AMD held a press briefing today on their upcoming 8000M graphics chips, which they are calling the "second generation GCN architecture" parts. We’ll have more on that in a moment, but while we were expecting (dreading) a rebranding prior to the call, it appears we are at least partially mistaken; there will be at least one completely new GPU with 8000M. (If you want additional background material, you can see the previous generation high-end 7000M announcement from April 2012 for reference.)

I’m not going to get too far into the marketing aspects, as we’ve heard all of this information before: AMD has improved Enduro Technology, they’re continuing to improve their drivers, and APP Acceleration has a few more applications. There have been a few major titles released in the past couple of months with AMD Gaming Evolved branding (Far Cry 3 is arguably the most notable of the offerings, with Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs also scoring well amongst critics and users), and Bioshock Infinite is at least one future release that I'm looking forward to playing.

Cutting straight to the chase, at this point AMD has released limited information on the core specifications for some of their 8000M GPUs, but they coyly note that at least one more GPU announcement will be forthcoming in Q2 2013 (8900M by all appearances). Today is a soft launch of high level details, with more architectural information and product details scheduled for January 7, 2013 at CES. AMD did not share any codenames for the newly announced mobile GPUs, if you’re wondering, other than the overall family name of “Solar” for the mobile chips (replacing the outgoing “London” series), but we do know from other sources that the 384 core part is codenamed "Mars" while the larger 640 core part is codenamed "Neptune". Here are the details we have right now:

Obviously there are a lot of missing pieces right now, but what we immediately notice is that the core count on the 8500M/8600M/8700M means that we’re definitely looking at a new GPU. The only other time we’ve seen AMD do 384 cores is with Trinity, but that’s a VLIW4 architecture so we’re not seeing that again. Given the currently shipping Southern Islands chips (“London” on the mobile side) have 640 cores max for Cape Verde, 1280 max for Pitcairn, and up to 2048 for Tahiti, AMD has likely created a fourth SI derivative that drops down to two CU arrays, each with three CUs. (You can read more about the GCN/SI architecture in our earlier GPU coverage.) Performance is something of a wildcard with the new 384 core parts, and the choice of DDR3/GDDR5 memory will also influence the final result. We'll find out in the coming months how the 8500/8600/8700M stack up to NVIDIA's midrange "GT" offerings, which interestingly are also using 384 cores.

Also worth a quick note is that AMD is not discussing TDPs at this point in time—which is common practice for both AMD and NVIDIA. We expect the new "Mars" parts to be more power efficient than the outgoing Thames/Turks cores, thanks to the shrink to a 28nm process. However, AMD and NVIDIA typically stick to common power targets for laptops that are dictated by their OEM partners, which often means they'll play with clock speeds in order to hit a specific TDP. That's why all of the clock speeds listed in the above table have a qualifying "up to" prefix (which I omitted).

The final announced card is the one where we appear to have more of a rebrand/optimization of a previous generation chip. 8800M has the same 640 core count as Cape Verde/7800M, only with modified clocks this time. The earlier 7800M chips could clock up as high as 800MHz, so maximum core clock is actually down a bit, but they only ran the memory at up to 1GHz (4GHz effective) GDDR5. If AMD determined memory bandwidth was more important for that particular GPU than shader performance, the new 8800M would make sense. Also note that AMD isn’t including the boost clock speeds into the above chart; under the right circumstances, all of the new chips can run at higher clocks than the reference clock.

Radeon 7800M Left, Radeon 8800M Right

AMD isn’t calling the 8800M a rebrand, but we’re looking at the same core counts as Cape Verde and the same 28nm process technology, so we wouldn’t expect a substantial change in performance. There’s also the above chip shot as a point of reference. If the 8800M is substantially different from Cape Verde then the above images provided in AMD’s slides must be incorrect, as the new and old chips look the same. Minor tweaks to power use, caching, or other elements notwithstanding, we’re probably dealing with a die respin at most. But, there’s nothing inherently wrong with rebranding—AMD and NVIDIA have both been doing it for some time now. Don’t expect every “upgraded” GPU to be better; a 7400M isn’t faster than a 6700M, and likewise we expect 7700M and 7800M to be faster options than the 384 core 8500M/8600M/8700M and competitive with 8800M. Here’s a quick recap of the same core specs as above for the current 7700M/7800M parts:

I’ll refrain from commenting too much more about performance of an unreleased part, but AMD indicated their 8870M should be substantially faster than NVIDIA’s current GT 650M GDDR5 (which isn’t too surprising considering clocks and core counts), and the 8770M should likewise be a healthy 20%+ bump in performance relative to the 7670M. I’d rather see comparisons with GTX 670MX and HD 7770M, respectively, but I suspect those wouldn’t be quite as impressive. Anyway, you can see AMD’s comparison charts in the complete slide deck gallery below. Availability of the new GPUs is slated for Q1 2013.

This came out of the blue. Samsung announced their intent to acquire NVELO, known for their Dataplex SSD caching software. Price or specific timeframe of the acquisition have not been revealed yet, but the acquisition does include all NVELO technology and personnel.

NVELO as a company may be a new acquaintance for many as it was founded only two years ago as a spin-off from Denali Software, which was acquired by Cadence in June 2010. While NVELO has not been around for long, the company is full of experience as most of the employees worked over a decade for Denali before the acquisition. In fact, Dataplex development began in 2007 when Denali was still a standalone company.

There are several products in the market that use NVELO's Dataplex software such as OCZ's Synapse, Corsair's Accelerator and Crucial's Adrenaline SSDs. Dataplex is essentially an alternative to Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT) but with fewer limitations. For example, Dataplex is not tied to any specific chipsets, making it a viable option for AMD based setups and older systems without Intel's SRT support. There is also no 64GB cache size limitation like in Intel's SRT, although most of the SSDs that are bundled with Dataplex are 64GB or smaller. Whether it's worth it to use an SSD bigger than 64GB for caching is a different question, but at least there is an option for that. We have played around with NVELO's Dataplex in our labs but we haven't thoroughly reviewed it (yet).

