Friday January 11, 2008

- Something in the air... - moose - 20:34:12

The folks over at Ars Technica are already on site to prepare for the 2008 Mac World San Francisco expo which starts next tuesday (we'll try and cover the Keynote live). And they have posted a couple of shots showing the first teaser banners that Apple has started hanging at the Moscone Center:

It reads "2008 There's something in the air"... as always, these teasers are done to effectively tease us, and it's difficult to know what that one means, but it smells like "wireless", so maybe we'll have some sort of new Airport-related product, or a 3G iPhone, or some form of wireless streaming of media.
My personal interpretation is that Apple will release an hoverMac: a Mac that will levitate above your desk using some sort of gravity distortion field ;-)

Well, we'll see and I'll try and post some more shots as soon as I arrive in San Francisco monday afternoon.

Stay tuned.

- New Mac Pro: Much Faster Memory Bandwidth - Lionel - 17:10:39

The main problem with the previous Mac Pro models and in fact with the first Xeon 5xxx platform was the low performance due to the bottleneck of the memory bandwidth.
It seems that the new Mac Pro do not suffer from this early adoption defect anymore, as illustrated by a benchmark assay run by Primate Labs to compare a new Mac Pro 8 cores 2.8 GHz with the previous Mac Pro 8 cores 3.0GHz.
When testing specifically the memory bandwidth, the performance gain reaches 30%, a huger value which can not be only due to higher clocked RAM module<
When looking at the overall results, the new entry level Mac pro almost put the previous high-end model on its knees. In addition, it remains unclear if the benchmark procedure takes advantage of the SSE4 instructions sets supported by the last Mac Pro models.


[translation by Linathael]

- New ATI/AMD Drivers for BootCamp - Lionel - 13:35:18

Thanks to our readers for reporting that ATI/AMD released a new set of drivers dedicated to BootCamp and available for download from the following website:
lhttp://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mac/bootcamp-xp.htm

Such drivers are only compatible for Mac Intel sporting a Radeon GPU. According to one reader, the new drivers increase performance by 9% when tested with Crysis, a DirectX-based game.

[translation by Linathael]

- GeForce 8800: Online Petition - Lionel - 10:29:35

It did not take long before seeing previous generation of Mac Pro users and/or owners to launch an online petition aiming to implore Apple to create a version of the GeForce 8800 GT that is compatible with all Mac Pros.
If this could help Cupertino to make it happen, it is definitely worth signing it up.
Details at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/geforce8800

[translation by Linathael]

- The GDrive Real Soon? - Lionel - 07:40:16

Source : Generation NT

Google has been suspected of having this in their pipeline for a long time: the GDrive could soon become a reality.
The GDrive, as can be suspected from its name, will be a storage space open to internet user with a large capacity, it's not unlimited.
It will have the advantage of being compatible with all existing OSes, including Mac OS X, and it will allow the backup of personal files and sharing files like .mac.
If it is confirmed, and especially if Google is not going to read the content of your files to make targeted advertising, the GDrive will erode a little more of the advantages of .mac which is very expensive for getting additional storage, even though the price per Mb has been divided by 5 to 7 since it became a paying service in 2002.

[translation by jwa]

- Apple to Abandon Akamai? - Lionel - 07:05:56

Akamai is a company which specializes in the transfer of large amounts of data throughout the world. To manage this they have a web of servers replicating data so that they respond quicker to the end user.
Apple, who is one of their shareholders, uses their services with the bulk of their technologies, from software updates to images shown on their website. A rumour suggests that Apple might soon be announing that they will no longer use Akamai's services but instead they will be using Google for similar services.
The rumour could hardly be credible, Google does not offer this type of service, yet:
- On at least one occasion, Apple was obligated to bail out Akamai from near bankruptcy in order to continue using their services.
- With Apple's rising market share and their products multiplying, the number of software updates downloaded for iPods, iPhones, and Macs... now uses considerable bandwidth. It is possible that Akamai is reaching saturation and that Apple does not wish to invest more.
- If Apple starts massively offering video rentals on the iTunes Store, the volume of data transferred will again explode. It will not be good if the downloads are so slow that they hurt sales.

All these points make it so that the rumour can at the end be credible enough to at least merit listening to it.
One question remains: Google does nothing altruistically, What will be the price to pay for using their infrastructure?

[translation by jwa]