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Ivy Bridge Specs Leaked
Intel has inadvertently leaked details of its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors in a sales flipbook uploaded to its website.
Intel’s much delayed Ivy Bridge processors are expected to tip up in the second quarter sporting the firm’s tri-gate transistor technology. Details of the chips had been relatively scant, until that is the firm decided to upload a sales flipbook, which details what appear to be most of its third generation Core i5 processors.
According to Intel’s slides there are only modest frequency bumps, with the quad-core Core i5-2570 and Core i5-2570K topping the range with speeds of 3.4GHz and 3.8GHz in Turbo mode. The addition of the ‘K’ suffix signifies Intel HD 4000 graphics, while the Core i5-3570 plods along with Intel HD 2500 graphics.
Like Chipzilla’s Sandy Bridge Core i5 chips, the Ivy Bridge Core i5 range will be all quad-core chips with 6MB of cache that lack Hyperthreading, with one exception, the Core i5-3470T, which is a dual-core Hyperthreaded processor with 3MB of cache. Previously the ‘T’ suffix was added to signify a 35W TDP chip, though this was not confirmed on the leaked slide.
Did AMD Want nVidia Instead of ATI?
While it is ancient history now, it seems that the story about the controversial buying of ATI by AMD was not an easy process.
Forbes has found a deep throat who has left AMD who has told it that AMD approached graphics processor designer Nvidia about an acquisition before snapping up Nvidia rival ATI in 2006. AMD leaders believed that shrinking transistors would create an opportunity to add new capabilities to the processors AMD and rival Intel designed for PCs and servers.
AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz decided to bet that AMD could get ahead of rival Intel by grabbing a piece of the market for GPUs. Fusing CPUs and GPUs would let AMD hit the PC market with something Intel wasn’t ready to offer. Initially AMD thought that Nvidia was the best bet but the deal was killed off because Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang insisted on being chief executive of the combined company.
Ruiz decided it was better to buy Nvidia rival ATI in July of 2006 for $5.4 billion. Nvidia replied by unleashing several strong products, gobbling up market share. AMD has fought its way back, with a strong lineup of graphics processors, Nvidia pushed into mobile processors. Nvidia has a market capitalization of $9.7 billion.
Did Google Bypass Privacy Rules?
February 28, 2012 by admin
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In the wake of reports that Google had circumvented privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft announced today it had discovered that the Web giant had done the same with Internet Explorer.
“When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?” IE executive Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a blog post this morning. “We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”
The blog post, which details Microsoft’s findings and offers privacy protection tips, said it has contacted Google about its concerns and asked it to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.”
Google countered that Microsoft backs a system that is dated and impractical.
“It is well known–including by Microsoft–that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern Web functionality,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy for Google, said in a statement to CNET this evening. “We have been open about our approach, as have many other Web sites.”
P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium that sites use to summarize their privacy policies.
Nokia To Unveil Cheaper Windows Phone
February 27, 2012 by admin
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Nokia debuted a new, cheaper and more budget-friendly smartphone using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, targeting a wider market for its new range of smartphones.
Cheaper phones are the key for Nokia and Microsoft in their battle to win a larger share of the market, analysts say.
In addition to the new Lumia 610 Nokia will also unveil at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone, which AT&T is scheduled to roll out in the United States, the sources said.
Nokia is set to unveil the phones at a news conference next Monday, on February 27.
Nokia last year dumped its own smartphone software platforms in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which has so far had a limited impact due to the high prices of phones using it.
Will Windows 8 Beat Android?
February 8, 2012 by admin
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ARM’s CEO Warren East has been having a look at his Tarot cards and has come to the conclusion that Windows 8 will probably put the fear of God into Android in the tablet market.
East said that Microsoft may have some potential advantages over Android particularly now it is going to run on chips lovingly designed on ARM. East told CNET that Microsoft’s brand recognition among consumers was a lot better than Androids and this could mean that they would go for that brand. He said consumers are familiar with Microsoft and very familiar with Windows and they’re less familiar with an Android environment. East added that it will be interesting to see how Microsoft exploits that advantage, but I think that’s a fundamental difference. He believes Android tablet sales will eventually take off as there were similarities between what happened with smartphones.
When Android phones were introduced, there was a lot of hype and nothing happened then a few years later–two years later–half a million units a day, 700,000 units a day and Android phones now are successful. East thought that everyone should give Android tablets a little bit more time. He did not think that Intel would be able to dent the smartphone or tablet market.