While at least I didn't expect this acquisition, it does make a lot of sense. SSD prices have come down significantly in the last few years but we still aren't at a point where SSDs can replace hard drives in mainstream products. However, the difference an SSD makes is just so substantial that there is no reason not to want an SSD. The advantage of caching is that you can have SSD-like performance with plenty of storage without breaking the bank. Samsung doesn't have any consumer-grade SSD caching products, so with the acquisition it seems that Samsung is interested in entering that market. Why Samsung chose to acquire NVELO instead of just licensing the Dataplex software is a good question, but it's possible that Samsung wants to develop something in the house instead of using a commercially available solution (given the significant vertical integration already present in their SSDs, this wouldn't be a surprise). The acquisition may also be a way to eliminate competition because Samsung can force the competitors to get out of the SSD caching market or to use another solution (assuming Samsung makes Dataplex proprietary). 

In one of the most "interesting" moves I've seen in the mobile market, MSI has equipped their GX60 gaming notebook with an HD 7970M...paired with an AMD A10-4600M APU. Curious to see how the combination would stack up against the Intel i7-3720QM + HD 7970M combination used in AVADirect's Clevo P170EM, I ran some quick benchmarks and put together a video of Batman: Arkham City showing the systems running side by side. First, here's the video link:

Not surprisingly, the Ivy Bridge solution walks away from the Trinity laptop when we turn down the details a bit, but at maximum quality the two solutions appear relatively close. The issue is that while average frame rates may be close in some cases, minimum frame rates often tell the real story. There are points in the above video where Trinity falls to sub-30 FPS for a second or two at a time, which can be very noticeable in gameplay.

Anyway, I'm curious: are you interested in more videos like this? It takes a lot more time than a simple reporting of a benchmark number, but if there's enough demand for it I'll be happy to oblige. I should also note that there are some titles where the Trinity and Ivy Bridge notebooks are fairly close in performance (at maximum detail at least), while other titles are even more in favor of a faster CPU (e.g. Skyrim). Regardless, the full review of the MSI GX60 will be forthcoming.

Pricing for the GX60 is the one area where MSI looks to beat Intel HD 7970M offerings. The base model comes with a 750GB hard drive, 8GB RAM, A10-4600M, and of course the HD 7970M. Right now (if it's in stock), you can get that configuration for around $1200. Our particular unit takes yet another odd approach by including a 128GB RAID 0 SSD set for the OS and apps, which might sound appealing until you realize they're using SanDisk U100 drives (not exactly the fastest SSDs around); we're not sure what pricing is for this particular configuration. AVADirect's P170EM by contrast is priced at $1519, with a $100 off coupon available at the time of writing. That will get you an i7-3630QM and the 7970M, so for about $150 to $200 extra, for gaming purposes we recommend most users go that route.

We are no strangers to boutique PC makers here at AnandTech, having reviewed systems from AVADirect, iBUYPOWER and Puget Systems regularly. Most of these boutique PCs are targeted exclusively towards gamers, while a few cater to the small form factor space. We rarely see boutique PC makers target the HTPC market. Low Carbon PC is one of the boutique PC makers making an effort to serve the HTPC / gaming crowd. Earlier this month, Steiger Dynamics entered the fray with a luxury gaming HTPC lineup, the LEET series. The LEET series has three models, the LEET Pure, LEET Core and LEET Reference. 

Steiger Dynamics uses components from Intel, NVIDIA, Asus, Corsair, EVGA, Seasonic and Western Digital (amongst others) in the lineup. The HTPC credentials are strengthened by the option to add the Asus Xonar Essence STX (for the audiophiles who don't need bitstreaming) and the Ceton InfiniTV 4 quad-channel cable HD TV tuner card.

Steiger Dynamics aims at consolidating the various devices in the living room with the LEET series. By integrating the functionality of a desktop PC, gaming console, cable TV STB, Blu-ray player and NAS into one unit, they are implementing device convergence of a different kind. The LEET series is quite high end, with the premium being justified by an exclusive custom chassis and liquid cooling solution. The low-end LEET Pure series starts at $1798, while one could splurge more than $10000 on the highest-end LEET Reference with maxed out specs. The table below presents the hardware specifications of the various models in the LEET lineup.

We will be meeting up with Steiger Dynamics at CES. If you have any questions for them, feel free to sound off in the comments.

We were at Broadcom's press event in San Francisco on Tuesday, where they outlined their vision for the trends in the next few years. Covered aspects included location technologies, Wi-Fi display, 5G Wi-Fi, NFC, connected automotive technologies and enterprise BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) issues. Rather than just presenting details from the press releases, we dug a little bit into what Broadcom thought about related competing and complementary technologies. In this piece, we will be taking a look at Broadcom's thoughts on the technology trends and our analysis of the same.

Location Technologies

Broadcom was bullish on location technologies which can enable creation of contextually aware platforms. These enable ad-targeting (for example, available sale or discount offers near the user's current location), automatic traffic advisory notes and other similar applications.

Broadcom indicated that they are well positioned to provide location technologies at various levels of 'accuracy' including cellular station identification, GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and MEMS. MEMS might appear to be out-of-place in the list, but it supplies essential information related to directionality / orientation.

These technologies make it necessary to have multiple antennae in the device. Wi-Fi operates in 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, BLE in 2.4 GHz and NFC in 13.5 MHz. Cellphone reception and GPS signals require completely different frequencies too. Designing a system with a smartphone form factor and antennae for so many different applications is also a challenge in addition to the silicon requirements.

