Sharp creates five colors per pixels screen

The extra colours extend the colour gamut to the point where it can reproduce more than 99 per cent of real surface colours as defined by the Pointer colour space, a standard for real surface colours derived from measurements of real-world colours from paints, inks, coloured paper, and other materials and pigments.

Can I have one? Please?

Mind you, this is not 99% of the RGB color space, which 99% of the LCD monitors out there can't even reproduce, this is 99% of a more complete standard.
I'm sick and tired of 16.7M color monitors which can't even do basic colors right, let alone 16.7M, but unfortunately this new type of panel will probably end up in $1000+ professional monitors - until OLED comes to the rescue, whenever that is.

Sharp achieved this by using 5 colors per pixel, the typical red, green and blue, plus cyan and yellow sub-pixels. The prototype screen measures 60" and has a 1080p resolution - I'd settle for something smaller.

Via The Register

Bake a GPU, bring it from the afterlife

I have attempted this before with the ill fated "Xenon" Xbox 360, with no good results but I was mostly doing it blindly. The principle is the following: if you have a failing graphics card, RoHS solder may be to blame, so, calmly, stick it in a over for a few minutes, at a precise temperature, and let it reflow.

The guinea pig in this case was an 8800GTX which had failing connections, causing it to exhibit artifacts before dying out.

Before you do this, it is imperative to remove anything that can melt from the card, stick it in the oven for 5 to 8 min at a temperature of 385ºF, slightly above the solder melting point. Let it cool down and it should be working; repeat, if not.

A word of caution, though, this won't play well if there's electrolytic capacitors in the card, which may be rendered useless - this 8800GTX has only solid caps, which can handle a lot more of temperature.
A heat gun may also be something more appropriate but will take more time to find the damaged spot(s).

More details @ HardForum and OCForums

Computex day 3 tidbits

InnoDisk's NanoSSD @ Tweaktown
AData's 8 SSD drives in RAID 0 @ Tweaktown
Asus' Booth @ VR-Zone
Lancool PC-K62B case @ Tweaktown

Overclock or undervolt your Phenom from inside Windows

Overclocking while maintaining a working Cool & Quiet behavior is now possible - and with more settings than using AMD's Overdrive.

Meet the PhenomMSRTweaker:



As the name implies, it's limited to Phenom based chips, although the new Athlon II will also work with, what's required is a CPU based on the K10 architecture.

The program is has it's source code available, so further modification to current features is also possible.

Sony shows motion sensitive controller

Sony also gets cozy with the PS Eye camera, with a twist.

... they're still using a controller, a pad with some extra buttons and a "light".

Depending on how well Microsoft can separate what is person and environment, can they excel or not. Sony can't, and looking at this Xbox demo, I just wish I could see what's behind the girl, if there's something like a green background that would contrast - there's plenty of green around - or if they're really up to something. Sony, apparently, is just playing catch up with Nintendo.

Sony PS3 motion controller @ Telegraph

Intel Core i7 975 EE and i7 950 reviewed

Intel continues to rule the high-end desktop, no surprises there.

Power consumption is the same, performance has increased only proportionally with clockspeed but overlocking has improved slightly, from around 3.9GHz to 4.1GHz in both models. Gary Key at Anandtech managed 4.4GHz with an undisclosed aftermarket cooler, probably not air cooling since at 4.1GHz the folks at Xbit labs were hitting close to 100ºC.
Guess there won't be too much to get excited if AMD doesn't bring those hexa-cores to desktop, and even then they would probably still have to play price wars.

Computex day 2 wrap up

Links after the jump.

Thermaltake Level 10 case @ Tweaktown
Various P55 motherboards @ Tweaktown
ASUS MARS GTX 295 QuadSLI @ Tweaktown
AMD DX11 Demos @ VR-Zone
EVGA X58 SLI LE @ TCMagazine
Android coming to netbooks from ASUS, Acer and ECS @ Reuters
New Thermalright coolers @ VR-Zone
ECS new products @ VR-Zone

AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition unlocking & overclocking

AMD delivered another pearl for enthusiasts, now at $100.

An enthusiast from the Xtreme Systems forum has managed to overclock and unlock it's Phenom II X2 550 to considerable heights: 4GHz and four cores.


The motherboard used was a DFI JR 790GX-M3H5 although Gigabyte's 790FXT-UD5P has also been reported as a successful one. In the GigaByte board ACC must be set as "Hybrid", while in the DFI setting it to AUTO was enough. Other motherboards like the excellent Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P also supports this feature.

With the unlocking process complete, it is recommended to use, at least, Prime 95 on the four CPUs and some Super Pi and 3D Mark runs to ensure stability.
The unlocking process will also disable the embedded thermal diodes, so you will have to use the motherboard sensor, if present, to monitor temperatures.

Update: You can now also choose to unlock only one of the disabled cores with some ASUS motherboards. Statistics of successful unlocks inside.

AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition 3.1GHz Socket AM3 80W Dual-Core Processor @ Newegg

OCZ releases Agitilty SSD drives

New, affordable MLC based SSD drives with 64MB of cache.

The new drives have 64MB of onboard DRAM to serve as cache, come with the cheaper MLC NAND chips and an unknown controller. I have contacted OCZ to clarify which one.
The onboard 64MB of DRAM should help mitigate random write issues that have plagged JMicron 602 based SSD drives.

