LG was one of the first companies to demonstrate a Moorestown based phone as recently as earlier this year. Just one hour ago however LG announced that starting in Q4 2010 it will be shipping smartphones based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2.

We first introduced you to Tegra 2 back at CES 2010. It's NVIDIA's second generation smartphone SoC with a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores (ARM's first out-of-order architecture). The dual core CPU will run at 1GHz. Tegra 2 also features NVIDIA's own mobile GPU, although we know nothing of its architecture or how well it stacks up to high end GPUs from Imagination Technologies. NVIDIA calls it a GeForce GPU however I'd be surprised if there's any similarities between it and what's shipping in desktop GeForce GPUs today.

LG's press release is pretty light on details although we do get some performance projections. LG states that web browsing can be up to 2x faster and gaming performance can be up to 5x faster compared to single core processors running at 1GHz. If we're conservative and assume that is in comparison to Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC then we'd expect Quake 3 frame rates at just under 100 fps. Web browsing at 2x the speed of Snapdragon would be much faster than anything we've seen to date.

LG mentions that Tegra 2 will enable 1080p HD video playback however with no indication of bitrate it's too early to get excited about that claim. TI's OMAP 4 will also have 1080p support when it ships in phones next year. The same is true for Intel's Moorestown based devices.

Obviously SoC speed isn't all that matters, LG has to deliver a compelling smartphone design. The first LG Tegra 2 smartphones will be a part of its Optimus Series of smartphones, most likely running Android.

Read on for the full press release if you're interested.

This one has been a hotly requested item from you all: a review of the Samsung Galaxy S. Samsung sent us their newest Galaxy S phone, the Epic 4G for use on Sprint's WiMAX network. It's the first 4" phone we've reviewed, the first to use Samsung's Hummingbird SoC and the first with a Super AMOLED display.

The CPU performance proved to be on par with the Motorola Droid X and other 1GHz Android offerings, but the GPU performance is a good 30 - 45% better than anything else on the market today. The new Super AMOLED display is also a huge improvement over the AMOLED screens we've seen in other Android phones. 

Battery life leaves a lot to be desired as the Epic 4G lasted less than 4 hours in our 3G/4G web browsing tests. We also encountered issues with the phone's GPS receiver as many others have reported.

Overall Samsung's Epic 4G is a nice step forward for Android, but with a few glaring issues it remains imperfect.

Read about it all and more in our full review of the Epic 4G.

The Silent Pro series is one of the best-known series power supplies from Cooler Master, previously covering range from 500 to 700 watts. The range has now extended to 1000W with two models rated at 850W and 1000W, including flat connection cables found in higher power classes. Today we are looking at the latter. The 1000W model comes with a 5-year warranty, promises a maximum efficiency of 86%, and uses a single +12V rail. Excluding the motherboard connectors all cables are fully modular. Cooler Master also makes note of the high quality of selected components. Even though the housing of the PSU seems to be very similar to the smaller Silent Pro, a different ODM is responsible for the manufacture. On the next pages we will explore the design and topology and see if Cooler Master is able to keep their promises.

The pricetag of Lenovo's ThinkPad X100e has come down a couple of hundred dollars from its lofty perch when it entered the market more than six months ago, but it still remains a pricy alternative to CULV and Atom-based ultraportables. The X100e is saddled with AMD's outdated Congo platform, but is there more to a notebook than just the hardware under the hood? We think so, and we took the ThinkPad X100e for a spin to prove that the platform isn't always what counts.

When Fermi first launched on the desktop, we wondered how long it would take to trickle down to the lower end markets—and the mobile team also wondered if we'd ever see Fermi make it into notebooks. NVIDIA managed the latter with the GTX 480M, a lower clocked chip harvested from the full GF100. Now they're ready to launch the rest of their mobile lineup, with product schedule to start shipping later this month. Want to see what NVIDIA's brining to the table? We've got the official specs, though we do have to note that there are a few areas NVIDIA isn't discussing just yet. Regardless, we'll see plenty more Optimus Technology laptops and notebooks, and mobile GPUs may actually get the kick in the shorts we've been longing for!

