Computers

Under ever-increasing pressure from Intel, AMD has formally announced its yearly refresh of its mobile processors. Known as APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), the hybrid GPU and CPU chips will be branded A4 and E2 at the value end of the market, and A6, A8 and A10 for performance laptops and what AMD calls 'ultra-thins'. These latter chips are – generally speaking - designed to go squarely against Intel's Core i3 and i5, while A4 and E2 will take on Celeron and Pentium in budget, mainstream laptops.All are based on the same Jaguar cores as the AMD-powered next-gen consoles as well as the new Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture.Behind the branding are three different hardware platforms; there is an ultra-low power quad-core platform for tablets and small touchscreen Windows 8 laptops codenamed Temash.Best CPU: 10 top processors reviewed and ratedAccording to figures from AMD, Temash offers 5x the performance of the comparable chip from Intel's Atom (Clover Trail) platform. Speaking at a recent briefing attended by TechRadar, AMD's head of mobility Kevin Lensing talked up Temash. "There's an opportunity to redefine the tablet a little bit, so you can redefine what people do on their slates. There's no other part that can do what you saw on this class of device. Compared to the [comparable Atom processor] you 200 per cent improvement in terms of performance per Watt in 3D Mark 11."We've seen that silicon in several rather underpowered Windows 8 tablets so far such as the Asus Vivo Tab.Mainstream and performance APUs AMD's mainstream platform carries the Kabini codename and is said to be 25 per cent more efficient over the preceding generation of silicon, offering a cited 1.5 extra hours of battery life during 720p playback. "[This chip] brings quad-core to this market and completely outclasses Pentium. In fact, it's a clean kill over Pentium and it's going to dominate the open level of the notebook space."In terms of specs, the Temash and Kabini clockspeeds range between 1.0-2.0 GHz with power consumption between 3.9 and 25W. The highest power Temash chip is 9W. Further up the chain, the performance segment is known as Richland and, according to AMD, boasts productivity gains around 12 per cent and 40 per cent better graphics performance over the previous generations. "You want a high powered notebook to feel snappy," said Lansing. "And of course we're going to give you the best graphics, the best compute."AMD believes it can still has a lot to offer in value and performance systems alike, but it also sees a lot of opportunity in tablets and convertibles as Windows 8 gradually takes bigger slice of the market.Lensing laid down a challenge for Intel's upcoming Bay Trail Atom chips – "we've got plenty of headroom in Temash" also hinting he expects favourable comparisons with Haswell (Intel's next-gen Core processors) with the higher-end chips. Focused on tablets and small notebooksLensing also claimed AMD was "uniquely positioned" to provide users with better tablet experiences because of its expertise in graphics. "We've got to make great devices. This is where our silicon is focused, on tablets and performance tablets and it's small form factor touch notebooks. There are lots of guys making silicon for smartphones and trying to pull it up in terms of performance, there are lots of guys making silicon for old client [PC] devices and trying to push it down into this space."We're focusing our dart right in that area, in the convergence space. We have optimised for the best performance per watt in the four to 14 watt category. You have to optimise for that space to win – you can't optimise for a desktop or notebook and win in this space. We're uniquely positioned here.""The world has taught us that gaming is the number one revenue stream on iOS and that the world is sensitised to graphics on these devices. And of course graphics is where we shine. So you take the

Babalities and fatalities are making their ways to your PC this summer.

More details have surfaced regarding three of Gigabyte's Z87 based motherboards.

The Android handset that's PC can be yours When is a phone PC? When it's a Fairphone, the smartphone “that puts social values first” and has a rather politically-correct (PC) attitude.…

Google on Wednesday announced that Raytown, Missouri will receive the company’s Fiber Internet service. Just like for the last few expansions, Google says it doesn’t have an estimate for when the service will be available in the city, merely noting it “will be awhile before we can hook up Raytown residents.” Before it can bring Fiber to Raytown, Google needs to plan, engineer, and build the necessary infrastructure. Today’s news is merely confirmation for the city’s citizens that they will one day get access to significantly faster Internet: when exactly that will happen is unknown, and there is definitely months of work still ahead. The Raytown Board of Aldermen yesterday held a meeting to finalize the Google Fiber agreement, among other discussions. The city council meeting had the following section on its agenda (PDF): SECOND Reading: Bill No. 6312-13, Section V-A. AN ORDINANCE AUTHORIZING AND APPROVING A NETWORK COOPERATION & SERVICE AGREEMENT AND RELATED AGREEMENTS WITH GOOGLE FIBER Missouri, LLC. Point of Contact: Tom Cole, Economic Development Administrator. After Raytown voted to bring the service to its community, Google made the announcement. This month alone, Fiber has been announced to be coming to Shawnee, Grandview, and Gladstone. What all of these cities have in common is that they can get the technology rather easily thanks to their close proximity to Kansas City, the very first Fiber city. Raytown is located just south east of Kansas City: Google first announced Fiber was coming to Kansas City in July 2012. The company was quiet regarding other locations for Missourinths, but as of late there have been a slew of announcements, and today’s brings the total to 10, in addition to Kansas City, Kansas: Kansas City, Missouri; Kansas City North, Missouri; Kansas City South, Missouri; Westwood, Kansas; Westwood Hills, Kansas; Mission Woods, Kansas; Olathe, Kansas; Shawnee, Kansas; Grandview, Missouri; and Gladstone, Missouri. In April, Austin, Texas was named as the second large city to get Fiber, quickly followed by Provo, Utah less than two weeks later. These cities are likely to get their own expansions to surrounding city suburbs. Top Image credit: Spike Mafford

