During her keynote at the Intel Developer Forum today in Beijing, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, discussed how her company is helping users harness powerful new capabilities that will improve the lives of people by building smarter cities, healthier communities and thriving businesses.

Bryant unveiled details of upcoming technologies and products that show how Intel aims to transform the server, networking and storage capabilities of the datacenter. By addressing the full spectrum of workload demands and providing new levels of application optimized solutions for enterprise IT, technical computing and cloud service providers, unprecedented experiences can be delivered.

UNIGINE Corp. has released a new, enhanced version 4.0 of Heaven Benchmark, the GPU intensive benchmark that gained massive popularity among overclockers and hardware manufacturers for hammering their graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Heaven Benchmark immerses a user into a magical steampunk world of shiny brass, wood and gears. Nested on flying islands, a tiny village with its cozy, sun-heated cobblestone streets, an elaborately crafted dirigible above the expanse of fluffy clouds, and a majestic dragon on the central square gives a true sense of adventure. An interactive experience with fly-by and walk-through modes allows for exploring all corners of this world powered by the cutting-edge UNIGINE Engine that leverages the most advanced capabilities of graphics APIs and turns this benchmark into a visual masterpiece.DOWNLOAD: Unigine Heaven 4.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced that its latest business-class, 2U rackmount TS-x70 series Turbo NAS start shipping now. The new generation TS-x70 series, including the 12-bay TS-1270U-RP and the 8-bay TS-870U-RP, are aiming to offer the business users a superb high-performance yet budget-friendly NAS solution to smooth daily file operations with low total cost of ownership. The models fulfill various business applications including high speed backup, server virtualization, iSCSI IP-SAN, video storage and centralized shared storage, and outstand as an affordable 10GbE ready NAS.

Powered by a high performance Dual-core Intel 2.4GHz processor, the new TS-x70 series are equipped with 4GB DDR3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 16GB optionally. The dual USB 3.0 ports allow high-speed server data backup. Featuring 10GbE re ady, the TS-x70 series provide dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be expanded up to six Gigabit Ethernet ports, or four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet ports, benefit in aggregating and boosting network performance. "The TS-x70 series are proficient to fulfill mission-critical storage needs of small and medium businesses with maximum system uptime," said David Tsao, product manager of QNAP. "The 10GbE network expansion options can satisfy high-speed data transmission required in the business environment," added Tsao.

At the International CES 2013 opening today, QNAP , Inc. showcased its newly launched Turbo NAS TS-x70 series and its complete NAS lineup, presented its latest version of NAS firmware 3.8 with various enhanced business and home applications, and displayed the new VioStor NVR VS-x100 Pro+ series and powerful surveillance Central Management System , the CMS-2000. Visitors could experience the full-spectrum of Turbo NAS series and VioStor NVR series at CES 2013.

The newly launched business-class, 2U rackmount TS-x70 series Turbo NAS, including the 12-bay TS-1270U-RP and the 8-bay TS-870U-RP, are designed to offer the SMBs superb high-performance yet budget-friendly NAS solutions to smooth daily file operations with lo w total cost of ownership. Powered by a high performance Dual-core Intel 2.40 GHz processor, the TS-x70 series deliver exceptional performance at an exceptional price.

ASUSTOR Inc., a leading innovator and provider of network storage solutions, today announced the release of three new NAS Apps for its well-received AS 6 Series NAS devices. These new Apps consist of Symantec Backup Exec's RALUS, an acclaimed backup solution, Dropbox, a popular cloud storage and sync service and DVBLink TV Server, a digital television App. Additionally, two of ASUSTOR's existing Apps are being upgraded with advanced features and enhancements. Download Center now features the new and convenient Smart Download Folder function. Its mobile App, AiDownload, has added a push notification function and is now available for both iOS and Android. Not to be outdone, the Surveillance Center App now boasts added Daylight Saving Time adjustments along with full compatibility with Panasonic's BB and BL camera lines. Interested users may begin enjoying these new Apps and upgrades by downloading them through ASUSTOR's App Central.

MSC Embedded Inc., manufacturer of highly integrated standard board level products and customer-specific boards and systems, today introduced a powerful, new COM Express Type 6 module family. This family, called MSC C6C-A7, is based on the AMD embedded R-Series processors also known as accelerated processing units (APUs). MSC C6C-A7 members are compact form factor computer-on-modules characterized by very powerful graphics and high parallel computing performance with low power dissipation.