Our Ask the Experts series continues with another round of questions.

A couple of months ago we ran a webcast with Intel Fellow, Rich Uhlig, VMware Chief Platform Architect, Rich Brunner and myself. The goal was to talk about the past, present and future of virtualization. In preparation for the webcast we solicited questions from all of you, unfortunately we only had an hour during the webcast to address them. Rich Uhlig from Intel, Rich Brunner from VMware and our own Johan de Gelas all agreed to answer some of your questions in a 6 part series we're calling Ask the Experts. Each week we'll showcase three questions you guys asked about virtualization and provide answers from our panel of three experts. These responses haven't been edited and come straight from the experts.

If you'd like to see your question answered here leave it in the comments. While we can't guarantee we'll get to everything, we'll try to pick a few from the comments to answer as the weeks go on.

Our readership is composed largely of people who prefer to roll their own, but recently we've had the opportunity to take a look at some interesting desktop machines from big name manufacturers. Now we tread on much more challenging terrain: can a hardware boutique like iBUYPOWER make a convincing case for buying a custom built machine instead of learning to build one yourself? That's what we aim to find out in our review of iBUYPOWER's new flagship, the Paladin XLC.

Last week we published our preview of Intel's 2011 Core microarchitecture update, codenamed Sandy Bridge. In the preview we presented a conservative estimate of what shipping Sandy Bridge performance will look like in Q1 2011. I call it conservative because we were dealing with an early platform, with turbo disabled, compared to fairly well established competitors with their turbo modes enabled.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that this performance preview, ~5 months before launch, wasn't officially sanctioned or supported by Intel. All companies like to control the manner in which information about their products is released, regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad. We acquired the chip on our own, ran the benchmarks on our own and published the article, on our own. 

As a result a number of questions remained unanswered. I measured significantly lower L3 cache latencies on SB vs. Westmere/Nehalem, I just have no idea why they were lower. I suspect many of these questions will be answered at IDF, but the point is that we were flying blind on this one.

A big unknown was the state of Sandy Bridge graphics. As I mentioned in the preview, there will be two types of integrated graphics enabled on Sandy Bridge parts: 1 core and 2 core parts. Intel refers to them as GT1 and GT2, respectively. The GT1 parts have 6 execution units (EUs), while the GT2 parts have 12.

While some desktop parts will feature GT2, all notebook parts (at launch) will feature GT2. Based on the information I had while running our tests, it looked like the Sandy Bridge sample was a GT1 part. With no official support from Intel and no way to tell how many EUs the sample had, I had no way to confirm. Since publication I've received more information that points to our sample being a GT2 part. It's not enough for me to 100% confirm that it's GT2, but that's what it looks to be at this point.

If it is indeed a GT2 part, the integrated graphics performance in our preview is indicative of the upper end of what you can expect for desktops and in the range of what we'd expect from SB notebooks (graphics turbo may move numbers up a bit but it's tough to tell at this point since our sample didn't have turbo enabled). As soon as I got this information I made updates to the articles indicating our uncertainty. I never like publishing something I'm not 100% sure of and for that, I owe you an apology. We trusted that our sources on the GT1/6EU information were accurate and in this case they may not have been. We all strive to be as accurate as possible on AnandTech and when any of us fail to live up to that standard, regardless of reasoning, it hurts. Thankfully the CPU and GPU performance data are both accurate, although we're simply unsure if the GPU performance will apply to the i5 2400 or not (it should be indicative of notebook SB GPU performance and some desktop SB GPU performance).

The desktop Sandy Bridge GPU rollout is less clear. I've heard that the enthusiast K-SKUs will have GT2 graphics while the more mainstream parts will have GT1. I'm not sure this makes sense, but we'll have to wait and see.

Many of you have been drawing the comparison to Llano and how it will do vs. Sandy Bridge. Llano is supposed to be based on a modified version of the current generation Phenom II architecture. Clock for clock, I'd expect that to be slower than Sandy Bridge. But clock for clock isn't what matters, it's performance per dollar and performance per watt that are most important. AMD has already made it clear that it can compete in the former and it's too early to tell what Llano perf per watt will be. On the CPU side I feel it's probably easy to say that Intel will have the higher absolute performance, but AMD may be competitive at certain price points (similar to how it is today). Intel likes to maintain certain profit margins and AMD doesn't mind dropping below them to maintain competitive, it's why competition is good.

