Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Velocity Micro relaunches Overdrive gaming desktop: overclocked to 4.6GHz, with trio of GeForce graphics

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/velocity-micro-overdrive-gaming-desktop/

Velocity Micro relaunches Overdrive gaming desktop family overclocked to 46GHz, trio of GeForce graphics

After furnishing its latest machines with fresh Ivy Bridge processors, Velocity Micro has decided to tend to its high-performance gaming machines. The desktop's Overdrive BigBlock GTX promises to be "the new benchmark for extreme speed and luxury." It reckons it accomplishes this with a Core i7 3960X processor, "hyperclocked" to 4.6GHz, 32GB of quad-channel memory, three (yes, three) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards in Tri-SLI and two SSDs backed up with a weighty 2TB hard drive. The machines will also get treated to a splash of sports car-style paint, aiming to mirror the likes of Ferrari and BMW. Naturally, all that top-drawer tech corresponds to a similarly top-drawer price tag. The gaming rigs start from $8,000, which helps soften the blow of another recent product launch.

Continue reading Velocity Micro relaunches Overdrive gaming desktop: overclocked to 4.6GHz, with trio of GeForce graphics

Velocity Micro relaunches Overdrive gaming desktop: overclocked to 4.6GHz, with trio of GeForce graphics originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our te! rms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceVelocity Micro  | Email this | Comments

Read More...

HTC decides to buy S3 after all, keeps it on ice for future patent wars

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/htc-decides-to-buy-s3-after-all/

HTC hearts S3 Graphics

HTC was exhibiting more than a bit of buyer's remorse after its acquisition of S3 Graphics went off the rails: it had used the $300 million deal to scoop up a company with a victory over Apple in a patent dispute at the ITC, only to see that decision reversed and its dreams crumble. S3 will be glad to know that HTC wants the shotgun wedding to last. The One X creator's general counsel, Grace Lei, is now promising that the buyout will wrap up at some point in the near future after "cautious assessment" of its worth. The union won't help HTC fend off escalating Apple assaults, but the 270 patents may make other companies think twice before starting a feud -- oh, and give HTC some graphics technology to improve its products.

HTC decides to buy S3 after all, keeps it on ice for future patent wars originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceFocus Taiwan  | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Rivals AMD and ARM unite, summon others to become 'heterogeneous'

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/amd-arm-hsa-foundation/

Rivals AMD and ARM unite, summon others to become 'heterogeneous'Rumors of a hook-up between AMD and ARM have been circulating ever since someone coined the phrase "the enemy of Intel is my friend." As of today, however, that alliance is real and cemented in the form of the HSA Foundation -- a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the dark arts of Heterogeneous System Architecture. It's a relatively old concept in computing, but the Foundation's founding partners (AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek and Texas Instruments) all stand to gain from its wider adoption. How come? Because it involves boosting a chip's performance by making it use its various components as co-processors, rather than treating them as specialized units that can never help each other out.

In other words, while Intel pursues Moore's Law and packs ever-more sophisticated transistors into its CPUs, AMD, ARM and the other HSA pals want to achieve similar or better results through parallel computing. In most cases, that'll mean using the graphics processor on a chip not only for visuals and gaming, but also for general tasks and apps. This can already be achieved using a programming language called OpenCL, but AMD believes it's too tricky to code and is putting mainstream developers off. Equally, NVIDIA has long had its own language for the same purpose, called CUDA, but it! 's propr ietary. Whatever niche is left in the middle, the HSA Foundation hopes to fill it with an easier and more open standard that is not only cross-OS but also transcends the PC / mobile divide. If it works, it'll give us a noticeable surge in computational power in everyday apps by 2014. If it fails, these new-found friends can go back to the less awkward custom of ignoring each other.

Continue reading Rivals AMD and ARM unite, summon others to become 'heterogeneous'

Rivals AMD and ARM unite, summon others to become 'heterogeneous' originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Read More...

