Never mind all that Computex…

It’s the S|A weekly roundup!

Flaming Wafer

It safe to say that Computex pretty much dominated the attention of the tech press this last week. So today were bring you the most interesting bits from it and a few other bytes to keep you stoked..

AMD - logo

AMD’s E-450 chip, a new revision and minor speed bump of the E-350, made an appearance at Computex this week. It seems that the chip is well on it’s way to a rumoured launch in the third quarter and will have significant support from motherboard manufacturers. Also announced this week was AMD’s Z series of APU’s designed for tablets. With a TDP of 5.9 Watts these new chips look significantly better suited to the tablet form factor than the old C series was; But not quite good enough to really compete with most ARM offerings in terms of power consumption.

Bad news came down the pipe about Bulldozer this week. The desktop variant isn’t going to make a quarter 2 launch. Can you hear the sighs of disappointment? The current glut of theories and rumours range from performance issues to launch swaps. 60 to 90 days, mark it on your calendar, and then start sharpening your pitch forks picking out your torches…

Another dual 6950 board popped up this week. It looks about the same as all the other ones, except for the light blue plastic cover on the heat-sink. Hopefully this colour won’t catch on in the wider market.

Intel Logo

Bit-tech’s James Gorbald had an excellent roundup of the new X79 motherboards that were on display at Computex. Ranging from bland to bossy, the most distinctive feature of the new X79 motherboards are the two RAM slots on either side of the CPU socket. The oddest X79 motherboard shown off at Computex has to be this one by Clevo that’s design to fit in a notebook chassis. But by far the coolest was this Socket 1366 X58/ Socket 2011 X79 motherboard from ASUS. As far as workstation platforms go, I don’t think you could ask for much better than what Intel’s designed with its X79.

Via showed off its quad-cores again, and had a big booth at Computex with a couple cool demos. An actual laptop was shown, (OMG, OMG!!!111!1) and they had some neat looking posters. Let’s hope they get some traction with the OEMs for their efforts. We mean outside of China.

This week in the browser wars a new statistic came out that lends credence to the upwelling of support for Google’s Chrome. Apparently, one in eight people now use Chrome as their primary web browser, fancy that.

MSI Logo

The engineers over at MSI seem to have developed a fix for the dust problem that seems to be killing so many cards lately. By running the fans backwards for 30 seconds upon the start up of your computer the cooling solution will blow out all the dust that would normally clog it up. Hopefully we’ll see EVGA and all of the other manufactures implement this feature in order to cut down on the number of “life-time” warranties being invalidated do to dusty graphics cards. It will be interesting to see if this dust cleansing idea spreads to other fan based cooling solutions.

Because our very own Charlie was too busy staring at silicon instead of silicone we offer you the stellar photography skills of the guys at VRZone with their series of articles on boothbabes.S|A

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.