Technology News

AMD Launches "Kaveri" APU with Radeon R7 Graphics

 Low power, high performance..

 The boys and girls at AMD officially launched the company's 2014 A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) with integrated Radeon R7 graphics. You know the parts by their codename "Kaveri," which AMD says is representative of a major architecture improvement. Kaveri sports completely redesigned cores, new Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features, new accelerators, and enhanced power management on a new 28nm manufacturing process.

Kaveri boasts up to 12 compute cores (4 "Steamroller" CPU cores + 8 GCN GPU cores) on a die measuring 245mm2 with 2.41 billion transistors. AMD made a concerted effort to improve the graphics in Kaveri, which include the latest technologies found in Hawaii -- Graphics Core Next (GCN), TrueAudio, Eyefinity, UVD, and VCE technologies. One thing that's interesting with AMD's focus on graphics is that the chip designer is embracing its role as a preferred choice among virtual coin miners. Apparetly Kaveri parts will be good at digging up Bitcoins, Litecoins, and other virtual currencies.

"AMD maintains our technology leadership with the 2014 AMD A-Series APUs, a revolutionary next generation APU that marks a new era of computing," said Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD. "With world-class graphics and compute technology on a single chip, the AMD A-Series APU is an effective and efficient solution for our customers and enable industry-leading computing experiences."

 The other big focus is on performance per watt. Kaveri will push better battery life on notebooks. AMD says Kaveri can scale up or down to other segments, such as embedded and server platforms, while bringing new features to small form factor (SFF) desktops.

  AMD is kicking off the Kaveri launch with its A10-7850K and A10-7700K APUS, both available this month and both coming bundled with Battlefield 4. Sometime later this quarter, AMD will release its lower end A8-7600 APU. As far as we know, the A8-7600 will not come with a game bundle.
  

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The Smallest Console,Pisten!!

 Xi3 Piston SteamBox Details: Specs, Availability, $1k Price

Xi3 has finally confirmed the hardware specifications and release date of its new Piston SteamBox PC.
With all the SteamOS and SteamBox chatter over the last week-plus, Xi3 decided it wants to be the first OEM out of the gate with a PC purpose-built for SteamOS. Or rather, that’s what they want everyone thinking ahead of the Piston PC launch.
The Piston will ship on November 29th for $1,000, and those who pre-order (be it now or previously) will get theirs two weeks before the rest of is. The Piston’s guts include a 3.2 GHz AMD Trinity quad-core APU, which has an AMD Radeon 7660D GPU on-board. While this hasn’t been confirmed, I think the Piston is using the A8-5500, underclocked from 3.4 GHz to 3.2 GHz. It’s one of the only Trinity APUs that has the 7660D GPU component.
The chip is complimented by 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, a 128 GB mSATA SSD, and more I/O than you will every need — an internal microSD card slot, four USB 3.0 ports, four 2.0 ports, four eSATA/USB combo ports, two Mini DisplayPorts, one HDMI/DisplayPort combo, audio in, out, and Ethernet.
Xi3 is stressing upgradability above all else, which is pretty impressive for a coffee mug-sized machine. The 128 GB of included SSD storage can be upgraded to two 512 GB drives, giving you 1 TB of SSD storage in a package smaller than most external hard drives.
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  The Amazing Steam Console!

 


GPU:  some units with Nvidia Titan, some GTX780, some GTX760, and some GTX660

 
CPU: some boxes with Intel i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3



RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB GDDR5 (GPU)   Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD 

 Power supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold.


Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high       



Unlike other gaming consoles, the Steam Machine does not have a specific configuration of hardware, but a minimum specification of computer hardware components that would be needed to support the SteamOS operating system and games developed for it. Valve plans to have several different retail versions of the Steam Machine through various hardware manufacturers, but will also allow users to create their own units from components and or modify retail products with off-the-shelf parts as desired. The units are expected to arrive in 2014, with Valve expecting to announce its partners for this first line at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in early January.

Valve will run a beta-testing program in late 2013, selecting 300 Steam users to test their optimized prototype hardware units and initial versions of the Steam Controllers. The initial prototypes to be sent to testers will have various configurations, and may not be representative of the final Steam Machine specifications.
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 The AMD Radeon R9 290x

 The Rx 200 series was announced on September 25, 2013, at the AMD GPU14 Tech Day event. Non-disclosure agreements were lifted on October 15, except for the R9 290x, and pre-orders opened on October 3.The Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X were announced on September 25, 2013. The R9 290 is based on AMD's Hawaii Pro chip and R9 290X on Hawaii XT. R9 290 and R9 290X will support AMD's TrueAudio, Mantle, DirectX 11.2, and bridge-free Crossfire technology. A limited "Battlefield 4 Edition" pre-order bundle of R9 290X that includes Battlefield 4 will be available on October 3, 2013, with reported initial quantity being 8,000 units, deposits will have to be made for the purchase as the price will not be revealed for some time even after the pre-orders begin. R9 290X will have 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 512-bit wide buses, 44 compute units and 8 ACE units. The R9 290X has a launch price of $549.

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GeForce GTX 780 Ti 

                      

The GeForce 700 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It is based on a refresh of the Kepler architecture (GK-codenamed chips), used in the previous GeForce 600 Series. A number of GeForce 700 series chips were released for mobile devices in April 2013. GeForce 700 series cards were first released in May 2013, starting with the release of the GeForce GTX 780 on May 23, 2013.The top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 780 is based on the GK110 chip. The GK110 chip was designed for high performance computing with a much higher 64 bit floating point performance than its predecessor graphics chips, while still maintaining all functionality needed to perform the tasks of a GPU. The chip was first used in the Tesla K20 and K20X computing modules, and since in the GeForce GTX Titan GPU. For the GeForce GTX 780 the high 64 bit performance has been stripped, effectively making the card a much less capable computing solution while retaining high 3D rendering performance used in video games.

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