USB 3.0 Next Revision Is Going To Double Speeds
Tue, Jan 8 2013 04:12
| Hardware
USB data transfer is about to get a lot faster. The USB Promoter Group is rolling out SuperSpeed USB, a supplement to USB 3.0 due out later this year that should surge your speeds two-fold.
SuperSpeed USB is supposed to give you 10 Gbps USB data rate, which is the same theoretically as Thunderbolt but in actuality this is only burst speeds and not sustainable like Thunderbolt and of course is not two way or capable of driving monitors are like Thunderbolt is It's also expected to feature better data encoding for transfers, more efficiency power efficient ports, and best of all, compatibility with existing devices. Later this year when you download a movie or a CD, it could take much less time thanks to the new standard.
To take advantage of the double-speed USB 3.0 interface, devices such as computers, hubs, and digital cameras will need new USB controller hardware. However, the new version of USB 3.0 uses the same connectors, so existing USB devices can be plugged into the higher-speed ports.
USB 3.0 cables may or may not work. "Existing SuperSpeed USB cables are not certified to operate at 10 Gbps; it is possible that some existing SuperSpeed USB cables may be capable of operating at 10 Gbps," the group said.
SuperSpeed USB is supposed to give you 10 Gbps USB data rate, which is the same theoretically as Thunderbolt but in actuality this is only burst speeds and not sustainable like Thunderbolt and of course is not two way or capable of driving monitors are like Thunderbolt is It's also expected to feature better data encoding for transfers, more efficiency power efficient ports, and best of all, compatibility with existing devices. Later this year when you download a movie or a CD, it could take much less time thanks to the new standard.
To take advantage of the double-speed USB 3.0 interface, devices such as computers, hubs, and digital cameras will need new USB controller hardware. However, the new version of USB 3.0 uses the same connectors, so existing USB devices can be plugged into the higher-speed ports.
USB 3.0 cables may or may not work. "Existing SuperSpeed USB cables are not certified to operate at 10 Gbps; it is possible that some existing SuperSpeed USB cables may be capable of operating at 10 Gbps," the group said.
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The New Tegra 4 CPU for Smartphones Is here and it's fast. It packs
Tue, Jan 8 2013 04:09
| Hardware, Smartphones
The New Tegra 4 CPU for Smartphones Is here and it's fast. It packs 72 GPU cores, 4 A15 CPU cores, and a built-in LTE.
In a (somewhat simulated) head to head test between a Nexus 10 tablet and and a Tegra 4 mystery machine, the latter loaded 25 webpages in only 27 seconds, with the older chip taking 50. Not many of us will be loading up 25 webpages simultaneously, but Nvidia is hammering beefed up browser performance here—as well as topping the iPad 4's A6X processor across the board. Nvidia says it's simply the fastest mobile processor in the world. Nvidia says.
The Tegra 4 will also have supercharged HDR photo rendering, Nvidia says, beating out the iPhone 5's abilities with better capture speeds thanks to all of those aforementioned cores working at once. In actual life terms, Nvidia says it'll be the difference between two seconds of rendering on the iPhone and 0.2 seconds on a Tegra 4-powered mobile camera.
One particularly nifty feature is "live HDR," which actually shows a video preview of the difference between a shot with and without HDR. Very impressive, and nothing we've ever seen before.
Nvidia is banking pretty heavily on the virtue of HDR here! Sometimes it looks nice, sometimes it looks tacky—but at least with a live preview you'll be able to tell beforehand.
A demo of Dead Trigger 2 running on Tegra 4 yielded some highly purty visuals—think early-PS3 era—though there was some slowdown. Still! This is phone and tablet tech. Fancy stuff.
No word on when we'll start seeing these things in our things. Soon!