WIN8 Enter Final Pre-Beta
Microsoft Windows developer build tracking site Winunleaked.tk has recently updated its Windows 8 build number page, documenting the milestones Microsoft developers have been achieving in the compilation of the Windows 8 operating system. According to the latest numbers, it appears that the company has just released the final pre-beta build, marking another significant milestone in the release cycle of the operating system.
The site claims Microsoft’s own testers will then vote on which of the next Windows 8 builds will become the “Final Beta,” with a voting decision being made on Saturday, January 28th. The final beta build will then be shown at an internal Microsoft preview on Monday, January 30th.
The official pre-beta build number is 8189.0.winmain.120120-1830, and according to the site, the next builds for Windows 8 will be labeled as “Beta Escrow” builds. Additionally, the operating system roadmap claims that the “Final Beta” build to be released to the public will be named “winmain_win8b1.”
Nokia Sold 1 Million Lumina Smartphones
January 30, 2012 by admin
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Nokia reported a one billion year over year loss for the quarter ended 30 December 2011, only slightly offset by its launch of Lumia Windows Phone smartphones.
The firm shipped 113.5 million mobile phones during the quarter, down eight per cent from the same period in 2010. However, the figures were up from the 106.6 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2011, as the company benefited from its launch of the Lumia 800 smartphone in October, its first Windows Phone handset since it announced its deal with Microsoft.
Nokia shipped 19.6 million smartphones during the final quarter of 2011, down from the 28.6 million it shipped a year earlier, but up 17 percent from the 16.8 million sold in the third quarter of 2011.
The company reported net sales of $10 billion for the quarter, 20 percent down from the same quarter a year earlier. Full year sales were $38.7 billion, a nine percent decline from 2010.
Nokia reported that it sold one million of its Lumia smartphones since they went on sale in October. The firm said it is accelerating investment in its Lumia range of devices running Microsoft Windows Phone, claiming it has sold “well over one million Lumia devices to date”.
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said, “Just six months after signing an agreement with Microsoft, we introduced our first two devices based on the Windows Phones platform – the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710. We brought the new devices to market ahead of schedule, demonstrating that we are changing the clock speed of Nokia. To date, we have introduced Lumia to consumers in Europe, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
iPhone Narrows Gap With Android
January 26, 2012 by admin
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Apple’s iPhone gained major ground among recent buyers in its battle against smartphones running Google’s Android, but still lagged behind its OS rival, pollster Nielsen said today.
In a December 2011 survey of U.S. consumers who had purchased a smartphone in the previous three months, 44.5% chose an iPhone, a jump of nearly 20 percentage points from the 25.1% that Nielsen measured in October.
That represents a 77% increase in the iPhone’s numbers.
But Android maintained the lead in the recent-buyers game with a 46.9% share, down from October’s 61.6%.
A majority of the new iPhone owners — 57% to be exact — bought an iPhone 4S, the newest model in Apple’s line-up, said Nielsen. The iPhone 4S debuted in the U.S. on Oct. 14, 2011.
Nielsen said the iPhone 4S had an “enormous” impact on Apple’s huge jump in share among new smartphone purchasers.
Apache Finally Goes To The Cloud
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.
The open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. Apache describes it as “a foundation of cloud computing”.
“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.
“Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security,” he added.
Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often Petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.
The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo.
Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.
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Windows 8 To Have Simple Recovery
Microsoft has detailed the options that will be available to recover a crashed PC running Windows 8.
Users will be offered two alternatives when presented with a Windows crash, with options to either refresh or reset their lost machine.
The changes are detailed in a blog post from the firm where the refresh option was described as a way of retaining some work while restoring core OS functions. The other is a full face wipe.
“We’ve built two new features in Windows 8 that can help you get your PCs back to a ‘good state’ when they’re not working their best, or back to the ‘factory state’ when you’re about to give them to someone else or decommission them,” explains Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky in the introductory blog post.
“The strength of this approach is that you start over from a truly clean state, but you still get to keep the things you care about. With that as the basis of the solution, our goal was to make the process much more streamlined, less time-consuming, and more accessible to a broad set of customers.”
Broadly, the two options work as follows. Fully resetting your PC will remove all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC and reinstall Windows, while just refreshing will keep all personal data, Metro style apps, important settings on the PC and reinstall Windows.
The reset option includes features for erasing old data more thoroughly. This involves choosing the “Thorough” option and should help protect more sensitive users, or firms storing official or compliance related information, from having their data exposed through third party refreshes.
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