Wi-Fi Display

Intel's Wi-Di was one of the earliest commercially well-adopted wireless display technology which involved encoding the frame buffer contents and transmitting it over a ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection. While the initial versions utilized MPEG-2 encoding, the rise of Full HD requirements signalled the move to H.264. Currently, all wireless display technologies using the above method utilize H.264 encoding. While Wi-Di was an Intel-only initiative for notebooks, the Wi-Fi alliance took a keen interest in this segment of the market and created the industry-wide Wi-Fi Certified Miracast standard.

Broadcom showed a demo with the wireless display working on a Korean Sky-branded smartphone and a Broadcom based USB-powered Wi-Fi Display receiver on the sink side. Interestingly, even though the Nexus 4 supports W-Fi Display (and it was used for the NFC demos), it appears that support is not fully baked-in yet for that smartphone. It was also indicated that Broadcom uses the 5 GHz channel for cleaner video transmission. I did see a few encoding / decoding artifacts in some cases during the demo. Latency is a bit of an issue with this technology and gaming is not recommended because of the lag. Battery life is a much bigger concern because H.264 encoding is very power hungry. Notebook batteries might be able to bear the brunt with Wi-Di, but we are very interested in analyzing battery consumption profiles when using Wi-Fi display.

Interestingly, the Wii-U uses Broadcom's chips for the wireless communication features and also uses a customized version of Wi-Fi display in the GamePad. Since the encoding and decoding profiles are both controlled by Broadcom in this case, the latency is lesser than what one gets with standard Miracast.

5G Wi-Fi - 802.11ac

Broadcom ends 2012 as the only company shipping 802.11ac radios in routers being sold to the end users. Marvell and Qualcomm Atheros have also announced 802.11ac radios, but they are not shipping to consumers yet. Broadcom expects PCs, TVs, smartphones, tablets and other devices to join the ac bandwagon next year. Interestingly, Broadcom expects the 'Internet of Things' concept to be carried forward with 802.11ac radios, but we find it difficult to understand why low bandwidth/cost/power requiring applications would go with 802.11ac.

We did ask about where Broadcom stood on the 802.11ah front (something we have been very interested in since starting coverage of home automation technologies). Even though Broadcom is keenly following the developments in that area, they don't seem to be very enthusiastic about the current prospects citing spectrum issues in the sub-1 GHz range. We also asked about where powerline networking stood in Broadcom's plans (considering that they had acquired Gigle Networks, a PLC silicon manufacturer, back in December 2010). They indicated that the shipment of PLC products had come down in favour of Wi-Fi even in traditionally strong PLC markets such as the EU. This may be a biased point of view since we were talking to the wireless group, but the fact definitely presents interesting points to ponder as G.hn slowly picks up speed to compete with HomePlug.

NFC

The main announcement at the event was the NFC quad combo chip BCM 43341. Broadom has enjoyed huge success with the Wi-Fi / BT / FM BCM 4334 combo chip and they have now added the IP from the 20793 NFC chip to the mix. This brings down complications in the board design for the OEMs. It also makes it easier for companies which have been hesitant to include a dedicated NFC chip in their phone to join the NFC club.

Manufactured in the 40 nm process, the BCM 43341 supports both 2.4 and 5 GHz WLAN with HT40. Android has been instrumental in driving up NFC adoption and Broadcom's standard NFC software stack is now part of the AOSP 4.2 release. We are looking forward to a combo chip with 802.11ac support.

Personally, I have always regarded NFC as a solution in search of a problem, but Broadcom demonstrated interesting tap-to-share applications (such as playing a video on a smartphone and tapping a tablet to transfer the video playback). I am still not fully convinced, but NFC does seem to have some interesting use cases, provided apps put in support. The integration of the NFC software stack into AOSP should provide app developers with the necessary impetus.

Broadcom also presented some of their achievements in the connected automotive space (particularly, the rapid strides made by OPEN for use of Ethernet for in-vehicle automotive communication). They also talked about some chips for use in enterprise routers where the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon has brought about some challenges in terms of security and feature set. These two topics are not in the main coverage area for us yet, so we have not discussed them in detail.

In conclusion, Broadcom has exciting things in store for 2013. We are looking forward to BCM 43341 based products, increased NFC adoption and more number of devices supporting 802.11ac in the future.

In recent months much has been made over the potential incursion of ARM into Intel’s tightly held server markets, and for good reason. ARM’s general focus on SoCs for consumer devices like phones and tablets has treated the company and its partners well over the past few years, but with continued upwards and outwards growth of the ARM ecosystem, ARM and its partners have been looking to expand into new markets. With that in mind they have turned their eyes towards servers, a somewhat small but very lucrative market that offers much greater profitability than the cutthroat consumer space.

ARM’s leading edge partners like Calxeda have already been toying with the concept, creating a new class of microserver based around utilizing many ARM cores to create a high density, highly threaded server with weak per-thread performance but strong overall performance, an ideal setup for shared hosting and other subsets of sever workloads. Of course ARM’s existing 32bit ARMv7 designs can only go so far, leading to ARM taking a more direct shot across Intel’s bow with the announcement of their new 64bit ARMv8 ISA and parts such as Cortex A57. ARM and their partners believe in the potential of the microserver concept, and ARMv8 will be the ISA that lets them seriously chase the concept. But before they can get that far they must face the 800lb gorilla of the server world: Intel.

Intel for their part jealously guards the server market, looking to hold onto those profitable markets that have driven Intel’s own growth and phenomenal profits. Though Intel’s primary focus has continued to be on their Core architecture derived server parts, the company has also indirectly flirted with the concept of microservers, with ex-customer (and now AMD subsidiary) SeaMicro building one of the first server businesses based around Intel’s Atom processors. SeaMicro may be gone now, but Intel has continued to work on the technology, and with ARM drumming up interest in microservers ahead of their entrance to the market next year, Intel will be making the first move.

