Intel Corporation today took the wraps off its brand new, low-power, high-performance microarchitecture named Silvermont. The technology is aimed squarely at low-power requirements in market segments from smartphones to the data center. Silvermont will be the foundation for a range of innovative products beginning to come to market later this year, and will also be manufactured using the company's leading-edge, 22nm Tri-Gate SoC manufacturing process, which brings significant performance increases and improved energy efficiency.

"Silvermont is a leap forward and an entirely new technology foundation for the future that will address a broad range of products and market segments," said Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive vice president and chief product officer. "Early sampling of our 22nm SoCs, including "Bay Trail" and "Avoton" is already garnering positive feedback from our customers. Going forward, we will accelerate future generations of this low-power microarchitecture on a yearly cadence."

PNY Technologies, Inc. ("PNY") today announced the launch of a new high performance 5-Port Smart HDMI Switch with wireless remote, an ideal solution to expand the amount of HDMI ports available on an HDTV. The PNY 5-Port Smart HDMI Switch connects up to 5 HDMI devices via one HDMI port.

The new PNY 5-Port Smart HDMI Switch utilizes HDMI Smart Technology, featuring auto-switching from one device to another, LED indicators, and onboard manual switching control. The HDMI Switch is also powered to maintain superior signal quality with up to 1080p HD video playback. The included wireless remote allows for easily switching from one device to another. Users can connect multiple HDMI devices via a single HDMI output on their HDTV. The PNY 5-Port HDMI Switch easily connects to one HDMI port on an HDTV and converts to 5-HDMI inputs. Available in a matte black finish, with a sleek and slender aluminum frame of 4.38" x 3" x 1", this new HDMI Switch from PNY was designed to be a great enhancement to many of the HDTV's consumers own today.

Eurocom Corporation (eurocom.com), a developer of long lifespan, high performance, fully upgradable Notebooks and Mobile Workstations has been testing and benchmarking and is now launching the NVIDIA Quadro K5000M GPU with 1344 CUDA cores and 4GB GDDR5 graphics memory in its Panther 3.0 Mobile Workstation.

NVIDIA Quadro K5000M graphics are manufactured on the newest 28nm kepler based GPU architecture from NVIDIA. Featuring a long list of technologies such as PhysX, CUDA, DirectX 11 and OpenCL, the NVIDIA Quadro K5000M will offer next generation graphics performance for the EUROCOM Panther 3.0 Mobile Workstation.

Giada, a brand of Shenzhen Jiehe Technology Development, Co., Ltd, today announces the i53 Mini PC. With full HD 1080P video, high connectivity, support, and an attractive design, Giada's new book-sized i53 Mini PC is an ideal choice for home entertainment, web browsing, and document writing.

The i53 is based around Intel's Mobile HM76 Express chipset and Ivy Bridge technology platform. Even while offering great performance, this environmentally friendly PC only uses 35W.

PNY Technologies, Inc., a worldwide leader in USB flash drives and a leading manufacture in memory products, today announced the new PNY Transformer USB Flash Drive. This new product exhibits amazing engineering with the famous hook design made famous by the PNY Hook Attaché and can rotate 180 degrees and transform to change its form factor, hence giving itself the name “Transformer Attaché”.

PNY's new Transformer Attaché drive comes in high quality stainless steel with a polished and lustrous finish that gives it a professional look and also durable design. Unlike common plastic USB flash drives, the Transformer can easily handle rough use due to its resistance to wear and damage. It bears a corrugated, three dimensional line decor that exudes robustness as well as style.

Nonstop Technology from Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) finally delivers a hassle free computing experience by solving common PC hardware problems before they can even occur. A specially-devised testing regime – far stricter than common industry standards – combined with the highest quality components and shielding, ensures that ECS Nonstop certified motherboards can be relied on for stability and reliability far into the future.

For PC owners suffering crashes, instability and poor performance, ECS Nonstop motherboards can now deliver the stability, reliability and power that other manufacturers only promise. All ECS Black Series Motherboards are Nonstop certified, including these models: X79R-AX, X79R-AX deluxe, A990FXM-A, A990FXM-A Deluxe, A75F-A, H61H2-A2 Deluxe, Z77H2-AX, Z77H2-A2X, and Z77H2-A2X deluxe. Future Black Series Motherboards will adopt ECS Nonstop Technology, as well.

