How’s your memory today? Specifically, can you remember the last time AMD had a legitimate claim to the desktop performance crown? Don’t hold your breath, the latest and greatest Phenom II still can’t steal the spotlight from Intel’s spectacular top-of-the-line Core i7-980X, but if prices actually matter to you, you’ll wanna read on. Whereas you’d need to shell out $999 to get six cores from Intel, AMD is offering you its flagship 3.2GHz 1090T model at a reasonable $285, or an even more affordable option with the 2.8GHz 1055T at $199. The T in those names stands for Turbo Core, which automatically downclocks half the cores in order to provide a little extra speed (up to 500MHz more) to the other three. Reviewers agreed that its inclusion helped significantly improve single-threaded performance, to the point where the faster (in default clock speed) 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 was falling behind in benchmarks. The general opinion by the typically jaded journalists was that AMD has finally regained some pep in its step and that these new 6-core CPUs are going to give Intel’s upper midrange offerings something to worry about. Lest we forget, the 1090T and 1055T also retain socket compatibility with current AM2+ and AM3 motherboards, making upgrades a cinch too. The full reviews await below.

Read – AnandTech
Read – HotHardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Hexus
Read – Legit Reviews
Read – TweakTown
Read – TechSpot

AMD’s 3.2GHz hexacore Phenom II X6 1090T comes out for a review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AFP – Most young Chinese use mobile phones to access the Internet as these are cheaper and easier to obtain than desktop computers, according to a survey by a government-linked body.

Source:
Most young Chinese use mobiles to get online: survey
(AFP)

Right on time, Denon’s dropped the details on its hardware for 2010 on us. Taking top honors are two Blu-ray players: the DBP-2011UDCI ($799, August, not pictured) and the DBP-1611UD ($399, June, pictured above) that are touted as “true universal players”; with DVD-Audio and SACD playback out of the box and Blu-ray 3D on the way in a fall firmware update the company’s confident they’ll play most any 5-inch optical media you may be able to get your hands on. If you’re past discs don’t worry, Netflix, DLNA and YouTube streaming is also part of the deal.

Those should pair well with any of the slew of receivers due up including the AVR-991 (SRP: $999, July), AVR-891 (SRP: $799, May), AVR-791 (SRP: $499, May), AVR-591 (SRP: $349, May) and the AVR-391 (SRP: $249, July); or the custom install-focused AVR-4311CI (SRP: $1,999, Sept.), AVR-3311CI (SRP: $1,199, June), and AVR-2311CI (SRP: $899, June). All of the above bring HDMI 1.4a repeaters for 3D compatibility, onscreen displays through HDMI, and some include web browsers plus music streaming from Pandora or connected PCs. Check the press releases after the break for all the details including a few new headphone models, though we recommend taking it in just a bit at a time — the threat of overdosing on this much info is high.

Continue reading Denon’s 2010 receivers, Blu-ray players are Control4, streaming & 3D ready

Denon’s 2010 receivers, Blu-ray players are Control4, streaming & 3D ready originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Macworld.com – It may have been five years since the team at Panic released the last major version of their popular Transmit FTP client, but they’ve hardly been sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

See the original post here:
Transmit 4 gets new interface, faster performance
(Macworld.com)

Enterprise solid state drives aren’t typically our foray, but when they support SATA 6G, we pay attention. It also doesn’t hurt when they sport a fantastic name. The SATAsfaction drives from Accelerated Memory Production (AMP) have both Sandforce controllers and the speedy ports to match, alongside 12 byte per sector ECC error correction and TRIM support. Still, they’re not the fastest SSDs around, clocking in at only 260MB / sec reads and 150MB / sec writes, but they do have SLC flash memory for likely higher reliability than the current speed demon. No pricing or availability yet, but SLC NAND is pretty expensive stuff… so unless you’re buying for a corporation with a large bankroll, better count on waiting for the cheaper Devo version.

Continue reading (You can’t get no) SATAsfaction 6Gbps SSDs (yet)

(You can’t get no) SATAsfaction 6Gbps SSDs (yet) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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