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Tech News for Thursday April 13th 2000.Voodoo
4/5 launch date. Folks, it's official now that the Voodoo4's and Voodoo5's will be shipping by the end of this month (April). Q: When will V4 and V5 release? A: The Voodoo5 5500 will start shipping towards the end of this month. 3dfx's new Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 3D video accelerators are competing directly with nVidia's GeForce 256 DDR card which is currently the video speed king. The new Voodoo cards sport a couple of new hardware features such as motion blurring and FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing.) Before you get caught up in the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 hype make sure you read this article over at VoodooExtreme on the future of video cards. I'm not sure if you have heard but 3dfx will be
releasing a Voodoo6 this summer which is powered by an additional 100W
powersupply!! Intel
Itanium CPU preview. GamePC previews Intel's new "Itanium" processor which should be available sometime in Q2 of 2000. The machine previewed in this article is almost unbelievable and you have to see the pictures yourself just to believe it. Imagine a desktop PC system that requires a 800W powersupply (yes, it's 800w - not a typing error), 4GB of SGRAM and a Itanium CPU with 2/4MB full-speed on-die L2 cache configurations. Take a look at the
pictures and components here
or read the full article here. AMD
future update. AMD is the talk of the town today with the recent press release that informs about the doubling of the companies expected earnings. Here's some more information to wet your appetite on AMD.
How
hard drives work. Ever wonder how manufacturers are able fit so much data in hard drives and allow for extremely efficient data throughput? Tech-Review takes you on a fantastic voyage into the inner workings of modern day hard drives. Ah, the hard drive. The ever expanding storage device that holds all the vital information for your computer. It's able to provide you with the security and room to store whatever you like. However, it also has the ability to drive you insane when it decides to crash. Man has always had an instinctive curiosity
when it comes to learning how things work. How does the sun provide the earth
with energy? How does gravity keep us grounded? How does David Blaine levitate?
You may very well know the answer to each of these questions, but for this
article we will focus on how hard drives store and retrieve information. The
3D Card Industry. Every once in a while someone writes a very strong article predicting the future of the PC hardware industry - which is very difficult. I'm not sure where VoodooExtreme finds all these talented authors but they have done it again with the an article on the future of 3D graphics cards. Here's some of the highlights from the article but be sure to read it in it's entirety. I think NVIDIA's NV15 will be the fastest next generation chipset, even though Rage6 looks very good on paper. However, NVIDIA's short-lived dominance will be over soon, and I see NVIDIA and ATI products taking turns as king of the hill. <SNIP> When will we see 3D accelerators which
accelerate ray-casting. This is extremely useful for calculating where bullets
hit in a 3D game. They should make an accelerator which can check a ray for
collisions with a list of polygons. When developers can do this quickly, they
won't have to resort to BSP trees and we'll have games which have extremely
dynamic environments. Perhaps when geometry cores become programmable this will
be a reality. IBM
breaks density record for laptop hard drives. Can you imagine your laptop having 20GB or 30GB of hard drive space? IBM has upped the ante again with squeezing more information on laptop hard drive platters to hold 17 billion bits per square inch, better than the recent record of 14.3 billion bits per square inch held by another IBM drive. The new drive's capacity is five times typical notebook drives, enough to hold 49 music CDs or a mile-high stack of documents, according to Lee Johnson, marketing manager for IBM's mobile division. The new drive also spins at about 5,400 rotations per minute, faster than most notebook drives and more like a desktop PC drive. The new drive will also come in 20GB and 6GB sizes. The
drives will begin to appear in May in notebooks from, among others, Gateway, IBM
and Compaq. Best
hardware choices for Q1 2000. The PC hardware
market is more confusing than ever before with more choices to pick from and
with so many new devices around the corner - the choice of when to buy and what
to buy can be rather tricky. CTNEWS has been kind enough to post a brief article
with the CPU and motherboard choices for the first quarter of this year. Weekly
CPU prices. Nothing overly exciting on this weeks current CPU prices but SharkyExtreme has updated the list with links to companies who are selling the CPU at the lowest posted price. Still no word on the prices for 1ghz Intel Pentium III CPU's as the company scrambles to fill OEM orders. If you are
building a new machine then AMD Athlon is the road to take on the other Intel
motherboard owners may want to seriously consider the 550E for price and
performance. Site