NVIDIA is readying a high-performance mobile GPU for a Computex 2012 unveiling. Called the GeForce GTX 680M, the chip is based on its trusty 28 nm GK104 silicon, but with about half its streaming multiprocessors disabled, resulting in a CUDA core count of around 768. Reference MXM boards of the chip could ship with memory options as high as 4 GB, across a 256-bit wide memory interface. With the right craftsmanship on the part of NVIDIA, the GTX 680M could end up with a power draw of 100W. A Chinese source had the opportunity to picture the reference board qualification sample, and put it through 3DMark 11, in which it was found to be roughly 37% faster than the GF114-based GeForce GTX 670M, scoring 4905 points in Performance preset. The test bed was driven by Intel Core i7-3720QM quad-core mobile processor.Source: VideoCardz

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today announced a new family of CinemaStar 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the growing traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets. With continued technological advancements and increased capacities, 2.5-inch hard drives are satisfying the needs of both the traditional 3.5-inch CE market as well as the small form factor market, while allowing OEMs to design smaller, more compact A/V streaming devices.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST’s new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing the right balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs). Now in its sixth generation, each CinemaStar drive is fine-tuned with advanced streaming technology to efficiently optimize the 24/7 recording and playback of A/V content.

Palit Microsystems Ltd, the leading graphics card manufacturer, has unleashed the GeForce GTX 670 graphics card. It taps into the powerful Kepler architecture to deliver faster, smoother, richer gaming. It’s more than state-of-the-art technology and features. It’s truly game-changing performance.

Following with GeForce GTX 680 JetStream, JetStream 風– that introduces innovative custom cooling and optimized overclocked capabilities to deliver the ultimate gaming experience, now continuing to represent the exciting new series is the Palit GeForce GTX 670 JetStream, which offers incredible overclocked performance, low noise emission, as well as a powerful cooling design for efficient heat dissipation.

HP today announced powerful business products packed with energy-efficiency, security and performance features designed to meet customer needs across industries such as healthcare, retail, and media and entertainment.

Among the products announced for businesses are:

• The powerful HP t410 All-in-One (AiO) Smart Zero Client, featuring new and innovative one-wire Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology while still providing outstanding multimedia performance and a true PC-like experience.
• The highly customizable HP RP7 all-in-one retail system with a sleek and stylish design that fits into a variety of retail settings.
• The HP L6015tm and L6017tm Retail Touch Monitors with multitouch projected capacitive screens for retail and hospitality environments, and the HP L6010 non-touch Retail Monitor for use as a customer or associate-facing display.
• New high-performance HP Z220 Workstations and HP EliteBook Mobile Workstations, packed with reliable and professional-class features.

Dell’s newly redesigned portfolio of Dell Precision tower workstations announced today delivers superb performance, accessibility and best-in-class¹ chassis design to help creative and design professionals deliver results faster. Dell engineered its tower workstations to enable engineering, product design, animation, and other graphics and compute intensive professionals increased productivity and minimized downtime so they can focus on their innovations.

From creating the 854 stereo 3D VFX shots featured in the award-winning movie “Hugo” to designing unique architectural spaces to analyzing seismic data to accelerate exploration of natural reserves, companies around the world rely on Dell Precision workstations to design and deliver superb results fast.

AMD's upcoming "Trinity" family of desktop and mobile accelerated processing units (APUs) will use up to four x86-64 cores based on the company's newest CPU architecture, codenamed "Piledriver". AMD conservatively estimated performance/clock improvements over current-generation "Bulldozer" architecture, with Piledriver. Citavia put next-generation A10-5800K, and A8-4500M "Trinity" desktop and notebook APUs, and pitted them against several currently-launched processors, from both AMD and Intel.

It found integer and floating-point performance increases clock-for-clock, against Bulldozer-based FX-8150. The benchmark is not multi-threaded, and hence gives us a fair idea of the per core performance. On a rather disturbing note, the performance-per-GHz figures of Piledriver are trailing far behind K12 architecture (Llano, A8-3850), let alone competitive architectures from Intel.

Source: Expreview

Digital Storm, the predominant name in computer system integration and engineering, unveils Aventum, the first system to feature its patent pending chassis and CES Innovations Award-winning Cryo-TEC cooling system. Designed by Digital Storm engineers from the inside out, Aventum's chassis boasts a proprietary thermal exhaust chamber, intelligent 5 thermal zone regulation and exclusive Aventum software that controls 13 customizable fans to effectively dissipate performance inhibiting heat. Together with the Cryo-TEC liquid cooling system that chills liquid below 0ºC, Digital Storm has designed the industry's first truly custom high-performance PC.

