Quantenna Communications has launched the world’s first wireless chipsets that deliver guaranteed bandwidth for high speed wireless networking.

The Quantenna High Speed (QHS) family of chipsets pioneers a new level of ultra reliability for delivering high-definition (HD) multimedia content over wireless networks. The fully integrated 802.11n chipsets with 4x4 MIMO and transmit (Tx) beamforming, are designed to deliver guaranteed wireless bandwidth within any home, anywhere.

“It eliminates the need for home rewiring and allows for seamless HDTV and ‘multiple play’ wireless connectivity, while enabling complete home coverage,” said Corrado Rocca, senior vice president of Product Marketing and Development.

The new Quantenna chipsets - QHS1000, QHS600 and QHS450 - overcome interference and dead zones, enabling consumers and carriers to reliably deploy wireless HD, HDTV and IPTV services, to any point in the home over a plug-and-play wireless network.

With its advanced architecture - which includes vector mesh routing, two or four concurrent bands and throughput link rates in excess of 1 Gbps - Quantenna has taken the technology lead in establishing a new approach to intelligent wireless networking.

“Our unique combination of cutting-edge 4x4 MIMO and Tx beamforming on the smallest footprint positions Quantenna in the forefront of the highly competitive Wi-Fi chip market,” said Dr. Behrooz Rezvani, Quantenna’s founder and CEO.

The company will start shipping samples of its Quantenna High Speed chipset family this quarter.

Link: Quantenna

Intel Corporation has introduced its third-generation Intel vPro suite of business desktop PC technologies, which among other features enhances security and reduces the time and cost of maintenance by enabling PCs to literally think and act for themselves. The new vPro Technology for desktop PCs also opens the door to new virtualized PC models and products aimed at the special needs of small businesses.

Using the new Remote Scheduled Maintenance feature, IT administrators can program PCs for regular tune-ups that have PCs automatically connecting to an IT management program for maintenance. With the new Fast Call for Help feature, the user can get immediate assistance over an out-of-band link by entering a key sequence, even if the computer is completely crippled with a failed operating system or hard drive.

With the new Remote Alert feature, a suddenly ailing PC - even one that is turned off - that is experiencing symptoms outside preset parameters can "call" for IT assistance on its own.

"Intel vPro Technology has been a win-win for the IT industry and high-tech industries, and each year we've unveiled unique innovations to solve IT's biggest challenges," said Gregory Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager, Digital Office Platform Division. "For 2008, vPro Technology continues that trend, automating repair and maintenance functions to not only free IT professionals' time, but rapidly accelerate the time it takes to get endusers up and running."

Link: Intel

The soon to be released new architecture from Intel still has a big question mark floating over it, will their claims regarding no overclockability prove to be true? If the whole matter depended on them, buying cheap processors to get high end performance would be history.

Some months ago they leaked their plans to stop this practice. They were basically going to double check the FSB speed by means of two clock generators which should reference each other. With upwards locked multipliers for the CPU and "crippled" motherboards, overclocking was facing a dead end.

The only hope left was for the mainboard manufacturers to bypass this lock. But now it looks like Intel might loosen its grip a little and allow for some overclocking on their non-extreme processors. It only affects memory dividers, right now, but the future certainly is brighter now that we're closer to the real thing.

Link: Expreview.

We think that's the best way to describe what the guys at Fudzilla did, because it doesn't resemble your average hardware review. For example, you only get one graph where comparisons are rendered (for the Sandra test), so let's see what it's all about.

Lame encoding performance: 4.7x and 6.8x (without and with multithreading); as a point of reference, you can consider that a Celeron 220 (1.2 GHz) reaches 11.3x. SuperPi 32M takes a little bit more than an hour and a quarter (no comparison is given here, but you should be resourceful enough to find out how slow that is). Sandra's FPU test, on a Celeron 420 (1.6 GHz) is twice as fast, and we can say the same about the ALU.

You may add to this scarce data the "incredibly" bad impression that running Cinebench on this processor gave to them. The Windows XP installation took more than normal, too (with the decompressing stage being guilty for the delay).

Link: Fudzilla.

The C7 is dead, long live the Isaiah or, to call it something a little bit less biblical,  ong live the VIA Nano™.

