With the annual Consumer Electronics Show right around the corner and the industry’s marketing efforts going into overdrive, what is it that we will likely see next week?

It’s a safe bet that if will be a week of opposites.

From hardware going to both larger and smaller designs, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) G-Sync versus AMD (NYSE: AMD) FreeSync, small displays with massive resolution, and gaming notebooks of both massive and diminutive sizes.

Small form factor hardware as is one of the fastest growing areas in the hardware segment, and no doubt there will be a lot of it on display at CES.  With hardware becoming so powerful and small we are seeing a lot of really powerful builds that can be done.  With even MATX X99 boards we are seeing that there is a move toward making things small and potent.  On the other side there is a lot of huge pieces of hardware showing up on the market, namely 4K and ultra wide monitors.  They are becoming even more prolific and the ultra wide monitors are drawing a lot of interest from gamers and power users who were once planning on going for a 4K monitor or two.  There will be a lot of talk this CES about AMD’s FreeSync for enthusiast gaming monitors as it is the newcomer challenging Nvidia’s established G-Sync.  FreeSync will draw the attention of monitor manufacturers since it is less costly to implement and license than the G-Sync solution.  The LG 34UM67 will be a curved ultra wide monitor that will feature AMD’s FreeSync, and should definitely steal a lot of the spotlight next week.

The mobile computing segment is also something to watch next week as we will see a lot of small notebooks with very high resolution displays.  It is easy to say that there will be a number of notebook models that will feature 3K and 4K screens, even at the 15.6-inch sizes.  There will also be a movement with ultraportable gaming notebooks of small size that can be docked with a desktop graphics card for superior gaming ability while at a desk.  With the shrinking of parts that make up computers we will be seeing a drastic reduction in size and weight of these ulta portable notebooks.  Not only will they be smaller but they will be potent and even come equipped with quad-core Intel i7 processors and decent graphics.  On the other hand you will also see that there is a move to the opposite extreme as there will be new 18″ gaming notebooks that will be the true embodiment of the “desktop replacement” name.  Some of these huge notebooks will even sport gaming grade mechanical keyboards featuring Cherry MX Brown switches.

Be sure to check back throughout next week as CES 2015 kicks off in Las Vegas.

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Here is the daily roundup from Japanese consumer tech and tech business websites for Dec. 18, 2014.

Bandai Namco to change its official name

Major game video game publisher Bandai Namco Games announces that it will be changing its official name to Bandai Namco Entertainment.  The change will be officially implemented on the 1st of April next year.

The decision for the corporation’s rebranding was officiated by Bandai Namco Holding’s board of directors today, along with the company’s decision to expand the business beyond video game publishing and out towards the general entertainment industry. A total number of 20 other company subsidiaries will also be rebranded in accordance to this decision, and will also be effective starting today.

HP rolls out new PC and notebook lineup in Japan

HP Japan finally reveals its new product lineup of notebook and desktop PCs. The new models will be available starting this week.

The notebook lineup includes the HP Omen 15 high-end gaming notebook PC and the entry-level HP Stream 11.  Both models will be available in Japan at a base price of $1,680.00 and $220.00 respectively. For its desktop lineup, HP offers the HP Envy 700, HP Pavillion 500, and the HP Pavillion Slimline 400. The HP Envy 700 will be available with a base price of $760.00, while the two other models will be available at $500.00.

Toshiba develops new heavy ion radiotherapy scanner

Toshiba unveils its newest 3D medical scanning technology, in the form of a next generation heavy ion radiotherapy scanner. It was first unveiled last week during the JASPRO 2014 event.

Designed for respiratory-gated imaging and superconducting rotating gantries, the new 3D scanner was built with the purpose of allowing much faster scanning than most other 3D scanners. It was co-developed by Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences, and was in steady development for at least three years since 2011, burgeoning several prototypes and other similar technologies before arriving to its latest iteration.

The company is now planning to commercially develop and release its 3D scanning technology to other countries.

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Today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2014.

Intel’s expected consensus earnings were $0.65 per share, while the company reported an EPS of $0.66  on record $14.6 billion  in revenue. As a whole Intel reported $3.3 billion in profit on $14.6 billion in revenue. It also generated approximately $5.7 billion in cash from operations and paid back $1.1 billion in the form of dividends to investors for the quarter while using $4.2 billion to repurchase 122 million shares of stock. This is very likely thanks to the strength of the PC market recently in North America and Europe. Intel’s earnings for the quarter were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter and their revenue was up 5% quarter over quarter. When you look at the same time a year ago, Intel’s profit was up 12% and revenue was up 8%.