To that end, today Intel is launching the Atom S1200 series, Intel’s first Atom processors designed specifically for the server market. Previously going by the codename Centerton, the Atom S1200 series is based around Intel’s existing 32nm Saltwell architecture, utilizing Intel’s low-power SoC-ready CPU cores in a new design better suited for the server market.

Atom S1200 Series, aka Centerton

Centerton is for the most part very similar to Intel’s existing 32nm Cedarview Atoms, operating with a pair of Saltwell cores at between 1.6GHz and 2GHz depending on the specific SKU. The key difference however is that Centerton supports a bevy of server-grade features that the consumer-focused Cedarview did not; Centerton adds support for Intel’s VT virtualization technology, 4 more PCIe lanes (for a total of 8), and most importantly support for ECC memory. Though Intel has not confirmed it, coupled with the fact that Centerton uses a new socket (FCBGA1283), we believe that Centerton is a new Atom design rather than just being a server-branded version of Cedarview. In any case Centerton represents a big step up for Intel in the server market by finally offering an Atom-level processor with the ECC support that server vendors need to offer sever-grade reliability.

The Atom S1200 family will be composed of 3 parts, the S1220, the S1240, and S1260.

As implied by the model number, the S1220 will be Intel’s entry-level part, clocked at 1.6GHz with an 8.1W TDP. Beyond that the family splits a bit. The S1240 will be Intel’s lowest-power part and the part most directly designed to take on ARM designs, clocked at 1.6GHz like the S1220 but operating a full 2W lower at 6.1W. Finally the S1260 will be Intel’s top-performance part, operating 25% faster at 2Ghz with the highest TDP at 8.5W. All of these parts are shipping today; Intel hasn’t given us the specific prices, but pricing starts at $54, presumably for the S1220.

For their part Intel is looking to head off any ARM incursion into servers by not only being the first CPU vendor to release micro/high-density server CPUs with 64bit support and ECC support, but they also intend to hold off ARM by leveraging the existing x86 software ecosystem and software compatibility with their Xeon processors.  This also means that Intel has been able to tap their existing partner network, having secured design wins from Dell, HP, Supermicro, and others. For Intel’s customers this makes the S1200 effectively a continuation of Intel’s existing technology, which can make adoption easier than having to jump to a completely new platform with ARM.

As far as performance goes it will be some time until we have a good idea of how ARM-based processors stack up against the S1200 series, but Intel and HP have already released some generalized performance data comparing the S1200 series to Xeons. As expected, performance is going to be heavily dependent on the nature of the workload, with the S1200 designed for and exceling at heavily threaded, simple tasks, while coming up short in lightly threaded scenarios that need bigger, faster cores. Given the relatively low pricing of these processors, it will be in Intel’s interests to ensure that they are complementary to their existing Xeon processors and not significantly competitive.

Ultimately there is clear customer interest in servers designed to efficiently handle highly-threaded/low-intensity workloads, and with the Atom S1200 series Intel finally has a server-grade product capable of meeting the needs of that market. At the same time microservers are just but one segment of the complete server market and for the foreseeable future Intel’s traditional Xeon processors will remain as Intel’s biggest source of server revenue, but with the ever-increasing emphasis on power efficiency this is not something Intel could have afforded to pass up.

Meanwhile by launching first Intel will get to set the stage for the micro/high-density server market.  The Atom S1200 series is far more important for Intel than just a defense against an ARM incursion into the server market, but at the end of the day that may just be the most important role it plays. ARM has shown that they are a capable competitor, and in turn Intel will need to show why they are called the 800lb gorilla of CPUs.

2013: Avoton and Beyond

Wrapping things up, along with the announcement of the Atom S1200 series, Intel also released a very general roadmap of where they intend to take their new server CPU segment. Centerton is not just a one-off product, but rather the first product in a new range of server CPUs.

In 2013 Intel will release Avoton, Centerton’s successor and based on Intel’s 22nm process. Based on Intel’s previous roadmaps we know that 22nm is also supposed to coincide with the launch of Intel’s new Silvermont architecture, so it’s reasonable to assume that Avoton will be Intel’s Silvermont-based processor for servers. Processors based on the ARMv8 ISA are not expected to launch until late in the year, so it’s possible that ARM and its partners will be going up against Avoton rather than Centerton/S1200.

Beyond that, Intel is also planning a 14nm successor to Avoton in 2014. If Intel finds success in the S1200 series, then this will set up the S1200 series and its successors to be the second prong of Intel’s server CPU offerings, similar to the relationship between Core and Atom today in the consumer space. With the forthcoming release of Haswell we have seen signs that Intel is intending to push Core into some of the space currently occupied by Atom, but all the same this two-pronged approach has worked well enough for Intel’s consumer CPUs, and is something Intel is clearly going to try to replicate in the server space.

We've been covering the issues surrounding Samsung's SSD 840/840 Pro lately. The issue was first discovered when Anand's pre-production review sample died during testing and we also noted that in our initial review. Samsung quickly sent us another drive but it also failed after a couple of days of testing. My SSD 840 managed over a month but ironically enough, it died right after I had completed endurance testing.

Earlier Samsung told us that all review samples including our three shipped with a pre-production firmware that had a bug in it causing the failures (retail units were shipped with a newer firmware without the bug). At the time we didn't know what exactly was wrong in the firmware, but now we do. When the drive was issued a secure erase command, it would clear all table mapping information at the Address Translation Layer (ATL) but not at the Host Interface Layer (HIL). The data in both layers needs to be up-to-date for the drive operate properly, so when a write request came in, the controller wasn't able to map the data correctly, which caused the firmware to hang. An SSD obviously can't operate without a functioning firmware so from a user's standpoint, it looked like the drive had completely died even though only its firmware was broken.

