Alienware brings Ivy Bridge-E to its Aurora gaming desktops

Alienware brings Ivy Bridge-E to its Aurora gaming desktops

Here's a nice update for those of you who like your high-performance gaming rigs coupled with tiny glowing extraterrestrial heads. Alienware today let it be known that it'll be upgrading its Aurora line with new processors. The flagship desktop is getting those new Ivy Bridge-E chips, letting users configure their machines with up to six cores and a 15MB of cache, bringing overclocking speeds of up to 4.3GHz. Also new for this week's Intel Developer Forum are NVIDIA GeForce 700 AMD 8900 series graphics options. The new configurations are available today through Dell's site, starting at $1,399.

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Source: Alienware

GestureWorks Gameplay adds onscreen controls to almost any Windows 8 game

DNP GestureWorks Gameplay adds virtual controllers for video

GestureWorks is smearing the lines between PC and tablet gaming with its Windows 8 app, Gameplay. The application lets you custom-design gestures and virtual buttons for most games, and place them wherever you see fit. It probably works fine with Castle Crashers' simplistic mayhem (pictured above), but we aren't so sure we'd want to explore Skyrim without a mouse and keyboard. Regardless, maybe now you can give those Steam sale impulse buys a whirl while you're on the go.

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Source: GestureWorks (1), (2) (PDF)

Intel announces Quark system on a chip, the company’s smallest to date

The hits keep coming from IDF. After showing off svelte new 14nm silicon built for laptops, CEO Brian Krzanich announced a brand new SoC series named Quark. It's the smallest SoC the company has ever built, one-fifth the size of an Atom chip, and is built upon an open architecture meant so spur its use. Early on in his keynote, Krzanich said that Intel plans to "lead in every segment of computing," and Quark is positioned to put Intel in wearables -- and, in fact, he even showed off a prototype smartwatch platform Intel constructed to help drive wearable development. And, Intel President Renee James pointed out that Quark's designed for use in integrated systems, so we'll be seeing Quark in healthcare and municipal use cases, too. Unfortunately, no details about the new SoC's capabilities or specs are yet available, but we can give you some shots of Intel's wearable wristband prototype in our gallery below.%Gallery-slideshow83631%

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Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shows working 14nm SoC laptop, announces sub $100 tablets at IDF 2013

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shows working 14nm SoC laptop, announces sub $100 tablets at IDF 2013

Many eyes may be shifted south of San Francisco to a shindig in Cupertino, but Intel's making some waves in the city. Just now onstage at IDF 2013, CEO Brian Krzanich showed off a functioning laptop running on a 14nm Broadwell Intel SoC. Naturally, Krzanich didn't deal any other details about the laptop, but did say that we'd see those tiny chips ship by the end of this year. And, following that little nugget, Chipzilla announced that there will be tablets packing Intel silicon being sold for less than $100 this holiday season. Who will build these bargain slates? Krzanich isn't telling, but we'll do our best to find out, and we'll let you know as soon as we do.

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Intel teases MXC: a 1.6Tbps optical interconnect for servers

Intel teases MXC a 16Tbps, optical interconnect for servers

While we think of optical connections as cutting edge, they're positively decrepit in server rooms; current fiber interconnect technology got its start in the 1980s. Intel may soon drag servers into the modern era with its just-teased MXC format, however. The standard (not pictured here) will combine both silicon photonics and a new form of Corning fiber to link servers at 1.6Tbps -- more than quick enough to eliminate many data bottlenecks. The connectors themselves are smaller, too. Intel won't say more about MXC until the Intel Developer Forum next month in San Francisco, but we already suspect that supercomputer operators will be happy with all that extra bandwidth.

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Via: PCWorld

Source: Intel

Hands-on redux: Creative’s Interactive Gesture Camera at IDF 2013 Beijing (video)

Handson with Creative's Interactive Gesture Camera at IDF Beijing 2013 video

At IDF 2013 in Beijing, Intel is again making a big push for perceptual computing by way of voice recognition, gesture control, face recognition and more, and to complement its free SDK for these functions, Intel's been offering developers a Creative Interactive Gesture Camera for $149 on its website since November. For those who missed it last time, this time-of-flight depth camera is very much just a smaller cousin of Microsoft's Kinect sensor, but with the main difference being this one is designed for a closer proximity and can therefore also pick up the movement of each finger.