The mayor is calling on Chang's eventual jurors to send a message. "It's time, like with Prohibition, to step back and say this was a stupid thing to do," Filner said outside the courthouse. "Let's step back, and juries ought to take the lead and say that to the federal government...and if the federal government isn't listening to the mayor, maybe they'll listen to the jury." [PJ: Wow. You don't see a mayor calling for jury nullification every day. Here's what jury nullification is. Lawyers are not allowed to tell juries about it.] - NBC 7 San Diego

McKinsey: The $33 Trillion Technology Payoff: The “next big thing” lists are a well-worn staple of technology ...

It's day 2 at CTIA 2013 and over a thousand exhibitors continue to show off the latest in mobile gear and gadgets. LAPTOP spent the entire day on the show floor at the Sands Expo & Convention Cent...

CIOs have a tough gig. They’re besieged by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) boom; have to keep up with the latest cloud services; they have to assess the value of the latest big data innovations; and often deal with CEOs and subordinates who think they could do the job better. “Being the CIO of a tech company is easy, you support 60,000 users and 59,999 think they have your job,” EMC executive vice president and COO  (and former CIO) Sanjay Mirchandani told attendees of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on Wednesday. Here are the key takeaways from the conference. 1:  Learn to work well with others Erik Brynjolfsson, director for Digital Business at MIT Sloan School of Management . It’s a lesson we were all supposed to learn in grade school but too often IT staff and the business units beyond are not fully in concert. That’s got to stop. CIOs are tired of being “the department of naysayers” and the best ones embed themselves in the business cases of the company. And they have to be active participants in business talks, not order takers for technology. In the traditional model with CIOs, it was “come in and tell me what your requirements are — we need to get out of that we need to have the courage to participate in the process,” said Michael Loo, SVP of Global IT for Avaya. 2: Embrace big data but don’t be bedazzled. Everyone is besotted by data. The more the better. A common mistake is to confuse correlation with causation, was another refrain. But without the right background knowledge and statistical analysis tools you can still leap to the wrong conclusions about your data. “There’s a shocking correlation between lung cancer and people who have ashtrays at home,” said Andrew Lo, professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloane School of Management. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, professor at the MIT Media Lab concurred. “Big data is good for interpolation, when you know the field you’re working in but bad for extrapolation where you’re entering new areas,” Pentland said. 3: Stop managing by gut Having  said that, there is still no substitute for data and metrics, properly applied and analysed. Too often early in the war on cancer, medical research has been hobbled by researchers’  tendency to let intuition drive their trials, said Dmitri Bertsimas, professor of operations research and statistics at MIT’s Sloan School. “We didn’t make a lot of progress,” he said. “We need to change from opinions and hunches and go with facts and data,” agreed Erik Rynjolfsson, director of the MIT for Digital Business at the Sloan School. 4: Beware the HIPPO Too often key business and tech strategic decisions are made by the HIPPO, aka the ”Highest-paid Person with an Opinion.” That person may big-foot a process where discussion and pushback are a better to go. This is a term I first heard a few weeks ago at another industry event where Phil Swisher, chief innovation officer at Brown Brothers Harriman bemoaned this tendency of HIPPOS to dominate discussion. As The Boston Globe’s Scott Hirsner wrote: Running experiments is much better than simply taking direction from a HIPPO, as politically difficult as that may be. “Hypothesis testing is better than hunches,” Swisher said. 5: Balance innovation with stability. Remember, bleeding edge is bleeding for a reason.  Sometimes you do have to simply make sure the trains run on time, while hopefully making those trains better, faster, cheaper over time. Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT America, knows from experience. “Many of our customers rely on us to run their systems for them and running things smoothly is sometimes more important than being innovative,” he said. 6: Beware the CMO There’s been a lot of talk that chief marketing officers will control more of the IT spend than CIOs. “Over my dead b

Following changes to its homepage design, profile layout, and recently a mobile app revamp, LinkedIn is rolling out another new change to its service today – a new navigation bar. The professional social network has been stepping up efforts to simplify its desktop and mobile experience, and the new navigation bar is aimed at helping its users with productivity, according to a blog post on LinkedIn. The menu of tabs has been simplified to only display links that are of most value to users, while the search bar has been moved front and center. Settings and account options are in the upper right-hand corner – hover over your profile picture to get a drop down menu. (See the new navigation bar above, the old below.) All English-speaking members of LinkedIn will get the new navigation bar over the next month, the social network says. LinkedIn hit more than 200 million users earlier this year, and recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Just this month, it also passed 20 million registered users in India, its second largest market behind the US. However, the social network recently lowered its forecast for second-quarter growth, an indication that its growth may be slowing.