In a (somewhat simulated) head to head test between a Nexus 10 tablet and and a Tegra 4 mystery machine, the latter loaded 25 webpages in only 27 seconds, with the older chip taking 50. Not many of us will be loading up 25 webpages simultaneously, but Nvidia is hammering beefed up browser performance here—as well as topping the iPad 4's A6X processor across the board. Nvidia says it's simply the fastest mobile processor in the world. Nvidia says.
The Tegra 4 will also have supercharged HDR photo rendering, Nvidia says, beating out the iPhone 5's abilities with better capture speeds thanks to all of those aforementioned cores working at once. In actual life terms, Nvidia says it'll be the difference between two seconds of rendering on the iPhone and 0.2 seconds on a Tegra 4-powered mobile camera.
One particularly nifty feature is "live HDR," which actually shows a video preview of the difference between a shot with and without HDR. Very impressive, and nothing we've ever seen before.
Nvidia is banking pretty heavily on the virtue of HDR here! Sometimes it looks nice, sometimes it looks tacky—but at least with a live preview you'll be able to tell beforehand.
A demo of Dead Trigger 2 running on Tegra 4 yielded some highly purty visuals—think early-PS3 era—though there was some slowdown. Still! This is phone and tablet tech. Fancy stuff.
No word on when we'll start seeing these things in our things. Soon!
Netbook's Are Dead and Apple's To Blame.
Finally Netbooks are dead and Apples getting the blame
These small, underpowered, ultracheap laptops were considered the future of the computer industry. In 2008 and 2009, recession-strapped consumers around the world began snapping up netbooks in droves. They became the fastest-growing segment of the PC market, and some wild-eyed analysts were suggesting that netbook sales would soon eclipse those of desktops and regular laptops combined. That didn’t happen. Over the past couple years the netbook market crashed. Now, as Charles Arthur reports in the Guardian, most major PC manufacturers have stopped making these tiny machines. The last holdouts were the Taiwanese firms Acer and Asus. Both say they won’t build any netbooks in 2013.
What killed the netbook? Arthur’s smart piece offers three plausible suspects: First, PC makers began making better, cheaper laptops, which made for stronger competition against netbooks. Second, PC makers discovered that netbooks were a terrible business—after paying Microsoft a licensing fee for Windows, manufacturers weren’t making any money on very cheap computers. And finally, there was the rise of tablets; once machines like the iPad came along, people lost interest in $400 netbooks.
These are all plausible theories, but I think Arthur is a bit too reluctant to tie the whole story together and issue a blistering indictment against the netbook’s assassin. If you study the PC industry over the past five years, you find only one company that had the means, motive, and opportunity. Apple killed the netbook, more or less single-handedly, and we should all be grateful for it.
Netbooks were terrible machines, a technological blight that threatened to become the future of computing. They had awful, nearly unusable keyboards, very slow processors, and they ran versions of Windows or Linux that were a trudge to use on tiny screens. Yet despite their awfulness, they were embraced by the world’s largest tech firms—Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Lenovo were all gaga for them.
Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold.
In 2008, Apple launched the expensive but very portable MacBook Air, and then in 2010, it put out the cheap but capable iPad. Neither was a direct substitute for the netbook. But consumers immediately recognized their utility—and quickly abandoned netbooks. The iPad and the Air became the blueprints for the rest of the industry, with every other PC manufacturer now making similarly thin laptops and touchscreen tablets. Thus, thanks to Apple—and Apple alone—we were all saved from the rise of terrible tiny machines.
It’s difficult, now, to appreciate how courageous Apple’s refusal to join the netbook parade once was. In 2008, its cheapest laptop sold for more than $1,000. This was crazy expensive in the midst of a global recession, and investors and analysts were hounding the company to lower its prices. Apple’s stock price sank to less than $100.
But Apple had two reasons for holding steady against netbooks. One was noble: Shrinking a laptop to the size of netbooks—which typically had 7- or 9-inch screens and very slow Intel Atom processors—made for an inherently inferior computing experience. At that size, pointing devices and keyboards became very annoying to use, and operating systems designed for systems with more power worked like molasses. In other words, netbooks sucked, and Apple didn’t want to make computers that sucked. As Steve Jobs told investors in 2008, “We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk. Our DNA will not let us do that.”
