AMD has formally announced its second-generation A-Series mobile processor, which you’ll see in notebooks branded as AMD Vision A4, A6, A8 and A10.
- Check out our AMD A10-4600M review
As well as traditional notebooks, AMD is also targeting ‘ultrathin’ notebooks with this release – going after Intel’s relatively new Ultrabook target market. AMD was first to announce AMD-powered ultraportables last week, with what it called Sleekbooks.
AMD says that Trinity represents an inflection point in computing, and while that’s little more than PR bluster, there’s no doubt that AMD is a serious option for those who want both performance and DirectX 11 graphics in their mobile devices. However, whether AMD can start to seriously impact on Intel’s dominance is quite another matter.
Trinity follows on from last year’s Llano APU, the first mainstream chip to combine DirectX 11 graphics and processing on a single die. The new 32nm chips deliver double the performance-per-watt of their predecessors.
The all new architecture features dual or quad new Piledriver x86 cores – an evolution of the Bulldozer architecture. AMD claims up to a 29 per cent improvement in productivity performance over the Husky32 cores found in Llano.
Battery life is the battleground
The GPU are HD 7000 Series cores, based on AMD’s Northern Islands architecture – the high-end A10 chip we’ve been testing features integrated AMD Radeon 7600 graphics – AMD is calling the integrated 3D core the Radeon HD 7660G.
Battery life is a big focus of the new chips – AMD claims 11 hours of resting battery life and five hours of video playback. Clever technology (called AMD Turbo Core 3.0) enables automatic bi-directional power management between the x86 and Radeon graphics cores to deliver power and performance where it is needed.
Mobile versions of the APUs are being made available first, with desktop chips at a later, currently unknown, date. The mobile chops will be available in a number of configurations rated at 17W, 25W and 35W thermal design power (TDP).
The memory controller on the 2012 AMD A-Series platform supports up to DDR3-1600 and adds support for low power 1.25V DIMMs. There’s also support for DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort 1.2 for up to four displays.
The new Kepler GPU that Nvidia recently announced has been five years in the making.
It will be at the heart of supercomputers that will help make scientific discoveries as well as powering gaming clouds and high resolution remote computing. But why is Kepler more than just another really powerful, really expensive GPU?
If it was just really powerful, Kepler would still be impressive. Demonstrating a combination of fluid simulation and ray tracing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pointed out that "Doing ray tracing for films takes up the vast majority of processing time – the hours and hours that are necessary to render a frame – and with Kepler we’re able to do ray tracing in real time.
"These are real time simulated effects that are only possible because of high performance computing only possible because were really doing fluid simulation, light simulation. Simulation and computer graphics are merging; in a few years computer graphics will look nothing like the easily shaded graphics we see in console games today."
Faster and lower power
Architecturally, Kepler is both faster than the previous Fermi GPU and lower power; there are many more cores but they run at 750MHz rather than 1.3GHz.
Two GPUs on a graphics card like the Kepler-powered GTX 690 will be able to communicate directly with each other; they can also communicate with up to 32 CPU cores instead of just one CPU at a time, and data parallelism means the GPU can look at the results of computations and decide what to do next instead of sending information back to the CPU and waiting for instructions.
It also has a memory management unit; combined with Nvidia’s hypervisor and VGX architecture, that lets Kepler be a virtual GPU for remote access with a tool like Citrix Receiver on a tablet or Microsoft RemoteFX on a thin client – or power gaming cloud services that Nvidia is calling GeForce Grid.
Not all of that is in the first Kepler GPU, the Tesla K10 that’s just started shipping, but all the features will be in the Tesla K20, coming in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Services like Playcast and Gaikai will use Kepler GPUs later this year to let you play console-style games on any device with an H.264 decoder. That’s similar to the OnLive service but Nvidia General Manager Phil Eisler says GeForce Grid will be much more efficient to run.
