Items tagged with nex
Apple's multi-touch technology is so popular among "the rest of us" that it seems destined to replace all existing laptop pointing devices shortly:“The next models to receive the oversized trackpads will be updated 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models due for an introduction in the next several weeks, people familiar with the company's 2008 product roadmap say.”It seems possible, if not likely, that Apple will eventually migrate their entire laptop lineup to the new muli-touch trackpads. It also seems likely that the new MacBook Pro models due soon will feature the new Penryn-family CPUs that offer up to 6 MB of L2 cache and SSE4 support. As usual, we expect the MacBook Pro to get the...
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The dreaded "R" word is being whispered on Wall Street again, and the boom and bust nature of the Tech sector makes it especially vulnerable to a downturn. Is there a corner of the tech universe where you can hide from a replay of Pets.com this time? According to Forbes, software-as-a service (SaaS) companies, providers of Internet based process software for business, might have a good desk for you to hide under. While some tech pundits believe that Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), which gets a lot of buzz for its online software products, will become the vendor of choice for SaaS, I think companies that specialize in software for specific business processes will...
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Intel Unveils 16 Next-Generation Processors, Including First Notebook Chips Built on 45nm Technology New Transistor Design, Manufacturing Capabilities will Also Power Mobile Internet Devices INTERNATIONAL 2008 CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW, Las Vegas, Jan. 7, 2008 – Intel Corporation unveiled 16 products today, including the company's first 45 nanometer (nm) processors for Intel Centrino Processor Technology based laptops. All of these new chips include the company's new transistor formula and 45nm manufacturing process that boost a PC's speed, reduces power requirements, saves on battery life, helps the environment and comes in smaller packages for more fashionable and compact computer designs....
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While we still don't know if the R700 will be known as the Radeon 48xx, 39xx or some other nomenclature, it seems that the first R700 GPUs actually 'taped out' sometime in December. As with all rumors, we remind you to take the following with a grain of salt:“[the] R700 is in the process of being fabbed now, or at least its components are. The component thing is a story for another day, the part that matters is that R700 bits are in the oven now and things appear to be going swimmingly, or at least skatingly if you know what Toronto is like in the winter.”This could mean products on shelves in March if the parts perform well and no flaws are found in the design....
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There is a rumor that the Eee PC is going to get a successor sometime in the new year. Keep in mind that this is just a rumor, but the upgrade could be fairly extensive. Early reports suggest that new Eee(e?) PC would feature a larger 8.9” screen, WiMAX, and could very well ride on Intel's new Menlow UMPC platform.“Should ASUS choose to adopt the Menlow platform for the next generation Eee PC, huge power saving will be realized for users. The current Eee PC uses a 90nm, 900MHz Celeron M processor running at 630MHz with the current official BIOS. Intel's Menlow platform includes a 45nm Silverthorne processor which promises ten times the power efficiency of first generation UMPCs using...
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Any time that a console is responsible for the bulk of a next-gen disc format's sales, we're willing to consider the possibility that most consumers just don't give a damn. Yet, it seems that nearly ¾ of all North American Blu-ray Disc players are found in PS3s and more than a third of all HD DVD Drives are Xbox 360 HD add-on drives if the following numbers are accurate:“Microsoft does not openly share its sales figures on its accessories, though a company representative did say in June that it had reached 155,000 units sold – showing a slow but steady adoption rate of the HD DVD add-on.The HD DVD Promotional Group announced in November that it had sold more than 750,000 HD DVD players,...
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MRAM stands for magnetoresistive random access memory. NEC recently announced that they've developed an SRAM compatible MRAM that can run at 250 MHz, which they claim is the fastest MRAM in the world. MRAM is swell because it's non-volatile: it remembers what you just told it even if you turn the power off. If it's as fast as SRAM there's no competition.The unique MRAM was designed and fabricated by NEC and has a memory capacity of 1 megabit. Incorporating a memory cell with two transistors, one magnetic tunnel junction, and a newly-developed circuit scheme (3), the new design achieves an operation speed of 250MHz; double that of conventional MRAMs and almost equivalent...
