nVidia has taken control of Portal Player a company well-known thanks to its partnership with Apple for the first iPod generations.
NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics technologies, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire San Jose, CA-based PortalPlayer, Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductors, firmware, and software for personal media players (PMPs) and secondary display-enabled computers. PortalPlayer, which was founded in 1999, is widely recognized for its pioneering technology, including the high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) technology which powers some of the world's most recognizable portable digital music players.
Many companies expect that the war between BD and HD-DVD will end soon; in order to give a green light to customers to buy Blue laser devices and equipments. The problem: Sony nor Toshiba wants to throw the towel.
So, for the time being, the solution would be to get a universal player able to deal with BD and HD-DVD media. For the electronics, it is already done thanks to the chips recently unveiled by Nec. For the optical part, it remains more complicated, in addition blue laser diodes remain rare so having a dual optical system might be simply too expensive and not viable for the customer market.
The solution might come from Ricoh, it
keeps progressing towards the development of an optical system based on a single blue laser diode able to focus and read/play information from BD and HD-DVD media. Such universal players are expected for the end of 2007.
For the time being, Blu-Ray is leading the market for burners and computer integration, while HD-DVD is leading the market for HD movies thanks to a larger choice of standalone players... but it might change in a near future when the PS3 will be finally launched.
Well, the day before the launch of its new flagship GPU, GF 8800 GTX, nVidia has discovered a defective resistor in its reference board. It leads to display artifacts when the GPU is 100% loaded. nVidia will have to call back all reference cards for exchanging this component.
In addition, the faulty resistor is named R520... the code name of current ATI GPU flagship ;)
It is a sign :D
Google has already taken control of most of online advertising campaigns, and does not plan to stop there. Indeed, they will test their Ads system on physical support, meaning newspapers, for a test period of 3 months. The Washington Post and the New York Times are among the selected journals.
If online advertising was a new and growing market, it is different for ads located in reviews or newspapers, competition will be stronger for sure.
The website
Play.com has several references of MacBook sporting Core 2 Duo clocked at 2GHz. One could have imagine that it was a mistake, but references of Core Duo were also there... and in addition the availability for Core 2 Duo models is expected from November 13th.
Well, today it is Tuesday, the usual introduction day for new hardware, so we will not have to wait for too long to determine if it was a website editing mistake, leaks or "how to promote its website at no price".
