LG Optimus Vu Review

LG may have given up on tablets, but not on the Optimus Vu - it's halfway between a phone and a tablet, a hybrid of form factors that we like to call "phoneblets". The Samsung Note was one of the first, but that doesn't mean it can have the market all for itself. The LG Vu pairs the big screen with a handy stylus to enhance tasks like note taking, something that can be a chore on a normal thumb-operated handset.

The LG Optimus Vu is certainly an unusual device - some might see this as an advantage, but there are ergonomic reasons why phones aren't this wide. But the Vu isn't a phone, is it?

While not quite a full-blown tablet, the 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is actually an advantage when taking notes or just drawing something using the stylus - 16:9 is popular with videos, not notepads or printed media.

It all revolves around the stylus - the Optimus Vu is a fine upper-mid-range device in terms of performance, screen and camera, but it's the stylus and accompanying software that carve out its niche.

As for where else you can get a similar experience, the Samsung Galaxy Note is the closest match. Its stylus is smaller, but tucks inside the Note itself and the 720p Super AMOLED screen is pretty cool too. Oh, and it's already on Android 4.0 ICS.

For the ultimate Android tablet with a stylus experience, we have to point to the Galaxy Note 10.1. The big stylus is even more comfortable than the Vu's and the tablet tracks it while you hover it above the screen, the way professional graphics tablet do. It's the size of one too. The only downside (and it's a big one) is that Samsung is taking its time releasing it due to last-minute adjustments and we are not aware of its launch schedule.

Source: http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_optimus_vu-review-783.php

Apple's Public Shaming

A judge in the United Kingdom dealt an unusual punishment to Apple for losing a court case against Samsung last week. Apple sued Samsung in the U.K., claiming that the South Korean manufacturer's Galaxy Tab tablets copied the iPad. This, the judge said, was not true. Yesterday, the judge ruled that Apple must issue notifications on its U.K. website as well as in newspapers and magazines saying that Samsung did not copy the iPad. While the punishment may seem extreme, it may be just what the mobile device industry needs.

Apple has been fighting patent and design lawsuits against Samsung in courts across the world. The U.K. case hinged on design similarities between the iPad and the Galaxy Tab series, specifically the Galaxy Tab 10.1's back and rounded corners. 

Last week, Judge Colin Birss said that Samsung did not infringe on Apple’s design because the Galaxy Tabs “are not as cool.” They “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said, according to Bloomberg. 

The judge's ruling yesterday is a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Samsung. In terms of tangible benefits, the South Korean company definitely wins. Its products will remain on the market in the U.K. and Apple must do penance for the “prejudice” its lawsuit thrust upon Samsung’s Galaxy Tabs. On the other hand, Birss basically called Samsung’s tablets dweebs compared to the uber-hip iPad. 

If Samsung truly was unduly influenced by Apple, it has has long since moved on. The Asian device maker has released several designs for the Tab 2 series that depart from the original Galaxy Tab designs and look less like the iPad. Yet Apple will have to issue its public notices anyway (assuming the ruling holds up on appeal).

Meanwhile the patent lawsuits under way in every corner of the mobile market are hurting consumers looking for a variety of mobile devices. Or, as Samsung put it in a press release, “innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited” if companies like Apple were to prevail in their efforts to bully the competition out of the market.

In this context, the judge's decision seems like the perfect punishment for a company that has lodged a patent lawsuit and lost. Essentially, it is a form of public shaming. Apple now has to stand in the town square with a sandwich board over it proclaiming, “We were wrong, Samsung did not copy us.” If this were 18th-century England, the townfolk would gather around and throw rotten fruit at the offender. 

AMD 7xxx Series Graphics

The Southern Islands series is a family of Radeon GPUs developed by AMD. AMD builds Southern Islands series graphics chips based on the 28 nm manufacturing process at TSMC.

In 2010, the Northern and Southern Islands cards adopted the AMD Radeon brand name. Southern Islands GPUs are branded as the Radeon HD 7000 Series.

