THERE HAS BEEN a lot of false information floating around about TSMC and their 40nm process. It ranged from the overly optimistic to hopelessly wrong, so lets clear the air, it is OK now.
IN ORDER TO GAIN access to the Chinese market, US companies have co-operated in one way or another with government requests to restrict freedom of access to the Internet. Why are those companies pushing back now because of China's new Green Dam web filter?
AFTER HAVING ATTENDED the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's (SIFMA) annual technology conference in Manhattan for several years, this years event came as quite a shock. Attendance was down noticeably, and several big names were not in attendance.
The TJX retail chain has agreed to pay $9.75 million to the states after a huge data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of cardholders to identity thieves. They have also agreed to implement and maintain a “comprehensive information security program”, supposedly designed to safeguard consumer data at TJX. Since they already attested that they were complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, why should consumers believe them now?
IT LOOKS LIKE the killer attack lawyers are circling the big OEMs, the scent of payola in the air. If you have been following the whole battery life tiff in the news, you will not be surprised that the affair is about to become a class action.
JUST WHEN YOU thought PC OEMs couldn't get any dumber, HP reaffirms that the bottom has yet to be reached with their new Pavilion PC. How any OEM could be this abjectly stupid is beyond me, but they managed to take a PC that aspires to mediocrity and make it worse.
WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Apple has shown Nvidia the door, very unceremoniously. Several people who are familiar with the 'negotiations' are saying the language used tended to be a bit harsh.
INTEL HELD RESEARCH@INTEL DAY at the Computer Museum in MountainView, California last week. They presented a TLS replacement technology that could make it easier to deploy very large numbers of secure connections across the internet.
IN WHAT IS SURE to be the news event of the year in gaming, ZeniMax Media has completed its acquisition of iD Software. This is a historic merging of two giants of the industry; with titles such as Doom, Quake, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Wolfenstein under its umbrella, ZeniMax can legitimately say that is home to the most innovative and immersive games ever conceived. In fact, ZeniMax is a Zelda or a Super Mario away from having a monopoly in the legendary games business.
SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE solved disconnecting and low data rate problems with L2, the DSL low power mode. By using artificial noise during initial connections, they have stabilized the modem to prevent crashing and restarts at lower data speeds.
GATEWAY JUST ANNOUNCED a new computer that straddles the netbook/notebook line, the LT Series. More importantly than the specs, it looks like the HP monopoly on AMD Yukon-class CPUs is up.
INTEL LOVES NOKIA and Nokia loves Intel, you know that because they announced it in a joint conference call. There was little of substance, vague future prognostications, and two real bits to chew on.
A LOT OF people don't understand the train that is heading at Nvidia this fall, most pundits think that the red locomotive only has Cypress trees on it. They would be wrong, there are not one but at least four cards coming in October, possibly a bit before.
ONE OF THE companies that most westerners have never heard of, J&W, had one o the best laptop lineups at Computex. The upcoming 8xx series is one to watch closely.
WHEN WE FIRST started talking about TSMC 40nm delays a year ago, people laughed, but the ramifications of those, and subsequent slips, are becoming clear. The lack of availability of ATI's RV740/HD4770 chip is tied to this, but not in the obvious way.
WORD HAS REACHED us that one of the last good generalist computer sites, ExtremeTech, is going away. According to our sources, ET will be shut down in a week or two.
THE CASE OF JAMIE THOMAS-RASSET came to a close today as the jury returned a verdict that she had willingly and knowingly downloaded 24 different songs from KaZaA, violating the copyright of the companies represented by the RIAA.
THE MORNING WAS SLOW at RIAA vs Thomas, and both jurors and spectators were assaulted multiple times by Richard Marx ballads before the plaintiffs finally rested. Three days and innumerable legal opinions later, the RIAA’s final arguments were made by a succession of copyright lawyers listening to Sarah MacGlachlan and sagely nodding their heads at dusty pieces of paper from the US copyright office.
INTEL JUST TRANSITIONED their product naming schemes from annoying to downright stupid. The new branding schemes make no sense and will only add confusion to a line that is already almost impenetrable.
IT'S A RARE TREAT for a member of the public to be able to walk into a regular, everyday federal courtroom and watch veteran attorneys make mistakes that would have Johnnie Cochran rolling over in his grave.
