News for Sunday, 1 February 2009

In a official statement NVidia indicated that William J. Dally, president of the computer department of Stanford is going to join the company in the place of David Kirk who held this position up to to now and since many years had directed the design of the chips of the company.
The news could have passed unperceived if the CV of William J. Dally was not also atypical for this position. He has no particular expertise in the world of the video cards, but has on the other hand a large reputation in the world of parallel processing and the microprocessors.
Since it will decide the future of the GPU, NVidia is thus likely to radically change direction and to approach what Intel has started a few years back, Larrabbee.
And it is certainly to better improve the gains brought by Cuda and the GPGPU that Dally was put in this position.
In the long term the graphics chips will be used more and more to replace the central processors to make parallel calculations, which is their strong point thanks to their multitude of calculating units. The goal will be certainly to enable them to treat increasingly complex instructions while keeping their force, parallelism.
We will then move forward to a new major change of data processing, by returning to what one called in the past, coprocessors.

And here again is the rumour that Apple could authorize Adobe to implement Flash on the iPhone.
According to Appleinsider Apple and Adobe would work hand in the hand in order to propose the support of this protocol, at least this is what Adobe says in the margins of the Davos summit.
We do not know if it will be proposed in the form of a Safari plug-in or under a version more limited available only as a separate application, but in any case we will witness a real reversal of the position of Apple. It should be said that Flash is greedy in resources and could thus put a heavy toll on the battery life of the iPhone.
But it could be especially a new entry door for those who want to propose small video applications.

vr-zone.com could obtained the roadmap of Intel SSD.

While the founder only start shipping its 160 GB MLC-based SSD, it will double storage capacity during the last quarter of the year thanks to thinner engraving process (34nm vs. 50 nm). They will use a new generation of controller in order to even further improve performance levels.
The second part of the roadmap is dedicated to the second generation of Turbo Memory, a technology that did and does not demonstrate the high level of expectations. With up to 16 GB of lash memory directly linked to the motherboard, it could finally unveil its true power, as one could install the entire OS on it.

As we reported it already earlier, Macrumors) and Appleinsider announce that Apple warns distributors of reduced iMac availability in near term. AS we mentioned it during our post-MWSF keynote, the iMac will be update early February and that Apple will most likely spread hardware introduction over some time in order to maintain the buzz around products, something important in such difficult economic environment. All iMac shipmet have been postponed till February 5th, being online with a potential update on Tuesday 3rd or Wednesday 4th.


The next product expected to be released soon are the new mac mini, as well as the new Mac Pro. While the Mac mini is really outdated, so could be released at any time, the mac Pro is rather expected in march as we mentioned it earlier (here).

The PCper site published an enormous test of the SSD disk APEXES 250 GB from OCZ.

To recall, this disk has as a main advantage, in addition to its capacity, of having two onboard memory controllers in order to create an internal RAID 0 and a very significantly increase of the data flows obtained with SLC memory.
It was compared with the majority of the SSD available including the Intel X-25M and also with the Velociraptor.
In short, the results are in conformity so that one can wait a bit for this RAID controller, alas also for the marque JMICON that has the merit of being not so expensive however are limited largely by their absence of cache.
The disk proves to be very fast, outclassing all the SSD during transfers of large files where its RAID helps a lot. Only the RAID of Velociraptor does better.
On the other hand, it falls behind during the transfers of small files and proves to be significantly less good than the Intel when the number of transactions that it supports a second are measured.
To give you an idea of the impact of these entry line controllers, it has a data flow 4 times lower than the Intel to startup a machine, 3 times inferior to launch a software of everyday usage.
You will have understood that this SSD is not a bolt of lightning . On the other hand, his capacity-price ratio is in its favour (around 850€).
However there is a test missing that was not done, that of its power consumption. It should indeed be higher than that of the other SSD since it uses simultaneously twice the number components.

If for an unspecified reason you encounter a problem during the first launching of iPhoto 09 and that the study of your photo library to identify the faces is not done completely, it is possible for you to start again this procedure.
Even though Apple does not provide a way of doing it via its interface, all that is needed is to put your hands a little in the dirty oil.
Start by locating your " iPhoto Library" that is in the Pictures file in your user account. Right click (or Ctrl click), and display the contents of the package.
You will then have access to the entrails of your library of photographs. It is enough then to erase the two files, " face_blob.db" and " face.db" and then to start again iPhoto; it will then restart its long work of investigation.
On this occasion, and since you will have opened the library you will be able to look at the size of the two files, " Originals" and " Modified" and to regret that Apple feels obliged to keep a backup of your unmodified photographs even if all you have done is a simple rotation.