Llano's GPU performance is arguably the more interesting comparison. While Intel had to do a lot of work to get Sandy Bridge to where it is today, AMD has an easier time on the graphics side (given ATI's experience). The assumption is that Llano's GPU will be more powerful than what Intel has in Sandy Bridge. If that's the case, then we're really going to have an awesome set of entry level desktops/notebooks next year. 

This summer has been a busy one for smartphone platforms. We started the summer with an Apple iOS update that remedied a number of the primary concerns with Apple’s iDevice platforms, followed by the launch of the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Android flagship crown was passed between no less than 4 devices (HTC Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, Droid X, and now arguably Droid 2 or Galaxy S phones), and Google’s OEM partners have slowly but surely rolled Froyo 2.2 out across their install base. 

Now it’s Research In Motion’s turn to deliver a summer update. Their answer is two pronged - BlackBerry 6 (that’s not a typo, they’ve named the new OS after the platform itself - BlackBerry 6), and a new device for AT&T, the BlackBerry Torch.

Lately, the BlackBerry platform as a whole has been showing its age. Browsing the web and checking email on a mobile device are no longer novelties that wow on their own - they’re old hat. Further, smartphone browsers have established a pretty steady cadence toward parity with the desktop in both speed and rendering, something the BlackBerry’s previous web browser was frequently criticized for failing to deliver - at all.

On carriers like Verizon, where BlackBerry once reigned supreme at the top of the smartphone food chain, it now faces direct competition with Android. The first Storm was a commercial failure, and the Storm 2 - though better - was still not the proverbial home run RIM needed.

One year and one acquisition later, and RIM is ready to play ball with a modern, WebKit based browser, revamped hardware design, and true capacitive multitouch screen (sans SurePress). How does the BlackBerry Torch fare? Read on for the full review.

We kick off our long overdue focus on AMD with an in-depth review of ASRock's 890FX Deluxe 4. Landing with an MSRP of $180, the Deluxe 4 slots in between the very best 890GX motherboards and the enthusiast 890FX based offerings. Have ASRock done enough to draw our attention away from the cheaper 890GX based ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 (circa $150)? It's a close call; the M4A89GTD Pro is the better clocker, while the Deluxe 4 proves to be the more versatile workhorse...

We've looked at AMD's slightly older Tigris platform in the form of their M300 and M600 processors. While performance of those parts was better than previous AMD designs, Intel still maintained a healthy lead in performance and battery life. That wasn't too surprising, and the far more pertinent question is what the new Danube and Nile parts bring to the table. Having taken Nile for a spin and come away impressed, courtesy of the Toshiba T235D, we're now moving up to Danube. AMD again shipped us a recently launched Toshiba A660D notebook, which aims squarely at the midrange performance notebook market.

Sporting the first quad-core mobile AMD processor we've ever tested in the form of the Phenom II P920, the A660D should offer quite a bit more performance in heavily threaded workloads—though the low 1.6GHz base clock speed means dual-core parts should still be faster in lightly threaded tasks. Coupled with the P920 processor are AMD's HD 4250 IGP and HD 5650 discrete graphics, with switching technology providing the optimal choice of performance or battery life depending on if you have the AC adapter connected. Beyond the above, the A660D also provides an update to Toshiba's Satellite design, with a thinner chassis and less gloss. Does the A660D join the T235D as an AMD laptop we can recommend? That's what we're here to investigate.

Years ago I used to publish a series of articles called Behind AnandTech. We'd occasionally do a massive server upgrade and I'd publish detailed specs, shots and info about the upgrade as we went along the process. I believe the last one I published was our move to Athlon MP processors back in 2001. Since then we've had a number of upgrades, bringing our total server count up to 28. We run a mix of AMD and Intel hardware but it's all getting very old.

