benchmarks

When Apple revealed the new MacBook, there was a lot of applause over the ultrabook's Air-like design, without bringing in the Air moniker. The details that came afterwards, however, proved to be somewhat contentious, especially the limitation of a single USB Type-C port for all your peripheral and charging needs. This latest revelation might provide even more fodder to the flames. It seems that the new 12-inch MacBook, with a Model Identifier or 8,1 actually more than one thing in common with the Air line, particularly in performance.

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After wisely side-stepping the Mobile World Congress hype, LG is readying their latest flagship for release. Reportedly set for a mid-April announcement, LG’s handset has —- unlike it’s Samsung and HTC brethren — been shrouded in mystery. We’ve heard relatively little about it, but that’s changing. Today, we get our first inkling at what might make the newest from LG one to have. If it’s accurate of the final hardware build (and it should be, at this point), the new LG G4 will be big and bold, but not quite cutting edge.

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Ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge reveal, a lot of discussion was aimed at Samsung’s choice of SoC for their new flagship. Stateside, we’re familiar with Snapdragon SoC processors in our phones, so anything else seems strange on paper). Samsung was developing their new Exynos SoC, using an impressive new 14nm manufacturing process. Still, they weren’t offering a Snapdragon alternative, so it seemed like a wholesale snubbing. If the latest benchmark results from Geekbench can be believed, we might know why.

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The pace of mobile chip development is relentless, something Qualcomm knows better than most with its new Snapdragon 810. Announced nearly a year ago, yet only set to show up in commercial phones and tablets in the coming months, the new Snapdragon arrives at a challenging time in mobile: raw performance simply isn't enough to win customers any more. So, it was with expectations broader than for just another fast chip that I sat down in Qualcomm's San Diego offices, the new Mobile Developer Platform (MDP) tablet and phone in front of me. After the cut, yes, there are benchmarks, but pure potency isn't all that you should care about.

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This week NVIDIA brings heat with the GTX 960 graphics card family. The unit we're having a peek at today is an EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SuperSC, working with clock speeds of 1279MHz Base and 1342MHz Boost, a brand new set of cooling features with ACX 2.0+ Cooling, and the ability to output video to 5 displays at once. This isn't a top tier card, it's meant to attack the middle - extraordinary processing power for a rather inexpensive price. That's the key to hitting the graphics card market from all angles.

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Last year, NVIDIA opened CES with its pre-show keynote and the Tegra K1; for CES 2015, it’s the turn of the Tegra X1. NVIDIA’s latest mobile super-chip takes the Maxwell GPU as one half of its beating heart, paired with an 8-core, 64-bit ARM processor. It’s arriving in devices like smartphones, tablets, and car dashboards this year, but we grabbed some early hands-on time to get a taste of what NVIDIA believes will thoroughly squash Apple’s A8x.

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The iPhone 5S was a pretty marked improvement over what came ahead of it (speaking strictly of iPhones, of course), but the newest iPhone may not be such an improvement. the first benchmarks are reportedly in, and the iPhone 6’s A8 processor might not be much more of a powerhouse than the A7. Still incrementally better, we now learn why Apple wasn’t making a big deal about the A8 at their product announcement soirée last week.

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On launch, the Moto X was slightly behind the spec curve. It had decent hardware, but not the bleeding-edge hardware we’d come to expect from a flagship handset. The Moto X+1 — or whatever it ends up being named — has purportedly hit Geekbench, giving us a glimpse at the performance of what may be the newest Motorola flagship.

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Apple's newly launched Retina Macbook Pros have already been put through the paces -- at least, their SSDs have been. The folks at OWC got a hold of both the 13-inch and 15-inch models and benchmarked the drives, as well as giving them a minor teardown to reveal what's inside.

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Ready for another monster phone? Samsung thinks you are, and may have just tested their newest out. On GFX Bench, the 5.9-inch (yeah, exactly) Galaxy Mega 2 is believed to have made an appearance. In addition to a roll-your-eyes screen size, the rest of the specs are equally groan-inducing.

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A new Sony Xperia smartphone going by the model number D2403 has surfaced by way of some benchmarks. By looking at the specs in the benchmarks, it seems this unannounced smartphone will be a budget handset around the Moto G's level.

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Qualcomm is readying the Snapdragon 805, and with new processors - and the superlatives to go along with them - proliferating, it’s trying to address the question of whether the new chip is the “Next Big Thing” or not. I caught up with Qualcomm to find out what makes the Snapdragon 805 special, to run some early benchmarks ahead of the first commercial devices arriving later in the year, and to see if its advances in 4K, CPU/GPU performance, camera tech, and more add up to a chip worth having.

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