Thursday November 23, 2006

- Blu-Ray in Macs by February? - Lionel - 21:26:22

Think Secret learned that Apple should offer Blu-Ray equipped Macs by February*.
They don't know which models will sport BD drives and whether there will be a specific announcement or if it will be simply an add-on to existing models. OSX 10.5 would supports BD drives out of the box while an update to 10.4 would offer it.
Our article on using a a BD burner on a MacPro, is enough evidence that this is possible: we're only missing an Apple driver to support it and an Apple player to watch those funky Blu-Ray movies, which DVD player currently cannot do. There would also be the need to adopt HDCP on Apple's displays, since it will be mandatory for Blu-Ray movies playback from 2010...

[*moose: that is if Sony stops grabbing all the BD drives that the market can produce to stick in their PS3s]

[translation by moose]

- MB Pro 17'' Features Full Speed GPU - Lionel - 20:22:03

MacBook Pro 15" RevB features in addition to the Core 2 Duo CPU a Radeon X1600 Mobility with increased RAM and GPU frequencies.


It moved from 310/278 to 423/450 (GPU/memory).

The GPU inside the new MB Pro 17" has also been clocked higher than in RevA:


With 472/477 (GPU/memory), the Radeon X1600 Mobility in MB Pro 17" is now at the top of its specifications.

To display such information we used the excellent Graphiccelerator from Thomas Perrier.

Last but not least, this information regarding increased frequency of GPU/GDDR will support the famous law: never purchase a Apple RevA hardware model.


[translation by Linathael]

- Hybrid HDs in March 2007 - Lionel - 19:08:24

Source : Digitimes

Seagate announced to have started mass production of hybrid HDs featuring flash memory. Availability is expected in March 2007. First HDs will have 256MB of NAND memory, and in H2 2007 new HD models with 512MB or 1GB NAND will be launched.
In such Hybrid HDs, flash memory will not be used as the current cache memory, it will rather behave like a standard HD with a NAND USB key.

Samsung is also following the same strategy with its FlashON technology, a hybrid HD featuring 2GB of NAND flash memory, allowing faster boot times, faster resume from sleep mode, power saving and reliability; features quite similar to Intel Robson technology.

Microsoft and Intel are also pushing for such NAND-enable hardware. For Redmond it is mostly to speed up Windows booting process and common tasks, while Intel expect that such HDs will save energy for future mobile architecture.

However, it remains unclear if such hybrid HDs will require external drivers, or if internal firmware will be able to manage this integrated NAND memory.

[translation by Linathael]

- Apple wants to recycle heat - Lionel - 15:47:48

Source : http://www.macworld.co.uk

According to the site Green Business News, Apple is extremely interested in chips developped by the Eneco company.
Their products have the ability to produce electricity from heat or to cool up to -200° via the exchange of energy.
It is easy to see why this type of product is so desirable, as it will have a double benefit of capturing the heat from the processor and using it to reload the batteries.
The technical information on this process is very vague, but it does not seem too far out from the Peltier effect, even if the latter is not capable, at least to our knowledge, of producing electricity.

[translation by jwa]