To make matters worse, as we've upgraded we have done so piecemeal. We have pockets of similar hardware, but there's very little consistency across the entire server farm.

For the past month, we've been working on changing that. And starting today, you're going to start seeing the fruits of our labor - part by part.

Intel has launched their first dual-core Atom processor designed purely for netbooks, the N550. The new CPU has led to the netbook manufacturers scrambling to update their products to feature the latest silicon. Intel promises that there will be a significant boost in performance while maintaining the same battery life. Intel plans to make the most of the market dominance of their Atom CPUs before AMD launches their Bobcat APUs next year, which will look to provide some real competition in this space.

Late last week we pulled back the covers on Intel's next-generation Core architecture update: Sandy Bridge. Due out in Q1 2011, we learned a lot about Sandy Bridge's performance in our preview. Sandy Bridge will be the first high performance monolithic CPU/GPU from Intel. Its performance was generally noticeably better than the present generation of processors, both on the CPU and GPU side. If you haven't read the preview by now, I'd encourage you to do so.

One of the questions we got in response to the article was: what about Sandy Bridge for notebooks? While Sandy Bridge is pretty significant for mainstream quad-core desktops, it's even more tailored to the notebook space. I've put together some spec and roadmap information for those of you who might be looking for a new notebook early next year.

Four years ago AMD did the unthinkable: it announced the 5.4 billion dollar acquisition of ATI in a combination of cash and stock. What followed was a handful of very difficult years for AMD, an upward swing for ATI and the eventual spinoff of AMD’s manufacturing facilities to GlobalFoundries in order to remain profitable and competitive.

In the years post acquisition, many criticized AMD for blowing a lot of money on ATI and having little to show for it. Even I felt that for $5.4 billion AMD could’ve put together its own competent graphics and chipset teams.

Despite the protest and sideline evaluations, good has come from the acquisition. The most noticeable is the fact that AMD’s chipset business is the strongest it has ever been. AMD branded chipsets and integrated graphics are actually very good. And later this year, AMD will ship its first Fusion APUs (single die CPU/GPU): Ontario using Bobcat cores and an AMD GPU. Ontario will be the first tangible example of direct AMD/ATI collaboration since the acquisition.

Just as we’re about to see results from the acquisition AMD is announcing that it will retire the ATI brand later this year. Save those boxes guys, soon you won’t see an ATI logo on any product sold in the market.

For quite a while now one of the largest obsticles for using Eyefinity in budget scanrios has been an issue of connectivity. Eyefinity video cards are cheap and large TV-derrived monitors are fairly cheap, but cheap monitors rarely have the DisplayPort connectivity required for the 3rd monitor in an Eyefinity configuration. The previous solution has been to use an active dual-link DVI adaptor capable of converting the DP signal to DVI, but at around $100 for these adaptors the cost was as much as some video cards.

Next month this situation will largely be resolved with the release of active single-link DVI adaptors. These adaptors still convert a DP signal to DVI, but by only generating a signal for a single-link port they're cheaper to build and no longer require external power. At $30 each they should go a long way towards making Eyefinity cheaper for gamers and non-gamers alike.

Last week we had our first (and unfortunately only) 6GB memory kit giveaway. Today I'm happy to announce the winner: khaydin. Check your email :)

Today we have two prizes from our good friends at PowerColor. I've got two PowerColor PCS Radeon HD 5770 1GB cards here and I'm giving them both away. I'm giving away one per winner, so we'll crown two winners this time around.

Read on for entry details!

Every two years Intel is committed to introducing a new microprocessor architecture. It's a part of the whole tick-tock strategy that Intel hatched back in 2005 - 2006. Thus far, every tock has been a knockout - with no competitor able to touch it. It started with Conroe in 2006, continued with Nehalem in 2008 and early next year we'll meet Sandy Bridge - the third tock in Intel's cadence. Correction, you'll be able to buy it next year, but you'll get to meet her today.

Sandy Bridge is a unique part for Intel. Not only does it address the neglected quad-core CPU market by moving it to 32nm and giving it a healthy performance boost (10%+ clock per clock, 23%+ compared to similarly priced parts) but it also brings Intel's integrated graphics on die. And I hate to ruin surprises, but it's actually not half bad.

