Items tagged with OSS
It's been years since Nicholas Negroponte unveiled his plans to develop a $100 laptop that would be made available to anyone in the developing world. While Negroponte's price point remains out of reach, a new, independent UK organization has released a prototype of its own computer—a $25 USB key that packs a full machine into a form factor not much larger than a traditional thumb drive. David Braben, of Rollercoaster Tycoon fame, developed the diminutive Raspberry Pi as a computer that all students could have access to, regardless of income. The system's specs are as follows: 700 MHz ARM11 128MB RAM Supports OpenGL ES 2.0 1080p30 H.264 decode Composite/HDMI video output USB 2.0 SD/MMC/SDIO...
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Any of you holding your breath for the possibility of Advanced Micro Devices announcing its own version to Intel's atom processor for use in netbooks better have large lungs. AMD's Chief Executive Dirk Meyer announced Thursday: "We're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor." That is, AMD is focusing on bigger, and in their opinion, better things. Instead of doing battle with Intel's atom processor, AMD is instead banking on the people wanting more power than that offered by netbooks, and has their sites locked on processors to run notebooks designed similar to the Macbook Air - the ultraportable category. As to the difference between an ultraportable...
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AMD Powers World’s First ATI CrossFireX High Performance Notebook by Alienware- ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series graphics and ATI CrossFireX technology pack an unprecedented 640 stream processors into a single notebook - SUNNYVALE, Calif. - November 4, 2008 - High-performance gaming notebook manufacturer Alienware is putting two powerful ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series graphics processors from AMD (NYSE:AMD) in the Alienware M17 notebook PC. The Alienware M17 is the world’s first notebook from a major manufacturer to include the raw horsepower of AMD’s award-winning ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology with Microsoft Direct X 10.1 support.“The M17, loaded with all the capabilities of ATI...
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Whether you like it or not, let's face it, disc media is just plain getting old. Further, "the power of the network" continues to rise and downloadable multimedia content continues to become more and more pervasive. Take a quick vitals check on companies like BlockBuster Video and you'll know why the folks at Netflix are running to head this one off at the pass as well. It's not rocket science people (actually it's called photonics, which is easily as complex), the fatter your pipe gets, the more data you can and will pump down it. Another case study of Valve's Steam game delivery, network gaming and community services, shows end user acceptance was spotty at best initially...
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Two European vendors have started taking orders for Intel Atom-populated motherboards. German-based, CARTFT is selling the Intel D945GCLF motherboard, populated with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor, for $114 U.S. Tranquil PC, based in the U.K., is selling the same setup for £52.90 U.K. (about $103 U.S.). Tranquil PC's site states that the motherboard is "shipping from first week of June on a first come first served basis." This coincides with Intel's planned official launch of the Atom platform at Computex Taipei (June 3 - 7). Both sites currently list the motherboards as in stock.The D945GCLF is a mini-ITX form-factor motherboard, but the CARTFT site warns: "The CPU heatsink has a height...
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AMD Takes the Ultimate Visual Experience in PC Gaming to New Heights with CrossFireX Milestone ATI Catalyst 8.3 release unlocks quad- and triple-GPU performance and ATI Hybrid Graphics for Windows Vista Hannover, Germany (CeBIT 2008) March 4, 2008 AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced its latest graphics driver release to advance the Ultimate Visual Experience for PC gaming enthusiasts and casual gamers alike. Expected to be available for download starting March 5, ATI Catalyst 8.3 is a milestone software update in delivering both CrossFireX for Windows Vista -- the world s first quad-GPU support, and scalable, cost-effective three GPU support --...
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Obtain Instant Upgrades Easily with CPU Level Up ASUS Crosshair II Formula Provides Extreme Graphics Support with 3-Way SLI and Hybrid SLI Support Catering to users who require extreme graphical support and robust performance, ASUS, leading producer of motherboards, has today released the new ASUS Crosshair II Formula Motherboard. This powerful motherboard includes innovative technologies like CPU Level Up, Hybrid SLI and 3-Way SLI for the best performance and graphical support. It is also ready for AMD Socket AM2+ Phenom FX / Phenom X4 / Phenom X2 / Athlon™ X2 / Sempron and legacy AM2 processors; and features up to 5200 MT/s via HyperTransport 3.0-based system bus speeds for AM2+ CPUs....
