At IDF 2012, Intel showed off an experimental SoC codenamed "Rosepoint," targeted at low power mobile consumer devices. Built on the 32 nm process, the tiny chip combines a full-featured dual-core Atom processor with a WiFi transceiver. This could eliminate the need for external transceivers on Atom-powered devices, reducing the platform's board footprint, and of course, power draw.

The current chip comes with its share of limitations. It supports just 2.4 GHz radio band. According to Intel's Justin Rattner, the chip should scale with Moore's Law, and future versions could have greater capabilities, including cellular data, and built-in antennae. Production versions of the chip aren't due for another two years, so it's safe to assume that Rosepoint is just a development milestone.

Lenovo today unveiled its first tablet specifically designed for Windows 8, the ThinkPad Tablet 2. The multi-use tablet boasts differentiators that matter, including an optional digitizer and pen for precision input, 3G wireless with Lenovo Mobile Access pay-as-you-go plans and 4G models, along with security features like a Fingerprint Reader, IT manageability technologies, and corporate-level service and support.

"Customers want a versatile device that fits their lifestyle and the many ways they use technology," said Dilip Bhatia, vice president and general manager, ThinkPad Business Unit. "Our new ThinkPad Tablet 2 marries incredible hardware and software to give consumers a great device for office, home or travel while also offering companies and IT managers the oversight they need to help secure and manage their company's networks and data. "For the next generation of Lenovo PCs, designed to be great with Windows 8, we're working closer than ever with Microsoft Corp. and our silicon partners. Today we are excited to reveal the fruit of this collaborative co-engineering, the ThinkPad Tablet 2, a joint effort between Lenovo, Microsoft and Intel."

Lenovo and EMC Corporation today announced a broad partnership that enhances Lenovo's position in industry standard servers and networked storage solutions, while significantly expanding EMC's reach in China and other key, high-growth markets. The new partnership is expected to spark innovation and additional R&D in the server and storage markets by maximizing the product development talents and resources at both companies, while driving scale and efficiency in the partners' respective supply chains.

"Today's announcement with industry leader EMC is another solid step in our journey to build on our foundation in PCs and become a leader in the new PC-plus era," said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo chairman and CEO. "This partnership will help us fully deliver on our PC-plus strategy by giving us strong back-end capabilities and business foundation in servers and storage, in addition to our already strong position in devices. EMC is the perfect partner to help us fully realize the PC-plus opportunity in the long term."

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS), provider of The World's Fastest Storage, today announced that TMS RamSan PCIe storage systems, including RamSan-70 products, are now bootable storage devices. This functionality is provided through a new firmware feature that allows most common servers to load operating systems directly from RamSan PCIe Flash storage systems, without requiring the presence of legacy hard drives or RAID controllers.

Launched in 2011, TMS RamSan-70 products have already been adopted by a broad variety of customers in healthcare, banking, e-commerce, and many other industries. Industry-leading bootability further minimizes complexity in such business-critical systems. Newly bootable RamSan-70 products are available with up to 900 GB of SLC Flash storage capacity and capable of 1.5 million I/Os per second (IOPS), 2.5 GB/s of bandwidth, and 30-60 microsecond latency. Bootability is available with the purchase of all new RamSan-70 PCIe storage systems, or as a firmware update with no hardware replacement necessary for existing RamSan-70 PCIe storage customers.

AMD today introduced the latest entry to the AMD Embedded G-Series processor family with the AMD Embedded G-T16R Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). The AMD G-T16R is targeted at very low power, small form factor and cost-sensitive embedded designs that require a combination of x86 compatibility and graphics. The optimized design of the AMD Embedded G-T16R sips power, with power consumption of just 2.3 wattsiv on average or 4.5 watts thermal design power (TDP).

Embedded product designers are taking to the industry's green challenge to design a broad range of next-generation applications for the industrial control, point-of-sale, medical appliance and transportation markets. For example, industrial customers can use the APU to help create greener factories based on more power-efficient factory hardware. Additionally, embedded designers can develop applications like point-of-sale order entry stations and tablets, medical bedside terminals and even solar-powered traffic control devices using the AMD G-T16R.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) today announces that it is the first hardware manufacturer to support the Windows 8 Hardware Program for its entire product line. Including all ECS motherboards, graphics cards, and AIOs currently on the market, ECS' products are optimized to take full advantage of the improved speeds, capabilities and features with the most anticipating technology Microsoft Windows 8, allowing users to fully experience its unique operating system.

After the success of Windows 7, this year Microsoft has revealed it's another masterpiece-Windows 8. Apart from the old-known operating system, Windows 8 has brought up a brand new image beyond your imagination.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family reached a new supercomputing milestone as the fastest adopted new processing technology to power 44 systems, including 3 Petascale-class supercomputers on the 39th edition of the Top500 list announced today.