"With the first generation of cloud gaming that’s out there, you pretty much take a one to one ratio of one computer, one graphics card to one game, which is pretty expensive. The new Kepler architecture is much more power efficient; we can actually render a game in half the power.
"Plus the built in encoder means you can offload encoding from the CPU so you can run many more games per server; you can go from what is effectively one game per server to about eight games per server and that reduces the cost by that much and reduces power by half."
The cost of running a service will be low enough that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsuan Huang told TechRadar the expects the monthly price for access to mainstream games will be the same as streaming films from Netflix. "Our goal is to be streaming at a cost level like Netflix. In which case you’ll be able to enjoy hundres of games, thousands of games in a library for a month. And for blockbuster video games the moment that it comes out, the nanosecond it comes out, you’ll be able to enjoy that for some premium charge."
Huang thinks that cable TV companies and Internet TV providers will offer their own gaming services. "They offer different channels and instead of ABC and CBS there would be potentially a channel that says GeForce GRID and has a whole bunch of games inside."
Kepler is going to power high resolution remote computing for work and high performance gaming in the cloud, but what about putting it in your home PC and having your own cloud? Huang likes the idea but he’s realistic about how well it would work in practice.
"The challenge is you want to be able to stream at a very low latency and that PC sitting in a den somewhere is literally right in front of you but we need to stream that over the clumsy Wi-Fi in people homes so there’s a lot of obstacles. That’s exactly the PC I want at home though. I want a PC with three GTX 690s – because that’s the most you can put in a PC- and put that in the basement somewhere and just stream it to wherever our family happens to be."
One thing Nvidia isn’t talking about this week is whether any of the same technology powering Kepler is going to show up in the ARM CPU it promised to build back at CES 2011, but Project Denver is still going strong according to Chief Scientist Bill Dally.
"It’s an ARM core with performance better than you can get with cores availability from ARM and it has substantially better energy efficiency even at this higher performance. That’s all we’re saying about it now, because we don’t want to tip our hand and have our competitors know what we’re doing."
Huang is making his usual bold predictions about Project Denver though; "You are going to be so happy," he promised. It doesn’t sound as if they’ll be ready for the Windows RT launch though.
Acer is packing Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor into the latest model of its TravelMate series of laptops.
The TravelMate P243 will run on an Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor with Turbo Boost technology.
It also features a 14-inch 1366×768 resolution screen, USB 3.0 port, HD webcam for video conferencing, 8GB of RAM, and option for a NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M video card with DirectX 11 support.
Business traveller
As part of Acer’s line of business designed notebooks, the TravelMate P243 includes Acer’s suite of professional software.
ProShield Security offers pre-boot authentication, secure drive encryption, and file shredder utility.
Software is also included for backup and recovery management, wake-on-lan remote access, and tools to help monitor and manage IT assets.
The TravelMate P243 is only slated for the UK at the moment, with a price set at £339 (about 6).
Acer is keeping quiet on when the launch will happen though, with no word either on whether its latest business notebook will be traveling to the US.
Week in tech
There’s been so much happening this week that we’ve been moved to rhyme. We discovered that the Galaxy S3 is perfect for stalking, New Jersey’s banned people texting while walking, we’ve seen new phones from ZTE and LG and the Beeb says we’ll all get Olympics in HD.
iPhone 5 rumours are awfully trendy, Samsung’s screens are going all bendy, Sony’s got new lenses and a new camera too, Facebook fraud was a blunder by Yahoo. Lenovo’s new ultrabook is awfully thin, and we test the HP Envy to see if it will win.
Okay, we’ll stop now — which is what we hope Samsung will do with its creepy ads for the Galaxy S3. According to Kate Solomon it ""shares what’s in your heart", "keeps track of loved ones", "recognises who you are" and "waits till you’re asleep". "Before what, Samsung?" she types in terror. "BEFORE WHAT?"