LucidLogix (Lucid), GPU virtualization software leaders, today announced DynamiX, a unique software implementation that will allow selected formerly unplayable high-performance games to be enjoyed on mainstream and low-end laptops and Ultrabooks equipped with only an integrated GPU. A free trial version that initially expands the playability of the game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on a variety of notebooks is immediately available for download.

"With DynamiX, a single embedded GPU is all you will need to enjoy your favorite high-performance titles on most new notebooks without reducing display resolution or minimizing game performance settings," said Offir Remez, Lucid co-founder and president. "We are offering this FREE trial beta version as a proof-of-concept, while working to provide DynamiX for more games. Try it and tell us what you think!"

Futuremark, the world leader in performance benchmarking software, today released the first benchmark results for the new iPad using Peacekeeper, its free to use browser speed test. While web pages may look sharper on the new iPad’s improved display, the benchmark results show that the browsing performance of the new iPad is the same as the iPad 2, suggesting that the computational processing power in both devices is near identical. http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/results?key=stats

Peacekeeper is an HTML5 based browser performance test that can be used to measure and compare the performance of any browser on any Internet capable device, from desktops and notebooks, to tablets and smartphones. What’s more, as a device's browser performance is strongly linked to the power of its CPU, Peacekeeper offers a straightforward way to compare the performance of competing devices regardless of differences in operating system.

NVIDIA's big GeForce GTX 680 launch is just around the corner, but performance figures are already trickling in. Last week, we were treated to a wide range of benchmarks covering a single GeForce GTX 680. Today, VR-Zone posted a performance-preview of the GeForce GTX 680 in 2-way SLI configuration. A set of two GTX 680 cards were put through 3DMark 11 in Entry, Performance, and eXtreme presets. It should be noted here, that the GTX 680 cards were clocked at 1150 MHz core, and 1803 MHz (7.20 GHz effective) memory.

In the Entry preset, GTX 680 2-way SLI scored E22878; it scored P16860 in Performance preset; and X6243 in eXtreme. 2-way SLI of GTX 680 should be fit for 2560x1440/1600 resolution gaming. The rest of the test-bench consisted of Intel Core i7-3930K six-core processor clocked at 5.00 GHz, with 16 GB of quad-channel DDR3-2133 MHz memory, and ASUS ROG Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.Source: VR-Zone Chinese

With its latest P8Z77, ROG Maximus V, and Sabertooth Z77 motherboard lines, ASUS became the first PC motherboard vendor to implement UASP - USB-attached SCSI Protocol. UASP changes the way the computer and connected USB devices talk to each other. It ensures more efficient utilization of bus bandwidth (5 Gb/s), resulting in higher bandwidth yield to connected devices. UASP allows connected devices to exchange multiple commands at once, reducing protocol overhead. UASP is implemented on ASUS motherboards using third-party controllers that support it. So far we know the likes of VLI to have such host controllers. In addition to these, ASUS motherboards also provide USB 3.0 ports wired to Intel PCH chipsets.Source: Expreview

GIGABYTE today introduced an extraordinary lineup of computers that are redefining mobility and powerful performance. The U2442V is a sleek and stunning 14” Ultrabook that provides fantastic performance with a 3rd generation Intel Core i5/i7 ULV processor, while the U2442N features the same incredible form factor, but has a powerful 3rd generation Intel Core i5/i7 standard voltage processor. Both models feature an excellent NVIDIA GeForce GPU, which provides remarkable graphics performance for multimedia and games.

Other models to be introduced include the P2542G, which is a 15.6” powerful gaming notebook with an exciting race car design; and the Q2542N, an excellent 15.6” mainstream notebook that delivers terrific versatility. Also to be showcased at CeBIT 2012 is the S1081, a 10.1” powerful business slate; the Booktop T1132N, an 11.6” revolutionary 3-in-1 notebook, tablet and desktop; the Booktop M2432, a sleek 14” notebook that provides desktop graphics performance through its unique docking station; and the AC21, an all-in-one PC that simplifies the desktop experience.

Have you ever seen a high-performance notebook computer packing Intel's top-of-the-line Core i7 Extreme Edition with overclocking that blazes along at more than 4GHz? Have you ever experienced the superfast performance of a quad core gaming laptop that transfers files in less than half the time? Only the MSI GT780DX laptop, on display for a limited time, supports the Core i7 Extreme Edition, the fastest in the industry, to give you extreme system performance and cooling capabilities.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that its SGI ICE 8400 high performance compute (HPC) system with AMD Opteron 6200 processors achieved the top performance number for 64-, 32-, 16-, 8-, and 4-socket configurations for the SPECMPIL2007 benchmark. The SPECMPIL benchmark is SPEC's “benchmark suite for evaluating MPI-parallel, floating point, compute intensive performance across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware,” according to the SPEC website.