IN THE CAPITOL RECORDS vs Thomas-Rasset media sharing trial, one thing became clear, the RIAA lawyers are down at least 100 IQ points on the defense. It shows too.
PROMISE PROMISED US they would deliver SAS 6Gb/s RAID cards in short order, and at Computex, they did. There were two 8 channel SAS cards shown off, one internal and one external.
INTEL LEFT THE most impressive parts of their Computex messaging for last, the so called ultra-mobility segment. This category encompasses handheld widgets, micro-laptops, phones and other gadgets.
NVIDIA IS STILL not talking to us, and competition in the graphics world means you the reader win. They have five new 40nm mobile parts launching tomorrow, luckily we can bring you the specs now at discount prices.
INTEL TALKED MOSTLY about mobile solutions at Computex, but desktop and consumer electronics were far from neglected. New were two i7 CPUs, talk of Lynnfield, Pinetrail, and even flash based accelerators.
FOR THE LAST year or two, Zalman has had some interesting products, but nothing that really made you stand up and say wow. The flair that redefined the look of fans and cases was absent, until the 2009 Computex.
ACCORDING TO THE always accurate chip news site, AmmoLand, ATI is launching a line of ammunition. No, not the DX11 missiles heading at Nvidia in October, but real bang bang stuff.
ONE OF THE rumors floating around Computex involves a pretty little Asus 'Smartbook' based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and it's mid-show disappearance. The story, as we are told, is that one day it was there, the next it was not, and almost no one would say why.
ONE OF THE rumors floating around Taipei was about an imminent price drop for ATI 48xx series cards. Less than a week later, the prices dropped by $10.
LITE-ON USED TO be known for inexpensive optical drives, but they are now branching out into places where they have never gone before. Did you know they made photoframes, SSDs and cameras?
DFI ALWAYS HAS an interesting new piece of technology or three to show off at Computex, and they usually make overclockers smile. This year they showed off one called BIOSeSecure.
TOURING THE GIGABYTEsuite in the Taipei 101 tower, we saw a diverse group of new items to talk about. We have told you about some of them earlier, here are the rest.
INTEL HAD TWO keynotes at Computex, with both Sean Maloney and Mooly Eden talking mostly about mobility. The main product launched was Montevina Plus, and there is a lot to like there.
THE PROGRAM FOR Hot Chips 21 was just released, and it is, umm, hot. The show will have speakers from Chuck Moore to Jen-Hsun Huang, and will cover chips from Atom to Power 7.
PROBABLY THE SINGLE most important thing to come from Computex is not a product, but the promise of a new standard. The best idea of the show award goes to Intel for kick starting the idea of a standard PC in monitor form factor.
WHEN YOU KNOW what is going on, it makes sorting rumors from truth a lot easier. One of the biggest tricks has leaked almost entirely out, so lets give you the rundown on the latest ATI code names.
YOU FIND THE most interesting things when you look closely at show photographs, in this case, it is a second new ATI chipset. This one is called the SR5650, and it sits on a single socket Tyan S8005 board.
SANDISK HAS UPPED the ante on their newest generation of SSDs, not just faster, but also smarter. Some of this is also trickling down to their lines of netbook SSDs as well.
TYAN IS SHIFTING gears, hard, both on the product side of things and how they sell them. The new products are a line called Yellow River (YR), and they will never be sold retail.
LIFE IS A DOUBLE edged sword, when you find something cool and take pics of it, like the upcoming OCZ 1TB SSD, your pictures inevitably disappear. The up side is that it is easy enough to describe, and there are other things from the company that didn't sneak off.
SUPERMICRO HAD FOUR neat items on display, ranging from the very low end to the insanely high. The servers and workstations ran from a half-U Atom based server to boxes with almost 1500 cores per rack.
INTEL JUST DROPPED a bombshell on the embedded world, they bought Wind River Systems today. This means Intel now owns one of the better embedded Linux development platforms and VxWorks as well.
AMD DROPPED A bombshell on Computex today, showing off not only an Cypress (commonly mis-known as R870) wafer, but also working silicon. As we keep saying, the competition has yet to tape out a chip.