The "SuperMUC" supercomputer at LRZ in Germany, which ranked fourth on the list, delivers 2.9 PetaFLOPs of performance, making it the most powerful in Europe, as well as the largest installation based on the new Intel Xeon processors E5 family.

ISC'12 - NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPUs offer performance breakthroughs on popular high performance computing (HPC) applications -- ranging from seismic processing to life sciences to video processing -- according to new benchmarks NVIDIA released today.

Based on the new NVIDIA Kepler computing architecture, the Tesla K10 GPU delivers the industry's highest single precision performance (4.58 teraflops) and highest memory bandwidth (320 GB/sec) in a single accelerator. This is 12 times higher single precision flops and 6.4 times higher memory bandwidth than the latest-generation Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.

A little earlier, Samsung refreshed its Series 5 line of performance notebooks with Intel Core "Ivy Bridge" processors. It created a new branch, powered by AMD "Trinity" accelerated processing units (APUs), which pack up to four x86-64 cores, Radeon HD 7600M series graphics, and dual-channel DDR3 IMCs. Samsung currently has two models that are Trinity-powered, the Series 5 13.3-inch (NP535U3C-A01US), which is driven by AMD A6-4455M quad-core APU (2.10 GHz); and the Series 5 14-inch (NP535U4C-A01US), driven by AMD A10-4655M quad-core APU (2.80 GHz). Both models come with 4 or 8 GB dual-channel DDR3 memory and 500 or 750 GB HDD standard, with other features being identical to those of its Ivy Bridge cousins. The 13.3-inch A6 model starts at $699, while the 14-inch A10 model starts at $849.

HP unveiled a new variant of its Pavilion dv6 15.6-inch notebook driven by AMD A8-4500M quad-core APU (model: dv6-7010us). The A8-4500M packs four x86-64 cores clocked at 1.90~2.80 GHz, 4 MB total cache, and Radeon HD 7640G integrated graphics. The APU is backed by 6 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory. A 750 GB hard drive and DVD SuperMulti drive handle storage. The 15.6-inch screen packs 1366 x 768 pixels resolution. Connectivity includes gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WLAN, and Bluetooth. Most other features are identical to the Intel-driven dv6t-7000. Sweetening the deal is the price. While the Core i7-3610QM driven dv6t-7000 starts at US $899, the AMD A8-4500M driven dv6-7010us starts at $699.

AMD today announced it will integrate a new security solution into its future products to meet the increasing need to provide consumers and businesses with secure access to their content and worry-free online transactions. Through a strategic technology partnership with ARM, AMD will integrate the established ARM TrustZone technology into future Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) via a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology. This industry-first collaboration will help accelerate broader ecosystem support by aligning x86 hardware with the world's most broadly-adopted mobile security ecosystem.

By adopting the industry-standard approach to security that TrustZone technology embodies, AMD and ARM will provide a consistent approach to security spanning billions of Internet-connected mobile devices, tablets, PCs and servers − whether they are powered by ARM processor-based solutions or AMD x86 APUs. AMD plans to provide development platforms that have TrustZone security features on select APUs in 2013, expanding further across its product portfolio in 2014. In a presentation this week at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2012 (AFDS), AMD Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Mike Wolfe described AMD's vision to advance computing security by enhancing AMD's existing security technologies. This is expected to include developing a platform security processor using an ARM CortexTM-A5 CPU that features TrustZone technology, to monitor and help protect against malicious access to sensitive data and operations at the hardware level.

AMD announced today that Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Mike Wolfe is the inaugural 2012 honoree of the Transformational CIO Award, which recognizes leading-edge CIOs. Wolfe was recognized by The Enterprise CIO Forum for his pioneering approach to the strategic use of IT to transform AMD's business by reducing costs, increasing efficiency and bolstering productivity.

Wolfe, who has overseen a significant and successful consolidation of AMD's worldwide data centers, uses AMD technology for the company's engineering development and support infrastructure, including managing cloud computing solutions running on more than 123,000 AMD Opteron processor cores.

Today AMD announced 11 servers from its customers, including two based on the new HP ProLiant Gen8 platform, will be integrating previously unannounced versions of the award-winning high-performance AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and the low-power AMD Opteron 4200 Series processor. These servers are based on five new AMD Opteron processors that offer increased performance without an increase in power consumption, providing customers more choice in using the world's best price/performance x86 server processor.

Last month, HP launched two HP ProLiant Gen8 servers using the new AMD Opteron processors and plans to refresh the ProLiant DL585 G7 and the BL685c G7 later this year. Moreover, Dell is also expected to refresh its AMD offering with the latest AMD Opteron processors in the PowerEdge C6145, C6105, R415, R515, R715, R815 and the M915.

