Well it looks like 2013 hasn’t been a very good year so far for Dell as their financial woes continue based on the latest earnings report. Dell has reported a 79% profit plunge for the first quarter of 2013 at $130 million while quarterly income for the PC division fell 65% year on year.

While this CNN article tries to attribute the decline of Dell (and other PC makers like HP) to a shrinking desktop market, I believe that is not entirely true and somewhat misleading. It is true that tablets are growing in numbers and as the CNN article points out, the world’s top five tablet computer companies shipped 49 million units at a tune of 142% growth year on year.

However, none of this takes into account end users switching to custom desktop builds where parts are sourced from numerous hardware makers like Asus, EVGA MSI, ASRock, Corsair et al. More and more people have realized that building your own PC can result in a computer that is both cheaper and much faster than a pre-built one purchased from companies like Dell.

Dell has failed to establish a presence in the tablet market and its recent PCs have been riddled with design flaws and/or simply did not offer anything exciting. One example that I can think of is their new XPS 15 L521X which looks good on paper but has severe wireless connection issues among other things.

One glimmer of hope for Dell is that their enterprise division grew 79% with $79 million in profits but that only constitutes 8% of the company’s overall income so it is hardly enough to keep them afloat. Therefore, if Dell wishes to survive, it has to innovate, improve product quality and have better customer service. It’s a very simple recipe that Dell should have perfected long ago.

Source: ‘Dell’wether: Desktop decline points to era’s end? – CNN.com.

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AMD is emphasizing GCN’s strength in compute performance (see our 7970M Crossfire vs 680M SLI review) with the 8970M as well as DX 11.1 support. Finally, this new GPU should still be built on the same 28nm process as the 7970M with GDDR5 memory on a 256 bit bus. Max TDP should still be 100W.

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AMD Introduces the World’s Fastest Notebook Graphics Card.

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Like most enthusiasts out there, we use Futuremark programs to test our systems and write reviews. It just so happens that we have an extra key of 3DMark Advanced and thought we’d give it out to a Tech|Inferno Elite member. To be able to win this key, simply register for our forum and become a T|I Elite Member. If you are already a T|I Elite Member, simply reply to this thread and you will be automatically entered for a chance to win this free key.

Please note that this free key give away is not sponsored by Futuremark and thus the rules for this give away are set by us only. In the future, Tech|Inferno will have more free give away’s like this exclusively for T|I Elite members. 

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Tech|Inferno resident vbios guru svl7 has just released his latest bios modification for the NVIDIA GTX Titan. As any Titan owner is aware, with NVIDIA implementing GPU Boost 2.0 and Power Targets, overclocking a Kepler card such as the Titan is no longer what it used to be.

Now the user is confined to what the hardware and vbios will allow and even if you set a certain voltage, power target and clock, it is constrained by a predefined setting and is automatically overwritten by the card at a bios and hardware level.

This new vbios circumvents most of those limits by giving the control back to the user. With it you can now set a clock and voltage and not have to worry about the card adjusting it. This leads to more stable and smoother performance in games and applications. Additionally, benchmarking enthusiasts now have full control over how to get the best score they can with a more fine tuned approach. Finally, the vbios is set with a default power target of 350W so there is no longer any need to set power targets manually.

For more information, follow the link below.

Source: Nvidia GTX Titan – modified VBIOS for more control and better overclocking.

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NVIDIA has just updated its mobile line with the 700M series. This latest release in its mobile line of cards are unfortunately not a new core but rebadged  Kepler’s with some tweaks.

One of the tweaks made to the new 700M family is GPU Boost 2.0 which is found in the desktop TITAN cards.

Of course like the 600M series, the 700M continues to offer Optimus which has become the industry standard for switchable graphics. This allows the user to switch between low power use for web browsing, word processing etc to conserve battery life and then automatically switch to higher power use for gaming. It is all done seamlessly for the most part so the user is never aware of it.

Continue reading the source link below for the full press release from NVIDIA.

SOURCE:  Articles : Introducing The New GeForce 700M Series GPUs | GeForce.

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It looks like the decision to take Dell private is just about done. In one of the largest buyouts since the financial crisis started, this buyout is aimed at making Dell more nimble as a company.

