Retailers T.J. Maxx and Marshalls have begun selling the cheapest model of the iPad for $400 this week, offering a full $100 discount off Apple’s pricing.
The cheapest model is 16GB and offers Wi-Fi support.
T.J. Maxx confirmed the deal on its Twitter page today, saying: “The rumors are TRUE! Select (unadvertised) locations/limited quant.”
Earlier in the week, Sam’s Club began selling the iPad, offering $12 off retail for all models, the biggest discount seen until today.
It is still unclear how the companies can offer the iPad at such a low price, especially without losing a significant amount of money per sale. Apple has not suggested any price drop is coming on the iPad.
Although unconfirmed, it appears that some Marshalls stores will be selling only 300 of the devices over a three-day period.
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Skype has released the updated Skype for Android software today, version 1.0.1.
Amongst the most notable improvements are:
* 320*240 and 240*400 screen resolutions are now supported.
* Hardware back key is now supported.
* Signing out from Skype now exits Skype.
* Reduced power consumption in idle mode.
* Improved login stability and behavior.
* Improved performance with large contact lists.
* Reduced application size.
* General bug fixes.
More phones are now supported by the popular software, including devices with “lower screen resolutions” such as the WildFire, which has 320×240 resolution.
Skype has added hardware back key support, meaning if you hit the back key on your smartphone, the user interface will close but the program will still run in the background, allowing you to continue receiving messages and calls.
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Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, has said that GPUs are the future of supercomputing.
Dunning said high-performance computing solutions will continue to move toward graphics processing units for more power. China has just recently claimed to have the fastest supercomputer on the planet, the Tianhe-1A, which uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
This GPU-CPU hybrid system is what Dunning expects to be the future in the area.
“What we’re really seeing in the efforts in China as well as the ones we have in the U.S. is that GPUs are what the future will look like,” Dunning said. “What we’re seeing is the beginning of something that’s going to be happening all over the world.”
He said that the migration to such systems will accelerate when chipmakers can provide combined high-performance CPU and GPU functions on the same chip. “If they start to solve some of these other problems like putting [the GPU and CPU] together on a chip, that’s when you’ll start to see a lot software rewritten,” according to Dunning.
“That combination will address a number of the more significant shortcomings that we currently see in these CPU-GPU combinations. Basically, the way they’re implemented presently is a very small pipe between [the CPU and GPU] and that really restricts the effectiveness with which you can use the GPU,” Dunning added, reports CNET.
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