News for Saturday, 23 August 2008

During the MacBook Air introduction Keynote, Steve Jobs had annouced that Apple asked for Intel to reduce the size of the Core 2 Duo processor. They succeeded building a chip with a 65 nanometer process technology, 4 MB of cache, and a 20W Thermal Design Power.
Intel has announced a new model of his chip: a Penryn with a 45 nanometer process technology, 6 MB of cache, and a lower 17W Thermal Design Power. Officially, CPU frequencies will stay at 1.6 and 1.8 GHz.
The first manufacturer to use the new Chip won't be Apple but Lenovo. To stay in the running, Apple will have to upgrade his MacBook Air soon, might it be with a little bonus from Intel, regarding the CPU frequency.
We hope Apple gets rid of the ATA hard drive interface and replace it with an SATA one, synonymous of better futur upgrades.

Apple registered a patent describing how to boot a Mac in Target Disk Mode via an eSATA port. For Now, one can do so using the firewire port.
Next step will probably be the addition of eSATA ports on all Macs. This may be helped by the fact that a new eSATA standard will allow to retrieve power from port.
On the other hand, it will be harsh competition for the Firewire, at least if you don't need to use multiple peripherals chained one behind another, or if you're looking for the fastest Data transfer.