[edit]Technical details

• Support for x86 addressing with unified address space for CPU and GPU.
  • 64-bit addressing
  • Support for PCI-E 3.0
  • GPU sends interrupts to CPU on various events (such as page faults).
• Usage of RISC SIMD instructions for GPGPU instead of VLIW MIMD (Which was only one option in previous AMD GPU-architectures).
• Support for Partially Resident Textures, which enable virtual memory support through DirectX and OpenGL extensions.
• PowerTune support, which dynamically adjusts performance to stay within a specific TDP.
• Usage of Liquid-chamber cooling technology over Vapor chamber.

These changes could lead to better utilization of the GPU for compute along with traditional graphics.

It is noteworthy that, as opposed to the Evergreen and Northern Islands GPU Families, the Southern Islands GPU Family has only 4 chips instead of 5, omitting the lowest end one (resp. Cedar and Caicos in previous families). This is due to this segment now being served by GPU cores integrated into AMD's CPUs.

Products

The 28 nm product line is divided in three dies (Tahiti, Pitcairn, and Cape Verde), each one roughly double in shader units compared to its small brethren (32, 20, and respectively 10 GCN compute units). While this gives roughly a doubling of single-precision floating point, there is however a significant departure in double-precision compute power. Tahiti has a maximum 1/4 double precision throughput relative to its single precision throughput, while the other two smaller consumer dies can only achieve a 1/16 ratio. While each bigger die has two additional memory controllers widening its bus by 128 bits, Pitcairn however has the same front-end dual tesslator units as Tahiti giving it similar performance to its larger brethren in DX11 tesselation benchmarks.

[edit]Radeon HD 7900

Codenamed Tahiti, the Radeon HD 7900 series was announced on December 22, 2011. Products include the Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7970 features 2048 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7950 has 1792 usable stream cores, as 256 out of the 2048 cores are disabled during product binning which detects defective areas of a chip. The cards are the first products to take advantage of AMD's new "Graphic Core Next" compute architecture. Both cards are equipped with 3 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process.

[edit]Radeon HD 7800

Codenamed Pitcairn, the Radeon HD 7800 series was formally unveiled on March 5, 2012 with retail availability from March 19, 2012. Products include the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850. The Radeon HD 7870 features 1280 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7850 has 1024 usable stream cores. Both cards are equipped with 2 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process.

[edit]Radeon HD 7700

Codenamed Cape Verde, the Radeon HD 7700 series was released on February 15, 2012. Products include the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7750. The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition features 640 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7750 has 512 stream cores based on the GCN architecture. Both cards are equipped with 1 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured in 28 nm.

Intel Ivy Bridge

Ivy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 22 nm die shrink of the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture based on tri-gate ("3D") transistors. Ivy Bridge processors will be backwards-compatible with the Sandy Bridge platform, but might require a firmware update (vendor specific). Intel has released new 7-series Panther Point chipsets with integrated USB 3.0 to complement Ivy Bridge.

Intel announced that volume production of Ivy Bridge chips began in the third quarter of 2011. Quad-core and dual-core-mobile models launched on 29 April and 31 May 2012 respectively. Meanwhile, Core i3 desktop processors are said to arrive in the third quarter of 2012.

Ivy Bridge feature improvements over Sandy Bridge include:

• Tri-gate transistor ("3-D") technology (up to 50% less power consumption at the same performance level as 2-D planar transistors).
• PCI Express 3.0 support.
• Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge).
• RAM support up to 2800 MT/s in 200 MHz increments.
• The built-in GPU will have 6 or 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's 6 or 12.
• Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support.OpenGL 4.0 is supported with 9.17.10.2792 WHQL drivers and later drivers.
• A new random number generator and the RdRand instruction, codenamed Bull Mountain.
• DDR3L and Configurable TDP for mobile processors.
• Multiple 4K video playback.
• Intel Quick Sync Video.

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This blog will feature everything about tech from processors to RAM to motherboard and mobile phones.