Aug 26, 2010

AMD spills beans on Northern Island codenames

Yes, Northern, not Southern

AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.
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Aug 26, 2010

Zotac launches two new mini-ITX boards

And a pair of mini PCs

ZOTAC HAS FINALLY launched its CULV powered mini-ITX motherboard that we spotted back in June at Computex. Alongside it Zotac also announced a pair of new ZBOX mini PCs which also use Intel’s CULV processors paired up with Nvidia’s ION chipset. We’re still waiting for a few more products from Zotac that we were shown behind closed doors at Computex, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, instead let’s take a closer look at today’s announcements.
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Aug 25, 2010

Netgear readying two new HD media players

And new HomePlug AV adapters

NETGEAR IS GETTING ready to unleash two new HD capable media players unto the world and judging by the specs, we’re looking at two very capable devices here. At the same time Netgear is also about to launch two additions to its range of HomePlug AV adapters of which the high-end model is said to offer a theoretical transfer speed of 500Mbit/s.
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Aug 25, 2010

Google launches voice calls from Gmail

Google Voice becomes integral part of Gmail, but only in the US of A

GOOGLE ISN’T A company that’s afraid to take on the competition with its many web based services and its latest addition allows you to make voice calls for free from within Gmail. Ok, so it’s a limited time offer until the end of the year and it only applies to calls initiated from within the US to phone numbers in the US or Canada.
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Aug 24, 2010

Today is tomorrow, so why are we stuck in the past?

The PC lives in a world of legacy support

DESPITE ALL THE criticism Apple gets, the company has done one thing well, in fact so well that its computers are playing an entirely different game than the humble beige box we all know as the PC. When Apple moved to x86 it dropped hardware legacy support and started with a clean slate and we’re now at a stage where the PC is desperately in need for the same treatment. You may ask why, well read on and I’ll try to explain.
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Aug 24, 2010

Western Digital launches Powerline AV networking kit

Does things a bit differently

WESTERN DIGITAL HAS been trying to branch out into new product areas beyond its storage solutions and have so far managed to do quite well with its media players. Today the company announced yet a new addition to its product line-up, the Livewire Powerline AV network kit.
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Aug 24, 2010

Intel and Nokia team up to research ThreeDee virtual sauna

At state of the art research center in Oulu

INTEL AND NOKIA’S joint product development has now spun off a join laboratory that will be researching the world of “3-D” [sic] for mobile devices. The research will take place at Oulun yliopisto or University of Oulu, if you prefer, and it’s meant to lead to “new user interfaces and experiences”. We can’t guarantee the virtual sauna, but considering the Finnish people’s obsession with saunas, well, who knows what will transpire…
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Aug 23, 2010

The Atom N550 is finally here

First mobile dual core Atom

INTEL HAS FINALLY unveiled its dual core mobile Atom N550 processor and the netbook manufacturers are jumping at the chance of getting something new into the market. However, don’t expect to see a raft of new designs, as instead it’ll be pretty much the same old chassis with slightly different bits inside.
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Aug 23, 2010
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Facebook is the first to jump into ARM servers

Tectonic change of our time

THERE HAVE LONG been rumors of a major player moving their data centers from x86 based PCs to the ARM architecture. It looks like the first big player to jump in to the market is going to be none other than Facebook.
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Aug 20, 2010

HP adds $2.3 billion to its piggy bank in Q3

Still wants you to pick up the bill at dinner though

HP is an interesting company.  They have been cranking out quarterly profits in the $1-3 billion range every quarter like clockwork (recession or no recession, dot-com bubble or dot-com bust) for over a decade, yet it’s all seems very boring to the casual observer.  They are that grey blob that permeates the server room of many businesses.  They slap their logo on grey business notebooks, desktops, and consumer products that while functional and effective are simply unremarkable.   Well the blob has done it again.  Yesterday Hewlett-Packard held its quarterly financial analyst conference call in which it announced a solid third quarter overall operating profit of $2.3 billion.
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Aug 20, 2010

OCZ readying RevoDrive-B

Will act as a hard drive cache

OCZ’S REVODRIVE PCI Express based SSD was something of a surprise when it was announced and it’s a fairly unique product in the market considering its competitive retail price compared to a standard SSD. However, it’s now looking like OCZ is readying a new model called the RevoDrive-B which is yet another PCI Express based SSD, but with an extra trick up its sleeve, it’s got a pair of SATA ports for drive caching.
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Aug 20, 2010

AMD set to phase out 3DNow! support

Will rely on SSE instead

AMD’S 3DNOW! INSTRUCTION set was never as big of a hit as Intel’s MMX or SSE and it now seems like AMD is getting ready to drop support, sorry, that’s deprecate support for 3DNow! This means that most new AMD processors will no longer have support for 3DNow! but judging by AMD’s blog post on the subject, it’s hardly going to have any effect on the performance of its future processors.
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Aug 20, 2010

Study says that Internet trolls may die… sooner… probably

Perhaps we should resume feeding them?

Happy Friday everyone, aNd what a decisiVely glorious day it is turning out to be. It has been reporteD that people who feel the irresistible urge to be antagonIstic may in fact be whittling hours off their life spans faster thAn a chain-Smoker rUnning with sCissors through an airport security checKpoint.  So pop a couple quarters into the troll food machine, and let the feeding frenzy begin.
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