For Intel’s business divisions, Intel once again saw a mixed bag of results. Its PC Client Group saw revenue grow to $9.2 billion, up 6% sequentially and 9% year over year. Its Data Center Group also saw sizable improvement, growing to $3.7 billion from growth of 5% sequentially and 16% year over year (showing Intel’s renewed server growth). The IoT Group saw revenue of $530 million, down 2% sequentially and up 14% year over year. As far as the mobile efforts go, its Mobile and Communications group saw revenues of only $1 million, consistent with Intel’s expectations. Lastly, software and services operating group also saw revenues of $558 million, up 2% year over year and sequentially.

What will it take for Intel to compete in mobile?

Intel is still struggling to compete in the mobile space, continuing to take heavy losses of over $1 billion (now at $3 billion this year alone) and having very few design wins to show for. It’s very likely going to consider their upcoming Broadwell chips as part of their mobile push, but the truth is that those chips are still going into laptops and high-end tablets rather than smartphones and affordable tablets where the real volumes lie. The new Core M processors are showing some serious promise, but they are still too expensive to put into a smartphone or tablet even though their power consumption is impressively low thanks to the new 14nm process. But they still need to find a way to make themselves relevant in smartphones and tablets, especially when you consider how much money they’re spending to keep that division going.

There is one seriously troubling business metric here that Intel is clearly trying to hide. That’s the Mobile and Communications Group. It reported a minuscule $1 million in revenue for a division that last quarter reported $51 million in revenue, that’s a reduction of around 98% quarter over quarter. And when you look at 2Q 2014 against the previous quarter (1Q 2014) their Mobile and Communications Group was already down 67 percent sequentially and down 83 percent year-over-year. What’s even crazier is that if you look at the Mobile and Communications Group revenues for the 1Q 2014, the company was already having a hard time while earning $156 million in revenue. During 1Q 2014, Intel reported $156 million in revenue which was already down 52% sequentially and down 61% year over year. Intel has successfully eviscerated their entire mobile division to effectively nothing, Investors are absolutely going to demand that Intel abandon their mobile push because it clearly isn’t working and its costing the company billions of dollars per year to run, essentially, into the ground.

Intel also recently announced its new Core i7 5960X along with a full line of Haswell-E based performance processors for the X99 motherboard platform, which now uses DDR4 instead of DDR3. However, this launch came at the tail end of 3Q 2014, and very likely won’t affect Intel’s sales as much as it will in 4Q 2013. It also launched the accompanying Xeon E5 v3 family of server processors, also based on Haswell-E and also running DDR4 shortly after the announcement of the Intel Core i7 Extreme processor. Both lines bring valuable advancements to Intel’s own server and high performance desktop lines, where the company is strongest.

Intel also guided for the 4Q of 2014, stating that it expects to once again have record revenues to the tune of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million and that they expect gross margin to go down to 64% from 65%. They expect R&D to increase a bit from $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion, even though the previous quarter was $4.9 billion, so it isn’t really much of a change.
Q4 2014. Intel was trading up 2% during regular hours and is now trading up around 2% in after hours trading.

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For all Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) wants to hype new unproven markets such as wearables and mobile, desktop along with servers, are still the company’s cash cow.

Intel didn’t share much in the line of desktops at IDF, as the company already made its big desktop related announcements earlier this year at the Game Developer Conference in San Fransisco as well as in June at Computex. The company did hint at Skylake, the successor to Broadwell, but didn’t reveal any important technical information (Skylake, however, was old news as its existence had been long leaked already).

But as desktop is one of the two main pillars of the company, getting a gauge on the desktop “state of the union” is important. Bright Side of News*’ Sam Reynolds sat down with Lisa Graff, Intel’s GM and VP of the Desktop Client Platform division, to see where the company has gone and where it is going in the desktop space.

Bright Side of News*: Intel is clearly pushing hard to expand its presence in Shenzhen, as was clear at IDF Shenzhen earlier this year. But so far this has been mostly for Intel’s mobile efforts. What about the Desktop Group?

Lisa Graff: Shenzhen has come from doing lots of different devices — CD players in the past, tablets, etc. So there’s a number of things going on there with desktops, primarily with all-in-ones. You’ve got a whole lot of the larger ODMs as well as OEMs there [doing all-in-ones]. Primarily, that’s where their interest lies.

Overall the PC group is there, enabling them, and helping them build what they want to build.

BSN*: Right now Intel has a commanding lead in the enthusiast CPU space. Technically speaking, why, in your opinion, is Intel leading by such a large margin against the competition?

LG: We’ve invested in it. We’ve invested in multiple aspects of our processors to make them very, very high performance. We put a lot of focus in the design of the processor itself to get each core high performance. Some software scales well with multiple cores and threading, while some software does not.

