The picture above shows three pairs of twins, but apparently there are only three real people, and the rest are all Skynet’s spies to understand us humans more, before slaughtering us all. They’re called the Geminoids, lifelike robots created by professors Hiroshi Ishiguro and Henrik Scharfe in their image and that of one other willing assistant, all of whom got together for a little photo op last month. Gosh, is the next person beside me even real?
Get ready for some bombardment from AMD in the netbook and ultraportable laptops, and nettops market. Previously known to be shipping at Q3 of this year, AMD has surprisingly announced that their new 32nm Llano APU processor has just shipped off to OEM manufacturers. In fact, AMD’s Singapore plant just celebrated the first shipment of the company’s 32nm Llano A-series APUs, complete with discrete-level graphics.
Of course, just because these chips are headed out to OEM partners doesn’t mean that they’ll be gracing the pages of your favorite PC maker tomorrow; Chief Financial Officer and Interim CEO Thomas Seifert notes that AMD is looking forward to seeing Llano-based machines during this quarter, but given that Q2 just got going, we may be waiting awhile still for a month or two.
When it comes to low-end graphic card market, they always get last from the introduction of a new generation. Then again, graphic card manufacturers somehow are struggling to keep things in place in this low-end sector. You have AMD’s Radeon HD5450, which is considered one of the most perfect HTPC graphic cards out there. But then again Intel’s HD3000 embedded graphics is capable of going neck to neck at time. So how does AMD go and outperform their already great HD5450 in such a crowded market?
The Radeon HD6450 is codenamed Caicos, and is one of the last two Northern Island GPU families from AMD. It’s still using the same 40nm process TSMC, but with some of the improved features from the HD 6000 series cards. The numbers of processors are doubled from 80 to 160, and there’s now support for GDDR5. Of course, there’ll be two version of the card, a GDDR3 HD6450 and GDDR5 HD6450, to cut cost and have prices driven down.
For the GDDR5 6450 the core clock is 750MHz and the memory clock is 900MHz (3.6GHz data rate), making it 100MHz faster than the HD5450 and having over twice the memory bandwidth too.
With the new display controller comes a new set of output options for the 6450. The 6450 has gained both DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a compliance. The former is going to make it very easy to drive three digital displays from a 6450—cards almost universally come with a VGA port as the 3rd display otherwise. The latter is going to make it possible to drive 120Hz TVs at 120Hz for 3D content, primarily for Blu-ray 3D given the limited rendering capabilities of the 6450.
AMD has put the MSRP of the 6450 at $55. This will cover both the 512MB GDDR5 and 1GB DDR3 varieties. Pricing of low-end cards rarely toes the line, so expect prices to be all over the place in two weeks’ time.
If you didn’t know, Amazon has a cloud music player for Android, and Google has been keeping quiet for some time now. However, the ‘Tech From 10’ website somehow managed to receive a developer version of the Android Market, which allowed it to download Android Music 3.0 and try it out for themselves.
Things are almost identical to the existing Android Music player in terms of appearance, while the settings menu has expectedly been augmented with various streaming-related options. Android Market itself has also apparently been tweaked slightly, and the developer version included a few other surprises as well, including new camera and desk clock apps.
The download is available at their site, but sadly though, that site is down at the moment, for reasons only Hobbits know. Maybe Larry Page is biting their Internet cable.
Apparently the nation of Georgia and Armenian received a huge Internet sabotage due to a very bad luck. Internet outage lasted for 12 hours, but there’s no issue with the country’s backbone, and there’s no undersea cable that got damaged. How the hell the Internet got disconnected all of a sudden?
Well, all these were performed by a 75-year old lady from Georgia. While foraging for copper wire near her home in the village of Ksani, the unnamed septuagenarian managed to come across a critical fiber optic cable, one responsible for serving internet connectivity to “90 percent of private and corporate internet users in Armenia” and some in her own country as well. Her swift strike at the heart of said bit-transferring pipeline resulted in all those folks being thrown offline for a solid 12 hours, while the Georgian Railway Telecom worked to find and correct the fault. Sure took them by a massive surprise, and one might even think of this as a late April Fool joke.
In spite of her relatively benign motivations, the lady now faces three years in prison for the damage she caused. Crude? Can’t really say that as she did ‘sabotage’ the whole nation’s critical infrastructure.
Not an unusual encounter, Asus and Lamborghini have yet again teamed up for yet another new round of bloody expensive laptops with very odd shapes and some raw powers ready to tear Crysis 2. The raging bull has supplied design touches to various Asus laptops over the past few years, and this marks the seventh generation of car/computer collaboration. Yes, it’s been seven generations. Called the VX7 and inspired by the latest Aventador from Italy, this Asus laptop features leather-lined palm-rests, a Lamborghini logo atop the clamshell lid and a set of Lambo-inspired taillights out back. And that’s just the looks.
Available in Orange or Carbon Fiber, the VX7 utilizes a 2.0-GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM quad-core processor, and boasts 16GB of RAM. Yes, they don’t care if you need it. And the chip that’s going to drive your Crysis 2 adventure is this magnificent GeForce GTX 460M graphics card with 3GB of dedicated memory, and there’s a Blu-Ray combo drive and a massive 1.5-TB of storage thanks to a dual hard-drive setup. There’s more, a 2.0 megapixel webcam, an 8-in-1 card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, one USB 3.0 port, two speakers, a HDMI output, and an 8-cell battery.
Like any self-respecting machine carrying the Lamborghini badge, this bad boy won’t come cheap – the pre-order asking price is €1,995. Yet again Asus defines ‘overkill’ in an elegant manner. Well, what you pay is what you get.
Very anticipating for the Samsung Galaxy S II to arrive? Well we have good news and bad news for all you Sammy fans. GSM Arena is reporting that Samsung has decided to upgrade the phone’s dual-core processor from 1GHz to 1.2GHz, something that was first revealed on Samsung Estonia’s Facebook page and has apparently be confirmed by GSM Arena itself from an “internal source.” The bad news is that it seems you’ll also have to deal with a bit of a delay. Some UK retailers are now listing a release date of May 6th, while Samsung India has tweeted that the phone’s global launch has been delayed by “at least” a month, and that it won’t roll out before June. Then again, this only affects the version that comes with Orion processor, as the Tegra 2 version is reported to be on track for launch. Last minute desperate modification? For what? Dual-core is already very powderful right now.
Ever wonder how to the deep blue sea looks like? We can always go diving at Redang and Sabah, but those sea-beds with white sand cannot be compared with the real deal that’s over thousands of feet under sea level.
More men have walked on the moon then diving into the depth of our blue planet. We’ve yet to explore completely what’s in our planet, so what makes us qualify to explore the space?
After letting everyone afford to fly among the clouds with the low-cost airline Virgin Airline, today, Sir Richard Branson, American sailor, pilot and explorer Chris Welsh, and submarine designer Graham Hawkes launched Virgin Oceanic, a project to explore “the last frontiers of our own Blue Planet: the very bottom of our seas.” . Of course, this won’t be a low-cost cruise.
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