Microsoft's product leak - it's not wrong, just don't trust it

Subject: General Tech | April 13, 2012 - 11:57 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: microsoft, leak, office 15, internet explorer 10

Microsoft had a very atypical reaction to the leak of slides which you can catch at The Register this morning.  While most companies disavow any knowledge of leaks and refuse to either confirm or deny the veracity of the leaks, Microsoft came out and confirmed that the plans and dates are correct but that no one should bank on them actually meeting those deadlines.  March of next year is when Office 15 is slated to arrive, along with Exchange, SharePoint, Visio and Project updates.  Office 360 should continue to receive updates every quarter, so users of that SaaS may be the first to encounter any changes that will be incorporated into Office 15.  Any users of IE should expect a new version this summer, but after that it will be two years before the next major rehaul of the browser occurs.

"Maarten Visser, CEO of Dutch cloud developer consultancy Meetroo, posted the plans, which were issued by Redmond at the end of last year, on his Twitter stream and they include launch dates for product as Office 15, Windows Phone and IE 10. Microsoft has confirmed the veracity of the images, but warns you shouldn't bet the bank on them."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• Real-time movie FX editing on the Flash PCIe cards @ The Register
• Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Approaches Stable State @ Phoronix
• Thunderbolt Roadmap Unveiled for 2013 Apple Macs @ VR-Zone
• When super-sized smartphones become pocketable tablets @ The Tech Report

More leaks about NVIDIA's Dual-GPU GTX 690? May be?

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | April 10, 2012 - 07:18 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: nvidia, leak, GTX 690

More information has surfaced about NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 690 video card. While other tidbits came to light, perhaps most interesting is the expected May release.

NVIDIA has suffered from quite a few leaks near their launch of the GeForce GTX 680 GPU and its associated cards. Benchmarks were accidentally published early and product pages were mistakenly posted premature. The hot streak continues.

It may be time to just reset fate and skip to the GTX 700-series. I mean they will eventually be rebranded 700-something anyway.

I kid, I kid.

Not many specifications were leaked, although there is not much left that cannot already be assumed about the card due to the similarities with its sister part.

The reference model GTX 690 will require two 8-pin power connectors and output via three DVI ports as well as a mini DisplayPort. The already released GTX 680, by contrast, requires two 6-pin connectors and outputs by two DVI, an HDMI, and a full size DisplayPort.

The new card will require more power for its dual GK104 GPUs as the larger power connectors would suggest. While the GTX 680 is happy with 550W of total system power, the GTX 690 would like a system power supply of at least 650W. Since the 680 is expected to draw a maximum of 195W, an extra 100W would put estimates for the 690 power draw at somewhere around 295W.

Unfortunately estimates based on rated total system power are very inaccurate as power supply requirements are often raised to the nearest 50W. Really, the 690 could be anywhere between 245W and 295W and even those figures are just estimates.

Still, it looks as though my 750W power supply will survive past May when the leak claims that the GTX 690 is expected to arrive. Yay! May!

... and here's Newegg with a GTX 680 leak

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | March 21, 2012 - 09:51 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: pelly wants revenge, nvidia, leak, gtx 680, fermi, 28nm

Not to be outdone by NCIX, NewEgg also managed to jump the gun on the GTX 680 earlier today. The screengrab that was sent tp Bright Side of News shows their pricing of the soon to be released GTX 680 with models ranging from $500 to $535.  The specs are there for all to see, a GPU running at 1.006GHz, Shader clock of 2.012GHz, effective memory of 6.008GHz and 1536 Stream Processors.  Contrast that with the last GTX 580 that Josh reviewed which had a 782 MHz core, 1.564GHz shader, memory at 4.008GHz and 512 SPs and you can see it is a big step up!

If you visit NewEgg now you will be greeted with a different result, a page describing the GTX 680's various features and a Buy Now button which unfortunately doesn't work at this moment.  That is a situtation which obviously cannot last as NewEgg would not have put it up.  Of course the realization that you can pick up a pair of GTX 570's for the same price might just mean some recalculations will be in order once we see the performance of the actual card.

