Asian LEADER 31
1 Jan - 14 Jan 2014
AMD works on cheaper video cards
I
t appears that Advanced
Micro Devices (AMD)
will soon offer two new
graphics cards that will sit
in the USD 179 and lower
price segment. The two
new products will carry the
Radeon R9 255 and Radeon R9 260 trade names and
will most likely be used in
pre-built computers that
are supposed to be “gaming ready”.
Let’s face it
though – these
two graphics
cards will not be
speed monsters
although they
carry the “R9”
moniker in their
names. The R9
255 is based
on 28 nm Cape
Verde silicon and
comes with 512
stream proces-
sors and 32 TMUs at 930
MHz and up to 2 GB of
VRAM at 6.5 GHz, accessed over a 128-bit bus
and offering 104 GB of
bandwidth. The card will
not be that power hungry requiring power from
a 6-pin PCIe connector,
which is good news.
The R9 260 will be a little
more powerful offering a
Bonaire GPU on 28 nm
silicon, 896 stream processors and 56 TMUs at 1100
MHz, up to 2 GB of VRAM
at 6.5 GHz accessed over
a 128-bit bus and offering
104 GB of bandwidth. This
one also draws power from
a single PCIe power connector.
Both cards are now fully
supported in the latest
13.12 Catalyst
drivers although
the exact date
of their market
release and their
pricing are still
unknown.
Toshiba to release
13.3-inch Chromebook
T
he Japanese tech company Toshiba is
getting ready to release its first notebook driven by Google’s Chrome OS. The
new device will come with a 13.3inch display at 1366 x 768 pixels
and will have a chassis that is 20
mm thick with total weight of 1.35
kilograms.
The so called Toshiba Chromebook will have an Intel Celeron
2955U Haswell processor at 1.4
GHz with built-in Intel HD graphics. The rest of the specs include
2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal
flash memory, a SDXC/SDHC
card reader, 802.11n Wi-Fi, two
USB 3.0 ports, a HDMI port and a
battery that can power the device
for up to 9 hours.
The Toshiba Chromebook will debut at
CES 2014 next month. It will be released in
the USA first where it will cost USD 279.
Samsung to present next
generation Exynos chips
T
he upcoming CES
2014 will become the
place where numerous
new technologies will be
unveiled. According to the
latest information this will
als o hold true for Samsung,
which will debut its next
generation Exynos processors at the upcoming tech
exhibition.
Unfortunately there is
virtually no information on
the upcoming processor(s)
except that the new chip
family will support eight
cores, Heterogeneous
Multi-Processing (HMP)
technology and most likely
64-bit support. This is
crucial to Samsung and
developers as the use of 64bit instructions will remove
the 4 GB limit 32-bit devices suffer, in addition it will
put the company next to
giants such as Apple, LG,
MediaTek and others that
have started employing 64bit technology already.
This information has
been leaked by the Samsung channel in Twitter so it can be deemed
legitimate and accurate. If
everything goes well then
we should expect a new
breed of high-performance
Samsung chips next year.
Jolla smartphone now sells in Europe
F
or years and years the
smartphone world has
been occupied by Android
and iOS, by giants like
Samsung and Apple or
even Nokia. But now it is
time for something different – a small but brave
company hailing from
Finland has released an
all-new smartphone – the
Jolla Sailfish.
Jolla Sailfish packs
most of the hardware you
would expect to see from
a modern smartphone but
there’s more to it – it runs
the Sailfish OS, based
on MeeGo software – the
core of what was to be a
future OS powering Nokia
smartphones. What’s even
more interesting is that
despite the OS difference
Jolla claims you can use
Android apps on the Sailfish with ease.
As to the hardware
inside the Jolla Sailfish
comes with a 4.5-inch 540
x 960 pixel display, a dualcore 1.4 GHz Qualcomm
Snapdragon 400 processor and 1 GB of RAM.
The new smartphone also
has an 8 MP rear camera
and a 2 MP front camera.
16 GB of internal memory
provide storage and endusers can also choose
among a few colors for
the smartphone. All this
is housed in a really chic
and modern chassis that
lacks front buttons.