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Jeep's all-electric Wrangler concept has a six-speed manual transmission
Jeep aims to show that EVs can be more than just staid sedans with a new concept based on its classic Wrangler 4x4.
Ford's 2021 Bronco SUVs offer 360-degree cameras for a 'spotter view'
Ford has resurrected the Bronco name, and packed its new 4x4 family with technology including Sync 4 and 36-degree cameras that bring an off-road spotter view inside your SUV.
Land Rover's rock-climbing Defender will come in a PHEV version
After shelving the model in the US, Land Rover has brought back the rugged Defender and will soon launch a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version of the vehicle. The all-new model is far from the capable, but spartan 4x4 that last appeared in the US in 1997. It can still tackle any terrain, including 42-degree hills, but drivers will be able to go off-road with the kind of comfort and tech you'd expect from the luxury UK brand.
Mercedes’ 350e 4MATIC EQ extends EV-only range to 26 miles
Mercedes has jumped into EVs in a big way with its EQ lineup, but realistically, it's going to be selling a lot more hybrid vehicles in the near term. To that end, the German automaker has unveiled the all-new GLC 350e 4MATIC EQ that uses its third generation of hybrid tech. The biggest update over the last generation is a 13.5 kWh battery, up from 8.5 kWh. That will allow it to go up to 26 miles in all electric mode (WLPT range) before the 208 horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder engine needs to kick in.
Garmin's latest GPS is designed for off-road explorers
With GPS now a basic cell phone feature, and more vehicles rolling off the production lines with built-in satnav systems, the role of standalone satellite-navigation devices is diminishing. Why have an extra bit of kit in your car that needs additional maintenance? But Garmin thinks there's still a place for them, particularly in the world of off-roading and overlanding.
Land Rover EV prototypes tread lightly uphill, recharge on the way down
Instant torque feels delicious on the highway, but it could be an even bigger asset in an offroader. Land Rover has been experimenting with electric versions of its Defender 110 for a while now, and claims its latest prototypes benefit from a reduction in wheel spin due to the single-speed motor, making them more adept at climbing and less likely to churn up the environment. The prototypes don't necessarily stand out in terms of raw specs: they're 25 percent heavier than turbodiesel models, with lower horsepower and torque ratings, and with a range of just 50 miles. They try to make up for it in other ways, however, with the ability to deliver up to eight hours of slow, grueling off-road time, where range is secondary to staying upright, and by exploiting Land Rover's Hill Descent Control feature for faster recharging through regenerative braking. There's no plan to bring an EV Defender to market any time soon, or to run the Dakar gauntlet like some rivals have, but the prototypes are due to make appearance at the Geneva Motor Show before being tested for painful-sounding "specialist applications" later in the year.
Land Rover develops Range_e hybrid, will show it off at the Geneva Motor Show
You know electric cars are in the ascendancy when even the fearsome 4x4s start looking to add an extra little spark to their energy production and storage. Land Rover has just announced it'll demo one -- there are multiple working versions -- of its development prototypes at the Geneva Motor Show next month, treating us to an exhibition of what a diesel engine can do when augmented with some electric firepower. The Range_e's design is based on the Range Rover Sport and its 3.0-liter TDV6 core, however the new vehicle is capable of going a full 20 miles purely on its electric charge and touts a whopping 690-mile range altogether. Let's hope Geneva shows enough interest in the Range_e to compel Land Rover to turn it into a commercial reality.
Netgear to stream Full HD anywhere in the home over 4x4 MIMO WiFi
Hey Netgear, did you have a surprise for us at CES? Say the world's first 4x4 MIMO 802.11n WiFi HD Video bridge? Sorry, but Quantenna just revealed your partnership that promises to deliver Full HD video quality streams across distances of "100 feet or more, regardless of signal interferences and dead zones." According to the Quantenna press release, anyway. That's up to 5x the distance of existing wireless HD solutions thanks to Quantenna's 4x4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology, adaptive transmit digital beamforming, and wireless channel monitoring and optimizing; a lot of scary sounding jargon that should allow the device to carry up to four streams of full HD video pretty much anywhere in the house with claimed "near-perfect transmission performance." While we don't have pics yet you can expect Netgear's baby to be sporting 4 antennas (like the Quantenna reference design pictured) when it's announced proper in the next few days.