All our three failures support this explanation. Our first 840 Pro sample died during a 128KB sequential write pass that we use to pre-condition our drives for enterprise tests, but the drive was secure erased just before beginning to fill the drive. The second 840 Pro died during power consumption testing but again it was secure erased right before starting the test. The regular 840 actually died when I tried to secure erase it. The secure erase command resulted in an error so I power cycled the drive but it was no longer detected by the system after reconnecting it. 

The good news is that all retail units have shipped with a newer firmware, only reviewers and others who have access to pre-production units were affected by this bug. 

For users considering the SSD 840/840 Pro, this should be reassuring news. The 840 Pro is still the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSD we have tested and it's definitely one of the top choices where performance is concerned today. The TLC NAND based SSD 840 is more mainstream focused but from what I have seen, it seems to be fairly competitively priced. The SSD 830 spoiled many with low prices but that was only to clear stocks. If you can still find a bargain SSD 830, don't hesitate to pull the trigger as those won't be available much longer, but we're more comfortable recommending the 840/840 Pro now.

While long-term reliability is still unknown, if history is any indication the 840/840 Pro are in good company as the 830 was a solid drive. Our third 840 Pro with the new fixed firmware has been going strong for weeks now and we have even recreated the scenarios that killed the earlier samples. We are also waiting for more samples from Samsung to test all capacities of SSD 840 and 840 Pro, so stay tuned!

Sometimes it's easier to take risks, if you aren't moving quite so many units. ARCHOS, long a player in media playback devices has spent a few years exploring Android tablets and we've put them through their paces. Their last offering was the remarkably thin 101 XS, with its impressive keyboard cover. The ARCHOS GamePad takes a rather different turn. One part tablet, one part portable game system, the GamePad brings hardware gaming controls and is available now for just 149.99 EURO, with a US release in Q1 '13. 

Arranged in landscape mode, the GamePad's 1024 x 600 screen resolution isn't going to light the world on fire, but paired with the ARM Mali-400 GPU it should provide excellent frame rates. We've seen a lot of TI silicon in the last several ARCHOS tablets, so it was a surprise to see the processor go unnamed. We're still digging to find more details, but it's described as a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor, with the aforementioned Mali-400 GPU. Given the last gen nature of the GPU, I imagine that the application processor is most likely of the ARM Cortex-A9 variety, somewhat similar to a higher clocked Samsung Exynos 4210. 

On the software front, this will be the first Jelly Bean tablet we've seen from ARHOS. Their software engineers have no doubt pushed themselves to the brink to bring the same media-centric features we've come to expect to, not just a new Android version, but also a new SoC. They've built a scheme for mapping the hardware buttons to soft buttons in games that aren't compatible with gamepads. 

So, is tablet gaming ready for a more dedicated device than we've seen in the past? We'll certainly be glad to find out. 

We're seeing a true shift in the mobile market to including SSDs in more of the market spectrum. What was once the domain of $1500+ laptops is now being pushed well into sub-$1000 territory, and good 128GB SSDs are generally available for under $100 now. If you need capacity, it's still hard to beat hard drives, but for fast storage SSDs are the way to go and have been for a few years. Along with the transition to faster and better SSDs, we're also seeing smaller mSATA SSDs.

Up until now, the largest mSATA SSDs have topped out at 240GB/256GB, but Mushkin is now announcing their 480GB SF-2281 based Atlas mSATA drive. What's particularly interesting is that this may be the first 16GB NAND die we've seen; we're trying to confirm that, but it would make sense considering the capacity and form factor. Update: Nope! It looks like Mushkin is using a stacked daughterboard--thanks to PaulJeff for the image link in the comments to TweakTown's review.

Ultrabooks and ultraportables in general are set to benefit from the presence of higher capacity mSATA SSDs. While many users can get by with 128GB or 256GB of storage, another class of users can routinely fill up 256GB SSDs and then some. A quick look at my Users folder on my primary desktop reveals I'm using 150GB just for my normal data (documents, images, videos, music, email, etc.) Add in my Program Files and Windows directories and that's another 80GB. Obviously I'm not a typical user, but if I were to try and go pure SSD while keeping all of my data on one drive, I'd definitely need more 256GB--and as Anand showed earlier this week, having more spare area available will only help improve the consistency of performance.

Specifications for the new Atlas mSATA drive are what you would expect from a modern SandForce 480GB offering. Trim, ECC, SATA 6Gbps, upgradeable firmware, and all the other usual suspects are present. Mushkin is using "high speed MLC NAND", just like virtually every other modern consumer SSD, and the Atlas comes with a 3-year limited warranty. Max read speed is 540MBps, write is 425MBps, with 78K random read IOS and 28K random write IOPS. It uses the MO-300 mSATA form factor (50.80 x 29.85 x 4.85mm). Availability is expected in January with an MSRP of $500. That's higher than 2.5" 480GB SF-2281 drives by $50-$150, but that's the price we pay for smaller form factors.

TeamViewer is one of those applications that some people have heard about and love, while others have no idea what it is. At its core, TeamViewer is a remote control utility for Windows and OS X computers—and unlike Windows Remote Assistance (WRA), in my experience it works well and it’s extremely easy to get connected.

I first stumbled on TeamViewer when I couldn’t get WRA working to help my mom with a computer problem; trying to explain to a computer neophyte how to start WRA, save an invitation file, find the file they just saved, then email the file is not exactly a simple process. What makes it truly frustrating is when you go through all the steps and then the connection still doesn’t work. When WRA does work, I have no complaints, but my experience has been very hit or miss.

After trying for a few hours to get WRA working, I gave up and started looking for other options, and that’s when I found TeamViewer. Literally 15 minutes later, I had connected to the other laptop, fixed the problem (which involved making some registry edits), and we were done. The quick connect options on TeamViewer was particularly handy, as it skips past the installation process and lets you get straight to helping someone.

