Blizzard Entertainment has reportedly laid off about 600 employees, about 10 percent of which are positions related to game development. It's reported that the people working on World of Warcraft are not affected. The company says that the decision came after a review of business needs. The company's game development and publishing schedules as a result of these job cuts, are not affected, the company says. It's still looking to hire game developers in some positions.

AMD has released two new FX-Series unlocked CPUs, the FX-4170 and the FX-6200, as well as made a nice price cut on its eight-core FX-8120 and six-core FX-6100 CPUs. The two new additions to the FX-Series lineup include the quad-core FX-4170 part clocked at 4.2GHz base clock and 4.3GHz Turbo. The FX-4170 packs 4MB of L2 and 8MB of L3 cache, supports DDR3-1866 memory and has a 125W TDP. The six-core FX-6200 is a tad bit more interesting as this one works at 3.8GHz base clock with 4.1GHz Turbo and features 6MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache, all at the same 125W TDP.

In addition to the two new FX-series CPUs, AMD did a decent price cut on its FX-8120 and the FX-6100 CPUs. The eight-core FX-8120 dropped from US $205 to US $185 (around €15 in Europe) while the six-core FX-6100 dropped to US $145 from previous US $155. Of course, these are bulk 1k order prices and retail/e-tail ones should be a tad bit higher. The price tags for newely announced FX-4170 and FX-6200 are still unknown but they did previously show up listed with pre-order price starting from US $145 for the FX-4170 and US $178 for the FX-6200.

Apple is apparently thinking about introducing a new MacBook Air with a 14-inch panel. Digitimes claims Cupertino is mulling the move thanks to strong demand for 14-inchers in Asia. Unlike Europe or North America, Asia is crazy about 14-inch models and they make up 35 to 40 percent of the notebook market.

Their share in the US and EU is much lower, probably because consumers in the west are already pretty fat and they don’t mind the extra bulk. If Apple chooses to go ahead with the launch, it would indicate that it is taking the booming China market more seriously.

More here.

Asus has finally shed some official light on its Padfone smartphone and we are looking at 4.3-inch 960x540 Super AMOLED screen backed by Gorilla Glass and powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 dual-core CPU clocked at 1.5GHz and paired up with Adreno 225 GPU. The Snapdragon S4 CPU is backed by 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM and it will be avilable with 16, 32 or 64GB of eMMC flash storage space as well as an microSD card slot for additional up to 32GB of storage space.

The rest of the specs include 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and A-GPS support, HSPA+, rear 8MP F/2.2 lens camera with autofocus and LED flash and front VGA one, e-compass, gyro, light and motion sensors, micro-USB and 3.5 audio jack and own 1520mAh battery. The dimensions of the Padfone are set at 128x65.4x9.2mm and it weighs in at 129g.

The Padfone Station will feature a 10.1-inch 1280x800 capacitive touch/multi-touch screen with Gorilla Glass and will use Padfone's rear camera and have its own fron 1.3MP camera. It will also have its own 24.4Whr battery that should provide up to five times more battery life and high quality Asus SonicMaster speakers.

The Padfone combo will also have an optional keyboard dock as well as Padfone Stylus Headset that is, as the name suggests, actually a Bluetooth stylus pen that can double up as a headset. Unfortunately,  the price, probably high remains a mystery but Asus did say that Padfone should launch in April.

Intels next-generation code-named “Ivy Bridge” microprocessor  has been overclocked by two times higher than the default frequency. According to Bright Side of News web-site, enthusiasts have managed to overclock quad-core Intel Core i7-3770K microprocessor from default 3.50GHz to whopping 7.063GHz.  It is not clear how the enthusiasts got their paws on the chip which is not out yet and is going to be delayed until June. It is not certain what cooling system was used during the overclocking procedure. Our guess is that it was probably temperature found on the surface of Pluto, or the Peljesac Pensinsula when you get the only summer's holiday Fudo ever gives you.

The highest clock-speed ever achieved by a PC microprocessor is 8585MHz. Andre Yang has managed to ovcerclock an AMD FX microprocessor using Asus Crosshair V Formula mainboard and liquid nitrogen cooling system. Ivy Bridge will have improvements that will boost its performance in general applications by around 20 per cent compared to Core i "Sandy Bridge" chips and new graphics core with DirectX 11 and OpenCL 1.1 support.  This will provide 30 per cent higher performance compared to the predecessor as well as new video processor and display controllers. Ivy Bridge will feature PCI Express 3.0 x16 interconnection as well as PCIe 2.0 x4 controller.

More here.

Sony has begun working on its next-generation gaming console under the Playstation brand, and Forbes learned that it's none other than AMD designing its graphics processing unit (GPU).

AMD is far from new to the game console GPU business, as its GPUs already drive graphics processing in Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii consoles. If launched anytime soon, the next-gen Playstation will create a rare moment where GPUs of all three major game console makers would be AMD-made. The current Playstation 3 console uses an NVIDIA GPU.

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.