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Look what's coming. Windows Vista SP1 RC1 (don't you just love all those 3 letter acronyms) will be available next week via the Download Center, and to MSDN and Technet subscribers tomorrow."We feel really good and we look forward to receiving feedback from our larger set of testers," said David Zipkin, a senior product manager on the Windows Client team.Microsoft also said on its Vista blog on Wednesday that it will make available a "blocker" that will allow customers who have Vista and use Windows Update to block SP1 upon its final release to allow for further testing. Microsoft offered a similar option with Windows XP Service Pack 2.Service Pack 1 is mainly designed as a collection of...
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According to reports, AMD will move away from mega-GPU chips with their next release, codenamed R700.Modern graphics processors rely on extensive amounts of parallelism to get calculations done as quickly as possible, but those GPUs are still monolithic chips designed with a given number of stream processors, texture units, render back-ends, and the like, each depending on their performance grade. However, the folks at Fudzilla say they have it on good authority that AMD will challenge that paradigm with its next-generation graphics processor, code-named R700. According to Fudzilla, low-end, mid-range, and high-end R700 cards will all have GPUs with varying numbers of identical R700 cores. To...
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Politicians have often been asked what they intend to do when a race is too close to call, and voters are starting to wonder if casting their votes for a 3rd party might not be a good idea. The answer, based on their actions (not responses) is simple: Start the mudslinging campaigns!It seems that Blu-ray and HD DVD might just be in such a position, and while we're not saying that this is the first handful of mud to be thrown, it sure is an ugly one:More specifically, according to Tech.co.uk, Simonis is upset at the significantly higher "attach rate" that the European HD DVD Group recently touted, which (Frank) Simonis (Blu-Ray Disc Associaton's European Chairperson) now says was a "gross...
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Are you as annoyed by some of the ActiveX controls you find on certain web pages, that give you a "Click to activate and use this control" message as many are?. It's soon to disappear. The issue first started with a dispute between Microsoft and Eolas Technology. Because of this, in April 2006, Microsoft made a modification to Internet Explorer. The message appeared on ActiveX controls that were directly embedded in HTML, rather than being injected via JavaScript.Next month, Microsoft will preview the modified Internet Explorer (IE) that eliminates the warning that's been popping up on screens when users select multimedia content, such as clicking on a link to a Flash file or...
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One nice thing about the recent transition Apple made over to Intel platforms is that Mac users spend less time touting their G5 CPUs and more time digging up interesting tidbits about future Intel CPUs. Details like the next-generation mobile technology going quad-core while remaining at 45W TPW are the sort of buzz we live for here.Perhaps the best part about this mobile quad-core is that it's not some nebulous product that Intel will release years down the road. It's something that Intel is demonstrating engineering samples of.Of course the 45W TPW is a bit higher than the existing 35W envelope, and a lot higher than the rumored 25W for some of the new Penryn based mobile CPUs...
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In what was pretty much a repeat of a March decision in which Vonage was found in violation of Verizon patents, a federal jury today ruled that Vonage is in violation of seven Sprint Nextel patents.Vonage has been ordered to pay Sprint $69.5 million in damages plus 5% royalties on all future revenue, though the defeated company said this afternoon it will file an appeal. Today's decision comes six months after Vonage lost a very similar case to Verizon. There, the VoIP provider was ordered to pay Verizon $58 plus 5.5% in royalties on all future revenue.If you are a Vonage customer, it might not be a bad idea to start shopping around ......
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Software unlocking of the iPhone has become the "deal of the day" with paid and unpaid solutions. Apple has an answer for that, and you may not like it. Apple issued a statement Monday afternoon warning users of unlocked iPhones that the next software update it ships will probably break their phones. It's not clear how many people have unlocked their iPhone to run on networks other than AT&T's, but there has definitely been some interest among early adopters who want no part of AT&T's network. Most of those folks were always operating under the assumption that Apple might relock their iPhones with future software updates, but were they expecting...
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For anyone old enough to remember the VHS/Betamax wars, the new battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD might seem like history repeating itself. While VHS did eventually prevail, it certainly put a lot of consumers off. It also probably opened the door for wide adoption of the DVD as a single unified standard after both the VCD and laserdisc failed to gain a large enough foothold.Both of the new formats have support from different coalitions of movie studios, which means that if you want to watch high definition movies you could very well end up needing to buy two devices or a more expensive combo-device. “Until recently, many consumers were able to defer the choice because players have been so...