Long story short, after having used TeamViewer to help several friends and family members over the past month, I received a press release announcing the new TeamViewer 8 with Windows 8 support (available as of December 4). With Windows 8 adding a few new items to the mix—e.g. the Start Screen and Charms Bar—TeamViewer has been updated to provide access to these items through its menus. It might seem like a minor thing, but given the UI overhaul in Windows 8 it’s something that will likely prove necessary. Windows 8 isn’t the only OS with new features; on OS X, Retina displays are now supported. TeamViewer also has their remote access app available on iOS, Android, and Windows RT

The above features are available in all versions of TeamViewer 8. For the non-free (e.g. Business, Premium, and Corporate) versions, other new additions include an improved user management interface, connection reporting of all sessions, browser-based connections, session handover, improved remote printing (VPN is no longer required), deeper MS Outlook integration, transmission of remote sound and video (video will require a fair amount of bandwidth, naturally), and enhanced session recordings.

TeamViewer’s Magdalena Brzakala (Public Relations Manager), Andre Schindler (Business Development Manager), and Tom Carpenter (Account Manager) took some time today to run me through some of the new features, and basically everything worked as expected. The fully licensed version, while expensive, also adds some functionality that I can certainly see as being useful for IT shops in particular, as well as telecommuters or those who need access to their home data and documents. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest TeamViewer is unique in any of these areas, but I can say that it has worked well when I needed it and it’s definitely one of those utilities I now keep in my software toolkit.

In my Nexus 4 review, I noted that the device was the first shipping handset to include support for SlimPort via an Analogix ANX7808 SlimPort transmitter. When I wrote that review it wasn't immediately clear what advantages SlimPort offered over MHL, which has become relatively ubiquitous in the year or so since its introduction. Since then I've acquired the SlimPort microUSB to HDMI 1.4 SP1002 and VGA (D-SUB) SP2002 adapters from Analogix for testing out SlimPort on the Nexus 4.

SlimPort is a new video output standard which works over microUSB, and is effectively an MHL alternative based on the DisplayPort standard administered by VESA. SlimPort is offered both license and royalty free, and supports up to 1080p60 or 1080p30 with 3D content over HDMI 1.4 (up to 5.4 Gbps of bandwidth), in addition to support for DVI, VGA (up to 1366x768 and 720p at 60 Hz), and DisplayPort. What's different about SlimPort from a user-facing perspective is that external microUSB power is not required for the adapter to work and is instead only required for optional charging. At the same time, the adapters draw no power from the source to operate. 

SlimPort over USB - From Analogix SlimPort Whitepaper (PDF)

I've spent some time playing around with the SP1002 HDMI adapter, which I believe is based on ANX7730, and the SP2002 VGA adapter, which is likely based on ANX9832. As of this writing, the Analogix SP1002 adapter is available on Amazon for around $30 USD. I haven't seen the SP2002 available online anywhere yet, however.

When connected to the Nexus 4, the HDMI adapter rotates the UI into landscape and mirrors the display just as expected. Resolution is scaled to 1080p60 on the Nexus 4 up from the panel resolution of 1280x768, which results in some letterboxing. As expected there's no requirement to have microUSB power connected to the adapter, I tested it with and without external microUSB power, all this does is just enable charging.

I posted a video review (shot on the Samsung Galaxy Camera) demonstrating the Nexus 4 doing mirroring with the SlimPort SP1002 adapter and received a query about whether the combo enables multichannel audio over HDMI as well. I tested VLC for Android with some .MKVs I had laying around with 5.1 AAC tracks and found that VLC will decode the multichannel audio and ship it over as 5.1 PCM to my A/V Receiver, so this does work, surprisingly enough. There's no bitstreaming support as far as I can tell, however. As an aside I was able to playback a number of 720p MKVs with hardware decoding checked in VLC for Android and 5.1 audio out with no dropped frames. The Nexus 4 seems to be a passable platform if you're looking to play the occasional 720p video over HDMI — provided you have the free storage for it.

I also tested out the SP2002 microUSB SlimPort to VGA adapter, which has a longer cable and correspondingly beefier module for accommodating the D-SUB connector on the end. I tried with a Dell G2410 LCD display and XGA resolution DLP projector and saw an output resolution of VGA (640x480 at 60 Hz), which wasn't quite what I expected. The SP2002 should work just fine with 720p60 over VGA, and I know both monitors expose the proper EDID, it seems as though the Nexus 4 just defaults to this mode. Just like the HDMI adapter there's a microUSB port on the back for optional charging, though the dongle doesn't require external power to operate. 

Thus far I'm fairly impressed with SlimPort. I enjoyed discrete microHDMI connections on devices when that was the norm, though finding a microHDMI to HDMI cable was always the challenge. Later MHL seemed a step in the right direction, but requiring three cables to do display mirroring seemed like a bit much. With SlimPort I think we've finally arrived at something close to ideal with the standard not requiring external power to function. It will be interesting to see how SlimPort, MHL, and Miracast adoption fare in the coming year as mirroring to a larger display is in the cards as a convergence trend for smartphones and tablets. 

Source: SlimPort (SlimPort Connect)

Yesterday, Qualcomm announced a new SoC for its Snapdragon S4 Play category, the MSM8x26, and alongside it a new transceiver, WTR2605. The announcement was a little light on detail and I waited until confirmation of a few details, but now know more about these two new parts geared at the growing entry-level Chinese handset market.

First off, MSM8x26 is a 28nm SoC consisting of four ARM Cortex A7 CPUs running at (1.2 GHz) alongside an Adreno 305 GPU. This is to my knowledge the first Qualcomm SoC using a Cortex A7 for CPU, previously we've seen a lot of Cortex A5 use at Qualcomm in parts like MSM8x25 (dual A5s), MSM8x25Q (quad A5s), and also onboard baseband as an optional AP for managing things like a router. MSM8x26 is the spiritual successor to MSM8x25Q, which was again quad core ARM Cortex A5s at 45nm with Adreno 203 graphics. MSM8x26 should bring a nice jump in performance on both CPU and GPU over that part, in addition to supporting 1080p video encode and decode, and support for 13 MP cameras. MSM8x26 will come in two flavors, 8226 with UMTS and TD-SCDMA, and 8626 with UMTS, CDMA, and TD-SDCMA, consistent with Qualcomm's part numbering scheme. 