Psst ... Hey buddy. Ya wanna see the GTX 680 under my jacket?

Subject: General Tech | March 20, 2012 - 11:26 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: pelly, nvidia, leak, gtx 680, fermi, 28nm

The gang over at Tweaktown managed to get pictures of a retail Gigabyte GTX 680, which is not only better than candid snaps from Las Vegas making it to the web, it also solidifies a few facts.  For instance, as you can see below there are two 6-pin PCIe power connectors which pegs the maximum supplimental power that this card can draw at 150W.  That is a big difference from the two 8-pin PCIe connectors that could deliver up to 275 to a GTX 580; NVIDIA has obviously made a huge step forward in power savings with the move to 28nm regardless of any design or manufacturing problems they may have had to overcome to deliver this card to retailers.  

Tweaktown didn't stop there either GPU fans; it seems that the online\brick and mortar computer chain NCIX made a little mistake and let the GTX 680 appear on their wishlist app.  Both an EVGA and an MSI model of the GTX 680 could be added to your wishlist ... for the price of $578.20 USD plus delivery.  That same retailer currently sells HD 7970's for between $564.99 USD to $619.99.  If only there had been some leaked benchmarks which might indicate which way AMD might have to adjust their pricing.

^{Lucas is so going to sue you!}

A possible GTX 680 specs leak?

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | March 14, 2012 - 05:29 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: rumour, nvidia, leak, gtx 680

Below you can see a screen grab from PConline which purports to show the specifications of the GTX 680. While the specs are well within reason, without any way to verify this leak, or to translate the Chinese characters it is hard to have these specs confirmed or denied as they stand.  Whether you should take the below with a good dose of NaCl is as of yet unknown but for now we can enjoy the speculation until NVIDIA finally releases the cards for review.

Please feel free to add any speculations, doubts or other leaks in the comments below ... or even a decent translation would be great!  You can catch the Google Translation here, if you wish to torture your brain with exclusive exposure.

Does AMD have a 2304 stream processor GPU in waiting?

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 2, 2012 - 07:23 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: amd, southern islands, rumor, leak

The review for the AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB card based on the Tahiti GPU and the new Southern Islands architecture was released on December 22nd with expected availability on January 9th.  In that review we show a diagram of the Tahiti GPU and its 32 Compute Units (CUs) that combine to form the total 2048 stream processors (SPs).  

We asked and asked, but a die shot was never given to us for our review - a very non-standard practice for new launches.  That started us wondering - was there something AMD was hiding from reviewers about the architecture?  Were there some disabled CUs on the 28nm GPU that they had disabled for business, yield or clock speed reasons?  Think of what Intel has done with Sandy Bridge-E or what NVIDIA did originally with the GTX 480 GPU.  

AMD assured us that was not the case - Tahiti is the full die enabled, 32 CUs and 2048 SPs.  And, based on some of our own internal information, that seems to be 100% the case.

But, an interesting image started floating around last week:

This image from the site ChipHell.com appears to show the development sheets for Sapphire's upcoming Radeon HD 7000 series products and their internal codenames.  There are some really noteworthy things to look at though starting with the Atomic lineup.  

While the Flex 6G is a 6GB card with 6 mini-DP ports on it running at the same clock speeds as our reference designs did initially, the Atomic RX card has a clock speed of 1335 MHz running on 2048 SPs and a pretty good memory overclock as well.  If that is accurate, the performance difference between the Atomic RX and "Da Original" (likely the reference card) would be tremendous!

Here is what is more interesting - another card listed above the HD 7970s that seems to include 2304 SPs, or 36 CUs.  Running at a reference speed of 1000 MHz, this card would have a noticeable advantage over the current HD 7970 cards.  What's more...?

