu of cash off, including $75 offerings on the iPad Air, $150 for iMacs and MacBooks and $50 for an iPod Touch. As for the rest of the EU, other countries like France and Germany are seeing similar cash discounts to their UK counterparts on the same products. Not everything is on sale, though. For instance, the iPad Mini with Retina display is still full price. Still, if your iProduct trigger finger’s been feeling itchy lately, hit the source.
Nov 27
Don’t think that the Black Friday shopping rush this year is all about the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. We’ve rounded up a smorgasbord of Thanksgiving week deals that should appeal to tech-savvy shoppers of all stripes, whether they’re looking for entry-level smartphones or giant 4K TVs. Hop past the break and you’ll find bargains that could please the gadget lovers in your life — and just might spare you from battling the crowds at the mall.
[Image credit: AP]
Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Home Entertainment, Laptops, Tablets, HD, Mobile, Apple, Microsoft, Dell
Nov 26
If Haswell innards weren’t enough to incite a purchase of Alienware’s X51 gaming PC, perhaps an extra choice of GPU could push you over the edge: Dell’s little gaming-machine-that-can is now available with AMD’s Radeon R9 270X. The card adds $100 to the base price of the Core i7 model, bringing the total to $1,200. In return, this configuration brings the chipset maker’s Eyefinity tech into the fold for multi-monitor support or output to a 4K monitor, although you probably wouldn’t want to attempt gaming on it beyond 1080p. While we’re scraping together enough pennies for a true 12K gaming rig, we suppose this may just have to do.
Update: Apologies for the earlier error regarding this being a flagship card. The post has been corrected.
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, AMD, Dell
Via: Direct2Dell
Source: Dell
Nov 24
Intel’s current Xeon Phi doesn’t really fulfill the promise of many-core computing — it’s a co-processor that needs a ‘real’ CPU to function. That will change when the next-generation Knights Landing model arrives, Intel revealed at the Supercomputing Conference this week. The 14-nanometer chip will be available as a stand-alone model that can run all software, like a traditional processor; since it won’t have to shuttle data between two components, it should be faster, easier to program and cheaper, too. There will also be high-speed memory built into the chip, as well as a number of (unspecified) architectural tweaks. Knights Landing isn’t likely to ship until late 2014 or 2015, but it could be worth the wait for researchers, server operators and anyone else who wants massively parallel computing power.
Via: Computerworld
Source: Intel
Nov 18
NVIDIA unveils Tesla K40 accelerator, teams with IBM on GPU-based supercomputing
Posted in: Today's Chili
NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs are already mainstays in supercomputers that need specialized processing power, and they’re becoming even more important now that the company is launching its first Tesla built for large-scale projects. The new K40 accelerator only has 192 more processing cores than its K20x ancestor (2,880, like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti), but it crunches analytics and science numbers up to 40 percent faster. A jump to 12GB of RAM, meanwhile, helps it handle data sets that are twice as big as before. The K40 is already available in servers from NVIDIA’s partners, and the University of Texas at Austin plans to use it in Maverick, a remote visualization supercomputer that should be up and running by January.
As part of the K40 rollout, NVIDIA has also revealed a partnership with IBM that should bring GPU-boosted supercomputing to enterprise-grade data centers. The two plan on bringing Tesla GPU support to IBM’s Power8-based servers, including both apps and development tools. It’s not clear when the deal will bear fruit, but don’t be surprised if it turbocharges a corporate mainframe near you.
Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, NVIDIA
Source: NVIDIA
Nov 18
Bitcoin mining motherboards promise huge profits (for your energy provider)
Posted in: Today's Chili
As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they’ve also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as “mining.” This air of futility hasn’t fazed ASRock, however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to “join the gold rush now!” The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously.
What ASRock doesn’t specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we’re quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator, based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware.
Filed under: Desktops
Via: Bit-tech
Source: ASRock [1], [2]
Oct 28
The cheapest Mac Pro you can buy, Apple informed us last week, will cost you $3,000. That’s a pretty penny, sure, but not outrageous for a workstation these days. What if, though, you spec it out as far as you can go? That’s when we hit new car territory.
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Oct 22
Today’s Apple event delivered a lot of things we expected. We’re still waiting on those 4K Thunderbolt displays, though.
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