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About every year or so, the software team at ATI, which is now a part of AMD, produces a Catalyst driver suite that introduces a handful of major new features, above and beyond their regular monthly release. And at least so far, for 2008, this new Catalyst v8.3 suite appears to be that major release. We’re sure ATI will have more in store as the year progresses, but for now there is plenty of new ground to cover. We were recently given a chance to chat with some folks from ATI about all of the new features they have in store for users with the Catalyst v8.3 release and we'll be outlining some of the finer details here today. In addition to the typical batch of performance...
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A fresh new set of graphics card drivers, like a pair of new shoes, can sometimes make a world of difference. We were recently given a chance to chat with some folks from AMD about all of the new features they have in store for users with the Catalyst v8.3 release and we'll be outlining some of the finer details here today. In addition to the typical batch of performance enhancements and bug fixes available with each new Catalyst release, the v8.3 suite is going to deliver official support for three and four GPU CrossFireX and Hybrid CrossFire, plus some new anti-aliasing features, previously unavailable tweaks for video playback, and GPU LCD scaling, among some other...
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Considering solar panels? How is your relationship with your neighbors? You might want to look around you and see if any neighbors have trees which may in the future shade your planned panel locations. Technically, if they eventually do, it will be a crime.Richard Treanor planted the trees in his yard 11 years ago, but neighbor Mark Vargas says they reduce the amount of electricity the panels can generate."Trees do a lot of good," says Richard. "Solar does a lot of good, too.""Some people say they're for solar power, and some people do something about it," says Mark.Vargas says his panels produce enough power to sell back to the utility company. His yearly bill is only $60.Both...
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Prior to holding its Financial Analyst Day in New York City, AMD showed off some new CrossFire-related technology to a few select members of the press. What we saw was AMD’s Hybrid CrossFire and its associated hardware, which marries next-generation integrated graphics processors (IGP) and entry-level discreet graphics cards for increased performance and functionality.We had a chance to sit down with some folks at AMD to talk about their upcoming Hybrid CrossFire technology and to get some firsthand experience with pre-production hardware. It looks like tomorrow’s next-gen IGPs are going to be much more interesting than today’s offerings. Click the link below and take a look...AMD...
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Prior to holding its Financial Analyst Day in New York City, AMD showed off some new CrossFire-related technology to a few select members of the press. What we saw was AMD’s Hybrid CrossFire and its associated hardware, which marries next-generation integrated graphics processors (IGP) and entry-level discreet graphics cards for increased performance and functionality. Please note, however, that “Hybrid CrossFire” may not be the official name of this platform when it is made available sometime in early to mid Q108. If you’re a regular reader of HotHardware, you already know what CrossFire is and how it works, so we won’t go into detail again here. Where Hybrid CrossFire differs...
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By now we hope you have all taken some time to check out our evaluation of AMD’s latest ATI Radeons, the HD 3870 and HD 3850. If you haven’t you can find the article right here. In that article we talk a bit about CrossFireX and explain that with a future driver release and the right motherboard, two, three, and four-way CrossFire configurations will be possible. And now, we want to show you what a system with four-way CrossFire will look like... What you see here are four Radeon HD 3870 cards installed in an upcoming MSI motherboard built around the AMD 790FX chipset. We don’t have benchmarks results to share with you just yet, but you can probably...
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Data recovery firm Retrodata is reporting that Seagate hard-drives used in MacBook laptops and MacMini desktops are prone to catastrophic loss of data. It's unclear whether the irreversible damage to the disk surface is caused by poor quality control in the factory, or whether Mac's Safe Sleep feature, which automatically backs up your computer whenever the computer is powered down, is causing the disk to be gouged when the computers are moved before the process is finished.To be fair to Apple, it does warn users not to move the machine until this process is complete - at which point the light on the lid catch begins to pulsate - but it's easy for users to grab their laptops and go as soon as...