Performance numbers below:

• 30GB Max Performance
• Read: Up to 185 MB/s
• Write: Up to 100 MB/s
• Sustained Write: Up to 60 MB/S
• 120GB/60GB Max Performance
• Read: Up to 230 MB/s
• Write: Up to 135 MB/s
• Sustained Write: Up to 80 MB/S

Power consumption is of 2W maximum and 0.5W while in idle.
Early prices in Europe are of 100eur for the 30GB model, 160eur for the 60GB model and around 250eur for the one with 120GB - very close to current prices of the OCZ Solid.

Engadget Computex coverage links

Netbooks galore:

Acer Android based netbook coming @ Engadget
Tegra powered netbook spotted @ Engadget
Tegra netbook running custom Windows CE @ Engadget

Intel Braidwood tips up

The replacement for Turbo Memory, or a cheap SSD slot?

Good question.
The shot above is from a P55 motherboard from EVGA, which is not unlike most "Lynnfield" motherboards that have been showing up on the web.

While specs for the technology aren't yet clear, something with flash will plug there and there are rumors that it may serve also as a boot device and not just as a helper device from RAM restricted builds.

Some sources claim this new technology will only be available in Intel's upcoming 57 series chipsets and not these 55 series chipsets - that doesn't make much sense right now, given the amoung of P55 boards with this slot. This is seriously looking like it will arrive together with the launch of Core i5 CPUs.

Microsoft's ''Project Natal'' unveiled

Xbox 360 motion sensing plans disclosed.

Engadget has the scoop.

Almost seems to good to be true and some of the demos seem scripted or concepts, still far from actual implementation. Well, except from most of the ones showed running realtime at the keynote. It's an exciting new technology but Microsoft likes to over promise and under deliver, so I'm not holding my breath for this one.
This console generation life cycle should be quite long though, so we may see this come out and still make a difference before everyone hits refresh. Still, I would not expect this kind of complex piece of technology to be ready for prime time for at least one year, probably more.

AMD Athlon II X2 250, Phenon II X2 550 reviews

Anandtech, PC Perspective and Xbitlabs have a look at the new processors.

Xbitlabs had took an earlier look at these new processors and what was still not known to general public was if the Athlon II was using a new core. As you can see above, this is the case.

Performance is quite good for both, as is their price, $87 for the Athlon II X2 and $102 for the harvested Phenom II X2.



Not all benchmarks end up so rosy, so have a look for yourself:

Xbitlabs,
Anandtech,
PC Perspective

As an heads up, overclocking is similar to the Phenom II and the X2 550 can have it's cores unlocked with the right motherboard, which must have either the SB750 or SB710 and some BIOS tweaks.

Nvidia partners with Adobe, brings HD Flash video support to Tegra

Adobe has announced a partnership with Nvidia in an effort to have the ARM based Tegra SoC to fully support HD videos in Flash, most notably those based on H.264 codecs.
Since Tegra has support for hardware video decoding, Adobe will make use of this functionality to provide decent playback on these chips, while maitaining power consumption low. It is not known, at this time, if other Nvidia chips will be able to use these features. It would be expected to since discrete and integrated graphics chips from Nvidia have had this functionality for a while - Ion platforms being a prime example.
Since Tegra will be used in netbooks, so this kind of functionality becomes essential for the target market.

AMD's Opteron 2435 ''Istanbul'' reviewed

AMD released today the first native six-core CPU, Anandtech has a look.

If you recall correctly, Intel had already released a six-core part, the Xeon 7400 series, codenamed "Dunnington". Contrary to Intel's design, "Istanbul" was built natively for this purpose and is not a bunch of dual cores glued together to an L3 cache, coupled with a low bandwidth FSB. AMD pumped the HT3.0 speed to 2.4GHz and added HT assist, aimed at reducing latency and bandwidth usage for cache snooping when using 4 sockets or more. 4 way CPU to CPU bandwidth is massively increased in this case, up 60% from around 25GB/s to 41GB/s.

The die size hasn't increased much and power consumption either, maintaining the L3 cache at 6MB helped restrict both but will hold back some performance in particular applications.
Die size is then 346 mm² compared to 263 mm² of "Shangai" cores. Xeon 55xx series currently are using 265 mm² and "Dunnington" six-core used a massive 504 mm².

Power consumption is well contained at 75W ACP or 115 TDP, the same as the 2.9GHz Opteron 2389, while the clockspeed has been just slightly reduced to 2.6GHz.

Performance is good in some applications, most notably virtualization. It's priced lower than the two top Xeons, but there's a sad lack of HPC benchmarks in the test suite for real comparisions. Most applications benefit the most efficient "Nehalem" architecture but, if priced right, AMD has a good CPU, although it's far from hiting a home run.

AMD has a good CPU in it's hands until Nehalem-EX platforms debut in 2010, and will reign in 4 and 8 socket configurations until that time comes. As for 2 sockets configurations, nothing seems capable of standing up to Intel's products right now but I'm curious to check HPC benchmarks, which typically see no benefit from Hyper Threading.

AMD Opteron 2435 review @ Anandtech