AMD Spider Platform - Phenom, 790FX, RV670

A few days ago, AMD officially unveiled their RV670 GPU, the chip at the heart of the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series of graphics cards. Just in case you missed it on the day of the launch, our coverage of the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850 cards is available right here. While we did thoroughly explain the RV670’s architecture and explored its performance in that article, we did not tell you that the new Radeon HD 3800 series is but one part of an entirely new platform from AMD dubbed “Spider”.

The rest of the Spider platform is comprised of not only new desktop processors, but core logic as well. The second piece to the Spider puzzle is AMD’s native quad-core Phenom processor and the third is the new 7-series chipset.

News of Phenom and the 7-series chipset has been circulating for what seems like an eternity. We’ve shown you glimpses of the platform and talked about its new features in a number of articles and news posts here at HotHardware. But today we can finally give you all of the details and show you just how AMD’s new processors and chipsets perform.

Before we get started, some specifications are in order. What we have for you in the table below are the main specifications and features of the AMD Phenom 9600 and 9500 processors. Take a gander at the specifics and then strap yourself in as we take a hands-on look at AMD’s latest and greatest and even check out the Phenom 9700, which won’t be available until early next year.

Drag and Drop Bluetooth Patent from Sony Ericsson

Here's another intelligent solution of making things easier with the help of Bluetooth, this time coming from Sony Ericsson. The handset producer thought of a more convenient way of transferring files through Bluetooth, without having to go
through all the classic steps.

Sony Ericsson's patent looks to get rid of all the steps of browsing through the phone's menu, selecting a specific file, as well as the communication method or channel and then activating the communication function such as Bluetooth in order to transfer it to another phone. The company looks to make the best of touchscreeen features to simply drop the file that the user intends to send to another mobile phone by dragging it on the side of their screen in the direction of the phone they want to transfer the file to.

The handset producer's concept sounds pretty bold and innovative, although it might be a long while until actually seeing this feature introduced at a large scale in mobile phones. First of all, the devices will have to be touchscreen enabled, which means that only the high-end ones will benefit from it.

The action of dragging the item initiates an automatic data transfer procedure using short range communication. When the user drags the item towards the direction of the other phone, a question will pop-up, asking him whether he really wants to send it. Moreover, in case of NFC and short range radio, the user can drag the file towards any direction, as position no longer matters if they are within range for communication.

It's a daring and rather unexpected concept coming from Sony Ericsson. The handset producer uses touchscreen features only in some of its handsets and has only recently made a strong push on this market with high-end devices equipped with such a feature. Many patents usually never make it out on the market, although it would be pretty interesting to see it available at a large scale.