YOU KNOW HOW the story goes, no sooner do you buy a laptop than the newer one is announced. The HP DV2 that we got last week was just supplanted by a dual core model.
CERTAIN USEFUL TECHNOLOGIES are so hard to explain that they disappear into the background. Intel's Cliffside PAN, now called My Wi-Fi is one of those.
INTEL LAUNCHED FOUR new laptop processors today, three Core Number Numerals at the top, and a the long awaited Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) parts on the bottom. Ironically, the slowest of these is the one that will change the market.
THE THERMALTAKE LEVEL 10 is the most striking and beautiful case to come out in the last few years. After a sneak peek at CeBIT, it finally got an official unveiling today.
ON THE VERY day of the AMD Istanbul launch, what does the green team from Austin do? They show off not one but two Socket G34 boards for the next generation Magny Cours parts.
THE WORD ON the grapevine at Computex is that Nvidia has been quietly shopping itself around for sale. A company that declined the privilege confirmed to SemiAccurate that the long whispered rumors were true.
JUST WHEN YOU thought we were done with Gigabyte stories for the day, they pull another oddity out of their hat, an AMD Yukon mini-ITX board. This passive board is half way between the Atom machines and a full blown CPU.
GLOBAL FOUNDRIES WAS showing off the goodies today, with three wafers of unreleased parts. Not only did they have the tried and true 45nm SOI process, but 32nm SOI and the long awaited 28nm bulk as well.
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of false information floating around about TSMC and their 40nm process. It ranged from the overly optimistic to hopelessly wrong, so lets clear the air, it is OK now.
The TJX retail chain has agreed to pay $9.75 million to the states after a huge data breach that exposed the personal information of millions of cardholders to identity thieves. They have also agreed to implement and maintain a “comprehensive information security program”, supposedly designed to safeguard consumer data at TJX. Since they already attested that they were complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, why should consumers believe them now?
FIREFOX 3.5 IS OUT. Not much more to say, the browser that more than half of you use to read this with is now much better.
IT LOOKS LIKE the killer attack lawyers are circling the big OEMs, the scent of payola in the air. If you have been following the whole battery life tiff in the news, you will not be surprised that the affair is about to become a class action.
JUST WHEN YOU thought PC OEMs couldn't get any dumber, HP reaffirms that the bottom has yet to be reached with their new Pavilion PC. How any OEM could be this abjectly stupid is beyond me, but they managed to take a PC that aspires to mediocrity and make it worse.
WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Apple has shown Nvidia the door, very unceremoniously. Several people who are familiar with the 'negotiations' are saying the language used tended to be a bit harsh.
INTEL HELD RESEARCH@INTEL DAY at the Computer Museum in MountainView, California last week. They presented a TLS replacement technology that could make it easier to deploy very large numbers of secure connections across the internet.
IN WHAT IS SURE to be the news event of the year in gaming, ZeniMax Media has completed its acquisition of iD Software. This is a historic merging of two giants of the industry; with titles such as Doom, Quake, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Wolfenstein under its umbrella, ZeniMax can legitimately say that is home to the most innovative and immersive games ever conceived. In fact, ZeniMax is a Zelda or a Super Mario away from having a monopoly in the legendary games business.
SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE solved disconnecting and low data rate problems with L2, the DSL low power mode. By using artificial noise during initial connections, they have stabilized the modem to prevent crashing and restarts at lower data speeds.
GATEWAY JUST ANNOUNCED a new computer that straddles the netbook/notebook line, the LT Series. More importantly than the specs, it looks like the HP monopoly on AMD Yukon-class CPUs is up.
INTEL LOVES NOKIA and Nokia loves Intel, you know that because they announced it in a joint conference call. There was little of substance, vague future prognostications, and two real bits to chew on.
A LOT OF people don't understand the train that is heading at Nvidia this fall, most pundits think that the red locomotive only has Cypress trees on it. They would be wrong, there are not one but at least four cards coming in October, possibly a bit before.
ONE OF THE companies that most westerners have never heard of,
WHEN WE FIRST started talking about TSMC 40nm delays a year ago, people laughed, but the ramifications of those, and subsequent slips, are becoming clear. The lack of availability of ATI's RV740/HD4770 chip is tied to this, but not in the obvious way.