The other part of the story is the new transceiver, WTR2605, whose name suggests a wafer-level package (W for wafer) and includes necessary improvements to accommodate dual SIM active and standby modes (DS-DS operation) popular in the entry level Chinese market MSM8x26 is geared at. I don't know anything further about the WTR2605 or how it compares in terms of RF ports to WTR1605L, which is Qualcomm's current flagship transceiver, but suspect it's an evolution of that design with changes to accommodate the dual SIM modes. We'll have a piece ready later in the week about WTR1605 and the state of Qualcomm's modem portfolio.

Source: Qualcomm

Continuing their work on the 12.11 drivers, AMD has recently released their 12.11 beta 11 driver update. This driver fixes several system hangs while including the previous improvements to performance found in Beta 8. In particular, the driver notes call out to a performance upgrade for Far Cry 3. Here are the direct links to the various drivers:

AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11 Driver for Windows Vista/7/8
AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11 Driver for Windows Vista/7/8 - with .NET 4 Support
AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11 Driver for Linux
AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2

AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta Release Notes

• Improves performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
• Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
• Resolves an intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in a CrossFire Eyefinity setup.
• Resolves image corruption found in certain DirectX 9.0c titles
• Resolve missing fonts issue in XBMC
• Resolves no video issue found in Media Player Classic Home Cinema when using full or half floating point processing
• Resolves stability issues found in the previous AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta8 driver for Linux
• For users experiencing issues with HDMI Audio under Ubuntu 12.04, users should try installing the “dkms-hda - 0.201211291615~precise1” package from  https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-audio-dev/+archive/alsa-daily/+packages and reboot; this will resolve the HDMI Audio issue found in Ubuntu 12.04
• AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 has just been released, and should be used in conjunction with AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11
  • Improves Far Cry 3 performance for single GPU configurations with AA enabled

Seeking a candidate for WHQL certification, NVIDIA has just released their 310.70 beta driver update for desktops and laptops. The driver continues to iterate on the 310.33 beta driver, which focused on improving performance for various games while updating SLI and Ambient Occlusion profiles. This driver update has come less than a week after NVIDIA’s 310.64 update, which focused on improvements for the newly released Far Cry 3.

The driver notes specifically call out improved performance over the 310.64 beta driver for Far Cry 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Assassin’s Creed III, and Battlefield 3. The driver also adds TXAA support to Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Assassin's Creed III (while resolving a shadow flickering issue in the latter) and continues to add SLI profiles for several games. Additionally, there are various “Driver Not Responding” errors that should no longer occur. Here are the direct links to the various drivers:

Desktop 32-bit Windows Vista/7/8
Desktop 64-bit Windows Vista/7/8
Mobile 32-bit Windows Vista/7/8
Mobile 64-bit Windows Vista/7/8

In both of our MacBook Pro with Retina Display reviews (13-inch & 15-inch), I pointed out a big downside to the user experience today: UI performance in some applications is significantly reduced compared to non-Retina models. I couldn't find a direct cause for the issue, just that whatever work Apple does to make OS X look like OS X ends up requiring quite a bit of CPU power, and the workload scales with resolution. I've seen this in applications like Mail and Safari, although it's present in more than just that. 

In our 13-inch rMBP review I proposed a couple of solutions: 1) a dramatic increase in single-threaded CPU performance, and/or 2) software improvements (e.g. the move to Mountain Lion for example shifted more animation workload over to the GPU, improving scrolling performance vs. Lion on rMBPs). 

Last week I received a tip (thanks Joan!) pointing me at a Macrumors post claiming that the latest nightly builds of WebKit fixed scrolling performance on the rMBP. I grabbed a build (r135516 - it's no longer the latest build but I assume the later builds also contain the fix) and tried it out on the 13-inch rMBP. Scrolling down my Facebook news feed ended up being one of the best showcases for poor scrolling performance on the rMBPs, so that's obviously the first test I ran. As always I used Quartz Debug to measure UI frame rate. First, here's what the average frame rate looked like using the latest version of Safari on Mountain Lion with the 13-inch rMBP running at the scaled 1440 x 900 setting:

13-inch rMBP, 1440 x 900 scaled setting, Safari Version 6.0.2 (8536.26.17)

Average frame rates end up being around 20 fps, with dips down as low as 17 fps. Now here's the same test but using the r135516 WebKit build:

13-inch rMBP, 1440 x 900 scaled setting, WebKit Nightly r135516 Safari Version 6.0.2 (8536.26.17, 537+)

Performance is more than doubled! Scrolling is so much smoother. I also ran tests on pages that previously worked fine (e.g. the AnandTech front page) and performance hadn't changed there. I haven't managed to figure out exactly what's changed in the codebase to improve performance so much but it's appreciable.

For those of you who are early adopters of Retina MBPs, there looks to be some hope that we might see software solutions to improving UI performance. The real question is when we'll see these types of improvements rolled into OS X. 

This isn't major news, but I find the periodic updates to the 3DMark suite at least interesting if only to see what Futuremark is up to. They have released a trailer showing a portion of the next 3DMark, dubbed Fire Strike. Designed to push the envelope in terms of rendering quality and techniques, Fire Strike makes use of a variety of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, dynamic particle illumination and shadowing, smoke simulation using grid-based fluid dynamics, volume ray casting with shadows, and a wide variety of post processing effects including depth of field, blooms, distortions and various lens effects.

