News for Thursday, 7 July 2005

IBM announced the PPC 970MP (dual core) and PPC 970FX (low power).
- The 970MP dual core frequency is between 1.4 and 2.5 GHz. Each core uses a 1 Mb L2 cache (so 2 Mb cache in total). It is possible to swich off one of the cores for low power operation.
- The 970FX Low Power is finally available. The power consumtion is only 13W at 1.2 and 1.4 GHz, and 16 at 1.6 GHz.
It is definitely IBM's response to Apple after being replaced by Intel.
IBM wants to prove that they would have been able to evolve the G5 to more power and even use a G5 in a laptop.
For sure, this brings back the debate on Apple moving to Intel!

Prodisc is starting to produce DVD-R 8x with an extended capacity of 4.9 Gb.
To gain the extra 200 Mb, they had to extend the track and reduce the space between two contiguous tracks. These media will be available at the end of this quarter. Prodisc announced that they will be compatible with most of the burners (LG, NEC, Pioneer, Ricoh, Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, TEAC...)