Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Three cards from ASRock Z68

As already made some of its competitors, ASRock has unveiled several models of motherboards based on Intel chipset Z68: The Z68 Extreme4, Z68 and Z68 Pro3 Pro3-M. The first two are the ATX format while the latter is the micro ATX format. Designed for Sandy Bridge processors, these motherboards has four DDR3-2133 connectors, two (or four on Extreme4) 6 Gbps SATA ports, four SATA 3Gbps ports and Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 audio and USB 3.0.

Kingmax: 64 GB who are not afraid of water

The manufacturer Kingmax has announced the launch of a memory card SDXC fearing neither dust nor water (without specifying if it is resistant to immersion, or just splash). With a capacity of 64 GB, this card is certified and UHS Class 10-I is according to Kingmax capable of reaching speeds of around 65 MB / s read and 40MB / s write.

ExFAT formatted, it also supports technologies ECC (Error Correction Code) and CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media). Unfortunately the manufacturer has not yet indicated the price of this card.

MSI Wind Top AE2420 3D All in One PC, complete analysis

Intel was delivering with its CPU watercooling

A paper from Intel shows that the firm is studying the possibility of supplying cooling water with some of its processors. These systems are sold with Sandy Bridge processors E LGA2011 premium for overclockers. As a reminder, these chips should be available during the fourth quarter of this year and have a large cache to optimize each thread and a memory controller to four channels.

These processors are the most likely to benefit from a cooling system further. So a break with air systems that Intel relatively simple book boxes in versions of its processors. The question is whether this strategy is really interesting. The audience for the Sandy Bridge E has the knowledge to build your own water cooling system and often buys a processor OEM version and not boxed.

A substrate touchscreen world champion

AGC, otherwise known as the Glass Asachi, announced it has developed the glass substrate for touchscreen finest in the world. It has a thickness of 0.28 mm and is intended for smartphones and slates. To recall, the glass substrate is placed under the protective layer touch, as shown in diagram cons. AGS uses a substrate composed primarily of sodium oxide and silicon dioxide to form a soda-lime glass previously used in the automotive world.

AMD profits, but down

AMD has released its results for the first quarter of the year. If they are not the same as those of Intel, the manufacturer, however, a new record quarter profit. Thus, the turnover reached 1.61 billion dollars, down 2% from the previous quarter but up 2% year on year. The net profit climbs on him to $ 510 million (or $ 0.68 per share) against $ 375 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Operating profit, however, that only amounts to $ 54 million, the difference from financial transactions related GlobalFoundries. In practice, these figures indicate that despite higher sales expectations of the first APU from AMD, the average price of manufacturer chips are down. As for GPU, the turnover is also down 3% from the previous quarter, reaching only 413 million dollars.

NVIDIA Optimus arrives on the Desktop

Nvidia will introduce its Desktop Optimus also known as Synergy. This technology will move from integrated graphics to dedicated card based applications. According to preliminary information we have, this technology would not be tied to the purchase of a license or a bullet. Any manufacturer could appeal.

This means that even AMD could use it, but we doubt very much that the firm should look to technology to its competitor. The Desktop is similar to Optimus Virtue LucidLogix. The system enters the integrated circuit to the dedicated adapter, and takes advantage of the Sandy Bridge QuickSync for encoding or decoding of video (see "Quick Sync: the secret weapon of the Sandy Bridge" As a reminder, this technology is to first appeared on laptops (see "NVIDIA Optimus switches between GPU and IGP).