The Toxic ZX, if it exists, would run with 2304 stream processors at 1225 MHz!  The performance of this card could easily beat out the Radeon HD 7970 3GB card by 35-45% with the shader and clock speed differences.

So, what does this all mean?  Probably nothing, but it is fun to speculate on a few things.  It seems possible that AMD either HAD or HAS another GPU waiting in the wings based on Southern Islands to compete with NVIDIA's Kepler when it finally gets released.  Even though these documents seem to indicate that, I kind of find it hard to believe that AMD would have been able to keep this secret from the media and the competition for this long.  It is also equally unlikely that AMD was able to quickly tape out another chip that we are unaware of as even a somewhat moderate change like adding in four very modular CUs takes many months.

And of course, we have to take in the possibility that these are all fake, or a decoy or were written up 18 months ago and plans have changed.  Those are much less fun though. 

Radeon HD7970 specs leaked. 3.5 Teraflops, 3GB vRAM

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | December 16, 2011 - 04:45 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: Radeon HD 7000, leak, amd

Update: 5:35, added a few points.

If the convincing-looking leaked slides are to be believed, the upcoming AMD Radeon HD 7970 card is now naked before us with all its measurements laid to bare. While there still is nothing official as the embargo is not up yet, rest assured that at some point the full story will flood to the surface. What can be said is that if this slide is true, the 7970 looks to be a real beast of a card.

The supposed reference specifications of the 7970… or are they?

(Image obviously from OBR-Hardware)

As you can tell from the heavily watermarked slide, AMD claims 3.5 TFLOPs of computing power from their 2048 stream processing units clocked at 925 MHz. Contrast this against the AMD’s assertion of 2.7 TFLOPs from the Radeon 6970’s 1536 stream processors and a core clock of 880MHz; while it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, it is a healthy buff to AMD’s portfolio. Also relevant, is a more recent slide claiming much-increased performance during tesselation which NVIDIA typically has maintained a healthy lead over AMD with.

Possibly the most major point from the table is the power consumption: less than 3 Watts during idle. To give a bit of... pc perspective...: HardOCP measured the idle power consumption of the 6970 to be 24 Watts and the NVIDIA GTX 580 at 41 Watts. We are talking about an 88% decrease in idle power draw compared to AMD’s last generation’s single GPU powerhouse. It makes me wonder: how will this affect mobility graphics? According to OBR-Hardware, their slide is somewhat out-of-date; the expected peak is 200W give or take for the card on load, though I am sure that will vary depending on which brand of card you purchase.

We now know about NVIDIA's New Years presents

Subject: General Tech | August 24, 2011 - 11:09 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: nvidia, fermi, kepler, leak

There is good news and bad news out of SemiAccurate about NVIDIA today.  The bad news is that the chips are all Fermi, they have simply been shrunk to 28nm from 40nm.  That makes the idea of mobile variants arriving first very probable with the respectably low TDP shown on the leaked chart.  There at the bottom, in the row with the most question marks are the higher powered chips.   The good news is that the list is incomplete, there is more in store for consumers in the same time frame.  They will likely be 40nm but they will definitely not be Kepler chips.

"What does Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) have coming up for the post-Christmas GPU line? You have heard a lot about the 28nm parts, and here is what you will be seeing.

The short story is this, Nvidia is putting out a bunch of Fermi shrinks on 28nm, and you will likely see the mobile variants first. They are as follows, with some information a bit blurred to protect the exact sub-species of mole involved."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• Researchers print high performance TFT transistors @ SemiAccurate
• HTC Puccini tablet details are leaked @ The Inquirer
• R2D2 Motorcycle Helmet @ Make:Blog
• Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet arrives in the US @ The Inquirer
• New Samsung-funded Flash disruptor uncloaks @ The Register
• High Voltage: Build your own 84 kV lightning stick @ Hack a Day
• Epson Stylus Photo R2000 Review @ TechReviewSource
• NZXT 'Back to School' Contest @ Techgage