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If you don't live under a rock, you've seen a PowerPoint presentation. Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel for what is essentially a PowerPoint presentation, although since he sits on the board of Apple he must use Keynote. But a series of slides designed to drive home the points of a speaker in a meeting is as common a computer utility as you can find. And Microsoft's PowerPoint is so dominant that it's become the defacto name of the idea. Google's bag of web-hosted applications, called Google Docs, is designed to compete with Microsoft Office Suite. Can you bore an audience properly with Google Docs version of PowerPoint? Slate says: no.One of PowerPoint's basic, indispensable...
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While Google soared on increased market share and lower expenses, AMD posted a net loss along with increased costs. AMD, which competes with market leader Intel, said its third-quarter net loss was $396 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net profit of $136 million, or 27 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 23 percent to $1.63 billion, beating the average analyst forecast of $1.52 billion according to Reuters Estimates.Despite the loss, analysts are happy with the revenue being produced by AMD. Excluding charges related to the ATI acquisition, AMD's loss per share was 49 cents, better than the loss of 61 cents forecast by Wall Street....
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For those of you that like to jump right down to the news, we wanted to pop in and let you all know that we've just posted a new article here at HotHardware. We recently got our hands on a pair of Diamond’s Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB cards and have compared their performance to the original 512MB Radeon HD 2900 XT, and to a trio of GeForce 8800 series cards, all running in both single- and multi-GPU CrossFire and SLI configurations. We also talk about the card’s bundle and overclockability. Click the link below and check it out, we definitely had some interesting results... Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB CrossFire...
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Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, a service which uses Human Intelligence to perform tasks (HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks) that humans are best suited for, such as image identification, is joining the hunt for Steve Fossett.In an email we received this morning, Amazon.com said, On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is. Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for...
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AMD held a Technology Analyst Day in Sunnyvale, California today, where members of their management team delivered presentations related to the company's various technologies and roadmaps. There were a number of details revealed during the presentations regarding AMD's modular M-SPACE design methodology, next-generation graphics technology and CPU / GPU Fusion, and attendees were also given a glimpse into AMD's more distant future with information about Bulldozer and Bobcat; the company's next-generation desktop and mobile CPU core architectures. AMD even went so far as to say Bulldozer was 'Designed to be the highest performing single and multi-threaded compute core in history'. The presentation...
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According to this article on DailyTech, AMD is preparing a chipset that will be the basis for future high-end motherboard, the RD790. The RD790 is supposedly going to support not only dual CPU sockets, but also up to 4 graphics cards. This could be the very platform for the next generation “Quadfather”, or “Quadfather 2.0” if you will. “The improved CrossFire multi-GPU technology supports up to four ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards in Quad CrossFire configurations. Unlike NVIDIA’s SLI, which supports dual or quad graphics cards in SLI, the improved CrossFire solution can take on three cards for improved performance. AMD claims CrossFire scaling with three cards yields a 2.6x performance...
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PC Power and Cooling Launches the CrossFire Edition Silencer 750 Quad to Complement the CrossFire Gaming Platform The New Silencer 750 CrossFire Edition now available at shop.ati.com Sunnyvale, Calif. - OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance memory and PC components, today announced the release of the Silencer 750 Quad CrossFire Edition under the PC Power & Cooling line. Designed to offer consumers a combination of legendary PSU architecture and the ultimate in quiet power management, the CrossFire Silencer is the ideal power solution for gamers and ATI enthusiasts. The "fiery red" exterior of this...
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The US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio has ruled that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant to look through your e-mail accounts without your permission. The ruling gives e-mail communications the same privacy protections that letters and telephone conversations have. “The content of e-mail is something that the user seeks to preserve as private and therefore may be constitutionally protected,” wrote Judge Boyce Martin, who was joined by judges Martha Craig Daughtrey and William Schwarzer in the decision.The court’s ruling requires prosecutors to either get a warrant or to notify the person whose emails are the subject of the investigation. Prosecutors could...
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