News for Monday, 8 February 2010

IBM announced to have succeeded in reaching 100 Ghz with a graphene transistor.
The transistor in question is made up of a single d' layer of carbon atoms forced into a two dimension configuration in the form of a honeycomb. It was obtained starting from simple graphite (i.e. pencil lead). This transistor exceeds by far that of traditional silicon where it is impossible to exceed 40 GHz. indeed, in Graphène, the electrons move much more quickly.
Currently, this type of transistor is conceived to be used in the military communication systems. It will need a long time before the way is found to link together billions in order to produce a microprocessor.

Today, the main video compression format is the H.264, used in BD, by Apple and YouTube for compressing video available from the web. It ensures an excellent quality of the image with a interesting compression ratio.
While it fully responds to current and probably futures needs, its potential successor is already being developed under the code name: HVC or High Efficiency Video Coding. This new format will support video with resolution reaching 8kx4K, but it also expects to directly compete with H.264 and MPEG2. The goal is to improve the ratio GB of video and quality. While it will most likely be draining more resources, it might offer higher quality for a smaller size format. However, this is again only preliminary claims and we would have to wait for first tests and beta to evaluate the real performance.

For a moment the traditional manufacturers of hard drives thought of making hybrid hard drives containing, in addition to the platters for storage, some flash memory which could be used as a buffer and thus accelerate reading and writing. The idea was quickly abandoned, the cost of the FLASH forcing them to use only a small quantity that nevertheless increased the price of the discs without bringing significant real performances. It was in the same way for the experiments of Intel and of Microsoft to manage memory flash to make a cache disc. Since we now have the choice, that is to say the SSD, with its speed but high price and low capacity or the hard drive, unbeatable in terms of the ratio of capacity to price, but quite insipid in performances when one has tasted the SSD. The SilverStone company tries ressusciter this concept by releasing a product. 

The unit functions by connecting a SSD on the SATA interface between the computer and the traditional hard drive. It becomes then a comfortable buffer (according to its size), several tens of GB and manages the writings deferred writing onto the hard drive. It would of course be necessary to test the solution to know the real performances, but they could prove interesting if the algorithms of management of the readings and writings are rather powerful and predictive.
PS: This type of solution will be very difficult to set up in Mac that does not have eSATA, two positions for the hard drive, or in the drawers of Mac Pro that prevents any originality in the connection of the hard drives.

Last October, Apple updated its Airport Extreme and Time capsule models to further improve performance. We have been testing both products and we could confirm the faster data transfer speed in optima conditions. However, it seems that many users are having problems with the 5 GHz network as reported on Apple forum: New Extreme (slow on 5 Ghz but NOT on 2.4Ghz?!?!?). If you remain very close to the station, performances are excellent, but they dramatically dropped as soon as you slightly move away from the station. We also experienced another problem, while the effective range has increased, the reliability of hate network dropped, usually connection is broken when the wireless link is heavily used. So in summary, if you remain close enough to the station, everything is fine, as soon as you move away, performance and reliability drop. So, we rely on Apple to provide an updated firmware for both devices in order to finally get long range performance and reliability as advertised for both models.

there is apparently another major issue affecting some Airport cards found in Mac mini and MacBook models after migrating to Snow Leopard as reported by one of our reader below as well as on Apple forum:

My son basically cannot get a reliable connection with a two and half year old white Macbook since installing SL. The Airport update did not fix anything. If you want to get a feeling of the detailed situation of many people (33 pages, 47000 readers!) look at:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2142725&tstart=0. I can assure it, it's hell when you cannot use wifi on a laptop. Beyond home, where he can get close enough to the router, my son can no longer use the mac in the library where he studies.

Here too, let's hope that Apple could identify the problem affecting apparently the Airport card found in those computer models when they are running Snow Leopard, it sounds like an obvious issue with Airport driver in SL.