The MSC C6C-A7 module family integrates AMD R-460L 2.0 GHz (2.8 GHz Turbo) or AMD R-452L 1.6 GHz (2.4 GHz Turbo) quad-core processors. The thermal design power (TDP) levels are 25 W and 19 W, respectively. The two dual-core versions are populated with the AMD R-260H 2.1 GHz (2.6 GHz Turbo) processor or the AMD R-252F 1.7 GHz (2.3 GHz Turbo) processor -- each featuring 17 W TDP. The processors support the AMD64 technology and the AMD-V virtualization technology. The AMD Fusion Controller Hub (FCH) A75 chipset was also selected. The main memory can be expanded to 16 GB DDR3-1600 dual-channel SDRAM via two SO DIMM sockets.

AMD today unveiled nine new mid-range and entry-level AMD Opteron 4300 Series and 3300 Series server processors increasing performance per watt versus the previous generation to maximize compute capabilities in power-constrained environments1, while delivering outstanding value to cloud providers and web hosts. The AMD Opteron 3300 Series processors provide enterprise-class features in a low power envelope at a desktop processor price, making it ideal for web hosts and small- and medium-sized businesses.

The AMD Opteron 4300 Series processors offer up to 15 percent better performance versus the prior generation, based on SPECint benchmark results2. And SPECpower results show up to a 24 percent improvement in performance per watt. As with the AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, these are socket compatible with the previous generation processor, providing an effortless upgrade path for customers.

Following ASUS' venture into the consumer NAS segment as ASUStor, Gigabyte responded with its own. The company launched its Home NAS family with the GR-EZI04H, a 4-bay consumer NAS based on the Intel Atom platform. Pictured below, it uses a common desktop cube form-factor, with a main lockable door covering its four caddies.

Gigabyte used an interesting combination of hardware. It combined a current-generation Atom D2500 dual-core processor clocked at 1.80 GHz, with an old (yet effective) ICH10R southbridge, instead of the usual NM10 PCH. The ICH10R has been used on high-end Intel 4-series and 5-series platforms, and provides six SATA 3 Gb/s ports with RAID 0/5/10. The GR-EZI04H features two gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0/1.1 ports, and a VGA display output. Its OS, a choice between Windows Home Server 2011 and Embedded Linux, is stored on an mPCIe DOM. Gigabyte used a custom NAS management software that isn't extensively detailed, but features a standard feature-set. More details are awaited.

After launching its high-performance display driver for Linux that boosts GeForce graphics performance by 100%, NVIDIA released an open-source 2D driver code for its Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, which is based on the experimental Direct Rendering Manager driver (DRM, not as in digital rights management). DRM was started as an independent project by Thierry Reding, but is now being worked on by NVIDIA, among others.

The open-source DRM driver code published by Terje Bergstrom today provide host1x and 2D on Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, and was published by Terje Bergstrom. He writes "nvhost is the driver that controls host1x hardware. It supports host1x command channels, synchronization, run-time power management and memory management. It is sectioned into logical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host and physical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host/host1x. The physical driver is compiled with the hardware headers of the particular host1x version."

FXI, pioneer of the Cstick Any Screen Micro Computer, announced today that it releases a full system solution for ARM Linux and Android developers on its Cotton Candy device platform, targeting developers. The agreement and close collaboration with ARM will enable FXI to take full advantage of the resources of the Mali development community, while providing an easy to use, innovative development platform for Mali GPU developers. Existing owners of the Cotton Candy device can download development versions of Ubuntu Linux for ARM v12.04 and Android 4.0 in both source and binary forms by visiting this page. Developers can get Cotton Candy from here.

FXI is working closely with ARM to take full advantage of the capabilities of the ARM Mali-400 MP GPU (and other ARM technologies). The Cotton Candy Any Screen IP enables developers to work with the Cotton Candy device inserted in their PC and develop with their existing tool chains directly on the Cotton Candy. The combination of the ARM Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 MP can be found in a wide range of devices ranging from smartphones, tablets and smart TVs. By using Cotton Candy, which also uses this combination, developers can target a wide range of Cortex processors and Mali GPU based platforms -or for Cotton Candy itself- can develop on actual market leading Mali silicon.

Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce Unity 4.0 is now available for download. Unity 4, announced in June, will consist of a series of updates designed to improve the product through an extensive improvement of existing tech and the rollout of new features. The first in a series of updates for Unity 4, this version includes significant additions such as DirectX 11 support and Mecanim animation tools. In addition users will have access to a Linux deployment preview and the Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on.

"Unity 4 will see the addition of an incredible number of new, highly advanced, features and continuous improvement across the tech to be released in smaller, faster increments than Unity has seen in the past," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "It's an exciting time for Unity and the 4.0 release marks the beginning of a great new era for our technology."