News Update. Apologies for the
slow news yesterday. We had major outages at work and when I finally went home I
dropped off to sleep rather early. AMD
shatters Wall Street estimates. And the good news is in....three cheers for AMD. The company deserves a round of applause from moving from a major quarterly loss to doubling Wallstreet estimates. AMD's success can be directly attributed to the impressive AMD Athlon K7 CPU and aggressive marketing. Intel can only remain the market leader for so long. Think about the Roman Empire. Advanced Micro Devices is the chips, with spectacular sales and earnings in its first quarter -- almost doubling analysts' profit estimates.Advanced Micro Devices delivered spectacular sales and earnings in its first quarter Wednesday, almost doubling analysts' profit estimates. "Q1 was a great start to the new millennium at AMD (NYSE: AMD)," Chairman and CEO W.J. Sanders III told analysts during a Wednesday afternoon conference call. "This was particularly for our PC processor business." Strong sales of its high-performance Athlon chips helped AMD earn $189.3 million, or $1.15 a share, on sales of $1.09 billion. First Call consensus
expected the chipmaker to earn 58 cents a share in the quarter. Tech News for Wednesday April 12th 2000.Linux
Conference Focuses On Products. MONTREAL -- The stock market rush for companies working with Linux may have stalled, but a high-speed push for product development continues, software executives said at a trade show in Montreal Tuesday. Ottawa-based software developer Corel (stock: CORL) set the tone, announcing it expects to ship a Linux version of its CorelDraw 9 graphics software in July -- two months ahead of schedule. Corel chairman, president, and CEO Michael Cowpland, who kicked off a day-long string of speeches at Linux Expo 2000, said the company will also launch a Linux version of its Ventura Publisher 8.5 by December, the product's first upgrade since 1998. "Corel has a tremendous Linux push underway," Cowpland told about 300 attendees at the three-day event. "We expect to have over 18 Linux applications of our own ready by the end of the year." Linux Expo 2000, Canada's
first Linux exhibit, follows on the heels of similar shows in New York and
Paris, and has attracted a modest crowd of about 100 companies. Bright
earnings expected from AMD. AMD will be posting their quarterly earnings sometime today and analysts expect the company to post very optimistic earnings. It will be very interesting to see what AMD's stock will do after the quarterly earnings are posted. Advanced Micro Devices is expected to accomplish later this afternoon a feat that has eluded it for more than a year: a second consecutive quarter of profits.The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker is expected to report earnings of 52 cents per share for the quarter, according to a consensus estimate on First Call that continues to climb. A week ago, the consensus rested at 48 cents. Last quarter, AMD reported earnings of 43 cents a share. The consecutive profits, based on sales of its Athlon processor and flash memory, will mark a change from the past. Last year, AMD revealed a massive loss of 81 cents a share for the first quarter, caused primarily by a price war with Intel. AMD reported consecutive quarterly profits at the end of 1998 but amid a price war that decimated the next few quarters. Two successive quarterly losses followed. AMD has not reported a profit for a fiscal year since 1995, but many expect that to change this year. AMD will announce its earnings after the market closes today. Earlier this month, AMD
surprised investors when it announced that it expects to report record revenues
in excess of $1 billion, or about 10 percent more than last quarter, a reversal
of the seasonal trend when sales declined after the end of the year. Intel
faces another 820 chip set problem. A word of
advice here is not to purchase any motherboard that uses Intel's new i820
chipset. Pickup any of the current well-matured "BX" motherboards for
reliability and performance. The spate of problems with the i820 chipset
featured on many new motherboards has caused much anger between Intel and the
motherboard manufacturers. However, an official with at least one major
SDRAM maker contends the fault lies with the 820, not the memory. Tech News for Tuesday April 11th 2000.OpenML
Announced There is a press
release regarding a new multimedia API that will be competing directly with
Microsoft's DirectX. The new API called OpenML marries video, sound and other
multimedia extensions into one complete environment. Here's the entire press
