Items tagged with SSE
We've discussed the fragmentation of Android and the shoddy update services of the various carriers before, but the Droid 3's situation is raising these issues again. According to pre-CES reports, Verizon is poised to end-of-life (EOL) the Droid 3 along with its entire current lineup of MiFi hotspots. The BlackBerry Curve 3G and Palm Pre 2 are also reportedly on the chopping block, but the former is low-end device that's several years old, while the latter is a bit of an anachronism. The Droid 3, in contrast, is barely six months old. It's the only Motorola phone with a physical keyboard that Verizon carries, and it's already become a poster child for the problems with the Android ecosystem....
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When AMD launched the Barts GPU that powers the Radeon 6850 and 6870 last year, it added support for what it described as a new type of antialiasing—Morphological AA (MLAA). Intel, who originally developed MLAA in 2009, has released a follow-up paper on the topic--including a discussion of how the technique could be handled by the CPU. While this might seem contrary to conventional wisdom, it could allow an integrated CPU+GPU to make better use of existing execution resources. The first thing to understand about MLAA is that it isn't a traditional form of antialiasing at all. Traditional antialiasing (supersampling or multisampling) is performed after lighting is calculated and textures...
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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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The Classics Deserve First-class Treatment ASUS Announces Xonar Essence STX PCI-e Audio Card with 124dB SNR Audio and Built-in Headphone Amplifier for Extraordinary Audio Performance Taipei, Taiwan, November 12, 2008 – Aimed as the culmination of searching for the very essence of sound, the new ASUS Xonar Essence STX range of audio cards delivers the purest, cleanest audio to offer users the ultimate audio experience ever from a sound card. Equipped with carefully-selected components, and ASUS’ exclusive Hyper-grounding and EMI Shield design, the Xonar Essence STX is capable of achieving an industry-leading 124dB SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) in signal clarity. Furthermore, full-driving for any...
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The enterprising lads over at iFixit sure like to take stuff apart. Then again, that's at the heart of their bread-and-butter--they take the risks with potentially broken parts and lost screws so that they can assemble comprehensive DIY guides for instructing you how you can repair your own Apple products, such as MacBooks and iPods. If you don't know how to take it apart, how are you going to know to put it back together?Their latest disassembly was of the new "unibody" MacBook Pro that was unveiled only two days ago. Here are some highlight of what they discovered during their dissection: The removable battery Bottom plate removed The system board Dissected!(Credit:...
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So we were kicking around the lab for the weekend with nothing much to do (ok, ok, we have plenty to do but we decided to goof off). And what do any self-respecting Tech Geeks do with a little time on their hands? We take stuff apart of course. This time our victim was the Dell Studio Hybrid. We'll be showcasing this machine next week in on our Video Spotlight channel but this sneak peek will actually give you a pretty solid understanding of what the Studio Hybrid is made of. Actually, you'll see exactly what she's made of here... The Dell Studio Hybrid, that we'll be looking at next week, is built upon an Intel 965 chipset with...
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There is no doubt that spam is pervasive and can be a major productivity killer if the right safeguards aren't in place. In fact, MessageLabs indicates that 78.2 percent of all e-mails sent during the month of August were spam. To make matters worse, Sophos reports that by the end of June, 96.5 percent of all e-mails to businesses were spam. In an effort to quantify the financial cost of spam to businesses, Ipswitch released the results from its recent "Spamometer" survey. According to Ipswitch's Marketing Manager, Brad Senter, the "Spamometer" survey was created by culling data from three Ipswtich e-mail servers that receive a combined one million e-mail messages per week. This data was then...
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Thecus 1U4500 Passes IEC / ISO Certified Reliability Test The CE marking is a mandatory European marking for NAS products to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. Thecus products are evaluated by a Taiwan Accreditation Foundation (TAF) certified independent test laboratory. CE Verifications of Compliance are issued in order to apply CE marking on Thecus products. Those verifications are to document that Thecus products meet the relevant requirements, eg, emission and immunity standards. Thecus 1U4500 series is one of the products that received CE marking (comply with CE standards EN 60950-1:2001+A11:2004 and IEC 60950-1:2001). In...
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Lenovo Asset Recovery Service Helps Businesses Go Green, Turning Computer Trash into CashEco-Solution Gives Customers Easy Way to Refurbish, Reuse and Recycle ComputersRESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – June 17, 2007: Lenovo today introduced Lenovo Asset Recovery Services (ARS), a new set of services to help business customers in the U.S. and Canada manage their end-of-life technology equipment by providing computer take-back, data destruction, refurbishment and recycling. Lenovo also offers additional services including inventory, value assessment, on-site deinstallation and data encryption. Lenovo can facilitate donation of the old computers or can help customers receive cash back for them. After...
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Don't worry, Rupert (Murdoch); MySpace still outdraws Facebook in terms of unique U.S. visitors. But in terms of worldwide visitors: second place.comScore statistics indicate that Facebook drew even with MySpace in April. At that point, the networks interested about 115 million users each. If we're allowed mentally to extend the growth lines through today, Facebook's likely closer to 120 million, and MySpace has almost undoubtedly been left behind.Keep an eye out for official global "nail in the coffin" reports, then. Since different research firms come up with varying figures, they'll trickle in for a while, making MySpace's position look quite bad.Why the trend? Many...
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Google Sites, the group Website tool that was originally available only to "companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains," can now be utilized by even non-business users--and you don't even need to host it on your own domain anymore: "Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information -- team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it -- in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at https://sites.google.com/[your-website] and add as many pages as you like for free.""Getting started with Google Sites is easy. You can create...
