News for Thursday, 17 July 2003

The European Store has a bug since this morning :

The delay for delivery exceeds 700 years ! We contacted them, this bug should be clear anytime now.

Apple has published the last semester's rresluts.
The company made a benefit of 19 M$ (against 32 M$ last year at the same period) for a sales turnover of 1.55 Billion $ (against 1.43).

On G4 Noise, Verax explained the cause of the overheat on certain machines. It would be due to the lack of "flatness" of certain processors. To solve this problem, Verax has modified the cooling system and provided a new thermal paste.

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro has now hit the market. (http://mirror.ati.com/products/radeon9800i - Thanks Overmac)

Here are the specifications : - 128 MB DDR - Multiple Display Connections - DVI - VGA - S-Vidéo - DVI to VGA and S-Video adaptor - TV-Out résolution up to 1024x768 - 10-bit intrgtayed per canal 400MHz DACs It is only vailable the the United States and Canada for the moment. But I think that it should be availbale soon for France, in August or September, since it is an option for the G5.

Blue-Hardware has tested an 8x DVD+R/RW prototype. Less then 9 minutes was neccessary to bure a whole DVD. This burner is also compatible with the ML-R technology. They managed to fit 9.2GB on a 4.7GB disc ! Only problem, it can only be read with this burner.

MacBidouille has just been added to the the list of web-sites being "watched" by the software News Interceptor (equivalent to MacReporter).

< Mac et Vidéo > web-site is no longer available because of a domain name problem. In the meanwhile you can gain access through this address : www.macbidouille.com/macetvideo.

Cammac.it has published the Dual G5 xBench results. The CPU test score was 245.48, which is particularly impressive, and a 319 for the memory isn't bad neither !

We have demonstrated yesterday that Panther can support n processors, and really large amount of RAM.
Several different sources have confirmed the circulating rumor that we already had received in the past :
Apple and IBM could be associated to developp and manufacture computer with n processors, where n could go til 64 G5! The project is internally named "Dark Star".
Each processor will have 4 memory slots, for a maximum allocated RAM of 16GB (when the 4 GB RAM modules). The 64 processors-based configuration will support up to 1 TB of RAM.
It will be possible to install in those computer many ATI graphic cards, and to use them in paralell, in order to allow a very high quality rendering.
Prototypes based on 8, 16, 32 and 64 processors are already working fine.
those machines will be available with an enclosure similar that to the G5' one.
The pre-production should start next month, but the availability should only be at the end of the year together with Panther Server.
Price will vary from 12 000 $ for the 8 CPUs version to 50 0000 $ for the top version including all the optionis.
Some people will probably consider this as a risky project. However, it seems that Apple and IBM could have already pre-sell some of those machines to prioritized clients, such as:
- Industrial Light and Magic
- Raytheon
- General Dynamics
- Genentech
- Amgen
- Pixar
- NASA
There are other names such as large american administrations.
But do not forget, this is only a rumor for the moment.

Here comes again a newer version of BenchUT2003.
Changes :
- BenchUT2003 now supports spaces in the app line
- Rewriting of the bench recovery routine in order to gain speed and correct a bug on certain configurations.
Download here -> BenchUT2003.sit