Apple still hasn’t confirmed the existence of an iPad Mini – and likely won’t until shortly before its release, assuming it exists.

But a new report claims the mythical 7-inch tablet could be in users’ hands by Christmas.

A report out of Taiwan claims that Apple is eyeing an iPad Mini launch toward the end of the third quarter this year, and has set internal sales goals of 6 million units – a number predicted by a Chinese report last month.

Aside from shipment quantity, suppliers LG and Au Optronics are believed to have already passed Apple’s certification tests for the iPad Mini LCD panel, and are hard at work preparing to ship them for actual production.

iPad mini pricing and production

A Japanese blog also reports that TPK Holding plans to produce 4 million backlight modules, with an additional 2 million provided by Chimei Innolux.

Finally, Nissha Printing is expected to make touch film sensors for the 7-inch iPad Mini, which at least one analyst believes will come with 8GB storage and be competitively priced between $249 and $299.

Apple remains the dominant player in the tablet market with a 61 percent share projected this year thanks to the new iPad and a $100 reduction in price on last year’s iPad 2.

AMD officially unveiled Trinity, the second generation of its A-series APU that is looking to rival Intel’s Ivy Bridge for high-performance chips with low power consumption at an even lower cost.

The Trinity line will launch in five models – three aimed at mainstream notebooks and two targeting the coveted “ultrathin” market, with designs for desktops and all-in-one PCs to follow later on.

The two ultrathin notebook chips, the quad-core A10-4655M and dual-core A6-4455M, use a sparing 25W and 17W respectively.

Additionally, AMD claims battery life lasts up to 12 hours in a “resting” state.

That’s an impressive figure – especially coming from a chip manufactured on the larger 32nm process compared to the 22nm chips Intel adopted for its Ivy Bridge processors.

Piledriving power

AMD is squeezing power efficiency out of a 32nm chip thanks to its new Piledriver architecture.

While built on the less than impressive Bulldozer architecture as a base, Piledriver makes notable improvements in dynamic power management between the onboard CPU and GPU for a 29 percent performance increase over Bulldozer.

This translates to faster startup times – 2 seconds to resume from sleep and 10 seconds for the initial boot to desktop – but also clock speed enhancements.

The quad-core 25W chip has a default CPU speed of 2GHz that can jump up to 2.8GHz in a pinch, while the dual-core 17W chip can bump from 2.1GHz to 2.6GHz.

Speaking of the Trinity’s onboard GPU, AMD will equip Trinity processors with its Radeon HD 7000 line to give it a significant graphical boost.

AMD claims a performance edge against comparable Ivy Bridge processors of up to 150 percent in mainstream games like Starcraft 2 and Dirt 3, though that statistic should be taken with a grain of salt since it hasn’t been substantiated by any third-party benchmarks.

Even so, given AMD and Intel’s respective histories, it’s fair to expect Trinity processors to have an edge.

The final factor for AMD’s Trinity processor is price, which is where the chip shines brightest.

Late to the party?

HP already set the trend for more super-thin notebooks when they announced a series of new Ultrabooks.

And, the Trinity processor may face an uphill battle, with 80 percent of PCs using Intel processors.

What’s more, Intel smartly coined the term “Ultrabooks” for slim notebooks using its low-power processors, providing an easily marketable term for retailers to display.

AMD doesn’t have that yet, with HP adopting the non-standard term Sleekbook for its new Trinity notebook and AMD opting to simply call them “ultrathin notebooks.”

There’s also stiff competition from Apple with rumors of a lower-cost Macbook Air and thinner Macbook Pro slated for later this year.

Where AMD can carve a position in the ultrathin market will be through its graphics capabilities, since slim notebooks aren’t typically known for their gaming capabilities.

And if the price is right, AMD shouldn’t be counted out yet.

Online retail giant Amazon is readying its Kindle Fire 2 tablet for the festive period and it could sport a larger 8.9-inch display.

If you’re already thinking about Christmas then firstly, shame on you, but secondly, Amazon may have the answer to your gift-giving conundrums.

The news comes via a Reuters source, who claims “Amazon plans to launch a new tablet closer to the holiday season later this year”.

About to set the tablet market alight?

It’s been suggested that the increase in screen size is an attempt by Amazon to challenge Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad range, which currently dominates the market.

However the Amazon Kindle Fire offers a simple, budget option for those US consumers unable to stump up the cash for the extravagant new iPad or even the iPad 2.

The Kindle Fire 2 is expected to make the dash across the pond and land in the UK and the rest of Europe, with hopefully the same low price tag, as Amazon looks to take on the worldwide market.

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The new Kepler GPU that Nvidia recently announced has been five years in the making.

It will be at the heart of supercomputers that will help make scientific discoveries as well as powering gaming clouds and high resolution remote computing. But why is Kepler more than just another really powerful, really expensive GPU?

• Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 review
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 review

If it was just really powerful, Kepler would still be impressive. Demonstrating a combination of fluid simulation and ray tracing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pointed out that “Doing ray tracing for films takes up the vast majority of processing time – the hours and hours that are necessary to render a frame – and with Kepler we’re able to do ray tracing in real time.

