A chinese reseller offers a Hakintosh with a strong Mac-design, and we might even say more...
Powered by a Via CPU clocked at 1.3 GHz, it is a reduced copy of a MacBook Air, with a much smaller LCD display. The inverted Apple logo is considered to be different enough by the chinese law for not being identified as a counterfeited product... not sure Apple will agree on such terms.
As one would have expected it, while the Radeon HD 4870 just became available for Mac users as the high-end graphic card of the new Mac Pro, the future flagship of AMD/ATI will be the Radeon HD 4890, and it should be available in shops very soon. Some shops already have the price of this future graphic card which will be cheaper than the Mac HD 4870... around 260 €. It will sport a GPU clocked at 800 MHz (instead of 750 for the Radeon HD 4870), the 1 GB of VRAM will be clocked at 975 MHz instead of 900 MHz for PC Radeon HD 4870 et 850 MHz for the Mac Edition.
The GPU will not be identical between both cards, so one can not predict if one can flash the forthcoming Radeon HD 4890 with the MAc ROM HD 4870, but we will try it as soon as the new AMD/ATI flagship becomes available in shops
Last year, NVidia launched its own conference dubbed NVISION. It was formed to show the world the knowledge of the community and put forward GPGPU solutions, which then seemed destined to dethrone Intel in the world of computing power.
Since then, Nvidia has lost much of its wonder after the problems in their laptop-embedded chips, the return to power of AMD / ATI and also the economic crisis that has stymied sales of high-end graphics cards.
So it's no surprise that they have announced the cancelation of the 2009 show. They are not the only players in the electronics industry to adopt a low profile in hopes of soon seeing the end of the tunnel.
In France, as in some other European countries, the government decided to apply a tax of all storing media in order to compensate lost of revenues due to piracy. Indeed, they simply think that consumers will purchase CD/DVD/HD to save musics and videos illegally downloaded from P2P networks. Such limited and simplified vision is supported by the fact that one of the music giant, Universal, is a French company, with an active lobbying activities on French politicians for now years.
So, the dedicated commission had to define the cost of the tax for BD media, and decided it will be 3.10 € (Tax not included) for 25 GB disc, and 6.20 € for 50 GB disc. Such decision will simply push French consumers to purchase their storage media from other EU countries where such taxes do not exist, such as Germany. Some German websites even offer access in French to their online store to help French-speaking consumers to feel more comfortable. With such decision, our government will not really help the French e-business, bad decision when all analysts think it is one of the driving force to go through the economic slow-down...
Only some executives at Universal or/and other music/video companies might be celebrating this victory around a bottle of Champagne. At least the latest is produced in France...
Without much surprise, Intel announced to have initiated a legal action against Globalfoundries, the out-sourced manufacturing activities of AMD. Intel claims that the new entity uses without rights some of the licenses originating from agreement between Intel and AMD.
As a reminder, to avoid legal action for its monopoly on CPU, Intel agreed in the past to license to AMD some of its technologies related to CPU manufacturing. Santa Clara's giant considers that Globalfoundries is not directly linked to AMD anymore, and has no rights to make use of those licenses and related technologies. In other words, the technology transfer between AMD and Globalfoundries is not legal and valid according to Intel.
Globalfoundries is not competing directly with Intel anymore, but rather with the Taiwanese companies such as TSMC or UMC for on-demand chip manufacturing, however, any legal actions that could affect Globalfoundries would indirectly hurt AMD too. Let's hope that the judge will issue a balanced decision.
We have been talking and thinking about it for months, then working on it for a long time, but today it is here and we are happy to unveil the new Hardmac! With this new design we do not plan to revolutionize Hardmac, but rather benefit from new web technologies, to bring you a cleared and lighter website. Be fast, different, responsive and efficient remain our driving forces and the editorial content will not change. The new Hardmac offers you different ways to navigate through the news:
Fans of keyboard-browsing will have the opportunity to exercise their art with the new Hardmac, moving from previous to next news with left and right arrows. All news are organized in categories and the "filter" option will allow you to only concentrate on topics you are interested in (deselect "iPod" if you do not want to have any news related to iPod displayed on your Hardmac). The new and improved search engine is now localized top right on the website, and requests can be customized to search into news, articles and/or blog entries. You can now switch from the English version (www.hardmac.com) and the French version (www.ùacbidouille.com) by simply clicking "EN" or "FR" in the menu bar. For your information, Macbidouille/Hardmac is hosted on 4 servers, runs on a php Symfony framework, mySQL, and a proprietary application (the forum is based on IPB). We would like to thank members from Innovagency, Christophe, Richard and Vincent, for their availability, reactivity and reliability along this long project. Members from the Macbidouille/Hardmac team have also been working hard during the development, support and migration stages: Arthur, Eric, François, and Guillaume. If you are experiencing or noticing a bug, please send your report with all possible details and/or screen capture to bugs at macbidouille.com.
Hardware.fr just posted the first part of an article dedicated to the forces present in the SSD market already un early 2009. They tested the OCZ Apex disk model with two RAID controllers, and the new generation of Samsung drives, the PB22-J.
Samsung set new standards and is now 195 MB/s read and 174 write.
Note that now HardWare.fr also test its r/w once they are fragmented. Indeed, paradoxical as it is, the write cycles and the wear-leveling system, optimizing the wear of memory cells so that they are homogeneous, that these discs are becoming slower after a while, the only way to recover is to format them setting all their data blocks to 0. Note that the Samsung drive is less sensitive than the X25-M Intel, a phenomenon which may give us hope that future optimization controllers help to blur or eliminate this problem.
