Wednesday July 02, 2008

- Applehas order 50 million GB of flash memory for the iPhone - Lionel - 21:45:28

Source : Digitimes

In order not to be caught short Apple ordered for July the equivalent 50 million GB in memory chips, enough to manufacture more than 6 million 8GB iPhone or half that for the 16 GB.
In spite of these very important orders, the market of the memory flash remains very down; however these low prices really help the bottom line for Apple.

[translation by crispin]

- More than 100 GFlops under PowerFractal! - Lionel - 17:09:13

Without a doubt, we've continued to play with our overclocked Mac Pro. Alas, the heat yesterday has not served us well, and we were unable to repeat our feat at a stable 3.7 GHz. We've become content with 3.6 GHz (for an October 3rd CPU, with a 2 GHz default clock speed) is a 11% overclock the CPU. We still made some tests on this frequency.

Before we comment, we remind you that at least take a stopwatch in hand to achieve them, you must restart the machine, which is unfortunately impossible with the 2nd gen Mac Pro, which refuses to do so once overclocked. Indeed, this only helps to restart the clock to run at a normal speed. Before restarting, it is also accelerated, thus distorting the results of using this software clock to calculate the performance index.

Thus, under PowerFractal, we managed to cross the 100 GFlops barrier, reaching precisely 101019.6 Mflops (against 88880 at 3.2 GHz).
We were also impressed with Cinebench R10.
-- Rendering with a processor rose from 3693 to 4171 BC-CPU
-- Rendering with 8 processors rose from 21418 to 24319 CB-CPU
-- More strangely, the video card has also benefited from 6816 to 7741 CB_GFX
In all these cases, there is much increased performance to be had while overclocking, or just under 12% in this case. This is consistent knowing that all frequencies of the machine are boosted, the CPU, one of the RAM and the bus, and probably also the PCI-Express, which would explain the gain in the video card, especially if one considers that the limit is not the card itself, but rather the throughput. If the information arrives and leaves quickly on a GPU that is not at its peak, the performance climbs.

[translation by CliveAtFive]

- Toshiba seems determined to perpetuate the DVD format - Lionel - 16:56:51

Source: TGDaily

The DVD Forum, of which Toshiba which is the primary instigator, endorsed this new logo:

It means that soon, under a new standard, one will be able to download from home and burn DVD videos. This confirms what Toshiba said after announcing its withdrawal from the blue-laser war, namely that they would focus on sales of non-physical media. The customer could then download a movie and burn it onto a DVD in order to retain and view at will.

Of course, one can also tie this to other information that Toshiba would work toward a next-generation DVD player with a modified Cell processor and will provide an excellent image quality without having to go to a more-costly new format. The most pessimistic believe that this player will only be equipped with very advanced upscaling features, while others imagine that these new DVDs would drop MPG2 for another format to offer more modern HD on 8GB, but requiring much more power to achieve decoding and rendering, hence the presence of SpursEngine. Again, we could assume this information since Toshiba began selling laptop computers equipped with this chip.

[translation by CliveAtFive]

- AMD wants to push up its Radeon HD 4870 - Lionel - 16:47:39

Source: TGDaily

AMD has managed a nice clip with its Radeon HD 4870. These cards are very powerful and can even tease the GeForce GTX 280. Teasing is not to say exceed, of course, and to be able to boast having video cards faster, AMD seems ready for anything, in this case to offer a Super RV770. This chip will clock up to 950 MHz (against 750 for the classic version) and its memory will reach 1.2 GHz. Like any product pushed the fundamental, this card will have to be equipped with a very effective cooling system: a watercooling system, along with its advantages (low noise and low temperatures) and disadvantages (requires more space and risk leak).

The products should be announced in coming weeks.

[translation by CliveAtFive]

- Optimize heat dissipation chips - Lionel - 16:42:32

Source: Digitimes

NEC has developed new thermal probe 10 times smaller than what is currently used. The company blankets chips in order to draw up a very precise map of hot spots or cold, and optimize their operations by distributing the best workload in the most optimized areas. The ultimate goal would be to work a maximum of burden-sharing transitors to then reduce the tension and overall consumption. It is not known if it is possible to bring this technology on central processor (CPU) or graphics (GPU) chips.

[translation by CliveAtFive]

- The iPhone at APR(France) from July 18 - Lionel - 10:17:39

According to the first information which we received from the meeting between Apple and the APR, they will be able to sell the iPhone as from July 18, thus not leaving for one day exclusiveness with Orange.

FNAC and Darty should also market it at the same time, which at least makes it easy to find an iPhone for those which want it.

[Update] APR in Switzerland will have it from July 11.

[translation by crispin]

- The 'no-ink' printer of Polaroid deceived us - Lionel - 10:10:09

Two weeks ago we told you about this new printer of polaroid



The concept had captured us: the product is very compact and does not need ink cartridges - the pigments are included in the paper.

Les Numériques had the opportunity of testing this product, and the result disappointed them. The photographs obtained were not at the level of what one expects at the time when any ink-jet printer can produce good economical photographs. The images obtained have large colour shifts and the contrast is almost non existant.
We can only hope that this technology be able to evolve in the future and not sink into a hole in our memories.

[translation by crispin]

- The price of double layer DVDs starts to drop - finally - Lionel - 09:55:27

Source : Digitimes

Even though DVD engravers have been able to burn double-layer DVDs for many years, the very high price of the virgin media prevented significant sales.
Since the beginning of the year, the manufacturers have made a large effort, and have managed to produce these disks at $1 each, which has clearly restarted the sales, all at least in the countries where the royalty on the private copy is not too high.
It is necessary to remember that in France such a disk is taxed at 2€ HT due to this royalty, which acts as a brake on the purchase.
It is a great pity that in an age where all numerical cameras have sensors having millions of pixels so that often a number of photographs greater than 10 becomes a sizable storage item. Their storage (and backup to avoid loss) is taxed a number of times.

[translation by crispin]

- Mac OS X close to 8% - Lionel - 09:42:16

Net Application has published its latest reading of the market shares of various systems of exploitation used on the Internet.
It confirms the constant progression of Apple with Mac OS X reaching 7,94% during June, a record for Apple. Mac Intel represent now more of two thirds of the Apple machines, the PPC Macs continuing in a logical way to drop in proportion.
Another news that will please Apple: the iPhone now accounts for 0,16% of the machines present on the web, which is far from negligible. On the other hand, Safari for Windows does not progress and this will disappoint Apple.

[translation by crispin]