AMD unveils desktop Radeon 300 series GPUs with HBM

AMD has lifted the veil off its new Radeon graphics card lineup: the Fury series, powered by revolutionary high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and the company’s brand new Fiji GPU.

For those who don't know what HBM is it essentially puts the VRAM onto the GPU die itself rather than outside which increases the bandwidth, decreases the latency and also the size of the overall pcb.The Radeon flagship line-up contains R9 Fury, R9 Fury X, R9 Fury Nano.

UMI X2 brings 1080p screen, quad-core CPU for unbelievable Rs 14,000

Blown away by the Micromax Canvas HD? Wait till you hear about this one. Chinese smartphone maker UMI has launched its flagship, the X2 in India, available online for Rs 14,000. The X2 is a follow-up to UMI's first smartphone, the X1.

That itself won’t grab your attention, so why don’t you take a look at the specs? For starters, the UMI X2 brings a quad-core MediaTek MT6589 processor, the same as the one in the Micromax Canvas HD. It also has a 5-inch IPS display just like the Micromax smartphone, but where the Canvas HD has a 720p display, the UMI X2 brings a full HD resolution. That adds up to 441 pixels per inch.

The UMI X2 has a 1080p display and a quad-core CPU

The UMI X2, you will remember, is one of many Chinese smartphones that are taking the world by storm, chiefly by packing in high-end specifications but at a low price tag. The high-end specifications are not limited to only the processor and the display. The 1.2GHz quad-core processor is coupled with 2GB of RAM and a PowerVR SGX544 GPU. We reckon that should be enough for any task you can think of. Well, maybe not for playing Crysis 3, but you get a fair idea. 

The UMI X2 runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box. We think there will be a few customisations, but looking at the images on the company’s site, it seems the handset is running an almost-stock version of Jelly Bean. The company says it will be upgraded to 4.2 Jelly Bean by April. It is a dual-SIM handset and supports a 3G connection on one SIM, which is pretty standard. Internal storage is capped off at 32GB and UMI has also allowed for a microSD card slot, which supports cards up to 32GB.

On the rear is a 13 megapixel autofocussing camera with LED flash. The camera supports HDR mode as well as 1080p video recording. The front-facing snapper is a cool 3 megapixel unit. The back of the handset is removable, so you can replace the 2500 mAh battery, if need be. All this is packed inside a 8.9 mm thin body. UMI has gone with capacitive Android navigation keys under the display instead of on-screen buttons, but it looks like the company has kept the recent apps button instead of the legacy menu button.

Here’s another look at the key specifications of the device

• 5-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and 441 pixels per inch


• Dual-SIM, HSPA on WCDMA, GPRS/EDGE on GSM


• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with Wi-Fi hotspot


• Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP


• GPS with A-GPS


• Accelerometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, magnetic sensor


• 13 megapixel primary camera with LED flash and 3 megapixel front facing cam


• 32GB internal memory, with microSD card slot for further expansion up to 32GB

However, we have to admit that the handset looks like a result of something nasty the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Nexus did when no one was looking. Of course, in light of other rip-offs coming to us from China, this is a relatively original-looking handset.

Sony Announces PlayStation 4:PC-like Hardware Inside!

Sony just announced the PlayStation 4, along with some high level system specifications. The high level specs are what we've heard for quite some time:

• 8-core x86-64 CPU using AMD Jaguar cores (built by AMD)


• High-end PC GPU (also built by AMD), delivering 1.84TFLOPS of performance


• Unified 8GB of GDDR5 memory for use by both the CPU and GPU with 176GB/s of memory bandwidth


• Large local hard drive

Sony has confirmed the actual performance of the PlayStation 4's GPU as 1.84 TFLOPS. Sony claims the GPU features 18 compute units, which if this is GCN based we'd be looking at 1152 SPs and 72 texture units. It's unclear how custom the GPU is however, so we'll have to wait for additional information to really know for sure. The highest end PC GPUs are already faster than this, but the PS4's GPU is a lot faster than the PS3's RSX which was derived from NVIDIA's G70 architecture (used in the GeForce 7800 GTX, for example). I'm quite pleased with the promised level of GPU performance with the PS4. There are obvious power and cost constraints that would keep AMD/Sony from going even higher here, but this should be a good leap forward from current gen consoles.

Outfitting the PS4 with 8GB of RAM will be great for developers, and using high-speed GDDR5 will help ensure the GPU isn't bandwidth starved. Sony promised around 176GB/s of memory bandwidth for the PS4. The lack of solid state storage isn't surprising. Hard drives still offer a dramatic advantage in cost per GB vs. an SSD. Now if it's user replaceable with an SSD that would be a nice compromise.

Backwards compatibility with PS3 games isn't guaranteed and instead will leverage cloud gaming to stream older content to the box. There's some sort of a dedicated background processor that handles uploads and downloads, and even handles updates in the background while the system is off. The PS4 also supports instant suspend/resume.

The most intriuging thing is that the actual console has not been shown,only the internal details,controllers and how it works..