AMD will welcome attendees, customers and partners to COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2012 with system demonstrations of the second generation AMD A-Series Accelerated Processor Unit (APU) and the newest AMD E-Series APUs, both designed for best-in-class PC entertainment, gaming, and battery life. A debut event the morning of June 6 in Taipei will underscore the diverse range of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) supporting AMD's 2012 product offerings, provide updates on new products, and demonstrate the powerful applications leveraging the unique processing power of the APU. A live webcast of the "Life More Brilliant" event will be available.

"There could not be a better location than COMPUTEX in Taiwan to recognize our customers and technology partners, and celebrate their contributions to the rapidly growing APU ecosystem," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Global Business Units and host of the upcoming event. "AMD saw consumers wanting a more visually-demanding, entertainment-focused PC experience long ago and created a product strategy to enhance those experiences. This week we will proudly share with the rest of the world the latest advances and accomplishments we have made with our customers."

AMD today announced its AMD A-Series APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) are winners of the 2012 Best Choice of COMPUTEX TAIPEI award, the second consecutive win for the product family. The award is given by the Taipei Computer Association, a driving force behind the annual event and the leading technology organization in the country. Extensive reviews are conducted by a panel of esteemed government officials, academics, research analysts, editors-in-chief of key media outlets and industry experts to select winning products based on outstanding design and cutting-edge technology in nine product categories.

The second generation AMD A-Series APU combines the company's latest multi-core x86 CPU core architecture and award-winning AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics to provide an increase in performance of up to 29 percent on productivity applications (as compared with the first generation AMD A-Series APUs), an increase of graphics performance up to 56 percent, and deliver up to 12 hours of battery life. Its unique features enable improvements in the areas that matter most to consumers today, including entertainment, gaming and mobility, through a growing ecosystem of APU-accelerated applications.

As revealed by a leaked slide, Dell's Windows 8 plans include the launch of a 10-inch tablet running Microsoft's upcoming operating system. Interestingly-enough, although Windows 8 will be ARM-friendly the tablet Dell has in the works, named Latitude 10, is going to be powered by an x86 processor, more specifically, a dual-core Intel Atom (Clover Trail).

The Latitude 10 will feature a 10.1-inch (1366 x 768) capacitive touchscreen, integrated graphics, 2 GB of LPDDR2 memory, up to a 128 GB SSD, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2MP front camera, stereo speakers, WiFi, Bluetooth and optional broadband, and a removable 2-cell or 4-cell battery enabling up to 8/12 hours of operation.

The tablet is rumored to become available around October/November.

While content-creation and media transcoding applications have transitioned to native x86-64 applications that can take advantage of large amounts of system and video memory, a similar transition by game developers has been rather slow. Very few PC games ship with 64-bit executables, as most games are ported from game consoles anyway, which have slim system requirements.

EA-DICE has been behind developing games that take advantage of the latest PC technologies (such as DirectX 11), and according to a lead developer and rendering architect with the studio, Johan Andersson, games that are driven by Frostbite engine, which are slated for 2013, will require 64-bit operating systems, these games will not run on 32-bit Windows, or in 32-bit mode, on 64-bit Windows, but with full-fledged 64-bit executables. The 64-bit address-space would allow games to take advantage of system memory over 4 GB, and more importantly, high amounts of video memory, as 2 GB and 3 GB become standard with performance-segment graphics cards.

MSI is working on a Wind U270 11.6-inch netbook variant that's driven by AMD E2-1800 "Brazos 2.0" dual-core APU. The E2-1800 packs two x86-64 cores clocked at 1.70 GHz, 1 MB of total cache, Radeon HD 7340 integrated graphics, and TDP of 17W. The APU is backed by AMD A68M FCH, which provides up to four SATA 6 Gb/s ports. 2 GB of single-channel DDR3 memory is included, so is a 320 GB 5400 RPM HDD. Connectivity options include 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and gigabit Ethernet. Other features include a 1.3 MP webcam, and a 6-in-1 flash card reader supporting SD/SDHC/SDXC/XD/MMC/Memory Stick. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit comes pre-installed. The 11.6-inch screen packs a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. Slated for May 18, the Wind U270-412 is priced at 46,800 JPY (US $587), in Japan.

Dell today announced that customers such as Morphlabs and Vibrant Media are using Dell microserver technologies based on Intel Xeon processors to power business-critical web 2.0, cloud, and content delivery networks (CDN), as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Driven by the emergence of a growing hardware and application ecosystem, x86-based microservers are rapidly evolving from a niche solution to one with widespread awareness and value.

"We're constantly inspired by the unique ways our customers are leveraging Dell microserver platforms to drive specialized web 2.0, HPC and cloud computing applications," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. "As the microserver market and ecosystem have matured, customers like Vibrant Media have validated that microservers are a cost-effective, scalable platform in web 2.0 environments."