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From desktops to notebooks, it seems like all the rage lately is the design and manufacturing of ultra-cheap computers. First we saw the OLPC and then Asus' new Eee PC made a serious splash. One has to wonder, can manufacturers make any money at all on products targeted to this market segment? It seems unlikely but there's certainly a ton of volume involved, so the traditional metrics are definitely skewed. Now it seems Lenovo will enter the fray. ''It's a natural evolution. We are not responding to our competitors,'' Chen said. ''After three years of market development in low-tier markets we have gained experience and understanding.'' Some 800 million people...
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After suffering from heavy losses, AMD takes some time to reorganize its two-year map for server and PC chips. According to AMD executives, the number two CPU maker has plans not only to reveal a new server-chip design in 2009 , but also to push forth faster versions of its Barcelona quad-core server chip later on in the year. The company’s short-term goal is to get the Barcelona “out there” into the market. While the Barcelona chips that will be available this quarter will only clock at 2GHz, AMD has plans to deliver faster versions in Q4, according to Randy Allen, corporate VP of AMD’s server products division. “Barcelona will come in three varieties, Allen said. The mainstream version will...
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With all of the recent hype surrounding Apple's iPhone, it seems more and more people are ditching, or at least thinking about ditching, their basic, 'mono-tasker' mobile phones in favor of multifunction SmartPhones. And although Apple has clearly been getting the lion's share of press coverage lately, there are a ton of other popular SmartPhones out there ranging from inexpensive Treos to the ultra expensive Nokia N95. So, what we want to know is this. If you were buying a new SmartPhone today, which one would it be? There's a new poll posted in the upper-right corner of the site. Vote there and if there's a product we missed, or you'd just like to give your thoughts on the models we have...
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VoodooPC Smashes Industry Records with Next-Gen Notebook PC 17-inch laptop sets new standard for performance notebooks (CALGARY, Canada) – Wednesday, July 18, 2007 – VoodooPC, the world’s leading architect of personalized, handcrafted high-performance PCs, today introduced its 17-inch widescreen notebook PC, the ENVY H:171. The machine is the first notebook to offer a range of next-generation PC technology, including the Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme X6800 processor, a Dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 graphics processing unit (GPU) and a hard drive capacity of up to 600GB using three 200GB hard drives. This balanced...
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While many of us still do not have access to High-definition TV signals, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) has already started development of the "Super Hi-Vision" TV system, which they hope will replace HDTV in the future. Apparently, SHV is capable of 7680x4320 resolution. What does that number mean exactly? Picture this: 16 HDTV screens arranged in a 4x4 array. That is what SHV is equivalent to.Nonetheless, there are still some obstacles that NHK must overcome before SHV is released: "An uncompressed SHV signal has a bit-rate of 24Gbps and that's unmanageable for broadcasting systems. It needs to be compressed. But real-time encoding and decoding of such a high-bandwidth signal is also a challenge.""Right...
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If you're contemplating the purchase of a new laptop, you might want to hold out a bit longer if this report from Digitimes is correct. It seems that Intel, who already dominates the laptop arena, is planning on adding new features that will both enhance performance as well as increase battery life. The Robson technology the article mentions is a flash memory socket or slot that will allow OSes such as Vista to improve hard disk performance and save electricity in the same way that hybrid drives work. This technology sounded really good a year ago, but recently there have been numerous hybrid and solid state disk (SSD) drive announcements from many key players in the storage arena, so the...
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OCZ Technology Unveils a Wealth of Next Generation PC Technology at CeBIT 2007, Demonstrating Leadership Across the Board Innovative, New Generation Technology Showcased at the OCZ Booth in Hall 21, Stand A32 CeBIT 2007 - Hannover, Germany - March 15, 2007 - OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today is unveiling a number of ground-breaking, next generation products at the World's largest digital technology tradeshow, CeBIT. Setting out to impress the worldwide enthusiast community and European market and impact the high-end computing and gaming industry, OCZ will be introducing new memory, power,...
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