Futuremark didn't indicate the name of the next 3DMark release, but they're promising a release before the end of 2012 so the clock is ticking. It is designed to provide a unified benchmark suite for testing everything from tablets to notebooks to desktops, including support for Windows RT, Android, and iOS.

The Fire Strike benchmark is targeting the high performance desktops rather than tablets, with other benchmarks for DX10 and DX9 level devices. Cloud Gate will handle the DX10 duties, with Ice Storm being the cross platform "DX9" level test. On Windows, it will use a DX11 engine limited to DX9 level features, whereas Android and iOS will use OpenGL ES 2.0. The scores will be comparable cross-platform.

You can see the full 3DMark Fire Strike trailer on YouTube, and if you have a high-res qHD or qWXGA display you can even view it at the original resolution of 2560x1440 (albeit with compression artifacts). We should have the final release for testing and evaluation some time in the next month, and it will be nice to have another graphics test outside of GLBenchmark to add to our suite, especially since we'll have comparison points between the three major mobile OSes.

Today's podcast covers two major topics: the rumored BGA-only version of Intel's Broadwell (2014/2015) CPU and Qualcomm's disclosures at its recent analyst day. The Broadwell BGA topic spawned a pretty big discussion about the future of the DIY desktop PC market, including speculation about the return of software unlockable CPU upgrades. On the Qualcomm side, Brian gives us the first details of the upcoming Krait 300 core.

The AnandTech Podcast - Episode 12
featuring Anand Shimpi, Brian Klug & Dr. Ian Cutress

iTunes
RSS - mp3, m4a
Direct Links - mp3, m4a

Total Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

Outline - hh:mm

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated. 

We're back! Brian and I recorded this one just after the holidays last week. Despite there not being a lot going on release wise, we had a bunch to talk about. Brian gave us updates on his experience with the Lumia 920, Droid DNA and Samsung's Galaxy Camera. I talk a bit about what the future holds for driving smartphone costs down, and we both talked about Nintendo's Wii U.

The AnandTech Podcast - Episode 11
featuring Anand Shimpi & Brian Klug

iTunes
RSS - mp3, m4a
Direct Links - mp3, m4a

Total Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Outline - hh:mm

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated. 

Last month I reviewed Microsoft's Surface RT tablet, and came away generally impressed. The form factor and attention to detail were both much better than expected from Microsoft. The integration of the touch/type covers into the design was very well executed in my opinion. That being said, Surface RT seemed to me like a great start but not the perfect product. I would love to see a Cortex A15 based version with some minor tweaks. We'll likely get that next year, but before then there's one more Surface tablet that we'll meet: the Surface Pro.

Surface RT is Microsoft's Windows RT (Windows on ARM) launch vehicle, while Surface Pro is based on Intel x86 hardware. Despite the funny wording in today's blog post, Surface Pro uses an Ivy Bridge based Core i5 (ULV) processor with Intel HD 4000 graphics. Contrary to what I assumed initially, Surface Pro will launch with a 17W Ivy Bridge CPU - so this is the same chip you'll find in modern Ultrabooks. Without a doubt we'll see a Haswell version sometime next year, but not at launch. I wondered if we might see Microsoft use Intel's upcoming 10W Ivy Bridge, but at this point that seems unlikely.

Surface Pro keeps the same display size, but increases tablet thickness by 43% over the RT version. Weight is also up by half a pound. Screen resolution goes up as well, at 1920 x 1080. Memory capacity also increases to 4GB, and Surface Pro comes with much more NAND on-board. With a 7-series chipset you get SATA support, so my money is on Surface Pro having a full blown SSD inside instead of something eMMC based.

Battery capacity goes up to 42Wh, an increase of 33%, putting it about on par with the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. Charger size also goes up to 48W compared to 24W with the RT version. Update: Microsoft announced via its Surface Twitter account that the Pro version would offer roughly half the battery life of Surface RT. Without S0ix support, Surface Pro should look a lot like a standard Ultrabook when it comes to battery life. If you want the best of both worlds, Haswell will be what you'll need to wait for.

The big news is we now have pricing for Surface Pro: $899 for the 64GB model and $999 for the 128GB model, both available in January 2013. Both versions come with a Surface pen, but neither includes a touch or type cover. Microsoft's Surface Pro pricing is clearly higher than any other ARM based tablet, but I'd look at it more as an Ultrabook/MacBook Air alternative. I'll reserve final judgement for when I get my hands on a review sample, but I'm pretty interested to see how the Pro does in our tests. This could end up being one of the better Ultrabooks. I do wish Microsoft had thrown in a touch or type cover into the bundle though, that would make it a real alternative to a standard Ultrabook without having to pay for anything else. It is entirely possible that Microsoft is banking on notebook users bringing a more traditional keyboard and mouse for work though.

The other big omission is the lack of Thunderbolt support. I don't know what it is with Microsoft's crusade against Thunderbolt (the port is no longer on Acer's W700 either), but I think that's a big mistake. Surface Pro would be a great platform for Thunderbolt in my opinion.

For full specs check out the Surface Pro on Microsoft's site.

In our review of Samsung's SSD 840 Pro I noted that my drive died shortly after I completed testing. Samsung sent me a replacement, which also stopped working (although it still pulled current) after a couple of days. Kristian's Samsung SSD 840 review sample shared a similar fate.

I spoke with Samsung about this problem a couple of weeks ago and was told that there was a bug in the pre-production firmware (version 2B0Q/5B0Q for 840 Pro/840) loaded on our drives. All retail samples should ship with a newer firmware revision (3B0Q/6B0Q) that have this bug fixed. To confirm what firmware revision is on your drive, look at the end of the hardware id string for the SSD in Device Manager.

Samsung sent me an 840 Pro with the updated firmware and so far I haven't had any issues. I'm trying to retrace my steps in bricking the drive and things are looking good thus far. As always, if things change I will  update you all.