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NVIDIA’s Tegra X1 is the first mobile chip with a teraflop of power

How powerful can a mobile processor get? Try a teraflop worth of raw computing muscle. NVIDIA just announced the Tegra X1 “mobile super chip” — and yah, it’s sort of fast. The X1 is the first mobile chip to achieve a teraflop of computing power, co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on stage at NVIDIA’s CES press conference tonight. That makes it just as fast as the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2000. It’s basically the same Maxwell GPU architecture for PCs, which the company announced several months ago , brought to mobile. Tegra X1 packs in an eight-core 64-bit CPU and 256 GPU cores. Altogether, it should deliver around twice the performance of last year’s Tegra K1 mobile chip. To prove just how capable the X1 can be, Huang showed the Unreal Engine 4 “Elemental” demo running off of the chip (it’s unclear if it was in real-time or just a recording). That’s a graphically complex 3D scene that’s been used to show off the rising computational capability of video cards and consoles over the past few years. While the demo didn’t look perfect on the X1 – it wasn’t as detailed as I remember it, there weren’t as many particle effects and there was quite a bit of slowdown – it was still an impressive for something mobile. Of course, since the X1 is something meant for smartphones and tablets, power efficiency is key. Huang pointed out that it was able to run the Elemental demo using just 10 watts of power. A year ago, the Xbox One needed 100 watts to run Elemental. And over two years ago, a leading Nvidia GPU had to burn 300 watts to run it. You won’t be stressing your phone with complicated 3D rendering all of the time, but the X1’s performance in this demo is a good sign that it could be more efficient at more mundane mobile tasks. Developing. Filed under: Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA’s Tegra X1 is the first mobile chip with a teraflop of power

Origin slims down its chunkiest gaming laptops

If you’d waved a tape measure at Origin’s brawny EOS-17X gaming laptop last year, your fingers would fall at the 2.15-inch mark. Sufficiently shamed by that statistic, the company has put the hardware on a diet, slimming down the hardware to a much more svelte 1.52 inches. Of course, that’s not the only change, since Origin has also upgraded the internals to include Intel’s Z97 chipset, and also offers the ability to overclock the hardware. Naturally, build-to-order options are the standard here, with both the 15.6-inch EON-15X and the 17.3-inch EON-17X capable of supporting an Intel Core i7-4790K, up to 32GB RAM and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980M with 8GB RAM. You’ll also be able to cram in 4TB of storage, split among M.2 SATA, SSD or traditional HDD options, not to mention the ability to hook up an external 4K display. At the same time, the company is also whipping out a refreshed EON15-S , a (comparatively) super-slim unit that’s just 1.13 inches thick and weighs in at 5.5 pounds, a drop of around 36 percent compared to the previous generation. In addition to the 15.6-inch HD display, the unit comes with a Core i7-4720HQ processor and a GeForce GTX 980M with 4GB RAM. You’ll be able to order all of the units from today, with prices entirely contingent on what specs you need for your next LAN party. Comments Source: Origin PC

This power pack can charge your iPhone 6 in 15 minutes

We lamented the iPhone 6’s battery in our review, but the folks at ibattz have a solution for when Apple’s handset loses juice when you need it most. The company says its ASAP Charger’s 20-volt, 2 amp power pack can fully charge an iPhone 6 within 15 minutes . Think about it this way: that’s less time than it’d take to watch an episode of 30 Rock on Netflix . Your typical 5-volt, 1 amp charger, on the other hand, needs an hour or more to do the same task. The ASAP comes in 5, 600mAh and 11, 200mAh sizes, but, s adly, there isn’t pricing or availability information just yet. Blerg, indeed. Filed under: Cellphones , Peripherals , Mobile Comments

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This power pack can charge your iPhone 6 in 15 minutes

The iRig 2 wants to replace your guitar pedal board with a phone

IK Multimedia has been cranking out new versions of its iRig guitar adapter for phones and tablets for nearly four years . And at CES 2015, there’s yet another update. The iRig 2 still allows you to connect that axe to an iOS, Mac or Android device, but this time around, there’s a 1/4-inch output jack, so you can use the company’s mobile apps (like AmpliTube) alongside an amp with ease. It also means that, if you so choose, you could make that mobile device part of an effects loop, or replace it entirely. Sure, the sound of individual pedals is hard to beat, but this setup aims for connivence. There’s also a headphone jack to keep from annoying bandmates, and while the on-board gain control returns, a new toggle switch will bypass the connected mobile device entirely. If you’re considering giving it a go, the accessory will be available during the first quarter of 2015 for $39.99/€29.99. Filed under: Misc , Peripherals Comments Source: IK Multimedia

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The iRig 2 wants to replace your guitar pedal board with a phone

Audi’s self-driving car is traveling 550 miles to Las Vegas

Audi is confident that its self-driving car technology is ready for prime time — so confident, in fact, that it’s about to give the platform a very public long-distance test. An A7 Sportback with the mostly autonomous hardware is traveling 550 miles from Stanford, California to CES in Las Vegas, with trained members of the press taking turns behind the wheel. Not that they’ll be doing much. The A7’s cameras, lasers and radar will let it control highway driving so long as it’s under 70MPH, and it’ll only hand over the reins in “city environments” and other situations where it reaches its limits. This is a marketing stunt, to be sure, but it could show that autopilot systems are capable of taking over during long, monotonous trips. Your pilot to #CES today is “Jack, ” an Audi A7 built with the latest automated driving technology. #DrivingNotDriving #Vegas A video posted by Audi (@audi) on Jan 1, 2015 at 9:46am PST Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Audi USA

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Audi’s self-driving car is traveling 550 miles to Las Vegas

Would you ditch your MacBook Air for this thinner Windows detachable?