For the first time, Intel's integrated graphics is actually performance competitive with low end discrete GPUs. You're not going to want to throw away your GTX 460, but if you were going to spend $40 - $60 on a GPU before, you may not need to after Sandy Bridge.

Want to see how it performs?

NVIDIA’s ION brought a tremendous appeal to mini-ITX last year, but over the past six months Clarkdale has established itself as the natural and more capable choice for small form factor builds. ZOTAC are today attempting to reinvigorate appeal for ION by teaming up Intel’s CULV processors with NVIDIA’s aging GF9400 chipset.  We take a look at the IONITX-P-E, and aim to find out how it fits into the HTPC landscape.

Usually when we get to the 17"-class notebooks here, we're dealing with machines designed almost exclusively for gaming. The problem is that these machines also tend to be prohibitively expensive, owing in no small part to the healthy premiums their gaming graphics often command. So what about the users for whom gaming isn't the biggest priority, the ones major manufacturers like HP and Dell tend to target? In Dell's case, there's the Studio 17 offering targeted to media enthusiasts, and that's what we're here to investigate.

With the recent rise in the number of triple-slot cards, we have a few different cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes an interesting direction with the triple-slot concept.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex Edition is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 5770 with a unique feature: an adjustable height fan. By default the fan sits flush against the heatsink of this double-slot card, but with a twist of the fan it can be raised roughly 9mm. PowerColor says that doing can improve the cooling beyond what a pure double-slot card can achieve by reducing backflow, and today we set to find out if that's the case.

The first half of 2010 saw Netgear get started on their AV Series product line. Their intent was to create a set of products to enhance the consumer's home theater experience. The first few products appeared to be just rebranded versions of already existing units. A case in point is the WNDR3700 802.11n Gigabit router which was apparently rebadged as the WNDR37AV a couple of months back. Rebadged products never generate much enthusiasm, even though Netgear may claim them to be designed with superior performance and features aimed at the home theater market. With Netgear's strength in the networking space, it is no surprise that all the products announced in the AV series so far have been aimed at making sure that the components of a home theater can talk in a satisfactory manner with the Internet, as well as the other components in the home network. However, can any home theater product line ever be complete without a media streamer? Is there any networking methodology (short of running Cat6 cables all over the house) reliable enough for streaming the highest quality Blu-Ray videos?

All this is set to change in the coming months, though. Netgear is slated to bring out a slew of press releases for the upcoming products towards the end of August 2010. In typical AnandTech fashion, we have the official scoop on the details which you are unlikely to find in the press releases. Read on to find out more about a few of the exciting products about to be announced by Netgear in the home theater space.

Yesterday we published our coverage of AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer architecture disclosures. If you haven't had a chance to read the piece or haven't been following AMD for the past few years: Bobcat is AMD's new low power architecture, while Bulldozer is targeted at high end desktops and servers. Both are due out sometime in 2011 and both promise a lot.

Now that AMD has completed its presentation at Hot Chips 22 we're allowed to share with you the contents of those presentations. There's not much in here that we haven't already covered in yesterday's article, but if you'd like the full slide deck head over to the AnandTech Galleries.

Almost all CE devices sold in the market today have some sort of connection to the Internet as well as the home network. The consumers' need to transfer data back and forth between various locations in their residences has led to wireless routers becoming ubiquitous in every home connected to the Internet. However, wireless networking is not a worry-free solution for everyone. The real world performance of wireless networks heavily depends on the layout and construction of the house, as well as the nature of other CE devices operating simultaneously. Running an Ethernet cable around the house is a very good option, but is not worth the hassle and cost for many. Given this situation, the electrical network inside the house looks like an unexploited part of the equation. The HomePlug AV standard aims to take advantage of the electrical wiring inside the house to network various computers and various CE products.

In today's review, we will look at Western Digital's first foray into the HomePlug AV market, the WD Livewire. The company claims that the intent of the product is to deliver the Internet to various locations in your house, including the place where the TV and devices like the WDTV Live are placed. Does the WD Livewire succeed in this respect? Read on to find out.

