Hasta La Gadget!

In recent years, Intel’s Celeron and Pentium processors have been cut-down versions of more advanced counterparts. For the chips’ next updates, Intel is taking an opposite tack — it’s bringing low-end Atom architecture into the big leagues. The company is confident enough in the speed and flexibility of the Bay Trail-based Atom platform that it’s launching desktop and laptop versions (Bay Trail-D and Bay Trail-M) under the Celeron and Pentium badges. There isn’t much more to share regarding the CPUs beyond their expected releases late in the year, although there’s a good chance that we’ll learn more at Computex next week.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Intel

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Source: PCWorld

Now that we have the low-down on NVIDIA’s two mainstream heavyweights, the GTX 770 and the GTX 780, we figure it’s time to move beyond specs and official slide decks and bring together some reviews from the specialist sites. Both cards contain the same Kepler architecture as NVIDIA’s 2012 line-up, with no huge leaps in evidence, but they either add more of this silicon (in the case of the GTX 780) or drive it harder (in the case of the GTX 770) in order create new options for enthusiasts and for those upgrading from a card that is two or more generations old. At the same time, these products represent a major shift in NVIDIA’s pricing strategy. At $649, the GTX 780 is priced much higher than its direct ancestor, and it aims to approach Titan-level performance without hitting the same thousand-dollar high. Meanwhile, the GTX 770 costs just $399 and yet is said to replace last year’s flagship cards like the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, which are still being sold for $450 and upwards at some retailers. Read on and we’ll summarize how these claims have stacked up against reality.

Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Gaming, NVIDIA

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It probably won’t come as a huge surprise, given the GTX 780‘s appearance last week, but today’s launch of the GTX 770 nevertheless brings us a very interesting product. The card is claimed to be about five percent faster than last year’s much more expensive flagship, the GTX 680, thanks to faster memory (7Gb/s instead of 6Gb/s), a slightly higher base clock speed (1,046 vs. 1,006MHz) and an equivalent number of CUDA cores (1,536). Seeing as how the the GTX 680 still holds its own with current games, this performance parity strikes us as something of a deal — assuming independent benchmarks back it up. We’re awaiting a confirmed US price, but we’ll eat our SATA cables if it’s anything other than $399 for a 2GB model (the press release just says “under $400”). UK and European prices match those of the GTX 670 (£329 inc. VAT, 329 euros exc. VAT), and availability begins today. Check out NVIDIA’s slide deck for more details, including power consumption and noise, SLI scaling (which looks healthy) and some in-house frame rate comparisons against other products.

Update: $399 is confirmed. The cables are safe.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, NVIDIA

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Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this roundup, we’ll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You’ll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won’t stick around long.

Our regular roundup of discounted tech makes its return with another handful of enticing selections for you to consider. Sony’s NEX-F3 mirrorless camera and Acer’s Iconia Tab A210 may garner an immediate look, but there’s plenty more to peruse on the other side of the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Cameras, Tablets, Storage

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Source: Slickdeals

During an interview tonight at the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a few references to what we can expect at his company’s WWDC 2013 event in a few weeks. As expected, he mentioned we’ll see the future of iOS and OS X revealed there, and directly referenced the recent management shakeup. Craig Federighi is running both teams, and Cook mentioned designer Jony Ive has been “really key” to this version of iOS. He left it up to interviewer Kara Swisher to decide if the changes made are as dramatic as have been reported, stating only that collaboration has been enhanced, with an “amped up” intersection of hardware, software and services.

Another name dropped is that of Eddy Cue, who is busy heading up work on services since Scott Forstall’s departure. We’ll have to wait until WWDC to find out the fruits of the various executives’ labor but Cook did leave us with this to chew on: “The whole concept was to tighten the groups even more, so we could spend more time finding magic in intersections. Seven months later, give or take, I think it has been an incredibly great change.”

Follow along with our D11 liveblog right here.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Mobile

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