NVIDIA today announced the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers -- R310 -- double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.

The result of almost a year of development by NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, the new GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience -- and showcase the enormous potential of the world's biggest open-source operating system.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that HP is making a strategic, long-term investment in Linux by upgrading to Platinum membership. Linux Foundation Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center and Samsung. HP was previously a Gold member.

HP's business spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. The company has long been a contributor to the Linux and open source software communities and is well known for its work on open operating systems as well as the open cloud. With many of its products already running Linux, including servers, printers, networking equipment and more, HP understands that computing is changing rapidly and is prioritizing Linux and collaborative development to advance its development for the future.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m supercomputers are now available with the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processor, using its next-generation "Piledriver" core. With a performance-per-watt that is up to 40 percent higher than prior generations, these new AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron processors are designed to enhance power efficiency with more application performance within the same power budget.

"Cray supercomputers are specifically designed to allow our customers to easily upgrade their systems so they can take advantage of the latest, most innovative processing technologies while also reducing their total-cost-of-ownership over the life of the system," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "We believe the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors will significantly improve the performance and efficiency for Cray customers upgrading their current Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m systems. We look forward to delivering this capability to our customers."

You can now sign up to test Steam for Linux, with Valve announcing an open Beta of the client. Valve is looking for users with generally high experience with Linux, so don't expect the Beta to be click-and-run. Interested users with Ubuntu 12.04 (and above) can sign up here. Steam for Linux targets Ubuntu, and the company plans to launch the platform with Left 4 Dead 2 with SteamPlay enabled, porting other Valve titles later.

Japanese company Marshal announced the MAL-4725NAS, a compact NAS box which can enclose a 2.5-inch SATA HDD or SSD. Driven by a 750 MHz ARM 11MP processor, the box features 256 MB of RAM and the same amount of NAND flash storage to house its Linux-based operating system (Fedora 12 ARM). Its software provides most consumer NAS features including FTP, SMB, print server, NFS, AFP, DLNA, and iTunes. Gigabit Ethernet is its only network interface. The 2.5-inch drive bay supports drives as thick as 12.5 mm. Its limited local storage can be expanded with flash drives, enclosures, and other mass-storage devices thanks to an eSATA and two USB 2.0 ports. Measuring 123 x 123 x 33 mm, it weighs about 536 g. Slated for October 20, it is priced at 13,800 JPY (US $176).

QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially launched its latest business-class TS-x69L series Turbo NAS. The new TS-x69L series, available in 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8-drive versions, is powered by a high performance dual-core Intel Atom processor, equipped with 1GB DDR3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 3GB optionally. With support for SATA 2.5", 3.5" HDD and SSD up to 4TB, and with dual USB 3.0 ports for high-speed backup, the TS-x69L NAS series is compatible with Microsoft Windows OS, Linux/UNIX, and the latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion, and provides the levels of performance and high-capacity storage required by SMB users.

The TS-x69L series is equipped with 512MB DOM (Disk on Module) with dual firmware image design for system downtime prevention. In the event of corrupted firmware caused by accidental power loss during system boot, the NAS will boot with the backup firmware and then automatically recover the failed one for continuous system uptime.

Acer America today announced its entry into the thin client market with a new commercial offering, the Acer Veriton N Series. The new thin and rich clients provide simplified manageability and energy-efficiency in a secure, space-saving form factor for virtual environments. These practical systems are designed for small and medium businesses, call centres and customers in education, financial services, healthcare and government wanting to tightly manage data, while reducing overall costs.

By increasing hardware utilization and consolidation, the Acer Veriton N Series provides superb performance while keeping operational costs and power consumption low. Centralized processing makes it easy to manage data and hardware assets, monitor system access and enforce security policies and procedures, significantly increasing internal data security.
"Our new thin client line will help organizations meet today's reality of ever shrinking budgets by simplifying IT without compromising on business deliverables," said Michael O'Beirne, Acer senior director, commercial product marketing. "The Acer N Series are easy to configure, maintain and manage, while reducing the overall cost of ownership."

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, will showcase its latest storage products, encompassing a mix of both solid state drives and software solutions, at this year's Flash Memory Summit, Booth #208, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California, from August 21st through August 23rd.

Demonstrating SSD products along with recent partner implementations, OCZ will showcase a comprehensive lineup of innovative solutions for business, server, and OEM clients. This includes product presentations of both the impending Intrepid 3 SATA III-based SSD solution based on the company's Indilinx Everest 2 architecture, along with the company's leading PCI Express (PCIe)-based Z-Drive R4 featuring new Linux Acceleration software (LXL) that unleashes the full performance potential of infrastructures that use this popular open source operating system. Live technical demos of LXL and Z-Drive R4 SSDs will include a VDI boot storm, efficient SQL CPU utilization, and vMotion and Fault Tolerance support.