AMD gained CPU market share at Intel's expense in the first-quarter of 2012, according to the latest data by Mercury Research. Intel's CPU market share dropped from 81 percent last quarter, to 80.2 percent, while AMD's rose from 18.2 percent to 19.1 percent. Principal analyst at Mercury Research, Dean McCarron said that AMD benefited from improvements in hard drive supplies. AMD is strong in desktop processors, with 43 percent of the market, the same as last year. Customers also opted for lower-priced laptops, many of which had AMD's chips. Supplies of AMD's A-series chips code-named Llano were restored after manufacturing issues were resolved, McCarron said.

AMD revealed performance numbers of its key product for mainstream notebooks, the A10-4600M, in an infographic for the Korean market. Besides detailing the part, it reveals some performance numbers. To begin with, A10-4600M is based on the 32 nm "Trinity" silicon with all its components enabled. It has four x86-64 cores spread across two "Piledriver" architecture modules, 4 MB of total cache (2x 2 MB), CPU clock speeds of 2.30 GHz (3.00 GHz TurboCore), and integrated Radeon HD 7660G graphics that has 384 VLIW4 stream processors, and GPU core speed of 685 MHz. The chip integrates a PCI-Express 2.0 root complex, and dual-channel DDR3-1600 MHz integrated memory controller.

Moving on to performance numbers, and as expected, the infographic doesn't touch comparative CPU performance with a barge-pole. Instead the focus is on graphics performance, with an emphasis on Dual GPU feature, where the integrated graphics can work in tandem with a discrete GPU of the same class, resulting in up to 75% performance increase. Based on data from this infographic, and its own testing data of other notebooks, NordicHardware compiled relative performance of the IGP and Dual Graphics setup involving the A10-4600M and Radeon HD 7670M discrete GPU.

Intel finally got the ball rolling on its third generation Core processor family codenamed "Ivy Bridge", which will go into making most of the company's client processor portfolio for 2012. These chips are characterized as being the world's first microprocessors built on the 22 nanometer silicon fabrication process. Intel aided miniaturization of circuits to such tiny scale thanks to 3D Transistor technology, a space-efficient nano-scale transistor design that enables chip-designers to achieve higher transistor densities, and come up with ever more powerful chips.

The third-generation Core processor family is based around a single die design (pictured below), from which it will carve out numerous SKUs in the client market in May-June, and enterprise market (under its Xeon brand, towards the end of June). These SKUs will be carved out by toggling the various parallel components (such as x86 cores, cache banks, processor graphics cores, and of course clock-speeds). The new Core processor family is expected to feature higher performance per clock-speed, and higher efficiency. Intel's Kirk Skaugen has been quoted by the BBC as saying "This is the world's first 22 nm product and we'll be delivering about 20% more processor performance using 20% less average power."

AMD and Google are locked in a race to buy out MIPS, an application processor architecture designer competitive to ARM. AMD comes from a decades old presence in the microprocessor industry, while Google is a satrap with smartphones, tablets, and other mobile computing devices thanks to its Android operating system. With Microsoft opening up to ARM architecture with Windows 8 RT, it is in Google's interests to hedge its bets on an alternative machine architecture to both x86 and ARM. The easiest way to that is buying out MIPS and funding development of powerful processors based on it. For AMD, it's a bid to stay competitive in the low-power processor market as Intel began making inroads to smartphone processor market.

Crushing previous reports saying that Windows 8 would have up to nine editions, Microsoft has officially announced that its next Windows release, due in the second half of this year, will come in three main flavors, two for x86 systems - Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro, and one for ARM-based devices - Windows 8 RT.

The 'standard' x86 Windows 8 SKU will target consumer-grade PCs and tablets and will allow upgrading from Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium. Windows 8 Pro, which is aimed towards tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals, includes everything in the non-Pro SKU and adds goodies like BitLocker and BitLocker To Go, Boot from VHD, Hyper-V, Encrypting File System, Group Policy and Remote Desktop (host). This edition also supports upgrades from Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate.

It's no news that Valve is working on its own gaming hardware platform so far referred to as Steambox, but its talk has been mostly based on rumors and anecdotal information. The Steambox theory, and the theory that Valve is working on hardware, got cemented by a new job vacancy posted by Valve, which calls for experienced electronics engineers. The posting reads "For years Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we're developing hardware to enhance those experiences."

The skillset asked for in the posting fills a lot of holes in the Steambox theory. It requires engineers to be proficient with prototyping, system-level design, embedded systems, high-speed serial interfaces, circuit simulation, etc., with a much more juicy "recommended" skillset requirement covering areas such as board layout, ARM/x86 system design, power/thermal management, RF and antennas, etc., basically everything a company out to design a game console would seek in its new engineers. Find the posting here, under "Electronics Engineer."