Meanwhile in America, a New Jersey town has responded to the menace of people walking and texting simultaneously by digging bear traps in sidewalks and covering lamposts and other street furniture in broken glass. Not really, but it has introduced fines for the offence. It’s no joke: as Scott Nichols reports, the town in question, Fort Lee, has "suffered three fatal texting accidents so far this year".
When it comes to testing phones we prefer to stay in the office rather than walk under buses, and this week we’ve looked at loads of new devices including the ZTE Tania Windows Phone, which is pretty good, and the LG Optimus L3 Android phone, which isn’t.
Still, you’ll be able to use it to watch the Olympics, which the BBC promises to stream in up to 24 channels of glorious HD via phone, tablet and mobile device apps. You’ll even be able to watch it on TV!
We’re hardly into summer time and already tech watcher’s thoughts are turning to autumn, when the iPhone 5 is due to appear. With months to go the rumour factory’s throwing out all kinds of ideas, but the rumours of a bigger screen are becoming deafening — and they’ve reached the Wall Street Journal, Apple’s favourite leak-receiver. You just know that "sources familiar with the situation" work for a firm whose name begins with A. And we don’t mean Argos.
Could the iPhone 5 have a bendy screen? We very much doubt it, but screen supplier Samsung says it’s received "huge" orders for its bendy OLED displays, which it’ll be manufacturing in bulk from the second half of this year. A bendy iPhone isn’t out of the question, but we think it’s still some way off.
Remember Sony, the Apple of the 70s and 80s? It’s still going, we’re told, and its camera division has unveiled some tasty new kit. There’s the new Sony NEX-F3 compact system camera, a new DSLT (Digital Single Lens Translucent) called the Sony Alpha a37, and a bunch of new lenses for both NEX and A-mount cameras.
There’s been lots of red hot ultrabook action this week, with Lenovo launching the super-thin and super-desirable Thinkpad X1 Carbon and HP letting us get up close and personal with the HP Envy 6. Our man Dan Grabham was impressed, suggesting that "these will be among the very best value Ultrabooks on the market when they go on sale".
Last but not least, the patent wars between rival tech firms continued in all their tedium this week — but Yahoo livened things up with an almighty cock-up when it wrongly accused Facebook of fraud. To be honest, we’re only including it in Week in Tech so we can say YAHOOPS!
Starting May 20, Microsoft will offer students purchasing a PC of 9 or more a free 4GB Xbox 360, presumably to aid in their studies.
Microsoft offered a similar deal last summer, and apparently it was successful enough to warrant a return.
With Windows 8 just around the corner, it may seem wise to wait to buy a new PC, but a free 0 gaming console is a particularly delicious carrot to dangle in front of college-aged teens and adults.
The deal won’t be limited to the U.S., as Canadian students will be able to nab a free 4GB Xbox 360 as well with the purchase of a PC at 9 and up starting May 18.
Participating U.S. retailers include Best Buy, Dell.com, Fry’s Electronics, HPDirect.com, Microsoft Stores, and NewEgg.com. Canadians can head to Best Buy, Dell.ca, Future Shop, Staples and The Source.
End dates for the promotion vary by retailer, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to TechRadar.
Students are important to Microsoft
Despite the well-known popularity of Apple’s Mac computers with college students, the demographic is important to Microsoft, Microsoft’s spokesperson told TechRadar in an email.
"Supporting students and education has always been important to Microsoft and each year we create student offers to make technology affordable and accessible," the spokesperson said.
"Every year during back to school season, millions of college students choose Windows PCs because they want technology that allows them to manage their school work and personal life with ease."
"With all the hard work students put in for their classes in college, they need some downtime, right?" reads a post on the Windows Team Blog.
Will Sony offer a similar deal?
Logically it seems Sony is in a position to benefit equally from a similar promotion, but it’s unknown at this time whether the company plans to offer students any special deals for the summer.
Giving away a PS3 with a Sony laptop could provide the same draw as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 offer.
But a Sony spokesperson told TechRadar that the company has nothing to announce at this time.
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