News for Friday, 9 November 2007

As we announced it this morning, Steve Jobs is indeed in Paris, his jet landed in Le Bourget Airport (Thanks to Justin and TF340 as well as Paul M-H for the photos below). It was 10h25 when Steve Jobs walked on the French ground.

Our friend Rob Art from Barefeats published the first results of a preliminary test aiming to evaluate the performance of the Santa Rosa integrated graphic chipset found in the new MacBook, with the GMA950 from the previous MacBook generation, and the 8600M from a MacBook Pro 2.2GHz.
If the X3100 is definitely faster than the GMA950, it is still far from being a true graphic card. When tested with Quake 4 1280x800 in high quality settings, the X1300 displays 7FPS, instead of 4fps for the GMA950, while the 8600M in the MBP scores 41fps. Similar results were obtained with Doom3.
One will have to wait for the test to be completed to make a final judgment, but if the X1300 is better than the GMA950, it is far from being a revolution in integrated graphic chipset.

AMD announced the future availability in January 2008 of the FireStream 9170, a RV670 GPU-based graphic card dedicated to Stream Computing (so lacking output).
Loaded with 2GB of DDR3, it should boost performance of workstations used for compute-intensive applications by scientists, engineers and consumers. A SDK will be available for allowing developers to benefit from this technology.
Hereafter are specifications:

Features
- Powered by next-generation ATI GPU from AMD
- Parallel processing architecture with 320 stream cores
- Up to 500 GFLOPs single precision performance
- 2GB GDDR3 on-board memory
- Double Precision Floating Point
- PCIe 2.0 x16 interface
- < 150W power consumption
- Memory export
- BIOS settings optimized for stream processing
- API and OS Support
- Windows XP, XP64
- Linux 32 and Linux 64
System Requirements
- PCI Express® based server or workstation with available x16 lane graphics slot
- 500W or greater power supply
- 512MB of system memory
Optimized for Computation
- Double-precision floating point for scientific and engineering codes
- 2GB on-board memory
- 320 stream cores drive up to 500 GFLOPS single-precision performance
- Asynchronous DMA, allowing data transfers without interrupting streams processor or CPU

Computing power of such system could put some well-known security codes in danger. Apple could take advantage of such card in a Mac Pro in order to boost performance of its Pro-dedicated video editing applications.

For those of you who could compare 802.11n to 802.11b/g, they probably easily noticed gains for range and performance. Currently all Core 2 Duo and Xeon are equipped with 802.11n. One can of course change the original Airport Card as we did it for the Mac mini or the Core Duo-based MacBook, but it is not so easy to find such card on the market. For the other older Mac models, they were no solutions.
Our partner Macway unveiled 3 new products which should bring 802.11n to older Mac models:
- 802.11n PCMCIA card
- 802.11n PCI card
- 802.11n USB2 card
All products are compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 and later, and are priced 69€ (all taxes included).

Today, the iPhone will officially be launched in UK and in Germany and news network are following this story to evaluate if this new device will have the same success in those countries as in USA.
The new iPhone firmware version 1.1.2 should also be released today, as it will be already loaded in iPhones available in UK and Germany. As we reported it previously, it brings support for French and German, but could also include some security fixes preventing the use of the Tiff buffer overflow bug currently used by hackers to SIM unlock the iPhone. If you own such iPhone, do not perform the firmware update.

According to our sources, Steve Jobs should be in France today. We could not get define reason for this trip, however he might be in Paris to visit the location selected to host the first physical Apple Store in France. He might also go in London later on to celebrate the launch of the iPhone in UK and Germany.