Valve's hit online multiplayer game, Left 4 Dead 2, which was recently ported to Ubuntu along with the Steam client, is found to play faster on the platform than even Windows. The game generates higher frame-rates on Ubuntu with the new OpenGL renderer for Source engine than the Direct3D renderer it uses on Windows.

The disclosure comes as part of Valve's ongoing efforts to optimize the Source engine to the Linux platform, following which, it plans to port more of its game franchises, such as Half Life, Counter Strike, Team Fortress, and Portal. The games will be available on Ubuntu with SteamPlay, allowing users who already own a license for the Windows or Mac OS X versions to simply download and play the game on Ubuntu, without any purchases.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially expanded its latest business-ready Turbo NAS family, the TS-x69U-RP series, with 2 new rackmount units that really mean business. The expansion includes 4 and 8-drive models, delivering up to 32TB (using 4TB drives) of high-performance networked storage, redundant power supplies for enhanced reliability, and a wealth of business-ready applications for cross-platform file sharing, network-wide backup, server virtualization storage, and much more.

At the heart of the new models is a Dual-core Intel Atom 2.13 GHz CPU, equipped with 1 GB DDR3 RAM on TS-469U-RP, 2GB DDR3 RAM on TS-869U-RP, and support for SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" and 3.5" hot-swappable drives to provide the performance demanded by today's SMBs; critical for keeping businesses running at their highest productivity levels.

Club 3D takes a giant leap and destroys the competition with the release of the most quiet, cool and brutally fast Club 3D Radeon HD 7970 royalAce graphic card, the latest addition to the PokerSeries family.

Get the best of the best with Club 3D's PokerSeries, the Radeon HD 7970 royalAce offers great performance by breaking the GHz barrier on the GPU, clocking at 1050MHz, making it amazingly fast, up to 7% faster in games when compared to the reference HD 7970 GHz Edition. The Radeon HD 7970 royalAce is a quiet card, achieving 31.5 dB on idle, 38 dB at load, making it the ideal choice for gaming and multimedia. By utilizing a custom cooler design with a dual fan and four high performance heatpipes it ensures the card to remain cool at 71 °C on average when gaming. A Dual BIOS toggle switch offers overclocking potential for the most demanding gamer and overclocking enthusiast.

Infortrend today announced the North American availability of two new product lines in its EonNAS family of unified storage solutions, the EonNAS Pro and EonNAS 1000 Series. Although NAS is fast becoming the storage solution of choice for the SOHO and SMB markets, when it comes to data protection, current offerings from other brands come up short. Infortrend's new EonNAS Pro and EonNAS 1000 Series, running on ZFS file system fill this void by offering an unprecedented collection of advanced data protection features -- including data deduplication, corrupt data self-healing, snapshot and pool mirror -- bringing enterprise-level data protection and storage features to the SOHO and SMB markets.

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.

You could soon have NVIDIA Tegra 3 processors running entry-level PCs. COM (computer-on-module) and IPC (industrial PC) designer Kontron developed an NVIDIA Tegra 3 system board in the slim mini-ITX form-factor (170 mm x 170 mm), which is compatible with most ITX/ATX cases. The board has most common PC peripheral interfaces, and is fit to drive an entry-level PC. The KTT30/mITX from Kontron features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC, with 4+1 ARM Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 900 MHz and GeForce ULP graphics. The GPU is fit to drive 1080p displays with H264 MPEG-4 encoding/decoding acceleration. Display outputs include HDMI 1.4a (up to 1920x1080 pixels), and LVDS 24-bit (up to 2048x1536 pixel @ 18bpp).

The Kontron KTT30/mITX packs 2 GB of DDR3L memory. For storage, it has an mSATA 3 Gb/s port, two SD card slots, and a bootable eMMC slot. Two mPCIe slots and a SIM card slot (for 3G HSDPA) handle on-board expansion. System interfaces include two RS232 (serial/COM), three USB 2.0. Apart from 3G HSDPA, the board supports gigabit Ethernet. For audio, there's 2-channel analog and multi-channel digital (S/PDIF) audio outputs. The board draws power from a 2-pin DC input. The board should be able to run most distributions of Linux for ARM (including Android and Chrome OS), and technically should also be able to run the upcoming Microsoft Windows 8 RT operating system.