AMD today launches the Radeon HD 7970, its first graphics card built at a 28nm production process and the first member of its Southern Islands family of GPUs. As its name suggests, the HD 7970 is the replacement for AMD’s fastest single-GPU graphics card to date, the HD 6970. The new card increases transistor count from 2.6b to 4.3b, cranks the engine clock speed up from 880MHz to 925MHz, and adds 33 percent more Stream processors, jumping from 1,536 to 2,048. VRAM is also up from 2GB to 3GB — with a 384-bit memory interface for a bandwidth of 264GBps — but the most important change is in internal architecture, with the new Graphics Core Next setup promising to untap the card’s potential to perform more computational tasks (i.e. GPGPU) without sacrificing any of its gaming prowess.

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Whenever Gresso’s not crafting expensive new threads for iDevices, the company makes its own featurephones from the finest materials mother nature has to offer. The new Grand Premiere is the latest from the company’s Avantgarde collection and carries on this incongruous tradition. Its frame and keys are made from more than five ounces of 18-carat gold, with numbers and letters laser-etched on its sapphire crystal skin. We don’t know the internals of the 12mm-thin candybar, but we do know it’s running Symbian S40 and is probably packing anemic hardware like other Gressos we’ve seen — you’re paying for exclusivity and the shiny stuff, not benchmarking abilities, after all. Only 30 Grand Premiere’s will be made at $50,000 pop, so all you conspicuous consumers with money to burn better move fast. Wouldn’t want to be the only luddite at the yacht club without luxury handset, would you?

SOURCE via CNET

Sony is a little hot under the collar after a recent wave of stories regarding some bugs that allegedly beguiled the first wave of PS Vita owners. As you may recall, reports were pouring in that many customers were experiencing freeze ups and other performance issues with their new handhelds, prompting Sony to issue an apology. Well, it seems as if something got lost in translation. A UK spokesperson for the company told the Guardian that the statement was actually apologizing to customers experiencing difficulty getting through to tech support, not for the screen issues that have been the subject of many a YouTube video. He went on to say that Sony has seen no evidence of widespread problems with the portable gaming device, though, there was firmware update made immediately available to address some bugs.

SOURCE via The Guardian

Google’s famous for its broad range of products. What started as a search company now includes email, a mobile OS, a laptop OS, a browser, a social network, and much, much more. Now, it seems Google is contemplating the addition of a pair of smart glasses to the list.

The New York Times kicked rumors off this week with a story that says both Apple and Google are working on wearable technology, with the ultimate goal being to shift more smartphones. NYT says that Google is working on its solution at its Google X Labs facility, while Apple is busying itself with an iPod Nano-like watch. Since then, 9to5Google has chimed in with its own two cents about what Google is planning.

According to the Google-centric site, Google is working on heads-up displays. The company points to the fact that “prominent wearables PhD Richard DuVaul”  moved from Apple to Google in June and that the good doctor’s research is focused on wearable HUDs. 9to5′s Seth Weintraub cites a source that says Mountain View is in the late prototype stages of a wearable glasses that look similar to ‘thick-rimmed glasses “normal people” wear’ but also incorporate a display with a heads up computer interface and a small number of buttons on the arms of the glasses.

According to Weintraub, these glasses are not an Android peripheral. Instead, it’s likely they’ll run a version of Android and feature transparent LCD or AMOLED in place of glass lenses. The glasses will directly communicate with the cloud via IP but could also make use of a phone’s internet connection via WiFi or Bluetooth 4.0.

Google has not commented on the rumors, and there’s no information regarding the release of such a device, but we’ll keep you posted.

While SSDs remain considerably more expensive than hard drives on a per GB level, the flash-based storage devices are coming down in prices much faster than HDDs have.

According to the data released, SSD memory cost 120 times as much as HDD memory in 2007, but only 32 times as much in 2011. The average price for a HDD per GB was $0.075 in 2011, the SSD cost $2.42 per GB. The lowest per GB price for a SSD was $1.50, while HDD could be purchased for $0.053 per GB. According to Pingdom, the 2011 average price per GB for the SSD is about the same as it was for HDD in 2002. SSDs are expected to be priced at about $1 per GB sometime in the second half of next year.

Despite the rapid price decline, it is unlikely that SSDs will be matching the price level of hard drives anytime soon unless hard drive technology will hit a substantial physical barrier. That barrier has been pushed out continuously for as long as modern hard drive has existed. The most recent increase in capacities has been driven by perpendicular magnetic recording technology and it appears that heat-assisted magnetic recording could surface in 2013 or 2014 to push the limits even further. Seagate, for example, believes that heat assisted recording will increase the maximum storage density of perpendicular magnetic recording by at least 50x.

SOURCE via Pingdom

It’s yet another lawsuit, but, this time, it is the kind that you simply expected and would say that Sony asked for it.

A class action lawsuit targets a clause in the PlayStation Network (PSN) terms of service that states users cannot sue Sony. The suit alleges that the company engages in “unfair business practices” by forcing users to give up their right to file a suit. The other choice is, of course, to deny that requirement and not be admitted to the PSN, which is a default feature of the PS3 game console.

There are some other issues with Sony’s shady move, the suit claims: For example, the new clause has been buried at the bottom of the terms of use, which is not easily accessible and rarely read given the inconvenient scrolling feature of the PSN interface.

In September of this year, Sony updated the terms of service following a catastrophic breach of the PSN, which reportedly exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and logins of more than 77 million users.

Sony has not commented on the lawsuit yet.

SOURCE via Gamespot

Google’s chairman told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the company will be releasing a “high quality” tablet within six months and continue the “brutal competition” with Apple in the mobile communications market. Schmidt also commented on Apple’s Siri, mentioning that Google has the technology to do something similar, and hinted that the company will have such a product in the future.

With Motorola on board, Google should have the capability to deliver its vision of a capable tablet, which has been rumored to be in the works for well over a year. Apple is expected to release its iPad 3 early next year with a major update for its display as well as software integration with an also speculated Apple HDTV. Google will have to follow Apple in hardware specs as well as software experience that will have to include a significant improvement of Google TV.

In Corriere della Sera, Schmidt also commented on Google X and its most critical area of research, the self-driving car. According to Schmidt, that car will not be available for years or even a decade due to regulatory hurdles. Initially, that car may be released as a driver-assistance system that informs the driver what it intends to do.

SOURCE via Corriere della Sera