release with all the details: OpenML, a new specification for this innovative technology, will be developed through the combined contributions of the members of the Khronos Special Interest Group (SIG). These technology vendors are contributing a range of industry experience. Critical digital content application authoring expertise, for example, comes from Discreet and others. 3dfx, 3Dlabs, ATI, Evans & Sutherland, and S3 are responsible for the development of the OpenGL extension specifications for integrating video data types with 3D graphics. The determination of what implications this synchronization and integration has for future platforms, comes from Intel, IBM, Compaq, and SGI. Experience in real time digital media input/output/processing is provided with the utilization of dmSDK 2.0 from SGI as a foundation for the standardization of video and audio input/output. Other companies will be invited to contribute to, and adopt the core technology from the Khronos Group SIG to facilitate OpenML being implemented with many different applications, devices and systems. OpenML Benefits OpenML will eliminate the need for professional application developers to develop different and proprietary programming interfaces for various media input and output devices. In addition, implementations of the API across multiple operating systems will enable portability of software applications. Extensions to OpenGL that handle compositing of multiple graphics and video streams will make it easier to enable the direct implementation of mixing 2D, 3D, audio, and video data to create dazzling effects in authored content. Other OpenGL extensions will relate to enabling high quality rendered output. OpenML functionality will offer new ways in
which a programmer can quickly and easily enable powerful graphics and video
integration such as: Industry Adoption The Khronos SIG expects that OpenML technology adoption will be widespread throughout the media industry in the next two years. The move to implement OpenML is expected to grow the marketplace for professional authoring software and supporting hardware devices. To promote easy interaction with the OpenML
concept and communicate news about its development in the future, the Khronos
SIG today launched a Web site at http://www.khronos.org. RIM
takes on Palm in handheld market. There is another contender on the handheld market by a Canadian company called Research in Motion (RIM). The (codenamed Proton) RIM 957 is taking on the Palm VII in the wireless arena and will cost you $499.00 plus $39.00 a month for unlimited service. The RIM 957
features a Intel 386 (yes, a i386) processor with 5MB of flash memory.
It's going to be a
tough battle with Palm handheld's accounting for 70% of the market share. CMGI,
Sun, Novell plan network services company. Internet investment company CMGI will be the majority owner of CMGion, a new company that will be based in Andover, Mass. CMGI chief executive David Wetherell will serve as its interim CEO. CMGI said Sun and Novell have each invested $20 million in CMGion and will contribute technology to the venture. Novell plans to provide directory and caching software, while Sun will provide server hardware. Further details about the new company are
expected to be disclosed later this morning at a press conference. IBM
Targets Oracle. Megacorporation IBM announced
the creation of a new database program entitled DB2 Universal Database, which is
just one part of the company's $1 billion dollar effort to take the market share
from underneath Oracle. The powerful database enables Internet companies to
search faster and retrieve often-accessed information quicker due to its
"in-memory database" structure. The system is currently being tested,
and is expected to hit the market sometime in the second quarter. Visit IBM
for more information. Pentium
III 800EB review. Remember that one
of the worst bottle necks in your PC is the main memory (besides mechanical
storage devices and external communications ports) so speeding up the memory
makes a substantial difference. Keep a eye on DDR RAM based motherboards that
should be available sometime late summer that will support RAM up to 166mhz. The
current 133mhz RAM is just standard SDRAM. This
weeks CPU prices. DSL vs
Cable. S3
and VIA merger update. 72X
TrueX Drive. Tech News for Monday April 10th 2000.nVidia
GeForce sequel press release update. Site News Update. DDR
memory gets backing from Infineon, Samsung, & Via. Infineon says it was shipping the samples, which feature extensively in future Intel server and workstation chipsets, to satisfy the need for low cost memory. Via, meanwhile, said that it believed that DDR 266MHz memory products will be targeted across servers, desktop systems, notebooks and PDAs. It said it is working with Micron, Samsung, Hyundai, Infineon Hitachi, NEC, Mitsubishi, Nanya, Toshiba and other memory manufacturers, in a bid to make sure its products are compliant with the current JEDEC synchronous memory standards. Wen-chi Chen, CEO and president of Via, said
that DDR 266 is a "sensible, evolutionary solution for the PC
industry". Let's
ask the rivals what to do with Microsoft. Access
Your Bookmarks Anytime, Anywhere. Blink.com, based in New York, provides users with the ability to regulate who can and cannot see their bookmarks. Privacy levels can be set by folder, or by individual link; and each site can be filed into folders and subfolders whichever way the member chooses. Blink.com also contains a database of
bookmarks that users have set to public access, organized into categories much
like a typical search engine. The difference with Blink is that when a search is
performed, it only searches available bookmarks, which eliminates some of the
hastle of finding a relevant site. AMD's Thunderbird Soon. Getting to know your chipsets.
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