AMD HAS LAUNCHED five new processors, of which three are priced at $99 or less. Okay, so this might not be such a big deal, as AMD already has a number of CPUs selling for under $100, but it seems like AMD is set on owning the sub $100 CPU market.
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TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.
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YESTERDAY NVIDIA RELEASED the 196.21 WHQL drivers for its graphics cards that add SLI support to several recent games – as well as some old ones – and bring a new version of the PhysX drivers along for the ride. However, it also killed most overclocking utilities at the same time.
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VOIP TELEPHONY TOOK off with the help of Skype, but the biggest hit in the US and Canada at the moment is the oddly named “magicJack” service, which we’ll call Magicjack. Rather than just being a software solution the Magicjack is a small USB dongle to which a normal phone is attached and it allows you use the phone as you normally would when connected to the POTS line.
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TSMC HAS REPORTEDLY fixed its yield issues with its 40nm manufacturing process, you know the one that all the new GPUs from AMD and Nvidia rely on. This should hopefully mean that there won’t be any more shortages of GPUs, at least for the ones that are already in production.
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ONE THING YOU hopefully learn very quickly in the IT business is that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV, or read on the Interweb these days. With Apple’s announcement that it’ll be announcing something on January 27th, the rumours about what Apple is up to haven’t stopped. The latest is that Apple is ready to unveil its own CPU, but the question you have to ask is if this makes any sense at all.
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COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN getting smaller and smaller over the years, although the x86 architecture hasn’t really changed much. However, VIA has been something of a pioneer when it comes to making it smaller and smaller and the company has just announced its first Mobile-ITX module which measures a mere 6 by 6 centimetres.
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LOCKHEED MARTIN MIGHT not be a company that most of us associate with computers, but as the company is heavily involved with the US military, it has come up with a secure computing solution called the IronClad in co-operation with IronKey. At first glance it might just look like any other USB key, although in a fancy brushed aluminium casing, but one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
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WE’VE BEEN GIVEN a sneak peak at Gigabyte’s upcoming AMD 890G board, the GA-890GPA-UD3H and although it’s not that different from the Asus board that Charlie spotted at CES, it does have a few extra features that makes it standout from the so far very small crowd.
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WE’VE HAD SOME criticism on our original story about the rusty chokes on certain Asus motherboards that got pointed out to us, so we decided to do a follow up. This time around we’ve done what many of the comments around the web have asked for, we cracked one of the chokes open to see what it looks like on the inside.
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SOME OF YOU might not be old enough to remember the farce about a decade ago about blown capacitors on motherboards. It was a huge issue and came down to the matter of poor choice of components as the motherboard makers tried to save some cost. Although we’re not the first to unearth this, it now appears that a certain manufacturer has ended up with at least some board models that come with pre-rusted chokes.
Update: Asrock responds
Update2: More information in part 2
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IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a tiny, power efficient server motherboard, then the new range of Pine View based mini-ITX server boards from Supermicro might just be what you’re looking for. The company has launched three boards going under the X7SPA moniker that offer slight variations in the feature set from each other.
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TRADITIONALLY APPLE HAS been pretty good at keeping a tight lid on things when it comes to leaks about upcoming products, with the odd slip here and there. That doesn’t stop its fans from coming up with some wild speculations as to what Apple is going to launch next as soon as Apple announces that it is about to host an event. The next such event is on January 27th and the interweb has been full of speculations about what Apple is going to announce.
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THERE’S NO SECRET that Zotac has become something of a favourite among the HTPC crowd, but the new range of tiny PCs that the company was showing off at CES should have an even broader appeal. What’s interesting here is that unlike everyone else, Zotac has decided that not all of us want Atom based tiny computers and as such is readying AMD and Intel CULV models.
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AMD SEEMS TO BE EXCITED about its potential in the notebook market this year, as the company is expecting to steal away some market share from Intel. AMD is expecting to hit in excess of 10 percent market share by the middle of this year and to reach 15 percent by the end of the year. It might not sound like much, but considering how tiny AMD’s share of the notebook market is, this would be a huge improvement.
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