An Expreview community member ran benchmarks comparing the performance of the Intel HD 4000 graphics embedded into its upcoming 22 nm "Ivy Bridge" Core i5-3570K, comparing it to the integrated graphics of Core i5-2500K, and discrete graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 240. These tests are endorsed by the site. The suite of benchmarks included games that aren't quite known to be very taxing on graphics hardware by today's standards, yet are extremely popular; games such as StarCraft II, Left4Dead 2, DiRT 3, Street Fighter IV. Some of the slightly more graphics-intensive benchmarks included Far Cry 2 and 3DMark Vantage. All benchmarks were run at 1280 x 720 resolution.

The Intel HD 4000 graphics core beats the HD 3000 hands down, with performance leads as high as 122% in a particular test. The chip produces more than playable frame-rates with Left4Dead 2 and Street Fighter IV, both well above 50 FPS, even DiRT 3 and Far Cry 2 run strictly OK, over 30 FPS. StarCraft II is where it produced under 30 FPS, so the chip might get bogged down in intense battles. A mainstream discrete GeForce or Radeon is a must. On average, the graphics core embedded into the Core i5-3570K was found to be 67.25% faster than the one on the Core i5-2500K.

When pitted against a 2+ year old GeForce GT 240, the Core i5-3570K struggles. In StarCraft II, it's 53.64% slower. On average, the GT 240 emerged 56.25% faster. A decent effort by Intel to cash in on the entry-level graphics. We are hearing nice things about the HD video playback and GPU acceleration capabilities of Intel's HD 4000 core, and so there's still something to look out for. Agreed, comparing the i5-3570K to the i5-2500K isn't a 100% scientific comparison since the CPU performance also factors in, but it was done purely to assess how far along Intel has come with its graphics.

It looks like Roccat Studios' marketing department has sought to bring up the topic of the future of PC gaming, something Razer did, before going on to launch a $2,800 gaming laptop. Alienware asked the same question, but in contrast to Razer, went on to launch a much more sensible product that actually seeks to do something about the ailing PC gaming industry (a nice, cheap gaming PC that woos the console crowd). Roccat is known neither for fancy overpriced laptops, or desktops, but is a sizable player in the gaming peripherals industry.

Roccat's latest marketing campaign revolves around the question "Isn't PC gaming dead?", a cleverly worded question that asks why PC gaming isn't dead already, instead of a more inquisitive "Is PC gaming dead?", or an exclamatory "PC gaming isn't dead!". Roccat is seeking answers to this burning question on a specially set-up microsite. Roccat's campaign isn't just market research, but also leading up to something, a product launch, perhaps. The question site goes on to state "soon we'll tell you what we think is the smartest way forward." By 'soon', they mean about 13 days from now. The shoutbox in the microsite is nested in a frame shaped like an iPhone. Could this mean something? A gamepad-dock for iPhone that enhances gaming? Time will tell if Roccat does a Razer or an Alienware.

According to a report over at Sweclockers, Nvidia is pushing its first Kepler based GPU for March launch, sometime after Cebit that kicks off on the 6th of March. The first in line should be the GK104 that will be branded as the GTX 670 Ti and should end up somewhere between the GTX 580 and HD 7950, performance wise.

As it was rumored earlier, the GK104 will bring a radically overhauled architecture and rumored specs include 1536 shaders, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs and up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. The GTX 670 Ti name doesn't come as a surprise as the GK104 is actually going to replace the GTX 560 Ti, but as always, until partners print the boxes, anything is possible. The bad thing, for Nvidia at least, is that the flagship Kepler based cards are still months away and AMD will happily keep the performance crown for quite some time.

Intel has moved to squash rumours that its new Ivy Bridge chips will be really late. Last week, Digitimes claimed that Intel was going to delay mass availability of its new Ivy Bridge processors until after June. The original target date for Ivy Bridge shipments was in April. Intel has said that the report was only partly true. Intel will only be delaying the release specifically of mobile Dual-Core Ivy Bridge processors until after June and everything is more or less on schedule.

The reason for the delay of the Dual Core  processors is due to an overstock of the previous generation chips. There were some fears in the Apple camp that Job's Mob's release plans for updated MacBook Pros and iMacs might be put on hold.  However if Apple is going to stick Quad-Core processors in their iMac, so that product line should see no added delays. The iMac was last updated in May, 2011 and is overdue for a refresh.  Only one of those uses a dual core processor and that will probably be axed anyway.

Chinese company Yeston thinks there's still room for factory-overclocked Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards in the market, it unveiled the R6870 Game Master, designed to have high overclocking headroom. The card uses a custom-design PCB with an 8+1+1 phase VRM to power the GPU. The VRM takes advantage of LFPAK MOSFETs and two NEC TOKIN Proadlizers, which condition power and enhance stability with voltage-assisted overclocking. Out of the box, the card ships with reference clock-speeds of 900 MHz core and 1050 MHz (4.20 GHz effective) memory, leaving it entirely to you to take the clock speeds where you want them to go, instead of being spoon-fed with factory-OC profiles.

Moving on to the cooling, Yeston gave the R6870 Game Master a zesty cooling assembly that spans three expansion slots. It uses a lateral-flow design with a blower pushing air through numerous aluminum channels where heat is dissipated to it. It appears like heat is conveyed to these channels using heat-pipes, and not a hot plate.

