News for Saturday, 10 June 2006

NVidia unveiled their PureVideo HD technology. It consists in three main points:
- the material acceleration of formats decoding that will be used with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (H264, VC-1 and MPEG-2).
- post-treatment of decoded videos in order to optimize their quality up to 1080p.
- the HDCP support that seems to become a standard whether you like it or not.
The two first points will be available with most of the Geforce 7xxx video cards. On the other hand, HDCP support will require buying new products the specific chips required for material authentification.
In the PC world the first compatible video cards are arriving. But it's not enough. The screen must also have a HDCP protection, or it won't be able to display anything, or at best an altered signal.
If the lastest 24 and 30" Dell displays are already compatible, it's not the case for Apple.
In a near future, according to the majors will, you won't be able to use an unsupported display as a HD tv, even if you plug it to a more recent computer with a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD reader.

Intel is working on watercooling systems that are quite similar to those we currently have in a high end G5.

Those systems are also very compact, with metal pipes, and can't be reloaded.
If Intel insists on the CPU overclocking, those kits, that Apple could take advantage, will mainly allow to decrease the noise of the machines by deporting heat to places where you might install a new fan that would run more slowly.