“Our Chi is thinner than Air.” That was how ASUS Chairman Jonney Shih opened his CES keynote today. If you’re not following, what he meant was the super-slim ASUS Transformer Book T300 Chi that was teased at Computex. Well, the time has come. This 12.5-inch, all-aluminum convertible laptop is now confirmed to carry Intel’s latest Broadwell Core M processor (the new 5Y71 or the already-available 5Y10) to enable its fanless design. And don’t worry, it’ll still have that sweet WQHD (2, 560 x 1, 440) IPS screen option on top of the 1080p base configuration, plus a 128GB iSSD to keep it running smoothly. However, there’s been a subtle change: The device has managed to gain a little bulk over the last six months, going from 14.3mm (0.56 inch) docked or 7.3mm (0.29 inch) detached to 16.5mm (0.65 inch) and 7.6mm (0.3 inch), respectively. But hey, the docked unit is still slimmer than the MacBook Air by a mere 0.5mm, and given its ability to switch between form factors, we’d still be impressed even if they had the same thickness; and we can just as easily forgive the former’s 70 grams of extra weight. Announced alongside the T300 Chi are two smaller models: the T100 Chi (10.1-inch, 1, 920 x 1, 200 IPS) and the T90 Chi (8.9-inch, 1, 280 x 800 IPS). Both are powered by Intel’s less powerful Atom Z3775 processor and pack either 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage. When docked, the T90 is just as thick as its T300 sibling, but the T100 is even thinner by 3.3mm. As for weight, both are obviously much lighter — 1.06kg for the T100 and 0.75kg for the T90. Starting from February, these laptops will be rolling with the following price points: $699 for the 1080p T300, $799 for the WQHD T300, $399 for the T100 and $299 for the T90. Not bad, not bad. P.S.: “Chi” means “air” in Mandarin Chinese. Filed under: Laptops , Tablets , ASUS Comments

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Would you ditch your MacBook Air for this thinner Windows detachable?

Samsung’s first portable SSD packs fast storage for relatively little cash

You don’t exactly have a ton of options when it comes to portable solid-state drives. You can get fast performance or high capacity at a halfway affordable price, but rarely both. Samsung thinks it can strike that tricky balance with its first-ever external option, the Portable SSD T1. The USB 3.0 storage is based on the same speedy-yet-cheap V-NAND chips as the 850 EVO drive you might buy for your gaming PC, letting it hold a large chunk of your files without devastating your wallet or slowing down — it reads and writes at 450 MB/s, or just about desktop-level speeds. The line starts off modestly with a 250GB drive that costs $180, but you can opt for 500GB ($300) or 1TB ($600) if you have a lot of games or movies to carry around. That’s still expensive compared to spinning hard disks, but it’s a relative steal for the performance. Look for the T1 to hit US stores around mid-January. Filed under: Storage , Samsung Comments Source: Samsung

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Samsung’s first portable SSD packs fast storage for relatively little cash

YouTube is almost ready to take your 360-degree videos

Did you recently grab a 360-degree camera like the Bublcam or Ricoh Theta ? You’ll have an easy way to show off your all-encompassing footage very shortly. A YouTube spokesperson has confirmed to both Engadget and Gizmodo that its service will be adding support for 360-degree videos in the “coming weeks.” It’s not clear what the technical limitations are, but the update will undoubtedly require a way to pan around those videos — this isn’t simply a matter of raising the ceiling on file sizes. However it works, you can expect to see a lot of immersive online cinema in the near future. Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , HD , Google Comments Source: Gizmodo

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YouTube is almost ready to take your 360-degree videos

D-Link’s New Wi-Fi Routers Look Like Reverse-Engineered Alien Technology

At one time when all you needed to connect was a couple of laptops, a cheap wireless router would more than suffice for most homes. But these days, when there’s everything from phones to tablets to TVs relying on your Wi-Fi network, it makes sense to splurge on your hardware. And D-Link’s new 11AC Ultra Performance Series routers promise speeds of up to 5.6 Gbps optimized for the myriad of different devices constantly hopping on and off your network. Read more…

The New Chevy Volt First Look: Less Concept, More Sedan

Instead of waiting for the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next week to finally unveil what the new Chevy Volt looks like, General Motors pulled back the curtain on its new electric hybrid at CES just now. No details, no other specifics, just our first full look at the vehicle. Read more…

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The New Chevy Volt First Look: Less Concept, More Sedan

Ken May

Author: kenmay