News for Friday, 23 March 2007

Already announced several months ago, the first upgrade cards based on the PPC 7448 are now available.
OWC offer 4 models from Newer powered by one or two 1.8 or 1.8 PPC 7448. Prices range from US$399 (mono 1.7GHz) to US$679 (Dual 1.8GHz).
One can only install such upgrade cards in PMG4 AGP; PMG4 MDD is excluded.
As a reminder, hereafter are specifications of the PPC 7448 (already announced in 2004!):
- 90 nm engraving
- optimized Altivec
- 1MB of L2 cache
- power saving management system allowing to decrease CPU frequency up to 4 fold.
Of course, such upgrade cards come simply too late to our point of view, as one can find a second hand PMG4 Dual CPU for about the same price, and even a Mac mini Core Duo will be faster.
In addition those upgrade cards re not available for the Cube, a computer considered by most Mac users as a "collector" and for which the high cost of an upgrading card could have been justified.

As it was unclear if the Apple TV firmware would allow swapping the HD to get access to a larger storage space, a reader from Gizmodo reports that he has successfully installed a 120GB HD.
More details to come.

The website Techrestore published photo illustrating the disassembling of an Apple TV.

While the inside looks fully packed it remains well organized:
- one can see the 2.5" HD fixed on the top of the case that is probably acting as its passive cooling system.
- the 802.11n card is the same one we have been using to upgrade Core Duo-based Mac mini and MacBook to WiFi 802.11n.
- as shown on other photos, both NVidia GPU and Intel CPU are unfortunately soldered to the motherboard... so no chance to swap them for faster chips.
We are still waiting for our ordered Apple TV in order to write our review and test it extensively... while probably upgrading some components too.

Cooling systems manufactured by Artic Cooling, and dedicated to graphic cards, have proven their efficiency to control heat release by the GPU while being almost silent. However, current models will not be able to handle the next generation of highly power consuming GPUs, NVidia GeForce 88xx and Radeon X2900.
Generation 3D published some photos of naew cooling system developed specifically for those future GPUs.


The system is composed of 2 large heatsinks coupled to three 80-mm fans.
It also points to the currently ridiculous situation: while Intel is massively investing to reduce power consumption and offer CPUs with the best performance per watt, GPU manufacturers keep increasing performance of their chips regardless of the required power...

Apple has already released a webpage dedicated to the Apple TV in its Support section:
http://www.apple.com/support/appletv/
All articles are only available in English for the time being, they will be localized in the coming weeks.

The website Tweaktown published some photos of a Radeon X2900 XTX.

The card looks impressive with a huge cooling system, which is not there for fun or for its design, but rather to cool the beast as it will drain up to 270W of power!

Intel announced that it will release by the end of the year a new serie of CPU dedicated to ultramobile notebook and devices. Those CPUs will be engraved at 45nm, and be optimized to get the best performance per Watt ratio. If Intel did not provide any number yet, power consumption will sore be very low.
With LED-back lighted LCD displays, SSD HD and ultra low power consumption CPU being ready for H2 2007, Apple has all components required to build the long-awaited ultramobile notebook .