TiVo and PayPal let you buy stuff using your remote, hopes you swing past the shopping channel

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/tivo-paypal-commercials/

TiVo and PayPal let you buy stuff using your remote, hopes you swing past the shopping channel

Those late-night adverts for a steam-powered ab-crunching bagel toaster (just $400, plus $99 postage and packing!) will soon be much harder to resist, thanks to TiVo. The DVR maker has teamed up with PayPal to enable you to purchase goods with your remote control during the commercial. A global financial meltdown will probably ensue just as soon as the company can get compatible adverts developed, currently slated to begin airing during this year's fall TV season.

Continue reading TiVo and PayPal let you buy stuff using your remote, hopes you swing past the shopping channel

TiVo and PayPal let you buy stuff using your remote, hopes you swing past the shopping channel originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET  |   | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Google Generates $1 Billion On Five Enterprise Products: Can You Name Them? (GOOG)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-generates-1-billion-on-five-enterprise-products-can-you-name-them-2012-6

Larry Page

Google books more than 96% of its revenue from ads.

The remaining ~ 4% comes pretty much from its enterprise products. Even though it's a piddly percentage of revenue, in actual dollars, enterprise amounts to a $1.37 billion business for the search giant. 

And it's growing fast, at rate of about 30% a year.

Some 1,200 Google employees work on these various enterprise products, too. That's about 3.6% of Google's total headcount.

Google also has a network of 2,500 certified partners, including big traditional IT consultants like Accenture and Cognizant, as well as smaller partners to serve small and mid-size businesses.

In those terms, Google's enterprise business is actually the size of a fairly large company.

While Google doesn't break out the revenues of each of these business lines individually, we've come up with a few interesting tidbits on each one.

Can you name Google's five enterprise businesses?

No. 1: Google Apps (including Gmail and Google Drive)

Google Apps is Google's online productivity apps. They compete against Microsoft Office and Exchange, IBM Lotus, and various startups like Zoho (productivity) and YouSendIt (collaboration and storage).

Google claims to have over 4 million customers for Apps.

No. 2: Google Search Appliance

Google Search Appliance was launched in 2002. It competes against high-priced enterprise search and information retrieval technology from Autonomy (HP) and others.

Likewise Google also offers search to enterprises as a cloud service, known as Google Enterprise Search. This is a Google search engine box that companies place on their web sites that will search just the company's own site, not the whole Web.

No 3: Google Cloud Services

Google Cloud Services is Google's version of Amazon Web Services. It competes with Microsoft Azure,  Rackspace and a growing list of others.

Companies can upload their applications to Google App Engine provided those apps were written in a language that Google Apps supports. Google then sends a monthly bill based on how much that app was used.

Google also offers Google Cloud Storage, that competes with Amazon S3 and Google Prediction API. Last month it added a new big-data analysis service based called BigQuery, which competes against various Hadoop startups, recent hot IPO Splunk, and big players like IBM and HP.

No. 4: Geospatial and mapping products

Geospatial and mapping products are based on Google Maps technology and known as Google Earth and Google Maps. The paid-for business versions compete with specialty GIS providers like Esri.

By the way, this set of services no longer includes Google Sketchup. Google sold the super popular 3D modeling app to Trimble in April.

No. 5: Chromebooks for businesses

Chromebooks, and the Chrome OS compete against the Microsoft Windows ecosystem, including big PC vendors like Dell and HP, and Apple.

Google isn't discussing sales figures yet. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Chromebook hasn't exactly killed the PC yet.

Still, Google continues to invest in Chrome OS and these kind of thin client devices. In fact it just released a new Chrome product called Chromebox. This is Google's first ever kinda-sorta desktop PC. Chromebox is a thin client, meaning you plug in your own monitor and keyboard and use it to access applications stored elsewhere, like Google Apps.

Don't miss: 7 Tech Bigwigs Tell Us What's Next For Cloud Computing

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Read More...