News for Thursday, 9 September 2004

thanks to Lionel for this info
In the September 8th issue of "le Figaro" (French newspaper), in the Economy/Business section, it is mentioned that Air France will probably close its agency located on the most prestigious French avenue : Champs Elysées. One should propose to Apple this perfect location to install the first AppleStore in France. It is rather rare to have such a large area dedicated to shop becoming available in this famous avenue.

Despite problems faced to produce faster (and larger amount) of PPC970, IBM is positive for its future. during a recent conference, IBM was commenting on its roadmap. Power5 is currently engraved at 130nm, and should shift to 90nm in June 2005, with a quite substantial increase of the processor frequency. Power6, which will be engraved at 65nm, should arrive one year later. It is considered as a "Ultra High Frequency Cores". Just to remind you, PPC970 is a processor derived from the now old Power4 architecture. Apple's future on the processor front is also quite bright.
[translator notes: so far processors can be produced...]

First users to have ordered an imacG5 from the Apple Store have received an estimated shipping date on September 26th.
For those who are willing to buy this computer from their local reseller, they will have to wait a bit more. Ingram, one of the biggest apple reseller in France, is mentioning October 5th regarding iMacG5 real availability. when compared to the originally stated availability date of mid-September, maybe Apple does not consider 20 days delay as a delay...

No, this ain't porn, folks...
Ever since 1965, Intel has been under the spell of one of its co-founder Gordon Moore : He predicted that the processing power of chips would double every 18 months. The company has so far managed to make that saying come true. But now, the problems making the whole industry to slow down has forced Intel to look at some alternative courses of action. Over these few days, is held the IDF. At the keynote speech, Paul Ortellini has presented the Montecito processor. This CPU, targetted at workstations, will be multicore, and will boast a cache of 24MB, for a mind boggling 1.7 billion transistors.
The new strategy is similar to IBM's and AMD's, i.e. going multicore instead of incrementing the frequencies.
For a long time it was believed that shrinking the die of the chips would result in ever higher frequencies. What it actually will do is packing a higher number of transistor in an ever smaller die.

Up until now, Epson was the uncontested champion with the smallest ink drop size of 1.5 picoliter, on the R800 printer. Canon went all the way down to 1 pL. The smallest the ink drop, the better the gradients, and the overall granularity of the printed document.
Now the question is whether this droplet size difference will counter balance the fact that Canon uses 6 ink cartridges against 8 for Epson.
P.S.: don't get your hopes too high, you ain't gonna save on ink costs with a smaller drop size : the printer simply prints more of those smaller dots...

Yesterday, I intensively used my Dual 2.5Ghz G5. A fan that I never heard before, kicked in. After checking the temperatures with Temperature Monitor, it turns out that fan kicks in when the memory controller chips reaches about 70°C. Well, since this chip runs at a whopping 1.25GHz, it's kind of understandable. That's also one of the probable reason why the FSB/CPU frequency ratio is 1/3 on the new iMac G5; and also perhaps in an attempt to reduce some production related costs.
To monitor the temps on your system, you can also use ThermographX. But we find this utility a tad less convenient. Even more, it's a shareware.

What will be the maximum data capacity of a 12cm disc ?
Optware will demonstrate the HDV (Holographic Versatile Disc) during the "COST Action P8" in Paris, Sept 16 and 17. This media can contain 1024 GB worth of data. The company hopes to be introducing medias and burners during 2006.