Apple reportedly investigating iPhone 4S battery drain

 

The iPhone's low-battery indicator.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida)

Apple engineers are looking into faster-than-expected battery drain on the company's newest iPhone, according to a report.
The Guardian reports that some iPhone 4S owners are being contacted by Apple after complaining about lower-than-expected battery performance on the company's support Web site. Numerous users there are saying their phones are lasting just a few hours, even with minimal use, and with power-draining features disabled.
At least one owner told The Guardian that an Apple engineer contacted him and provided instructions for installing a diagnostic file that would be sent back to the company for analysis. This was after telling him the quick draining was a known issue.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
The iPhone 4S launched two weeks ago in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries, and is expanding to 22 additional countries this weekend. It boasts an extra hour of 3G talk time compared with the iPhone 4, while coming in at 100 hours less of standby time, based on Apple's own testing. CNET's own iPhone 4S battery testing with a model on Sprint's network yielded 9.2 hours of talk time on the carrier's 3G EV-DO Rev. A network, coming in as the strongest iPhone battery test to date.
The phone continues the trend set by previous iterations, sealing the battery inside to allow for better use of space. As a side effect, users can't swap it out with another battery, as most other phones allow.
A teardown of the iPhone 4S earlier this month by iFixit revealed that the battery in the 4S is slightly more powerful than the one in the iPhone 4, but not by much. Users get an extra .05 WHrs of juice compared with the battery that was in the iPhone 4. The big difference, of course, is that the iPhone 4S sports a dual-core A5 processor.

Source:by Josh Lowensohn October 28, 2011 12:54 PM PDT www.cnet.com

AMD VS Intel Who's really on top.

AMD’s recently launched eight-core Bulldozer processors didn’t live up to pre-launch expectations, as it barely managed to outperform Intel’s current offering of quad-core Core i7 CPUs. The likely reason behind, a former AMD engineer revealed, is over-relying on automated design tools that design less efficient chips than human engineers.

According to Cliff A. Maier, an AMD engineer who left the company few years ago, AMD has abandoned the practice of hand-crafting performance-critical parts of its chips shortly after acquiring ATI.

“The management decided there should be such cross-engineering [between AMD and ATI teams within the company], which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC [System on Chip] design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency. The reason DEC Alphas were always much faster than anything else is they designed each transistor by hand. Intel and AMD had always done so at least for the critical parts of the chip. That changed before I left - they started to rely on synthesis tools, automatic place and route tools, etc.,” he said.

Based on his experience, Maier believes that automated design tools produce designs that are 20% bigger and 20% slower, mainly due to the increase in number of transistors which results in increasing die size, increasing cost and reducing efficiency.

“I had been in charge of our design flow in the years before I left, and I had tested these tools by asking the companies who sold them to design blocks (adders, multipliers, etc.) using their tools. I let them take as long as they wanted. They always came back to me with designs that were 20% bigger, and 20% slower than our hand-crafted designs, and which suffered from electro-migration and other problems,” Maier reminisced.

AMD sells its eight-core FX series processors (315mm2 die size) for $245 in 1000-unit quantities, while Intel sells its hand-crafted Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" quad-core chips (216mm2 die size)  for $317 in 1000-unit quantities. Both processors employ 32nm transistors so they have comparable prices per mm2 of die, meaning that Intel’s CPUs are sold at a much higher profit margin than AMD’s.

Source Megagames.com

NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 Released

 

 

 

NVIDIA has announced the release of NVIDIA 3D Vision 2, the next generation of its famous stereoscopic 3D glasses.

The newly-redesigned, gamer-inspired glasses also introduces NVIDIA 3D LightBoost technology, a new display technology that dramatically improves the 3D experience by delivering images that are up to twice as bright and colors that are richer than those provided by other 3D display technologies.

NVIDIA has affirmed its commitment to “delivering the industry's broadest selection of high-quality 3D content and supported displays.”

“Gorgeous, bright, crystal-clear 3D worlds are created by NVIDIA's 3D Vision 2 glasses with 3D LightBoost monitors and notebooks,” said Phil Eisler, general manager of 3D Vision at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA's engineering team has made incredible enhancements in 3D on PCs, creating a breathtaking gaming experience that's better than the best Hollywood 3D movie.”

“NVIDIA 3D LightBoost technology makes 3D games, movies and photos more stunning and life-like than ever before," said David Wung, senior director of product management of Open Platform Business (OPBG) Group for ASUS Computer International. “With 3D LightBoost and our new full-HD monitors, colors are richer, textures and subtle image details virtually jump off the screen, and the overall quality of the experience is something to behold. We are thrilled to be the first desktop display manufacturer to bring this new level of 3D visual quality to our customers with the ASUS VG278H.”

NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses were designed specifically for gamers and 3D enthusiasts. They provide deeper immersion in games through lenses that are 20 percent larger than those in first-generation glasses, resulting in a wider viewing area and increased external light blocking. In addition, NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses are made of soft composite materials for a more comfortable fit with gaming headphones. 

The glasses, which feature NVIDIA's advanced active-shutter and IR wireless technologies, allow gamers and 3D enthusiasts to access the broadest selection of high-quality 3D content available today, including more than 550 full-HD 1080p 3D games, more than 100 Blu-ray 3D movies and thousands of 3D videos and photos from YouTube and 3DVisionLive.com. In addition, NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses are fully backwards-compatible with all existing NVIDIA 3D Vision Ready content and supporting products, including more than 70 different 3D Vision monitors, notebooks and projectors, video applications, and cameras.

The 3D Vision 2 glasses kit, which includes one pair of NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses and a wireless USB IR emitter, will be available from the leading retailers/e-tailers worldwide in October for $149. It will also be available on the NVIDIA online store. Extra NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses are available for $99.

Source Megagames.com