Dell's Precision M2800 workstation is for prosumers who need performance on the cheap

We know, we know: we're a consumer electronics blog. We get it. But when a workstation is cheap enough that even the most amateur of amateurs can afford it, it may as well be a consumer device. Today's specimen is the Dell Precision M2800, a 15-inch notebook that starts at $1,199 --- an aggressively low price for this class of product. In particular, specs include a Core i5 or i7 processor, a 2GB AMD FirePro W4170M GPU, up to 16GB of memory and up to 1TB of storage. As you can imagine, though, Dell had to cut corners somewhere, and that "somewhere" was clearly the display; for $1,119 you get a fairly low-res 1,366 x 768 screen. You can upgrade to a 1080p panel if you like but even then, a sharper display is simply out of the question. If that's a dealbreaker, you might want to check out the Precision M4800 instead, which can be configured with a 3,200 x 1,800 screen (albeit, for nearly twice the price). Otherwise, if all you really need is the horsepower, the M2800 will ship sometime this spring.

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BMW hits the performance limits with its driverless car

This BMW 6-series manages to automatically counter-turn to avoid a spin-out in the wet.

(Credit:BMW)

When you think about autonomous cars, it is often in reference to the sensor technology making the car aware of objects and other vehicles around it. At CES 2014, BMW showed off another key technology to make autonomous cars a reality, the systems needed to steer, accelerate, and brake.

And BMW demonstrated it on a racetrack with a 6-series tackling a wet corner, a slalom, and s-turns at serious speed.

In fact, the 6-series went as fast as its computer said it could without losing grip. I sat in the passenger seat while a BMW staffer sat in the driver's seat. He kept his hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals as the car roared towards the turns, hit the brakes, and swung the wheel over.

The most amazing part of the demonstration was the wet corner. To show the system's car control, BMW turned off the vehicle stability systems. As the car hit the wet, it lost grip and went into a sideways slide. The system counter-steered to prevent the car from doing a 180, keeping the slide under control until the car was back on dry pavement.

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Chevrolet debuts Corvette Performance Data Recorder: records audio, video and overlays telemetry (hands-on)

Chevrolet spent some time before CES showing us how it plans to offer Corvette owners a new instrument to hone their track skills: the Performance Data Recorder (PDR). The system, which was designed with British auto engineering company Cosworth, will begin shipping in 2015 Corvette Stingrays as a factory add-on. In its simplest form, the PDR captures video with user-selectable levels of vehicle telemetry overlaid on the 720p output. In its most complex, the session data can be dissected by the included Cosworth Toolbox software on your PC.

The PDR consists of three main bits: audio and video recording, telemetry capture and an SD card slot in the glove compartment where the data is sorted. The driver then selects one of four modes: Track, Sport, Touring or Performance and with the click of a button on the car's 8-inch display, sets the start/finish line and begins recording the lapping session. Once started, the system starts grabbing info from a dedicated GPS receiver that captures data points five times more often than a normal GPS, a 720p camera mounted at the top of the windscreen begins recording and then hooks into the car's Controller Area Network (CAN) for access to all the vehicle's performance data. During our time in the driver's seat, we used Track mode as it records the most metrics including speed, throttle position, brake force, rpm, g-force, lap time and even a location-based map. Once you come to a stop, you can quickly replay the video in-car or take it offline and examine every nuance of the drive on your desktop.

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Holiday Survey Indicates Strong Performance In The Tablet Space By Amazon, Microsoft

This morning, online advertising network Chikita released a short report detailing the changes it saw in the tablet space after Christmas compared to the period directly before. The report shows a small decline in Apple’s tablet dominance, strong momentum for Amazon, and perhaps surprisingly, second highest in-class growth for Microsoft’s Surface line of devices.

What Chikita found is that Microsoft’s Surface tablets picked up 0.5% usage share in the United States and Canadian tablet markets during the post-Christmas period. Assuming that more consumer-friendly tablets are gifted in the holiday period than business-facing devices, we can assume that Microsoft moved more Surface 2 devices than Surface Pro 2 devices at Christmas.

This data therefore affirms the other market indications that the Surface 2 tablet hybrid is selling well.

Why are we looking so closely for data of this sort? The simple answer is that the Surface project remains so nascent, and yet so important for Microsoft’s future as an OEM and platform (that thing called Windows) that we need to track its pulse as closely as possible.

Microsoft will provide us with a single Surface figure when it reports its calendar fourth quarter earnings: revenue. But that blunt statistic will only get us so far. That Microsoft picked up 0.5% usage share in the period to land at 2.3% indicates that as a percentage of its total share, this holiday was big for it, even if its total share gain pales compared to Apple’s dominance.

Amazon picked up 0.6% usage share in the period, on what Chikita calls the Kindle Fire’s “remarkable run to the top of the Android tablet marketplace.” Amazon ended the period with 9.4% usage share.

Usage share of course is not directly commensurate with market share.

With the help of Amazon, Android continues to outpace Windows handily, but there was a minor change of the guards that is worth nothing:

Microsoft’s Surface lineup also continued its impressive year end run. Surface users generated more tablet traffic than all Google Nexus tablet users following the holiday, making Microsoft the fourth-largest source of continental tablet Web traffic should it maintain the lion’s share of this latest share growth.

Of course, Nexus devices are only one part of the Android tablet ecosystem.

Looking at the above broadly, innovation by partners is helping keep Android growing, while Windows claws market share from tablet leaders. That Apple is shedding minor share in the face of the twin challenge is not surprising.

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2013 Mac Pro Review: Apple’s New Desktop Boasts Dramatic Redesign, Dramatic Performance

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Apple’s new Mac Pro is a sight to behold: In black aluminum with an eye-catching cylindrical design, there’s little chance you’ll ever mistake it for any other computer. The previous Mac Pro was iconic too, of course, but this one is also just slightly larger than a football and dimpled on the top with a recess like a jet engine. But the true power lies under the hood, and what’s contained therein will satisfy even the most pressing need for speed.

Video ReviewFacebookTwitterLinkedIn2013 Mac Pro ReviewBasics (as reviewed)3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor16GB 1897 MHz DDR3 RAMDual AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards with 2GB of RAM each256GB SSD6 Thunderbolt 2.0 Ports, 4 USB 3.0802.11ac

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Mozilla’s Asm.js Gets Another Step Closer To Native Performance

Mozilla’s asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that Firefox can run significantly faster than regular JavaScript code. Thanks to the so-called OdinMonkey module for Firefox’s built-in JavaScript engine, asm.js code was running at about 2x native speed in March and this week, the organization announced that it’s now running most benchmarks at just 1.5x slower than native or better.

While Google is betting on Native Client to allow web apps to execute native compiled code in the browser, Mozilla is betting on its ability to run JavaScript at near-native speeds, too. While they approach this problem from very different angles, both Google, through Native Client, and Mozilla, through its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler, allow developers to write their code in C or C

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