WORD HAS REACHED us that one of the last good generalist computer sites, ExtremeTech, is going away. According to our sources, ET will be shut down in a week or two.
INTEL JUST TRANSITIONED their product naming schemes from annoying to downright stupid. The new branding schemes make no sense and will only add confusion to a line that is already almost impenetrable.
PROMISE PROMISED US they would deliver SAS 6Gb/s RAID cards in short order, and at Computex, they did. There were two 8 channel SAS cards shown off, one internal and one external.
INTEL LEFT THE most impressive parts of their Computex messaging for last, the so called ultra-mobility segment. This category encompasses handheld widgets, micro-laptops, phones and other gadgets.
NVIDIA IS STILL not talking to us, and competition in the graphics world means you the reader win. They have five new 40nm mobile parts launching tomorrow, luckily we can bring you the specs now at discount prices.
INTEL TALKED MOSTLY about mobile solutions at Computex, but desktop and consumer electronics were far from neglected. New were two i7 CPUs, talk of Lynnfield, Pinetrail, and even flash based accelerators.
FOR THE LAST year or two, Zalman has had some interesting products, but nothing that really made you stand up and say wow. The flair that redefined the look of fans and cases was absent, until the 2009 Computex.
ONE OF THE rumors floating around Computex involves a pretty little
ONE OF THE rumors floating around Taipei was about an imminent price drop for 
TOURING THE 
INTEL HAD TWO keynotes at Computex, with both Sean Maloney and Mooly Eden talking mostly about mobility. The main product launched was Montevina Plus, and there is a lot to like there.
THE PROGRAM FOR Hot Chips 21 was just released, and it is, umm, hot. The show will have speakers from Chuck Moore to Jen-Hsun Huang, and will cover chips from Atom to Power 7.
PROBABLY THE SINGLE most important thing to come from Computex is not a product, but the promise of a new standard. The best idea of the show award goes to Intel for kick starting the idea of a standard PC in monitor form factor.
WHEN YOU KNOW what is going on, it makes sorting rumors from truth a lot easier. One of the biggest tricks has leaked almost entirely out, so lets give you the rundown on the latest ATI code names.
SANDISK HAS UPPED the ante on their newest generation of SSDs, not just faster, but also smarter. Some of this is also trickling down to their lines of netbook SSDs as well.
TYAN IS SHIFTING gears, hard, both on the product side of things and how they sell them. The new products are a line called Yellow River (YR), and they will never be sold retail.
AMI JUST MADE port 80 cards a thing of the past by introducing their new AMIDebug Rx device. Now you can debug your BIOS over USB.
LIFE IS A DOUBLE edged sword, when you find something cool and take pics of it, like the upcoming OCZ 1TB SSD, your pictures inevitably disappear. The up side is that it is easy enough to describe, and there are other things from the company that didn't sneak off.
IF YOU KNOW where to look, the new ATI 8xx series chipset can be found at Computex. The trick, look to the servers.
SUPERMICRO HAD FOUR neat items on display, ranging from the very low end to the insanely high. The servers and workstations ran from a half-U Atom based server to boxes with almost 1500 cores per rack.
AMD DROPPED A bombshell on Computex today, showing off not only an Cypress (commonly mis-known as R870) wafer, but also working silicon. As we keep saying, the competition has yet to tape out a chip.
YOU KNOW HOW the story goes, no sooner do you buy a laptop than the newer one is announced. The 
CERTAIN USEFUL TECHNOLOGIES are so hard to explain that they disappear into the background. Intel's Cliffside PAN, now called My Wi-Fi is one of those.
THE THERMALTAKE LEVEL 10 is the most striking and beautiful case to come out in the last few years. After a sneak peek at CeBIT, it finally got an official unveiling today.
ON THE VERY day of the AMD Istanbul launch, what does the green team from Austin do? They show off not one but two Socket G34 boards for the next generation Magny Cours parts.
JUST WHEN YOU thought we were done with Gigabyte stories for the day, they pull another oddity out of their hat, an AMD Yukon mini-ITX board. This passive board is half way between the Atom machines and a full blown CPU.
GIGABYTE HAD ONE of the first ATI/AMD 785G boards we have seen. It is called the GA-MA785GPM-UDH2, and has a lot of goodies to offer.