The way the plan works is that the buyer is allowed one CPU replacement with no questions asked. The new insurance is called the Performance Tuning Plan and is valid only on certain CPUs. It is in addition to the normal 3-year warranty and costs just a little extra to get.

If the processor fails under normal use, the regular warranty fixes it. If it fails under overclocking, the tuning plan replaces the part. This sounds pretty cool to me. I wonder if AMD will follow suit. Pricing for the plan varies from $20 to $35 (USD) making this cheap insurance for overclockers – especially when spending $1000 or more on a top-of-the-line Core i7-3960X CPU.

In case you’re not familiar with the card game, the rules are simple. Each card comes with a set of stats. The trump cards that I grew up with mostly featured airplanes, vehicles or artillery; CPU Wars trades wingspan, horsepower and caliber with stats like clock speed and max TDP.

To play the game, each player (up to 6 players can play the game) is dealt a random hand and takes turns naming a stat and whether the contest for that turn will be higher or lower, e.g. higher Max Clock Speed wins. The person with the highest/lowest stat wins and gets the cards of the losers. You lose when you have no more cards. Decks also usually have one “Super Trump”, a card with very strong stats and therefore guarantees a win. Of course, you’re free to make up your own rules if you wish. But my rules trump yours.

You can pre-order a deck of CPU Wars at Kickstarter for $15(USD). I wonder why Mylonadis didn’t start out with graphics cards. That would’ve been a more appropriate fit.

[via Laughing Squid]

That’s right, Samsung has opted to use the awesomely fast Tegra 2 SoC inside some of the phones and not others, and they are not telling which devices have what SoC inside. The devices that don’t use Tegra 2 will pack in Samsung’s own Exynos SoC.

Apparently, Samsung can’t make enough of its own product, hence the need for some NVIDIA help. The rub for geeks is that we know the Tegra 2 SoC rocks, but the Exynos is a lesser known, so I personally would rather have the Tegra 2 version.

[via ITProPortal]

When Intel strapped its Atom line of processors with a screen size limitation of 10.2-inches I wondered why it even bothered with the netbook segment if they obviously didn’t really want to sell the Atom CPUs. Intel has now got at least half a clue and announced that it would be lifting the screen limits for the Atom N550 CPU.

The CPU is set to launch in the second half of 2010. Makers can now put the CPU into machines with up to 12.1-inch screens. Those machines must run at least 1GB of DDR3 RAM and at least a 32GB SSD or a 250GB HDD. Wait a minute, those are still limitations!

[via DigiTimes]

Fully maxed out, the systems can have two Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3.0GHz processors, up to 3TB of hard disk storage and up to 16 GB of RAM. Designed with graphics, video and multimedia professionals in mind, the new Mac is one serious machine. Some serious graphic card options are also available, supporting massive display configurations such as dual 30-inch monitors and more.

Eight-core Mac Pro systems start at about $4,000, but can go all the way up to $11,000 when you max out RAM and disk storage. If that’s too rich for your blood, you can always pick up a basic version of the system with dual 2.0GHz Dual-Core Xeons for just $2,200.