“These are real time simulated effects that are only possible because of high performance computing only possible because were really doing fluid simulation, light simulation. Simulation and computer graphics are merging; in a few years computer graphics will look nothing like the easily shaded graphics we see in console games today.”

Faster and lower power

Architecturally, Kepler is both faster than the previous Fermi GPU and lower power; there are many more cores but they run at 750MHz rather than 1.3GHz.

Two GPUs on a graphics card like the Kepler-powered GTX 690 will be able to communicate directly with each other; they can also communicate with up to 32 CPU cores instead of just one CPU at a time, and data parallelism means the GPU can look at the results of computations and decide what to do next instead of sending information back to the CPU and waiting for instructions.

It also has a memory management unit; combined with Nvidia’s hypervisor and VGX architecture, that lets Kepler be a virtual GPU for remote access with a tool like Citrix Receiver on a tablet or Microsoft RemoteFX on a thin client – or power gaming cloud services that Nvidia is calling GeForce Grid.

Not all of that is in the first Kepler GPU, the Tesla K10 that’s just started shipping, but all the features will be in the Tesla K20, coming in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Services like Playcast and Gaikai will use Kepler GPUs later this year to let you play console-style games on any device with an H.264 decoder. That’s similar to the OnLive service but Nvidia General Manager Phil Eisler says GeForce Grid will be much more efficient to run.

“With the first generation of cloud gaming that’s out there, you pretty much take a one to one ratio of one computer, one graphics card to one game, which is pretty expensive. The new Kepler architecture is much more power efficient; we can actually render a game in half the power.

“Plus the built in encoder means you can offload encoding from the CPU so you can run many more games per server; you can go from what is effectively one game per server to about eight games per server and that reduces the cost by that much and reduces power by half.”

The cost of running a service will be low enough that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsuan Huang told TechRadar the expects the monthly price for access to mainstream games will be the same as streaming films from Netflix. “Our goal is to be streaming at a cost level like Netflix. In which case you’ll be able to enjoy hundres of games, thousands of games in a library for $10 a month. And for blockbuster video games the moment that it comes out, the nanosecond it comes out, you’ll be able to enjoy that for some premium charge.”

Huang thinks that cable TV companies and Internet TV providers will offer their own gaming services. “They offer different channels and instead of ABC and CBS there would be potentially a channel that says GeForce GRID and has a whole bunch of games inside.”

Kepler is going to power high resolution remote computing for work and high performance gaming in the cloud, but what about putting it in your home PC and having your own cloud? Huang likes the idea but he’s realistic about how well it would work in practice.

“The challenge is you want to be able to stream at a very low latency and that PC sitting in a den somewhere is literally right in front of you but we need to stream that over the clumsy Wi-Fi in people homes so there’s a lot of obstacles. That’s exactly the PC I want at home though. I want a PC with three GTX 690s – because that’s the most you can put in a PC- and put that in the basement somewhere and just stream it to wherever our family happens to be.”

One thing Nvidia isn’t talking about this week is whether any of the same technology powering Kepler is going to show up in the ARM CPU it promised to build back at CES 2011, but Project Denver is still going strong according to Chief Scientist Bill Dally.

“It’s an ARM core with performance better than you can get with cores availability from ARM and it has substantially better energy efficiency even at this higher performance. That’s all we’re saying about it now, because we don’t want to tip our hand and have our competitors know what we’re doing.”

Huang is making his usual bold predictions about Project Denver though; “You are going to be so happy,” he promised. It doesn’t sound as if they’ll be ready for the Windows RT launch though.

Apple’s attempts to have the anti-trust suit brought against them by the US Department of Justice thrown out of court were denied on Tuesday.

Federal Judge Denise Cote cited previous statements from Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs as justification for the dispute over e-book pricing to continue.

Jobs’s comment was included in the DOJ’s case against Apple. “We’ll go to [an] agency mode, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the cusomter pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway,” Jobs reportedly said.

He added that prices would “be the same” at Apple and Amazon, which the DOJ contested in the suit.

The DOJ’s suit alleges that Apple colluded with book publishers including Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin to standardize e-book prices when the publishers should have been competing with one another.

Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster were quick to settle, but Apple insisted that the company has done nothing wrong, going so far as to say that they’re eager to begin litigation.

Eliminating the competition

Jobs’s statements were previously known, but it was unclear what importance they would play in the case until now.

“It has everything to do with coordinating a horizontal agreement among publishers to raise prices, and eliminating horizontal price competition among Apple’s competitors at the retail level,” Judge Cote said.

The suit alleges that Apple contacted major publishers in 2009, just before the launch of the iPad, and hatched a plan to force Amazon’s then-low e-book prices up to make Apple’s iBooks store more attractive to consumers.

At the time it was widely assumed that Amazon was selling e-books at a loss in order to stimulate sales of its Kindle devices.

“With the fortuitous entry of Apple into the market for e-books, and the decision by Apple to join the price-fixing conspiracy, that horizontal conspiracy became a potent weapon for engineering a fundamental shift in an entire industry,” Judge Cote said.

If the court rules against Apple and Macmillan and Penguin, the two publishers who have yet to settle, the companies could be forced to implement anti-trust compliance programs and pay hefty fines.