News for Monday, 12 February 2007

We just released a step-by-step procedure to replace original Dual Core Xeon CPUs of a Mac Pro 3.0GHz by Quad Core Xeon X5355 CPUs clocked at 2.66GHz.
As shown below, OSX perfectly handles doubled number of cores:


Direct link to the article: http://www.hardmac.com/articles/70/
A future article will evaluate performance gain obtained by doubling core number.
PS: Thank to Intel for giving us the opportunity to "play" with their last Quad Core Xeon CPU.

According to Businessweek, Apple would be currently in talks with several game publishers, including Electronic Arts, to provide a set of popular games for the future iPhone. It would also prove that Apple could give third parties access to the iPhone, despite the "only from Apple" statement heard in January during the launch of the iPhone in January.
Games are already available from the iTunes Store for iPods, and nothing prevent Apple to offer similar titles for the iPhone in the future as everything is already on place. In addition, games for iPhone would of course be more realistic and graphically more stunning thanks to the iPhone hardware: the NVidia GPU is able to display 3D, in a much better way than the current iPods.
But beyond the iPhone, this rumor could also open up the game market for the Apple TV station. But one should also not get too much ecstatic, as the Apple TV hardware is far from being as game-oriented as the PS3, Wii or Xbox360.

Intel announced to have developed an 80 Cores chip as the result of its innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research program. Technical details of this chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco. But already from the Press Release, specifications look quite promising: 1 chip = 80 cores @ 3.2GHz consuming only 62W.
Of course, such cores are not the same ones that we can find in Core 2 Duo or Quad Core Xeon; as the Tera-scale chip only features 100 millions, but they are designed according to a different architecture making it more efficient and massively parallel.
We will not see those CPU tomorrow in our Mac, as this Teraflop research chip first the result of a program aiming to explore specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches; but it paves the way for future CPU (r)evolutions.

Pascal, a Mac user as well as a Guitar fan, decided to mix his passion to create an Apple-shape guitar. The result is impressive:

He has posted (in French) the procedure to build this guitar as well as the samples to illustrate the quality of the work.
Please have a look, the result is amazing, and the video is worth it: http://pascalguit.free.fr

Thanks to Matthieu for this report.

a video uploaded on YouTube is getting a lot of interest:

It is reported to show the beta version of VMWare Fusion and displays several different 3DMark sessions and 3D games. Of course the quality of the video does not allow visitors to conclude about a possible hoax: pre-recorded video sessions.

If the 3D acceleration turns out to be true it would mean a lot for Mac users.