As a nice cosmetic touch, Yeston gave the card a thick back-plate that is ridged. It helps reduce PCB bending and could assist heat dissipation just a little. Display outputs include two each of DVI and mini-DisplayPort, and one HDMI. Power is drawn from two 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Out now in the Chinese market, the Yeston R6870 Game Master is priced at 1,199 RMB (US $190).

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have concluded that solid state drives (SSDs) have a bleak future in the evolution of computing technology. They have discovered that fast flash based storage are facing come pretty glaring technology hurdles during their natural course of evolution, which they don't think it will overcome. To begin with, shrinking (miniaturizing) them, to increase capacity or decrease manufacturing costs, will severely degrade performance beyond a point, 6.5 nm silicon fab process.

The scientists studied 45 different flash chips in various sizes, which showed that scaling of latencies and error-rates are 'tolerable' enough as the technology miniaturizes only till 6.5 nm, or the year 2024, when this fab process will be common, beyond which they question the drives' viability. Beyond this point, the more capacity you squeeze into flash memory chips, the more performance degrade (latency and error-rate scale beyond tolerable scales).

While the density of SSDs grows and the cost per gigabyte shrinks, "everything else about them is poised to get worse," said Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. "This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications," the author of the study.

The study, entitled "The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory", can be accessed here.

Shipments of tablet PCs is bound to go down by 30% in Q1 2012, according to market research carried out by DigiTimes. The various vendors will ship 14.97 million tablet PCs in the first quarter of 2012, dropping 30.6% on quarter but rising 77.6% on year. This figure can be broken down to 11 million iPad 2 and iPad 3 units, and some 3.97 tablets comprising of various other models than iPads.

Shipments of these non-iPad tablets will decrease by 50.8% on quarter and include 1.5 million Kindle Fires and 300,000 Nook Tablets, DigiTimes Research said. Of all the tablets shipped in Q1 2012, 26.3% will run Android, and 13.3% will be running Texas Intruments' processors, the research said. Taiwan-based ODMs alone will comprise a huge 90.25% of all tablet shipments in Q1, of which Foxconn will account for 83%, followed by Quanta Computer with 9.6%, DigiTimes Research indicated.

AMD is planning to launch its mid-range HD 7800 series cards based on the Pitcairn GPU sometime in March, or according to our sources, the first week of March. There will surely be a card or two at this year's Cebit show that kicks off on March 6. Expreview managed to score some details regarding the Pitcairn cards and it appears that we are looking at three different SKUs, the Radeon HD 7870, and two Radeon HD 7850 cards with either 1 or 2GB of memory. The specifications of the fully enabled Pitcain based HD 7870 include 22 Graphics CoreNext compute units, or simply 1408 stream processors, 88 TMUs and 24 ROPs.

The Radeon HD 7870 will ship with 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. The HD 7870, at least the reference ones, should be set to work at 950MHz for the GPU and 1375MHz (5.5GHz effective) for memory. The Radeon HD 7850 on the other hand has two GCN CUs less, for a total of 1280 stream processors, 80 TMUs and 24 ROPs. This one will be available with either 1 or 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with the same 256-bit memory interface. The HD 7850 should end up clocked at 900MHz for the GPU and 1250MHz (5.0GHz effective) for the memory. There has also been talk regarding the Radeon HD 7890 SKU that could be based on the highly crippled Tahiti GPU, and should come sometimes after March.

NVIDIA seems to be playing the blame game according to a article over at Xbit. This is what they had to say, "Chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp. said that besides continuously increasing capital expenditures that the company ran into in the recent months will be accompanied by lower than expected gross margins in the forthcoming quarter.

The company blames low yields of the next-generation code-named Kepler graphics chips that are made at TSMC’s 28nm node. “Decline [of gross margin] in Q1 is expected to be due to the hard disk drive shortage continuing, as well as a shortage of 28nm wafers. We are ramping our Kepler generation very hard, and we could use more wafers. The gross margin decline is contributed almost entirely to the yields of 28nm being lower than expected. That is, I guess, unsurprising at this point,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, during a conference call with financial analysts.

Kepler is Nvidia's next-generation graphics processor architecture that is projected to bring considerable performance improvements and will likely make the GPU more flexible in terms of programmability, which will speed up development of applications that take advantage of GPGPU (general purpose processing on GPU) technologies. Some of the technologies that Nvidia promised to introduce in Kepler and Maxwell (the architecture that will succeed Kepler) include virtual memory space (which will allow CPUs and GPUs to use the "unified" virtual memory), pre-emption, enhance the ability of GPU to autonomously process the data without the help of CPU and so on. Entry-level chips may not get all the features that Kepler architecture will have to offer."

Here is the first screenshot of Mozilla's first operating system (OS). It's not a PC OS, but a significant feat for an organization as collaborated as Mozilla. News of Mozilla working on its own OS first surfaced in July 2011, it was then interpreted as a "boot-to-web" OS along the lines of Google's Chrome OS.

It now appears Boot-to-Gecko's primary focus is on the portable computing market, primarily tablets and smartphones, as a possible 100% royalty-free option to manufacturers. In the screenshots, the phone dialer and main menu are pictured. Boot-to-Gecko will be detailed by Mozilla's CTO at the Mobile Web Congress.