The second reason Apple didn’t make a netbook was that it couldn’t make a netbook. The principal difference between Apple and most other tech manufacturers is that Apple prizes profits over market share. Sure, Apple, like all companies, wants to sell a lot of widgets—but given a choice between making $10 billion by capturing 10 percent of the market or $1 billion by capturing 90 percent of the market, Apple will always choose money over sales. (You’d think this was obvious; don’t all companies want to make money? Nope: Apple sells fewer PCs than most other companies, but makes much more money doing so than all of its rivals.)
That’s why Apple couldn’t make a netbook. Netbooks were a market-share play—at $300 to $400 each, PC manufacturers were making very little on each one sold, so the only way to succeed was to get a huge slice of the market. Apple had no interest in playing that game; why spend time and effort selling something you wouldn’t make any money on?
It’s worth noting that Apple wasn’t the only PC maker that was worried about netbooks’ low margins. Many other PC manufacturers recognized that netbooks would ruin them, too. In 2008, the New York Times published a piece citing computer makers’ rising anxiety about netbooks. One industry analyst told the paper, “When I talk to PC vendors, the No. 1 question I get is, how do I compete with these netbooks when what we really want to do is sell PCs that cost a lot more money?”
An executive at Fujitsu, one of the world’s largest PC companies, told the Times that the firm wouldn’t be making a netbook because it couldn’t see a way to make money from them: “We’re sitting on the sidelines not because we’re lazy. We’re sitting on the sidelines because even if this category takes off, and we get our piece of the pie, it doesn’t add up,” Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management for Fujitsu, told the Times. “It’s a product that essentially has no margin.”
But even though there was no money in them, most PC makers joined the netbook parade. That Times article was published in July 2008; in October, Fujitsu launched its first netbook. Soon everyone else except Apple had one.
I’m sure I’ll hear from a number of readers who’ll claim to have loved their netbooks. You’ll say that while there may have been terrible netbooks on the market, your particular one was just right for you. And you’ll further argue that however terrible netbooks were, they were certainly better than the iPad and other tablets, on which you can’t do any “real work.” (I know you!)
But I don’t believe you. Most research suggests that while people were entranced with the idea of netbooks, they hated them in reality. A 2009 survey by the market research firm NPD showed that most people bought netbooks thinking they would work as a substitute to a standard laptop—and they became very disappointed when they realized that netbooks weren’t powerful enough to be used that way. In other words, netbooks were marketed as being for “real work,” but they turned out to be unsuited for most computing tasks.
The iPad, meanwhile, never had any pretensions of functioning as a replacement for a laptop. It was always sold as something different: a truly mobile gadget meant for non-office computing. Everything about it, from its processor to its battery to its operating system, was designed specifically for delivering a better mobile experience. Unlike a netbook, the iPad turns on instantly, it has a 10-hour battery life, and it can find your location on a map. Unlike a netbook, it has an App Store that overflows with software designed for its screen.
True, the iPad, unlike the netbook, doesn’t come with a keyboard or a pointing device. But you can buy a keyboard for it—and if you want a pointing device and Windows, you buy Microsoft’s Surface or one of the many “hybrid” laptop/tablet Windows 8 machines now hitting the market. Or, if you want a “real” computer, you can buy a MacBook Air (which now goes for $1,000) or any of its Windows “ultrabook” clones.
See what I’m saying? Even if you don’t use the iPad or the Air and have no interest in ever buying an Apple product, pretty much every mobile computer you can buy today was inspired by the two devices that Apple ginned up to fight netbooks. In netbooks’ demise, Apple emerged victorious—but so did the rest of the PC industry, and so did we users.
Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter now available for $29
www.tech-sanity.com
Apple's relentless drive to shave millimetres off its laptops has come at a cost — your new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display might not have quite as many ports as you're used to. The company's own FireWire 800 port has fallen out of favour in recent years, for example, with Apple electing to push Intel's newer Thunderbolt standard in its place, but now there's a solution for those still relying on the older connector for audio devices and similar applications. Announced along with the new laptop lineup at WWDC in June, the Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter is capable of providing up to 7W of power and is finally on sale now at the Apple Store for $29. It's not the most elegant solution, no, but it just might be the final excuse you need to pick up that Retina MacBook Pro.
Apple's relentless drive to shave millimetres off its laptops has come at a cost — your new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display might not have quite as many ports as you're used to. The company's own FireWire 800 port has fallen out of favour in recent years, for example, with Apple electing to push Intel's newer Thunderbolt standard in its place, but now there's a solution for those still relying on the older connector for audio devices and similar applications. Announced along with the new laptop lineup at WWDC in June, the Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter is capable of providing up to 7W of power and is finally on sale now at the Apple Store for $29. It's not the most elegant solution, no, but it just might be the final excuse you need to pick up that Retina MacBook Pro.
Drobo debuts a duo of Thunderbolt drives: the 5D for desktops and the Mini for road warriors
Fri, Jun 22 2012 08:22
| Hardware
www.tech-sanity.com
Drobo's been delivering quality desktop storage for businesses and prosumers for awhile now, but previously, the company hadn't dipped its toe into Thunderbolt waters. But that's about to change with its two new units. The 5D is a BYOD desktop offering with two Thunderbolt ports and one USB 3.0 socket for connecting up to five hot-swappable, 3.5-inch drives to your Mac or PC. It also has an SmSATASD for data-caching quickness and a variable-speed fan to keep things cool and quiet. We don't know exactly when the 5D will go on sale -- Drobo's not telling until July -- but it'll cost under $850 when it does, and that price includes a Thunderbolt cable.
Meanwhile, the Mini is the first Drobo meant to be taken on the road. It packs up to four 2.5-inch drives in its front bays, plus, like the 5D, there's an mSATA SSD nestled in its underside that serves as a caching tier to speed up your main storage -- all in a 7.3 x 1.8 x 7.1-inch package weighing three pounds when fully loaded. All the drives are hot-swappable, a process made simple and easy with a trick, spring-loaded mechanism (patent pending) that lets users swap drives as they would SD cards. As for connecting the thing to your computer, dual Thunderbolt ports (for daisy chaining) and one USB 3.0 port reside round back along with the power plug and two vents for the Mini's variable-speed fans. Ringing the front face of the Mini are five LED strips that serve as drive indicators and capacity meter to let you know when a drive has failed or you're running out of space. Intrigued? Well, we got a sneak peek at the Mini and a little history lesson about its origins at Drobo HQ, so join us past the break for more.
The Mini's shell is crafted from metallic carbon fiber coated in a grippy soft touch material with the Drobo logo embossed on top, and a magnetic front plate covers up those unsightly HDDs -- it's a very clean, appealing design. We got our hands on a prototype unit that was almost production spec (the Firewire ports didn't make it into the final design due to cost concerns), and we can certainly see the appeal of such a portable, robust storage solution. But, because it's such a departure from Drobo's previous products, we were curious as to how the Mini came to be.
Turns out, its genesis was borne of company co-founder Julian Terry's desire for a Drobo that could fit in his office workstation, so Terry hacked together a bit of kit you see in the picture below. Terry's work was subsequently discovered by CEO Tom Buiocchi, who saw its potential as a portable solution for travel-weary videographers and photogs. After that, Terry designed and built the spring-loaded drive housing to complete the main Mini innards, and then it was a matter of designing the exterior and adding some elbow grease in the prototyping stage to get it ready for mass consumption.