The SGI ICE 8400 platform with AMD processors is a completely open platform optimized for HPC workloads and runs an off-the-shelf Linux operating system for application compatibility. Although the ICE platform is able to comfortably support multi-petaflop sized installations, design considerations allow cost effective solutions down to a half rack. Single- or dual-plane integrated InfiniBand can be cabled into four different topologies, including hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all to all, and fat-tree, allowing flexible network customization for a variety of workloads.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on a single chip to collaborate – boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent.

“Chip manufacturers are now creating processors that have a ‘fused architecture,’ meaning that they include CPUs and GPUs on a single chip,” says Dr. Huiyang Zhou, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who co-authored a paper on the research. “This approach decreases manufacturing costs and makes computers more energy efficient. However, the CPU cores and GPU cores still work almost exclusively on separate functions. They rarely collaborate to execute any given program, so they aren’t as efficient as they could be. That’s the issue we’re trying to resolve.”

We have previously reported on the super cheap ARM-based Raspberry Pi hobby computer that's been under development from the Raspberry Pi foundation. However, it's now going into production and is generating a lot of interest, so gamesindustry.biz interviewed its founder, Eben Upton, about it (free registration required).

The computer's primary purpose is as a computer science teaching aid in schools and colleges and also for home brew use by enthusiasts who want to tinker with it and make specialized solutions out of it. However, it seems that enthusiasts will have a nice surprise in that the onboard GPU is surprisingly good. The actual ARM implementation is a Broadcom BCM2835 System on Chip (SoC) containing an ARM 11 CPU and a custom graphics core, which has been designed by the Raspberry Pi team, including Upton. In the interview, Upton claimed that it can double iPhone 4S performance and handily beats NVIDIA's Tegra solution, because of its tile mode architecture.

HP today unveiled new consumer PCs and commercial displays that offer consumers and professionals superb design, performance and convenience. Launched in advance of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the new lineup includes:

• HP Omni27 PC – the company's first 27-inch all-in-one PC, and the first non-touch HP PC to feature HP's exclusive Magic Canvas software for a truly engaging experience.
• HP Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix PC – the most powerful HP Pavilion PC to date, it is engineered to run power-hungry applications, such as video editing and games, with ease.
• HP Compaq L2311c Notebook Docking Monitor – built to pair with a notebook PC via its USB port, creating an efficient, comfortable workspace for mobile professionals.
• Affordable HP LV1911 and LV2011 LED Backlit LCD Monitors – delivering intelligent design and reliable business performance at a great value.

Welcome to the first TechPowerUp news post of 2012! Read on for a couple of impressive overclocking feats with the HD 7970 graphics card.

It looks like the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 could be a bit of a dark horse and a lot more potent than its stock specifications would suggest – excellent for creating a competitive graphics card market. The reviews at stock speeds show the flagship HD 7970 to be around 10-15% faster than NVIDIA's flagship GTX 580, which doesn't seem all that impressive since the GTX 580 has been on the market for over a year now. However, what the reviews haven't really shown, is what kind of an overclocking monster the HD 7970 is. It definitely looks like AMD could have easily beaten the GTX 580 by a much bigger margin than they did, had they wanted to and it makes one wonder why they didn't.

VR-Zone have spent the New Year weekend overclocking this beast, having reached a whopping 1.26 GHz core clock speed with their HD 7970 - and decent benchmark improvements to go with it. Also, with the fan at 100%, the card never got above a very comfortable 68 degrees centigrade while running Furmark, which is amazing considering how this test is specifically designed to heat a graphics card to the max - but please see the update at the bottom of the article. The stock cooler may be noisy, but it's certainly very effective: an excellent result which will prolong the working life of the card.

Not quite two weeks ago, we reported on leaked pictures of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7770 mid-range graphics card based on the new Southern Islands architecture and listed its basic specs. Well, the leaks keep coming and bigpao007 of ChipHell has leaked more pictures with some benchmarks to go with them. The test setup consisted of an Ivy Bridge ES CPU – Core i5-3550K at 3.3Ghz and Z77 chipset-based motherboard. The driver used was the AMD Catalyst 8.940 RC2, giving the following 3DMark benchmark results: