News for Thursday, 5 June 2008

Samsung is following the trend of other LCD panel manufacturers and announced the future availability of a 15.6" LCD panel in the 16:9 format, dedicated to notebook.
As a major player in this market, it will confirm that future notebook models will have a LCD panels set for the optimal display of HD movies.
According to Digitimes, from 8 to 10% of the notebook models available for the second semester could already feature such LCD format. Other manufacturers are also working on a larger 16:9 panel of 17.3".

After having packed 320 GB of storage space per plate last January, Western Digital announced to have further increased the capacity per plate to 334 GB. This achievement will be only used for the 1 TB Caviar GP HD available in Asia. Other specifications of the HD (7200 rpm, 16 MB cache and SATA format) remain identical to the model available worldwide but there are based on four plates of 250 GB each. Western Digital did not provide any additional information regarding the price of such high-density plate-based HD, nor its availability for non-Asian markets. The main goal of increasing storage density is to reduce the number of plates and as a consequence the reduce power consumption and increase reliability.

Following NVidia and its new GeForce 9M, AMD/ATI unveiled its new notebook-dedicated GPU solution named Mobility Radeon HD 3800. Among the numerous features, hereafter is a selection:
▪ 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
▪ Unified Superscalar shader architecture
▪ OpenGL 2.0
▪ Native PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
▪ 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
▪ ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display architecture
▪ ATI PowerPlay™ 7.0 power management technology
▪ Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
▪ DisplayPort output support
▪ HDMI output support
▪ Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats (High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats)
▪ Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
Apple will have the choice between both new mobile GPUs to power the graphic rendering in the forthcoming revision of the MacBook Pro. Interestingly, both bring hardware-based decoding of HD video, so we might finally see a BD drive, at least as a BTO, in the future revision of the MB Pro.

It is now the turn of Arstechnica to announce that they have obtained information on Mac OS X 10.6. Its code name will be Snow Leopard and its release is scheduled for January 2009. As its name is close to the current version we can guess that it will not introduce any major changes compared to the current version.
This new variation would rather be directed towards an increase in the performances and stability, the goal being to easily be able to run it on other devices than our current computers. (Already the system that runs the iPhone is a derivative of Leopard). Apple will take advantage of this version to remove the last traces of Carbon and to keep only Cocoa.
Ars also confirms that this system will not be compatible with Mac Power PC, and thus it will mark the end of the transition of Apple towards the X86. Of course, these are just rumours, but some, such as Adobe which did not want to make radical changes in the CS4 envisaged for release this autumn must be very ill at ease with the idea of these changes.

As with each update of Mac OS X, many readers contacted us to tell us about bugs after having installed 10.5.3. As very often, they are very variable and affect functions of the machine or the use of certain software.
Will know that in the majority of the cases, almost all in fact, a solution is to download the update Combo and to install it - and then all returns in order.
You will be able to download it from the following address, it comes in at 536 MB:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx1053comboupdate.html
More generally, if your system starts to pose strange problems for you, think of remaking this Combo update that has a good chance to regulate everything.
Changing the subject a bit while remaining on the same topic, we have received statements from readers whose hard drive died during an update.
Of course, no update should be able to destroy a disk. On the other hand, at the time of its installation the hard drive is strongly exercised. For a few disks close to the end of their lives, installing the update is the final straw.
Thus think of also making backup BEFORE doing the update.

LG announced two new Blu-ray engravers intended for the desktop machines that succeed the current model, the GGW-H20L.
Since the format HD-DVD has bitten the dust, the new GBC-H20L and GBW-H20L no longer can read this format. The two models are able to engrave the Blu-ray single layer media in 6x, the DVD at 16x and CD at 40x. They are different at the level of engraving the BD-R double-layer, the GBC-H20L does not have this capacity. In exchange of this function, that is not entirely useful given the impossibility of finding virgin double-layer media, it is proposed at a price of $199,95$ compared to $279,95 for the equivalent model with double-layer engraving.
LG thus continues on its way by proposing powerful models with very reasonable tariffs.