Computers-Plus

The server racket returned to something resembling normalcy in the third quarter, according to the box counters at IT market-watcher Gartner.

The company reckons that global server revenues in Q3 rose by 15.3 per cent to $12.29bn, while the number of machines kicked out of the world’s server factories rose by 14.2 per cent to 2.19 million units.

According to Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, all regions of the globe had year-on-year growth for both server sales and shipments, except for Middle East and Africa, which saw revenues slip 2.9 per cent even as shipments rose by 4.2 per cent. Server revenues in Eastern Europe rebounded sharply, up 33.3 per cent, making it the fastest growing region on earth.

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It’s getting to be quite a kerfuffle lately… these IQ stories, it was only days ago people were accusing AMD of IQ tampering and now it seems NVIDIA has been messing with their own IQ, but it seems a bit sneakier.

KitGuru has a lengthy article based on it – where HAWX is tested and when AA is used the IQ is lowered – giving an improvement in performance by 8%.

With the GTX460 doing so well and the 580 being a great GPU – it would be disappointing for NVIDIA to finally get back on their foot (not feet, they’re not out of the woods yet) to have this stop them.

Check the source for the long read – it’s quite interesting.

Today, you’ll see more laptops than desktops being sold. Mobile needs are on the rise and laptops are becoming just as powerful as their desktop counterparts. In fact, a recent survey, conducted by PC World notes that laptops are also becoming more reliable. They certainly have to be in order to meet the needs of today’s rapidly growing groups of web and mobile workers.

25.9 percent of respondents to the R&S survey by PC World report experiencing at least one significant problem with their notebooks in the past year. This is down from 30.9 percent last year and 31.8 percent two years ago. While not a huge drop, the declining percentage says a lot about laptop reliability and a possible increase in technical knowledge from a user standpoint.  Un

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SC10 If the June edition of the bi-annual ranking of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world represented the dawning of the GPU co-processor as a key component in high performance computing, then the November list is breakfast time. The super centers of the world are smacking their lips for some flop-jacks with OpenCL syrup and some x64 bacon on the side.

China has the most voracious appetite for GPU co-processors, and as expected two weeks ago when the Tianhe-1A super was booted up for the first time, this hybrid CPU-GPU machine installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has taken the top spot on the Top 500 list with a comfortable margin.

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