News for Thursday, 16 November 2006

Officially, the 8-Core-based Mac Pro does not exist. However, getting 2 QuadCore Xeon from Intel and installing them in the current Mac Pro is the way to get a 8-Core-powered Mac Pro quite easily (does not mean it is cheap).
ZDnet has installed 2 Quad Core Xeon 5355 clocked at 2.66GHz in a Mac Pro originally powered by 2 Dual Core Xeon 3.0GHz.
Results are following our expectations and the theory. Only applications able to benefit from multicore architecture sees improved performance when moving from 4-Core @ 3.0GHz to 8-Core @ 2.66GHz. Only Cinebench is really boosted by doubling number of Cores.
This proves that one will first need to optimize both code and applications to really benefit of architecture with more than 2 or 4 Cores. Otherwise multicore CPU will become the new default marketing argument as MHz has been in the past.

A report from Bluesjazzyman.

as short email to mention that the160GB HD available as BTO for the MBP is a Hitachi TravelStar (5400rpm).

This is a good news, we consider this 2.5’’HD as the best one currently available on the market. You might want to read again the article we have published about it (voir l'article ici).
But be careful, not all MBP with a 160GB HD as a BTO will come loaded with this great HD, it might change according to the real availability of this product on the OEM market.

Rumors are again spreading about a forthcoming iPhone. After predicting it for years, once it will come true for sure :)
So the current rumor announces that Foxconn will manufacture the iPhone (same contractor in charge of the popular iPod and the cursed Airport Express). This would imply that Apple will ask a contractor to take care of iPhone production while Cupertino could have collaborated with well established mobile phone manufacturers such a Nokia or LG (not really sure that Apple wants to collaborate with Sony-Ericsson on this project). We think that such move would be risky as mobile phone technologies require skilled R&D and manufacturing teams.
The website http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com is even claiming that CNN has been mentioning this rumor to simply increase traffic on its website...

One can always delete a file by mistake, and it is often a pain to recover them if no backups have been made.
According to one of the screen captures of Leopard published on aeroxp.org forum, Apple might introduce with Leopard a data recovering tool.

This data recovering feature will be integrated in Disk Utility. Of course with such system, chance to recover deleted data are the best when data have been recently erased, files and HD not too much fragmented, etc.
Maybe Apple will also provide an integrated defragmenting tool in Leopard?