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How’s about this for a coincidence? We’ve just benchmarked the Snapdragon 800 reference tablet, with some very nice results, and now Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft will use a Qualcomm chip in its next refresh of the Surface RT. The report, based on insider sources, doesn’t stretch to detailing whether we’ll be looking at the flagship 800 processor specifically, but such a choice would tally with a previous statement from Qualcomm, and it’d also seem like a logical upgrade for the current hybrid which runs on NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 and already feels underpowered. As for NVIDIA, the same unconfirmed report suggests that the company will still have a role to play as a supplier “for some versions” of Microsoft’s product. That’s a curious notion, because it implies we might see multiple iterations of the Surface RT to suit different price points or markets (e.g., those with or without LTE), and at least one version of those could house a Tegra 4. Or it could simply be a diplomatic way of saying that the existing RT products will continue to be sold and supported for a while. Either way, if Microsoft doesn’t implement the full force of Snapdragon, someone else hopefully will.

Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft

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Source: Bloomberg

AMD has revealed its new “Seattle” chips, processors headed to power-dense servers, and using for the first time ARM architecture as commonly found in smartphones and tablets, rather than x86. AMD Seattle, which is expected to show up in systems from the second half of 2014, will initially offer eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores running at

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As predicted, Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2 (also known as the Milky Way-2) has now been crowned the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Arriving years ahead of schedule, and packing 32,000 Xeon processors alongside 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors, the supercomputer can manage a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (33.85 petaflops), double that of last year’s king (and closest rival), the Titan. In this year’s results, 80 percent of the Top 500 used Intel processors, while 67 percent had processors with eight or more cores — as clock speeds stall, supercomputer development has now focused on processors running in parallel. Top 500 editor Jack Dongarra adds that “most of the features of the [Tianhe-2] system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part,” meaning that you can expect to see more Chinese entrants (and possibly champions) over the next few years. For now, however, the US still claims the majority of the Top 500, with 253 top-ranking supercomputers.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Via: CNET

Source: Top 500

AMD has outed its latest FX processors, and its broken the 5GHz barrier in the process, with the new AMD FX-9590 8-core. Revealed at E3 this week alongside its 4.7GHz FX-9370 sibling, the chips use eight of AMD’s Piledriver cores – already seen in the Trinity and Opteron 6300 Series – and come unlocked for

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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