The Nano is a 64 bits CPU made using a 65 nanometres process, with 1MB of L2 cache and an 800 MHz FSB; it will require between the 25W of the L2100 (1.8 GHz ) all the way down to the 5W of the U24000 (1.0 GHz ). Maybe you don't think that's special, but it means a huge plus if we compare it's performance with that of the C7. Don't believe us? check this out:

We still await for real reviews. For now, all we can say is that, based on the data provided in another graph, it's performance under OfficeBench 2007 is comparable with that of a Celeron-M running at the same frequency. Of course, we're extrapolating from results offered by VIA when comparing the efficiency of both processors. You need to have faith in them, first.

Link: VIA.

Intel's installations in the Chinese province of Sichuan were not actually damaged by the earthquake, but it looks like that disaster will find it's translation into the PC market. More specifically, that of chipsets and motherboards.

The G31, G33 and 945GC (which means 45% of all Intel desktop sales) will see their price rise when sold in the thousands, to motherboard manufacturers. Changes will be: from $15 to between $18 and $19 for the 945GC, from $23to between $25 and $27 for the G31 and from $28 to $31 for the G33.

None of these rises should bother you, since you're not interested in buying from Intel and motherboard manufacturers are supposed to take the hit, but something tells me that even if the boards remain at the same price, they will do so for a longer time than otherwise they would've (i.e. it will take longer for the price to go down).

Link: DigiTimes

Until now, AMD has limited the use for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company capacities to it's graphics division, but from July on, we should see how more responsibilities are transferred to said company. Specifically, part of the CPU production it's expected to shift from AMD to TSMC.

According to sources in the sector, TSCM is already testing SOI manufacturing (Silicon On Insulator) that should allow them to get orders for the Fusion CPU.

The plan is: alleviate the load of the CPU production so some of their equipment may be sold, that should cover their goal to obtain benefits for the first half of 2009. What's not so clear is how their next goal of regaining a 30% market share will be achieved.

Link: DigiTimes.

AMD wants to keep as much of it's market share as possible, and they must think the mobile sector is their best bet for now. First, HybridPower is only developed for mobile computers, and now they say that the initial incarnation of Fusion will be a dual core mobile processor.

It's name will be "Swift", and Patrick Moorhead (AMD's marketing vice president) was the one to unveil it . It will house a couple of x86 cores and a graphics one probably based on a yet to be released graphics card from the ATI R700 family.

“The dual-core notebook processors will be available in the second half of 2009,” said an AMD's spokesman.

Link: X-bit labs.

If your apps of choice take advantage of them, Intels Quad performance is untouchable (just try an overclocked Q6600 and you'll agree), but maybe you're not among those users. Price could also be considered another drawback (even though the Phenom 9500 is quite affordable), so dual core processors are still a reasonable buy.

At this point, the question is to find out which one offers the best quality/price ratio. By "quality" we basically mean performance per watt, and no less than 17 processors (eight from AMD and seven from Intel) are put through the paces. As a side note, the variety of cache sizes for the Core 2 based chips turns out to be quite entertaining and shows how lyou can go "down" before actually killing the performance.

Looking at the results, it's hard to recommend an AMD processor, so we won't. You could say that the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ makes for a good el cheapo PC (integrated graphics, of course), but performance per watt leaves no doubt about the superiority of the Pentium E2160. On the "upper side", the Wolfdales dominate, specially the 8200 (which can be had for about 150€).

Link: X-bit labs.

Wolfdales are here, and they offer competitive prices compared to their Conroe equivalents. Continuing and intensifying a trend that started with the advent of the Core 2, the new technology isn't more expensive, but up to a 40% cheaper.

That battle is already won, and there isn't much to worry about in the performance department, so let's see what these puppies can really do by answering the question you probably ask yourself: how well do they overclock? Conroe was very close to 4 GHz already, and Yorkfield has managed that much, so the dual core version of Penryn should do even better.

With it's x9 multiplier, you could be fooled into thinking "9" is enough, but don't forget they reach 4.4 GHz, which means you will be needing a motherboard capable of nearly 500 MHz FSB. If yours doesn't go above 400, you can take solace knowing that the sweet spot may be around 3.6 GHz. At that speed, and with a Thermalright Ultra-120, it remains below 40ºC, while at 4 or 4.4 GHz it exceeds 60ºC. Having to raise the voltage to 1.45v, both temperatures and power consumption will be hard on your nerves and the environment (respectively).

Link: Legion Hardware.