Sony (NYSE: SNE) had a lot of surprises for us during the past few days, and one of it is the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact. Unveiled just a few days ago during a press conference at IFA 2014, this new sleek tablet offers the usual underwater functionality, plus a level of thinness that would literally make you feel like it’s nothing.

The Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact has an 8-inch full-HD (1920×1080) screen, which quite typical for most tablets today but nevertheless great. It has a miniscule thickness (or thinness) 6.4 mm and an equally almost insignificant weight of about 270 grams. This provides the unit with a brand new level of thinness, which, when combined with its handy form factor, makes it one of the lightest high-spec devices ever built yet.

But that’s just part of the hype. As part of Sony’s standard way of providing multi-platform integration feature to their devices, the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact will have a PS4 remote play option. A simple Wi-Fi connection would enable a user to play PS4 games on the tablet while using a Dualshock 4 controller. A special game mount (GCM10) is even available so you can simply snap the tablet onto the controller to make gaming more comfortable.

The Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact even has other audio and video enhancement perks, such as Sony’s propriety Triluminos display and DSEE HX (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) technologies. Oh, and let’s not forget its IP68 rating standard, in case you’re interested in streaming PS4 gameplay videos as you take your morning shower.

For its innards, the unit is powered by a 2.5 Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor. It has 3GB of RAM and holds a basic storage capacity of 16 GB. Outer ports and peripherals include an 8-megapixel rear camera, 2.2-megapixel front camera, a Micro USB 2.0 port, and a micro SD card slot (128 GB max). Available wireless options include Wi-Fi, NFC, LTE (4G), and TD-LTE (4G). OS is Android 4.4.

The Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact will be available internationally this fall.

The post Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact is PS4 Remote Play Compatible appeared first on VR World.

Intel was the first manufacturer to introduce this “element” into the mix, way back in late 1990s. First “expensive turned cheap” processor was a certain Celeron processor that shared the same die as more expensive Pentium III processors. But the caveat was that specific boards recognized that CPU as Celeron with whole amount of cache, and those beasts were more overclockable than PIII processors (due to difference in FSB – 100 MHz vs. 133 MHz). And as the song goes, “here we go again”. Korean enthusiast web-site Playwares found out that Advanced Clock Calibration feature on SB700/750-equipped motherboards could be the way how AMD is creating X3 and X2 CPUs, and started to play with them on Biostar’s 790GX motherboard.

How to make a "Phenom X4 10": One X3 10, Overclocking-friendly motherboard and Page Down key on a keyboard.

As you can see in picture above, really interesting thing happened. One press on Page Down key in BIOS turned X3 into an X4, and by the stroke of luck, this X3 didn’t had a broken down core, but was one of those CPUs that was “cored-down”. Sadly, I don’t have Athlon X2 or Phenom X3 CPU here (have ASUS and GigaByte 790GX+SB750 motherboards) to test myself, but those motherboards have the same BIOS feature as tested Biostar one.

Unless this story is a hoax, all we can say is – it looks like AMD is not certain how many heads its Dragon platfrom has. It morphs

The post Impossible is nothing: Turn your Phenom X3 into an X4! appeared first on VR World.

Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.

15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...

Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?

On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?

My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.

This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.

All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.

On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager )?

The post STEAM: Intel 8-core Skulltrail almost outsold 3-core Phenom X3 appeared first on VR World.