NEC's biggest pro LCD yet: 82-inch LCD8205
Adding to its line of professional displays, NEC is bringing the LCD8205 to 2008 Digital Signage Expo East. We've seen bigger in the consumer space, but when you've just got to have 4x4 tile support for a max 328-inch (diagonal) display, refreshingly realistic 5,000:1 claimed contrast ratio and 1920x1080 resolution, there's not much better. At $54,999 each, it's unlikely we'll find one under the tree when it releases in December but catching a peek (and fogging up a display window or two) is slightly more attainable goal.[Via CE Pro]
Atlona's 4x4 HDMI Matrix Switches go HDMI 1.3
If you'll recall, Atlona Technologies was pretty proud of its flat HDMI 1.3b-certified cables, and now it's pausing to announce that it's replacing its entire inventory of 4X4 matrix switchers with versions that are 1.3 savvy. As expected, the units will feature a RS-232 control port, a remote and include all the luxuries -- 10.2Gbps of bandwidth, support for 1440p / Deep Color, etc. -- of HDMI 1.3. It should be noted that the new flavor is still priced at $1,099, but we've got a hunch you could score a fantastic deal on those leftover units that just become old hat.
Ubisoft on Ubiports: 'We made mistakes'
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, speaking to Spiegel magazine, candidly (yet indirectly) revealed that he believed that some of his company's Wii releases were less than perfect. No, not Red Steel. Guillemot was referring to the spate of ports that Ubisoft released to fill out their lineup.Regarding the hasty ports (games such as Prince of Persia: Rival Swords, Far Cry: Vengeance, and Monster 4x4 World Circuit), Guillemot said that "We made mistakes." Ubisoft admitting to overporting? Between this and weird releases like My Word Coach, Ubi seems like a whole new company!
Ubisale at Toys R Us
There have been a lot of sales to report lately! If you picked up a Wii at Toys R Us yesterday, you now have an opportunity to get some relatively good games for a decent price, from now until the 10th.Toys R Us is offering three Ubisoft-published Wii games for the price of two. Your choices are GT Pro Series, Open Season, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, Red Steel, and Monster 4x4: World Circuit. This offer is valid online, but we aren't sure about its status in TRU stores. If there are three games in that list you're interested in, or two games you're interested in and one you think you could get a decent price for on eBay, then you are in luck![Via QJ.net]
AMD shows off Barcelona server chips, garners mixed reviews
With Intel giving its shareholders some awfully great news to savor over the holidays, AMD had to hit back with some news of its own, but you'll definitely get a different vibe from reading ExtremeTech's take on the firm's recently showcased Barcelona than from the horse's own mouth. While AMD parades its 65nm chip as "the world's first native quad-core x86 server processor," and boasts about its "significant advancements in performance per watt capabilities," we've reason to wonder if things aren't a bit sugarcoated. While the wafer was demonstrated as utilizing "all 16 cores" and being a seamless upgrade from "dual-core to quad-core", hard facts (read: the much anticipated benchmarks) were curiously absent. Aside from injecting onlookers with more of the same technical minutiae we've seen over the past few months, AMD didn't exactly flesh out a lot of new details to chew on, but ExtremeTech's reference system "was the loudest they'd ever had in their office," and sucked down nearly 600 watts of power with just two HDDs and a single graphics card. So while we're firmly withholding judgment until its officially released, we'd say AMD still has a bit of tweaking to do before the competition rolls in.UPDATE: Looks like we mistook the quad-core Opteron and the Quad FX (announced on the same day, nonetheless) chips as one in the same, when (thankfully) they're not, but those eying the recently-released FX-based desktops may want to think about how much noise they're willing to put up with before throwing down on a new machine.Read - AMD Press ReleaseRead - ExtremeTech's Hands-on Testing
AMD's Quad FX platform: some details and doubts
So we know AMD was launching the Quad FX platform this week (that officially happened in America today), but we were a little hard up for info on what that actually entailed. Well, here's what's what: the obviously enthusiast platform aims to please by eschewing AMD's own lower performing (yet wholly owned) ATI products for NVIDIA and its nForce 680a-based chipsets (yes, we know), and will feature quad and octo-core support (yep). They're touting twelve SATA connections for up to 9TB of storage, 20 USB 2.0 channels, four gig Ethernet ports, four or eight monitors powered by up to four PCI-E cards, and Dual Socket Direct Connect (DSDC) Architecture designed for optimized performance (or so they tell us). What wasn't clear, however, is that US pricing on the FX-70 series chips are for bundles; helping put one of those fours in 4x4, AMD's FX-70 (2.6GHz), FX-72 (2.8GHz), and FX-74 (3.0GHz) processors -- which use the same Socket F previous Opterons have -- will be sold in pairs for $600, $800, and $1000, respectively, literally doubling the value. Affordable is, of course, par for AMD -- except for one thing. Although we haven't tested these new chips ourselves, PC Perspective is reporting that an Impress study showed these new FX-series processors to be monstrously less efficient in cycles per watt of power consumption than Intel's. One graph (shown after the break) has an FX-74 gobbling what looks like near double the juice of a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 chip for comparable (or lesser) performance values. Whether that will hold you back from (re-)investing in AMD's new platform is up to you, but we know you're not the type to buy blind anyway.Read - AMD Quad FX releaseRead - Impress tests [Via PC Perspective]