The result? A handsome, onyx number that'll sate most any mobile professional's storage needs for under $650 (drives not included). Best part is, Drobo addressed a common pain point with other Thunderbolt drives: the Thunderbolt cable's included. Unfortunately, as with the 5D, we won't know the Mini's exact pricing or availability until next month, but until then you can peruse our spate of pictures to feed your Drobo dreams.
Drobo's been delivering quality desktop storage for businesses and prosumers for awhile now, but previously, the company hadn't dipped its toe into Thunderbolt waters. But that's about to change with its two new units. The 5D is a BYOD desktop offering with two Thunderbolt ports and one USB 3.0 socket for connecting up to five hot-swappable, 3.5-inch drives to your Mac or PC. It also has an SmSATASD for data-caching quickness and a variable-speed fan to keep things cool and quiet. We don't know exactly when the 5D will go on sale -- Drobo's not telling until July -- but it'll cost under $850 when it does, and that price includes a Thunderbolt cable.
Meanwhile, the Mini is the first Drobo meant to be taken on the road. It packs up to four 2.5-inch drives in its front bays, plus, like the 5D, there's an mSATA SSD nestled in its underside that serves as a caching tier to speed up your main storage -- all in a 7.3 x 1.8 x 7.1-inch package weighing three pounds when fully loaded. All the drives are hot-swappable, a process made simple and easy with a trick, spring-loaded mechanism (patent pending) that lets users swap drives as they would SD cards. As for connecting the thing to your computer, dual Thunderbolt ports (for daisy chaining) and one USB 3.0 port reside round back along with the power plug and two vents for the Mini's variable-speed fans. Ringing the front face of the Mini are five LED strips that serve as drive indicators and capacity meter to let you know when a drive has failed or you're running out of space. Intrigued? Well, we got a sneak peek at the Mini and a little history lesson about its origins at Drobo HQ, so join us past the break for more.
The Mini's shell is crafted from metallic carbon fiber coated in a grippy soft touch material with the Drobo logo embossed on top, and a magnetic front plate covers up those unsightly HDDs -- it's a very clean, appealing design. We got our hands on a prototype unit that was almost production spec (the Firewire ports didn't make it into the final design due to cost concerns), and we can certainly see the appeal of such a portable, robust storage solution. But, because it's such a departure from Drobo's previous products, we were curious as to how the Mini came to be.
Turns out, its genesis was borne of company co-founder Julian Terry's desire for a Drobo that could fit in his office workstation, so Terry hacked together a bit of kit you see in the picture below. Terry's work was subsequently discovered by CEO Tom Buiocchi, who saw its potential as a portable solution for travel-weary videographers and photogs. After that, Terry designed and built the spring-loaded drive housing to complete the main Mini innards, and then it was a matter of designing the exterior and adding some elbow grease in the prototyping stage to get it ready for mass consumption.
The result? A handsome, onyx number that'll sate most any mobile professional's storage needs for under $650 (drives not included). Best part is, Drobo addressed a common pain point with other Thunderbolt drives: the Thunderbolt cable's included. Unfortunately, as with the 5D, we won't know the Mini's exact pricing or availability until next month, but until then you can peruse our spate of pictures to feed your Drobo dreams.
Matrox Relesases Their Thunderbolt Docking Station
Tue, Jun 5 2012 12:42
| Hardware
www.tech-sanity.com
It offers a DVI output, Gigabit Ethernet, one USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports and audio input/output. It is fully compatible with Mac hardware and should cost around 250 USD. This is a rather premium price if you consider that you will have to purchase a Thunderbolt cable. However, for MacBook Air users especially it could be the perfect companion on a desk.
It offers a DVI output, Gigabit Ethernet, one USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports and audio input/output. It is fully compatible with Mac hardware and should cost around 250 USD. This is a rather premium price if you consider that you will have to purchase a Thunderbolt cable. However, for MacBook Air users especially it could be the perfect companion on a desk.