Michael Dell will be providing 16 percent of Dell equity towards the deal along with his own cash from MSD Capital. Microsoft will loan $2 billion on a 10-year subordinated note with 7-8 percent interest. Other firms like Silver Lake will also help finance the deal. The price of the buyout is at $13.65 per share which is a 25% premium over Dell’s stock price prior to the public knowing about the buyout.

In recent years, Dell has struggled to keep pace with competitors like HP, Apple and other Asian rivals like Lenovo. When tablets, smartphones and game consoles took hold in the market, Dell reacted too slowly with poorly supported and designed products.  Their worldwide market share of PC sales has declined to 10% compared to 12.5% a year earlier and continues to dwindle.

The reasons are simple: Dell products were built with quality and service but due to the intensely competitive nature of the market with razor thin margins, Dell followed the competition by producing low cost (and low quality) products that cost it market share. In addition, Dell faces a lot of overhead and complexity as a large public corporation which slows its ability down to react to market changes quickly.

Dell believes that by going private, it can cut costs without Wall Street scrutiny and focus better on providing software and service to large companies similar to HP and IBM. However, the risk Dell takes by going private is that it will have debt that will need to be repaid and will lack the ability raise capital as easily as a public company.

Dell isn’t expected to spin off its PC division similar to IBM since it still derives a significant portion of its revenue from it. In fact, David Johnson, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research believes Dell will need the cash flow from its PC division to help it focus on areas that it needs to grow. As a result, its hoped that Dell will be able to simplify solutions and deliver a better end customer experience.

Source: Dell to go private in landmark $24.4 billion deal | Reuters.

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evasi0n Untethered Jailbreak covers all current iOS devices!

And here it is, latest iteration of the never ending Apple vs Jailbreakers cat and mouse game have arrived.

Team evad3rs which consists of the veteran iOS hackers @planetbeing @pod2g @MuscleNerd and @pimskeks had done it again.

Truth be told, according to their twitter activity, the jailbreak was ready about a month ago but the team was patiently waiting for Apple to launch it’s 6.1 iOS version, to prevent apple from closing the hacks that are being used in that Jailbreak.

Evasi0n works on all iOS devices running 6.01 and 6.1 and can be executed on Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems.

According to user feedback, evasi0n is relatively trouble-free to use. You can follow redmondpie’s great step by step tutorial for this jailbreak.

The jailbreak can be downloaded directly from http://evasi0n.com.

Get Jailbreaking!

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Futuremark’s newest benchmark aptly named 3DMARK is now available for download. This is the successor to their popular 3DMark 11 and Vantage. This newest version is designed to be flexible and targets multiple platforms including the PC, Android, Apple iOS and Windows RT with the ability to compare their scores.

For now, the Windows version is available for download with the other versions set to follow shortly.

Download 3DMark and PCMark – Futuremark.

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Sony City Osaki

We mentioned in our previous report that Japanese companies were having financial problems and Sony figured prominently on that list. Well unfortunately the struggle to remain profitable continues for Sony as CEO Kuzuo Hirai plans to consolidate Sony into a “One Sony” brand by focusing on games, digital imaging and mobile.

Whether this “One Sony” program succeeds or fails is still up in the air but at least it is a step in the right direction. AMD has done something similar by putting its campus in Texas up for sale and then leasing it from the new owner in an effort to slash costs. However, when a company is faced with selling its assets to remain solvent, it should serve as a  red flag that things aren’t exactly going so well for them.

Sony’s Playstation 4 is expected to be released within the next year, it remains to be seen if it will be a big enough boost to help Sony’s dwindling bottom line.

Source: Sony eyes $1 billion building sale in Japan | Business Tech – CNET News.

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Samsung has just lifted the details on its newest Exynos processor called Octa. The Octa is an eight core processor that employs ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture with four Cortex A-15 cores and four Cortex A-7 cores.

The four Cortex A-15 cores are the powerhouses of the chip designed to tackle intense tasks while the four Cortex A-7 cores handle lighter workloads in the background.

This big.LITTLE concept allows the processor to be up to 70 percent more energy efficient compared to previous Exynos processors. Rumor has it that the Octa processor A-15 cores will have a frequency of 1.8 GHz while the A7 cores will function at 1.2 GHz.

Sources: Samsung, Geek.com

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