So, you need a core to be high-performance even if that software is single-threaded. The per-core performance needs to be very good. We can always scale and add more cores to the die. Those are the two aspects from the design standpoint. We’re always looking at how we could increase that performance. There’s a lot of different ways you could do that, and many of them are hard. Our per-core performance compared to the competition is very good; four-cores does not equal four-cores as I’m sure you know.

Those are the design aspects, but our other advantage is in process technology. Intel, as you know, is years ahead in process technology and we’ve put a huge amount of investment building our own fabs with a tight coupling between designing the processor and designing the manufacturing process. This is all done years ahead of when the product comes out so you can fine-tune everything to get the most performance out of the chip. All of that pays off in the end if you can have faster transistors that are less expensive, which you can put more of them on a die.

We know we have a customer base that will pay for performance so we’ve invested in it.

BSN*: Let’s shift to Broadwell on the desktop. Can you clarify the situation regarding PCI-Express? Some say that it may be intentionally slowed to give Intel’s Iris graphics a leg up.

LG: We’re only saying one thing about Broadwell on desktop: which is we are going to bring Iris graphics. We’ll come out with more details later, but we have confirmed that we will bring Iris Pro to desktop — meaning LGA. We think that’s going to enable us to have nice little mini-desktops — you can save the power, heat, thermals and cost of a discrete graphics card in these smaller form factors.

BSN*: As a follow-up, how do these small form factors play into Intel’s  broader vision for the desktop?

LG: Look, regardless of these small form factors, a lot of people still buy regular towers. So I don’t think there will be one size fits all, where this new “nirvanna” thing replaces everything. People have different needs.

For minis I think it’s [a few] things: one is there is absolutely a desktop replacement where the usage is such that the space saving is one of the big things we’re going after. This might be people who are already using small form factor. Second, there are new usages for minis. That’s the easy-embedded, standards-embedded use case. Point of sale is an example.

BSN*: Thanks for your time.

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Our buddies over at Origin PC are having a pretty sweet Back to School deal, depending on which product you buy from them. If you’re in the market for a sweet gaming desktop or a high-end EON gaming notebook from them, then you can expect to get a free upgrade to a 240 GB SSD from VisionTek as well as a free copy of Watch Dogs. Or, if you’re in the market for something like their EVO15-S gaming laptop, then you can get free ground shipping across the US, a free 2 year part replacement warranty (standard is one year), and a free copy of Watch Dogs. However, it appears that their 2 year warranty that they’re including here does not include the cost of shipping or labor for the laptop, so it may not actually be as good of a warranty as it may seem.

Back 2 School Origin PC

We’ll be watching out for other good Back to School deals for you guys as they start to heat up, leading to the beginning of the school year. We’re already working on some guides for the best laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets for this back to school season so that you’ve got most of your decisions covered. But as of right now, Origin PC is the only company that’s launched their back to school deals so far. And while the 2 year part replacement warranty may not seem so great, most gaming laptops dong really last that long to begin with and any repairs are mostly going to be the cost of parts and not really labor. That’s primarily because replacement parts for most laptops are incredibly expensive and usually drive people towards just buying a new laptop. But even with that caveat, the Origin PC desktop and EON Laptop deal isn’t a bad one because they’re basically throwing in a free SSD and game which is actually worth about what they say it is.

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Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1’2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3’2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.

The post EXCLUSIVE – Intel cans 45nm “Auburndale” and “Havendale” Fusion CPUs! appeared first on VR World.

Label that nobody reads...

Intrigued by this one, we’ve called our friends and visited them and saw that many of computers that have Seagate drives on – have the SATA-I jumper on. Seeing that jumper on in Dell OptiPlex 700 series machines only goes to show that even large OEM vendors don’t care about user experience.
We learned from one Seagate representative in EMEA region that the company made the call to disable SATA-II by default, in order to enhance the compatibility with older motherboards. OEM vendors can ask for delivery of the hard drive with SATA 3.0 Gbps mode turned on, but so far, nobody asked for it. If you jump the gun from WD or Samsung to Seagate, make sure that you pull one small jumper from behind the drive… that jumper locks the drive to SATA-I mode and that’s it.

White jumper that limits the performance of your drive...by default.

I took several 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and did a quick test in HDtach 3.0. It turns out that every hard drive experienced a major improvement in burst performance. Read speeds were positively affected as well.

This is performance of 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 by default (jumper on)...

...and this is what you get with the jumper removed. This is the same drive, same SATA cable, same power cable.

Given these numbers, I would advise that if you have a Seagate drive, check to see if your drive has SATA-I jumper on. If the jumper is there, remove it and experience the full speed of these silent drives.

Of course, if you have a motherboard with SATA 3.0 Gbps controller.

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