The third French Mobile Phone provider, Bouygues Telecom, is going to sell iPods in its physical store network. With the on-going discussion between Apple and the German Phone Company T-Mobile, it might well be the last step before the official launch of the long-awaited and rumored iPhone... at MacWorld 2007?
Many users have contacted us concerning the model of Xeon CPU installed in the MacPro in order to perform a CPU upgrade.
One should be cautious about Xeon, because in the past Intel has been releasing numerous Xeon processors, and there are almost as much Xeon chipsets.
The MacPro is powered by 2 Intel Xeon "WoodCrest", identified by a serial number 51xx. The low-end MacPro is equipped with a Xeon 5130 (2.0GHz), while the default model is sporting a Xeon 5150 (2.66GHz) and the high-end MacPro has 2 Xeon 5160 (3.0GHz). The price per CPU varies from 400 to 950 Euros.
One can find on the market, Xeon named 50xx, much cheaper and with a higher clock frequency, such as a 3.7GHz model for 900 Euros. But such Xeon are designed to be used on a 1066MHz FSB, and not the 1333MHz FSB found in the MacPro. In addition the Xeon 50xx releases much more heat than the WoodCrest while being much more power-consuming.
Upgrading the Xeon CPU of a MacPro is currently not a good deal, but it will for sure be interesting to perform such operation when Intel will release Quad-Core Xeon at the beginning of 2007.
NEC, one of the main player on the DVD burner market (either as a manufacturer or a chipset supplier), has announced a new set of chipsets named D63410 and C3360.
This new set is able to manage both format, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, of blue laser-based burners. In addition it supports 16x DVD and 48x CD burning speed.
The mass production should start in Q4 2006. However, it does not mean that universal burners will be immediately available. One will have to design a burner with either 2 blue laser diodes or one able to support both HD-DVD and BD media.
First burners with such chipsets should be released by Optiarc, the company originating from the merger between Sony and NEC optical technologies divisions; while manufacturing will be performed by Lite-On.
AMD was the first CPU manufacturer to stop the "GHz race"; Intel followed after failing to deliver a PIV clocked at 4GHz due to the huge power consumption as well as the heat release issue.
From then, AMD and Intel have been developing multicore architecture as well as promoting performance as a marketing argument instead of clock frequency; one could have thought that IBM will follow the same strategy. No.
IBM has announced that it will release in 2007 a new Power6, clocked at 4-5GHz, as a dual core CPU sporting 8MB of cache. It will be engraved using 65nm processing, using the SOI technology and will have a working tension of only 0.8V.
This processor remains a server-dedicated CPU with specifications and parameters much different than those found in our computers.
