Monday March 03, 2008
- A Blu-ray reader almost installed in the MacBook Pro? - Lionel - 20:59:20
According Apple Insider, Apple wanted to propose a MacBook Pro Penryn with a Blu-ray reader. However this was delayed due to quality problems of the device, certainly the BC-5600S, the only device that could fit into these machines.
The other problems are related to the battery life of the computer when reading these disks. In effect, the blue laser consumes more power than the DVD reader and also the decoding of these videos (H.264 for the Blu-ray) uses an enormous amount of processor power.
This last point can be largely overcome due to the latest generation of video cards. Hardware.fr illustrates this problem in an article.
However, most video cards do not help at all, thus the processor itself must do all the decoding. On a portable, one will have the fans running at full power and one can not get more than 1 hour of use on battery power. However, newer cards, like Radeon HD 2600 XT or Geforce 8800 based on the GPU G92 (such as the 8800 GT) already manage to give a big help to the CPU. The Geforce in particular make it possible to decrease CPU load by more than half of what is already colossal.
However, it will be necessary to go even further, and to reach only 20 to 30% of this load otherwise the battery power is not sufficient. It is necessary that the processors enter this low power mode.
While waiting, and if Apple resolve their problems with the AACS LA, it will be already interesting tp propose this solution for the Mac Pro, a machine that has enough power to read and to author this type of media.
[translation by crispin]
- Sony Offers BD Players Supporting for BD Profile 2.0 - Lionel - 15:20:15
As SONY won the battle for the blue laser-based HD video format, the company is now offering BD player supporting BD Profile 2.0. Such models sport an Ethernet output allowing them to recover add-ons and updates directly from the web. Of course, purchaser of previous BD players will not be able to update their units to BD profile 2.0, despite owners of the PS3. In USA, some consumers are already waving the flag of a potential class-action against SONY.
Previous BD players remain compatible with BD profile 2.0, but will not have the system requirements necessary to get access to new features or inline add-ons.
[translation by Linathael]
- Microsoft Cuts Prices for Vista - Lionel - 15:12:37
In order to push Vista adoption among PC users, as most of the current Vista sales originate from OEM and news hardware sales, Microsoft decided to cut prices for Vista. Users will save from 30 to 80USD depending on Vista version.
Despite claims from Redmond's giant, sales of the new OS are not rocketing as expected, and many Pc users are still living happily with XP, or even downgraded new Vista-loaded hardware to previous XP for several reasons, among:
- Vista is much more resource consuming than XP.
- Vista requires a rather powerful graphic card to enjoy all 3D effects available from the system.
- Several applications were and are still incompatible with vista.
- Adding or removing a components or a peripheral is truly a pain with Vista (checking serial numbers, etc.)
- The 64-bits version for Vista is expensive and only few drivers and not optimized drivers are available.
It would also be interesting to get the full figures for OSX, putting into balance the usage of Leopard on older hardware to the adoption of Leopard via the purchase of brand new hardware models.
[translation by Linathael]
- New Intel CPUs for Ultraportables - Lionel - 15:01:28
Source : Dailytech
Intel has officially launched its new Silverthorn processors dedicated to ultraportable and mobile devices.
As illustrated by the photo, those CPUs are tiny, but engraved with a 45nm process and packing all technology advances available from Intel. they will include 47 million transistors, and sport several features such as:
- compatible with x86 instructions
- very low power consumption: 0.5W at 500MHz to 2.5W at 1.8GHz.
Intel plans to offer those CPUs at an aggressive price in order to quickly capture a large part of the market share. Such CPUs will find their ways in ultraportable and multimedia mobile devices, and why not in the future iPhone 2?
[translation by Linathael]
- This only happens to other people - Lionel - 10:39:02
Even though we often report problems and breakdowns of machines, until now we have been little affected by such problems.
This period of normality ended this weekend. We relate the facts to you and the way in which they appeared with an aim of recalling the origin of this problem in detail - such a procedure leading us almost to a diagnosis.
The initial problem that we had on this machine was an increasingly frequent tendency to refuse to wake up and instead to reboot. We ignored this problem and it was the only one which we had to complain about with this Mac Pro.
However this Saturday, we have decided to start intensive tests with the idea to publish them. During one of these tests, particularly heavy on the RAM, the machine had a Kernel Panic that the logs associated with a memory card.
We then started by installing a clean system, however when the machine completed this some hours later the situation was the same.
Thus we thought that the RAM that we have added created problems and took it out. To test : we started doing the hardware tests of Apple available on the installation CD of MacOSX by hold the key D
on booting the machine.
In spite of the fact that we returned to the original configuration (4x 1GB Apple memory), and that we put all the original equipment on the machine (engraver, hard disks, video card...), the situation did not improve, the machine abruptly restarting during the tests.
We nevertheless continued to test all the possible pairs of memory cards and swapping the memory riser cards, the situation still degraded.
At the last restart, the machine made a kernel panic when it reached the desktop, and since refuses to start up at all.
On pressing the start button, the fans start up, but nothing else. One sees just two red LED on the motherboard between the two memory cards. We did not succeed in finding their significance but the red is seldom the color of the good news.
We presume that the problem comes from the motherboard (certainly) or perhaps from one of the two memory risers.
If we had to bet, given the rapid progression of this fault, we would guess that it is related to the one of the connectors of the mother board on which the memory riser boards are fitted. Our actions of continually plugging and unplugging the memory cards have probably broken the bad solder joint.
The machine will be deposited at the after-sales service this morning. We will keep you informed of progress, Attention, this does not put in doubt our thought on the MacPro. It is by far the best Apple machine and probably the best computer in this category. They are well conceived and the finish is of good quality
[translation by crispin]