We had a go on Creative's camera with some fun demos -- including a quick level of gesture-based Portal 2 made with Intel's SDK -- and found it to be surprisingly sensitive, but we have a feeling that it would've been more fun if the camera was paired up with a larger display. Intel said Creative will be commercially launching this kit at some point in the second half of this year, and eventually the same technology may even be embedded in monitors or laptops (remember Toshiba's laptops with Cell-based gesture control?). Until then, you can entertain yourselves with our new hands-on video after the break.

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Source: Intel

China UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment

UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment

At IDF's second-day keynote in Beijing today, Intel announced its collaboration with bank card giant China UnionPay for secure mobile payment, with the latter utilizing Intel's Identity Protection Technology and also its distribution of the Hadoop software framework for datacenters. With UnionPay being China's top bank card organization boasting a total of 3.5 billion cards to date, this is obviously a big deal for Intel both locally and around the world -- at least in the 141 countries and regions where UnionPay is accepted, according to Executive Vice President Chai Hongfeng.

Chai also used his stage time to show off UnionPay Quick Pass, China's very own NFC payment service with over 1.1 million local POS terminals as of December 2012. The exec used none other than Intel's developer device to buy its Corporate Vice President Doug Fisher a can of "Mountain Doug" (we would've preferred "Chai Tea" instead), but of course, HTC beat Intel to it with the joint launch of mobile Quick Pass back in August 2011. Anyhow, there's a press release after the break.

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ZTE Geek unveiled with 2GHz Intel Clover Trail+ and a terrible name (video)

ZTE Geek makes a quiet

Oh ZTE you cheeky monkey. Towards the end of day one at IDF in Beijing, we stumbled upon this awkwardly titled Android Jelly Bean phone that is the Geek at ZTE's booth. Needless to say, this is yet another phone powered by an Intel processor -- a 2GHz Clover Trail+ Atom to be exact, which is what Lenovo's K900 also has. The rest of the device isn't too shabby, either: you get a nice 5-inch 720p display with Gorilla Glass, along with an 8-megapixel main camera, a 1-megapixel front-facing camera, 8GB of storage space, 1GB of RAM, 2,300mAh battery and wireless charging. Radio-wise we see UMTS 900/2100 courtesy of Intel's XMM 6260 chip, and there's also the usual lot of 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and GPS.

Design-wise the Geek takes a huge step away from the Grand X IN and shares a similarly clean look with the Grand S, but without the black eye around the main camera. This particular unit had a glossy white finish as well, but we'd prefer a matte finish for a more premium feel. Since ZTE admitted that it had to rush this prototype for exhibition at IDF, we'll come back to the build quality once we see a final retail unit. Until then, check out our hands-on video and the press release after the break.

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Intel introduces next-gen Xeon E7, E5 and E3 families for enterprise space

Intel teases nextgen Xeon E7, E5 and E3 range,

Truth be told, not much has been announced on the consumer end at IDF Beijing earlier today, but Intel did tease us with upcoming refreshes of its Xeon E7, E5 and E3 families for the enterprise space. In chronological order we have the Haswell-based E3 with TDP as low as 13W, and it's coming in mid-2013. This is followed by the "Ivy Bridge-EP" E5 in Q3 and then the "Ivy Bridge-EX" E7 series in Q4, the latter of which boasting three times the memory capacity of its predecessor, along with Intel's Run Sure reliability feature. More details in the press release after the break if you're into these flavors of chips.

Also mentioned at the keynote were the now-available Atom S12x9 family for storage systems, as well as a couple of upcoming 22nm 64-bit Atom SoCs codenamed "Avoton" and "Rangeley," both of which are sampling now and are expected to launch in the second half of this year. We've actually already heard of the microserver-friendly Avoton from Facebook's Open Compute Project, whereas Rangeley for network infrastructures was also detailed around the same time; so again, hit up the press release for more details.

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Toshiba’s Portege Z10t detachable Ultrabook debuts at IDF (hands-on)

Toshiba's upcoming detachable Ultrabook debuts at IDF 2013 Beijing handson

Right after Intel's somewhat mundane announcement of the Ultrabook Convertible and Ultrabook Detachable sub-brands at IDF in Beijing, SVP Kirk Skaugen surprised us by whipping out an unnamed laptop coming from Toshiba, so we jumped onto the stage to get a sniff of the only two units at the venue. Judging by the looks of it, we're confident that this is actually the Portege Z10t that hit the FCC last month -- the vents, camera and logo on the back match those in the drawing (embedded after the break) filed in the application.

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