News for Friday, 6 February 2009

With the current crisis, graphic card manufacturers have a tendency to rename old GPU-model with new naming, fitting with the new series. It gves them a way to make something looks new without launching real new products.
NVidia will rename its GeForce 8800, already re-baptized as GF 9800, as GTS 240. In best case, the power consumption will be decrease, but performance should be identical. Mac Pro owners will then have the opportunity to install the newly named GTS 240 in their favorite hardware, instead of hte aging NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3...
ATI/AMD should launch similar renamed graphic card models in a near future.

Following the previous information released last week, additional details regarding the forthcoming Octo Core Xeon, also known as Nehalem-EX.

This processor will include almost al technologies currently developed/available by Intel:
- 2.3 billion transistor engraved at 45 nm
- 24 MB of cache
- 8 physical cores
- 16 logical cores thanks to Hyperthreading
- several QPI links to ensure high speed/efficient communication between cores as well as with the other components.
- RAM controller will be able to simultaneously manage 4 modules.
However, this Octo Core Xeon will require a specific chipset, and if Apple plans to offer it as a BTO in addition to the forthcoming quad core Nehalem Xeon expected by the end of March, the architecture of this Mac Pro will be radically different and more expensive than the current Mac Pro.

The RapidRepair company offers an upgrade to some iPods which equips them with a 240GB hard drive.

This upgrade is compatible with the 5G iPod, those which were thickest and are able to take a dual-platter HDD (having a thickness of 8mm). The disk without assembly is sold for $294,99 and this is somewhat a damper, especially now that Apple is interested primarily with the iPod Touch market, which has much less memory than the classic, but is able to do infinitely more things.

One of our readers, Tog, spotted a video in which a company VVM global is presenting a forthcoming visual Voicemail service for the iPhone:

The demonstration looks convincing, however, it has yet to be broadly tested and it is unknown whether the service will be available worldwide or only restricted to US.

Before we go further, we like to make the point of saying that what is described below and our criticism is also unanimous in the PC world . Thus, this is not a denigration campaign of Windows orchestrated by us or more generally by the Mac world, but a real and founded criticism.
One of the things that diverted the potential buyers of Vista was the number of versions: 6, costing a variety of prices that corresponded to more or less advanced functions. Steve Jobs made fun of this practice by praising the fact that all the versions of Leopard had the same price…
One would have thought that after the real failure of Vista that things could have changed, but nothing will change, and Windows 7 will also come in 6 different versions (going from the most powerful towards the least powerful):
- Ultimate: It will have all the functions activated
- Company: it will be only available for sale in volume
- Professional: In spite of its name it will miss the functions, Branch Cache, Direct Access and BitLocker
- Premium Home: It will be most complete with a family tariff, it will support Areo
- Home Basic. It will not support Aero
- Starter: It will be sold only via OEM and will be a stripped down version, it will not be possible to launch more than 3 applications at the same time.
It is this last version that makes us grind our teeth, since many entry line computer manufacturers will propose it knowing that it is more than limited; and they seek to make a sale based only on its name.
Some already see a resurgence of the affair "Vista Capable" that is likely to have cost Microsoft a fortune.
In short, in spite of its loss of market share, Microsoft continues to manage the release of its next OS in a position of quasi monopoly, seeking to extract the maximum from the entry line products as well as from the customers having the means of spending more.
In a certain way this is excellent news for Apple and the future Snow Leopard. Even if Mac cannot fight at the tariff level with the entry line PC, it offers, even on its cheapest machines, a completely functional system without restrictions.

Intel announced its intention to produce processors based on the architecture of Nehalem that consume less 10W. The details of this product will be revealed during the next week, but these processors will be certainly the next evolutions of the very successful ATOM.
There should not, however, be too much illusions on their performances. Intel makes a point of segmenting its market to cover all possibilities by preventing the performances of its products to overlap. The ATOM will become more powerful but so also will the Core 2 Duo mobiles, the difference in power will continue to be very marked.

According to a study, the smartphone market of which the iPhone is a part, will see their share increasing by 95% between now and 2013. This study is based on very the strong demand of devices capable of comfortably surfing on Internet, which is not the case of the traditional telephones that only offer a very degraded experience of the Web.
They will represent 23% of the total volume of mobiles marketed, which is a colossal market for the iPhone and its next variations. Attention however, the study assumes that the prices of these top-of-the-range mobiles will have to be competitive to reach these objectives. Apple will have to thus find the means of producing a less expensive iPhone while preserving its excellent ergonomics.They will probably prefer to increase the range of iPhone models following what they did with the iPod, thus always keeping a very remunerative high-end while having less expensive products that take advantage of mass marketing.