DIY shop in Akihabara to would-be Ivy Bridge modders we feel your pain

To qualify for the 1,000 yen discount on a new i7-3770K, customers are required to bring down their damaged Ivy Bridge processor and show it to staff. And although the discount is rather paltry, its a pretty nice gesture of goodwill.

According to Akiba PC Watch, tearing off the integrated heat spreader (IHS) is really not that difficult to perform. All you have to do is take a penknife, gently stick it into the wedge between the CPU die and the IHS, and carefully cut loose the bonding substance sealing the two together.

But it can be tricky: one misstep and you could end up scratching the CPU with your penknife, turning your investment nto a piece of junk with a voided warranty. Even the shop running this promotion, PC DIY Shop FreeT,has failed to at separating the CPU die from the heat spreader at least once. Said failed attempt is on display at a corner of the shop where you can also find examples of what a successfully separated CPU is supposed to look like.

Source: Akiba PC Watch

DMCA exemptions updated; iPad jailbreaking and phone unlocking illegal

Users of iOS products such as the iPhone and iPad have long enjoyed the privilege of legally Jailbreaking the devices. The jailbreaking process grants users root access to the device in question, enabling them to run applications unapproved by Apple, and to use various customizations such as themes and UI modifications.

In July of 2010, a Digital Millennium Copyright Act exception was approved, officially legalizing the procedure. Such exemptions are granted by the U.S. Librarian of Congress when it believes that users are ultimately harmed when forbidden to engage in non-infringing activities. In 2010, it clearly believed that this was the case, to the chagrin of Apple.

iPad, displaying "Cydia", jailbroken app/tweak repository (image by The iPad Guide)

But this year, under advisement from the U.S Copyright Office, renewed exemptions to the DMCA will prevent users from jailbreaking or rooting tablet devices. All tablets, including the Apple iPad, will be affected by the new exemptions.

These new alterations follow a complaint to the Copyright Office by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). This July, the BSA argued to the Copyright Office that jailbreaking leads to piracy.

“Jailbreaking enables the installation and execution of pirated -- i.e., unlicensed -- apps on a mobile device," the BSA wrote. "So there is a direct link between piracy and the circumvention of TPMs [technological protection measures], -- jailbreaking is the precondition for making pirated apps valuable."

Digital rights advocacy group EEF (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) argued against this reasoning in its own letter to the Copyright Office.

"There are many legitimate, non-infringing reasons why a user might choose to jailbreak or root a device. These reasons range from installing non-infringing applications that happen to be unapproved by the devices vendor, to customizing a devices appearance, to transforming a phone into a flashlight."

But in an odd and confusing twist, the new exemptions which prevent users from rooting tablets do not prevent them from rooting phones. So, jailbreaking the iPhone will not be illegal.

The reason that tablets are receiving the prohibition, and phones are not, arises from ambiguity over the term tablet. Tablets apparently constitute a broad and poorly defined class of devices with, according to the Copyright Office, "significant distinctions among them in terms of the way they operate, their intended purposes, and the nature of the applications they can accommodate."

Of additional relevance is the effects of new exemptions on unlocking. Phone owners will not legally be able to alter their phones or SIM cards purchased after January 26, 2013 in order to make them compatible with other networks.

Anybody in the U.S using nonofficial apps on their jailbroken iPads will have to be willing to kiss them good bye on Sunday of next week, when the new exemptions take effect.

Source: InfoWorld

EKWB Readies Full-Coverage Water-Block for MSI R7970 Lightning

Are you one of those who spent a big chunk of dough on MSIs flagship Radeon HD 7970 Lightning graphics card before launches of NVIDIAs GTX 680 and AMDs own HD 7970 GHz Edition, and are now uncomfortable with how close the two get to beating your card in performance? EK Water Blocks (EKWB) has just the thing for you. The Slovenian PC water-cooling expert unveiled the FC-7970 LTG.

The FC-7970 LTG from EKWB is a full-coverage water block tailored for the MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning. The block covers most warm components on the obverse side of the PCB, including the Radeon HD 7970 GPU on steroids, the 12 GDDR5 memory chips, and the seventeen sets of International Rectifier DirectFETs. The reverse side of the PCB is left for the back-plate the card shipped with, there are no hot components on that side. The primary material of the block is copper, with stainless steel and acetal tops. The coolant-flow channel covers the VRM and memory areas, in addition to the GPU area. The block uses EKWBs FCLink system that makes plumming for standalone and multi-GPU setups easy.

EKWB hopes to get the FC-7970 LTG available on the company website for purchase by 27th July. Detailed specifications and pricing will be available then.

Detailed Intel Haswell specs revealed

Were still an estimated five to six months away from Intels launch Ivy Bridge, a platform which is expected to offer slight improvements over Sandy Bridge in terms of performance, although it should improve power efficiency and graphics performance quite significantly. However, Intels 2013 platform code named Shark Bay has now turned up on some quite detailed slides online and it has some interesting new features on offer as well as yet another performance bump.

There seems to be some changes going on at Intel with regards to platform names, as in the past, Intel has gone for different platform code names for its mobile and desktop offerings, but Haswells platform for both mobile and desktop appears to be called Shark Bay, whereas for Ivy Bridge were looking at Chief River and Maho Bay for the mobile and desktop platforms respectively. As you can see from the slide below, were still looking at no more than four cores for Intels consumer platform which suggests that Intel isnt really about AMD catching up any time soon.

Although Haswell is a new "core" or a "tock" as Intel likes to call it, unlike Ivy Bridge which is a 22nm trigate version of Sandy Bridge or a "tick", Haswell will actually be very similar to Ivy Bridge at least in terms of the manufacturing process, as this is also a 22nm trigate part. Haswell will use the LGA-1150 socket for desktops and either rPGA947 or BGA1364 for notebooks as we reported a few days ago. The biggest change that were seeing beyond the new core is a move to multi-chip packaging for the ultra-low Voltage segment, which Intel appears to have unified into a single ULT SKU (were not sure what the T stands for) instead of the long running ULV and UL SKUs. This will make the ULT models Intels first single chip performance processor, but more on this a little bit later.

Were of course getting a new chipset, codenamed Lynx Point, although we dont have much in terms of details with regards to new features compared to the 7-series chipsets. What the slides do give away is that Intel has at least made one major change to the Shark Bay platform, theres no longer an FDI interface, which is used for piping the display connectivity via the PCH on the 6 and 7-series chipsets, again something we reported on a few days ago. Its also possible that well see integrated Thundebolt support, but theres no indication as to if this will be part of the Lynx Point chipset, or continue to rely upon a separate chipset, as all the slides are informing us about is support for the interface.

Other platform features include NFC support for mobile devices, configurable TDP and LPM (Link Power Management), improved system idle states (S0ix) for the mobile platforms, vastly improved boot times and general updates and improvements to current Intel technology found on its desktop and mobile platforms. One interesting new addition is three levels of Intel graphics, currently known as GT1, GT2 and GT3. Once again the desktop parts end up with slower graphics than the mobile platforms, which we still dont quite understand as its not as if desktop users would want worse graphics performance. Its almost as if Intel is telling desktop users to go and get a graphics card. The slides are also suggesting that well see real time HD to HD video transcoding

Apple launches new Mac commercials, in response to newly launched Windows 7

Source: Engadget