Here at AnandTech, we’ve been talking for a considerable time about Intel and Nokia’s joint collaboration in the mobile space on the MeeGo mobile operating system. Today, the two companies have announced another partnership aimed at improving MeeGo’s potential for competing against Android and iOS - a joint research program tasked with creating new mobile user experiences.

Intel and Nokia have chosen the University of Oulu’s center for internet excellence to be the host of this newly formed 'joint innovation center.' The University of Oulu is credited for being the home of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the open source VR platform realXtend, among other things, and no doubt Nokia already has strong ties to this large Finnish university.

University of Oulu

Starting immediately, some two dozen researchers from the university’s community will collaborate towards creating “compelling mobile user experiences.” 

Though the center’s goals are focused on 3D mobile interfaces, Intel and Nokia also noted that development time will be devoted towards crafting new interfaces for virtual worlds - but get this, for use in a mobile environment. The two talked about extending CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment - think holodeck) type interfaces into the mobile realm.

We've been waiting years for AMD to deliver another knockout microprocessor architecture rather than continue to play the value game. While we've been waiting for its next generation Bobcat and Bulldozer architectures since we first heard of them in 2007, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Bobcat, AMD's mobile architecture for netbooks, nettops and ultra mobile notebooks is due to begin production at the end of this year with systems on sale in Q1 2011. Bulldozer is in testing now, sampling to partners the end of this year and shipping sometime in 2011. And both are ground up redesigns.

Later today at Hot Chips, AMD will reveal more details about the architectures of both cores. And we've got the scoop here now - read on.

We've been looking forward to testing AMD's Nile Ultrathin platform since the first press releases went out. It's no secret that AMD's mobile offerings have trailed in performance and battery life for quite a while; in fact, pricing has been just about the only area where AMD could compete with Intel's mobile juggernaut. Nile—as well as the higher performing Danube platform—are supposed to increase performance by up to 38% in some cases while also boosting battery life. AMD claims some models will offer as much as 7.5 hours of mobility, which is a far cry from the sub-5 hour mark set by the old Congo platform. Does the Nile platform live up to the hype? Is there finally a reasonable alternative to Intel's CULV and ULV offerings?

AMD sent us a Toshiba T235D to let us see for ourselves, and frankly this is the first AMD laptop that I can recommend without a whole bunch of caveats. It's not going to be everything to everyone, but for the intended market there's plenty to like. The HD 4225 IGP is significantly better than Intel's old CULV with GMA 4500MHD, and roughly on the same level as the newer Intel HD Graphics found in Arrandale ULV. While Intel still has the outright CPU performance crown, there's also pricing to consider. So join us as we show how AMD's mobile offerings just got a much-needed kick in the pants.

Seagate recently announced the world's first 3TB 3.5" HDD. There's just one catch: it's external only. The FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB arrived in our labs over a week ago and we've put in a lot of hours testing this thing. Not only did we try it as an external drive but we cracked open the case and played around with it as an internal SATA drive to explore breaking the 2TB limit on present day PCs.

Read on for our full review!

With the back to school season in full swing now, manufacturers are all competing for a slice of a particularly delicious pie: college students. This is a group of users that need something powerful enough to do their work (and play the occasional game) but portable enough to tote around through classes and with enough battery life to survive a day running around campus. While more exotic builds from manufacturers like ASUS and HP may be making waves, Dell is looking to get their piece of the pie with a balanced blend of style and substance in the form of their Studio line. Does the Studio 14 hit all the right notes?

OCZ sent us a 850W power supply to give away and today we've got a winner: LKO. Respond to my email to claim your prize. Now let's give away some memory shall we?

We've been giving away a lot of 4GB kits for AMD and LGA-1156 Intel platforms, but where's all the X58 love? That changes today. G.Skill sent over a 6GB kit, the F3-12800CL7T-6GBPI to be specific. This DDR3-1600 kit is intended for X58 use so if you've got a Gulftown or Nehalem, get ready to enter.

Read on for contest entry details!