Here comes Quad FX: AMD's 4x4 platform gets "official"
Sure, we knew 4x4 was on the way, and we had an idea AMD was prepping a fancy new "Quad FX" moniker for the spankin' new chipsets, but we were still waiting for the stamp of legitimacy, which just came in the form of an AMD unveil this morning in Japan. The new chipset integrates NVIDIA's nForce 680a SLI chipset with AMD's fresh Athlon 64 FX-70 dual-core processors to great effect, with clock speeds hitting 2.6, 2.8 and 3.0GHz for the FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 processors. The 90nm chips include 2MB of L2 cache, consume no more than 125W of power, and can support 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM, all based on AMD's Socket F workstation infrastructure. Of course, all this integrated action doesn't come cheap -- or tiny, as the picture above proves -- since the CPUs will run you $599, $799 and $999 respectively. By the time you buy two of 'em, plus 4 NVIDIA cards and a motherboard to hold 'em all, your bank account will be hurting mightily, but if cost is no concern, there's no arguing with the power potential here.[Via El Reg]
AMD's 4x4 setup to start at "about $1000"
Over the last few months, we've enjoyed snippets of information about AMD's new 4x4 platform, but until today we didn't know the speed of the chips, nor their prices. TG Daily just got all the info from a company event in Munich; the 4x4 will launch on November 14, with three different models of 125-watt FX processors: the 2.6GHz FX-72, 2.8GHz FX-74, and 3.0GHz FX-76. Further, the site also confirmed with AMD that the entry-level chips would go for "about $1000," and acknowledged that there still aren't that many pieces of software that can take advantage of two cores on two chips, besides Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. So the short of it is, that totally decked out gamer rig -- with a 4x4 powering the whole unit -- isn't going to come cheap.
ATI to announce "Stream Computing" on September 29
Fresh off its approved merger with AMD, ATI apparently has some tricks up its sleeve and will reveal its hand at a special event in San Francisco on September 29. ATI is hyping something called "Stream Computing," which uses GPGPU (general purpose graphics processor units) to run normal code on graphics hardware. GPGPU (couldn't they have come up with a better acronym?) is something that's been bouncing around the computer science community for a little while now, and may be on its way to becoming feasible -- The Reg says this technology has the potential to kick up performance by a factor of 10 and possibly as high as 30 in some computing applications (like, say, running a huuuuge freakin' Excel 'sheet). Now that may be true, but it's like those floating point specs that Apple is always parading around -- those numbers may hold water in the lab for very specific applications, but mere mortals probably won't see that performance difference anytime soon.
Intel fights AMD's 4x4 with new quad-core tech
There aren't many arguments that Intel has a winner -- however temporary -- with their new Conroe Core 2 Duo chips, but they aren't relaxing just yet. With the oncoming threat of AMD's 4x4 chips in the performance/gamer space, Intel is getting a bit of quad-core action of their own with the new Kentsfield and Clovertown setups for consumer and server use respectively. Originally due in the first half of 2007, near when AMD's "Conroe killer" K8L was set to drop, both have been bumped up to fourth quarter '06 status, which sure has Intel looking smug. There are differences, however, in approach: Intel's Kentsfield architecture squeezes four cores into one socket, as compared to the dual sockets used by AMD's 4x4. This means the Intel chips will have less memory and frontside bus bandwidth available to each core, which will hurt them some in the performance race, but it also means cost savings that could give them an edge in the bang for buck arena. If anything, this is an indication of the intense competition going on for our chip dollars, and even if the quad-core war is a bit of a semantic one, we'll accept all the Photoshop crunching and AI processing power these guys want to push our way.
AMD's "4 x 4" platform pairs 2 dual-core CPUs, 4 GPUs
Gamers gather 'round, for we have a tale of a new platform from AMD that will surely get your pulses racing, at least if the idea of having two dual-core processors and four graphics cards in one machine sounds as appealing to you as it does to us. Known as the "4 x 4" Enthusiasts Platform (four cores plus four GPUs -- we know, it's a bit of a stretch), the setup will allow manufacturers to offer configurations which users can upgrade over time, so consumers could start out with one dual-core chip and and one or more video cards, for example, instead of laying down what will likely be loads of cash on a maxed-out system. Another interesting bit of info revealed at the AMD analyst day in Austin, Texas was the fact that dual ATI Crossfire configurations can be used with 4 x 4, which indicates that AMD's possible acquisition target is probably working on a quad-SLI-esque solution to match rival nVidia. So start saving your pennies, dear gamers, because things are looking to get mighty interesting this year.