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NVIDIA held a Financial Analyst Day yesterday, where representatives spoke about the company's strengths, market share, technology, and direction. There was a lot of discussion regarding current products and competition, which seemed to get NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Sun Huang fired up in a way that's not often seen publicly. The always outspoken Jen-Sun really went on the offensive and essentially dismissed CPU-GPU fusion and Intel's upcoming discreet graphics product (codenamed Larrabee). He also downplayed the erosion of NVIDIA's market share in the mobile segments and promoted the APX 2500 "system on a chip", CUDA, and other NVIDIA initiatives. Jen-Sun even went so far as to say NVIDIA...
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ASUS Takes the Mini PC to a Mighty Level with Essentio CS5110 Taipei, Taiwan – Extensive research and development have resulted in ASUS innovations that help pack more versatility and performance into compact frames. Packed with innovations, the ASUS Essentio CS5110 is a Mini PC that features exceptional graphics performance as its main focus – and is the world’s smallest Desktop PC equipped with a fully embedded discrete graphic card to give you high definition movie pleasure and smooth gaming fun. Mighty Fluency - 1080P High Definition PleasurePlaying HD movies easily and smoothly, the CS5110's superior graphic quality and HDMI display output allows for entertainment enjoyment in high definition....
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A copy of an internal Apple email to employees indicates that iTunes has surpassed Wal-Mart as the #1 music retailer. Or has it?The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes...
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Israeli mobile phone technology company Modu has announced their modular mobile phone system, the modu. By including only the components necessary to send and receive voice and data, their module is designed to be integrated into "modu mates," and "modu jackets": mobile phone skins and various electronic devices that need mobile connectivity. Leading mobile network operators (MNOs) with a total of tens of millions of subscribers have already committed to modu, signing strategic partnerships that will see the first modu products available in the fourth quarter of 2008. The MNOs are Telecom Italia’s mobile division TIM, BeeLine (VimpelCom) of Russia and Cellcom in Israel.modu ecosystem partners...
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We've been wondering how much performance benefit there might be for 64-bit software on the desktop ever since AMD started talking about the Sledgehammer series of chips nearly a decade ago. Now that 64-bit is here, in various forms of implementation, we're getting our answers. Some of the most interesting answers might come from recent tests that "the rest of us" might be curious about. OS X's latest build has 64-bit support without losing its 32-bit compatibility, and a very interesting performance trend emerges:“...The performance difference between the 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz Mac Pro isn’t as great as the difference between running 32-bit code and 64-bit code. In fact, the 2.8GHz...
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Certainly the RIAA and MPAA feel an IP address can be used to ID a person: that's the whole basis of their lawsuits to collect money from downloaders. So why can't the EU believe the same?Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address "then it has to be regarded as personal data."His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies...
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Well, not exactly, but pretty close. The Turing Test is a proposition first offered in the 1950s that tests a computer's ability to fool a human into thinking it's another human, using only natural language text interaction. Well, now there's a Russian website named Cyberlover.ru that sells a software utility that engages women in flirtatious chatroom conversation, up to ten at a time, all the while harvesting personal information that the unwitting conversationalists offer up. An Australian anti-virus software firm, PC Tools, has warned that the software could be abused by identity fraudsters trying to harvest people's personal details online. The Russian site denied it was intended...
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A lot of people, businesses included, have more or less decided to skip upgrading their OS to Microsoft Vista. Windows XP works for them, is well supported for foreseeable future, and many feel they can skip a generation and wait for Vista's successor, dubbed "Windows 7" to come along. Gartner Research VP Michael Silver thinks that might be a mistake, for large businesses, anyway....while Microsoft will support business versions of Windows for at least 10 years and Windows XP will be supported with security fixes into 2014, many software vendors won't support their products on Windows XP that long and won't support new versions of their software on older operating systems.For Windows XP, software...
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A report from Forrester Research paints a bleak picture for sales of next generation DVD players. They estimate that at least another eighteen months will roll by before many consumers make up their minds to buy one; and until then the two formats will fight it out in low-level trench warfare until one or the other is embraced by consumers. Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder stood behind his company's view that Blu-ray would eventually win out over HD DVD, but he said the Blu-ray camp needs to cut prices. A stand alone Blu-ray player sells for about $500, while HD DVD players cost about $400, and prices are expected to drop further...
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AMD made an announcement a few weeks ago that made many in the industry scratch their heads: AMD (not Intel) will release SSE5. This was quite confusing since AMD is known for their own set of instructions, 3D Now!, which the company has quietly dropped development of in favor or following Intel's lead with SSE instruction sets.One of the major reasons SSE was able to supplant 3D Now! is that Intel has one of the best software support divisions of any hardware company on the planet. While both AMD and Intel were able to release detailed documents on how developers could utilize their instruction sets, Intel went a step further and added automatic SSE optimizations to the compilers and libraries...
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It's been two years since the New York Times starting charging for "select" content on its site (hence the name), but the paper has admitted defeat and decided to open the content up for all, saying it could make more money from increased ad revenue than the subscription fees.Times Select, the name of the service that charged access to opinion pieces and some news stories, was available to print subscribers for free. Times Select had 787,400 subscribers, including 471,200 print subscribers who received access to the service for free. Of the remaining subscribers, 89,200 readers received free access on college campuses and 227,000 paid either $7.95 per month or $49.95 for the service, depending...
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