I find this bit of news humorous.  It’s no longer a surprise when a company will announce they’re very skeptical about transitioning their systems over to Vista.  But according to the Inquirer, there was an internal memo circulating that said Intel will not use Windows Vista in any of their internal corporate computers.  Now what is even more interesting is that Intel has full access to Vista’s source code and may even know it better than Microsoft since the operating systems need to work fully with Intel’s processors.  Does Intel know something more in-depth about the operating system than meets the eye?

What will Intel use for their own computers?  The other two options are Linux and Mac OS.  Microsoft’s Windows 7 is still about 1.5 years away from release and even with that Intel is not holding their breath.  Was this a wise decision by Intel leaving Microsoft out in the cold?  Time will tell.  As they say, the bigger they are the harder they fall.

Nvidia rolled out its next generation 200 series GPU’s today.  The GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280.  These GPU’s are fabricated on a 65nm process that uses 1.4 billion transistors.  Nvidia claims that the new GPU’s average a 1.5x performance boost over GeFrorce 8 or 9 GPU series.

Now these numbers may be impressive but I can only imagine what the power consumption on these beasts will be.  The rest of the world is trying to be more conservative in terms of reducing dependency on oil and becoming more ‘green’ friendly but these units will definitely drive the electricity bill up.  Nvidia should push into the 45-55nm process arena like ATI to reduce the additional power overhead.

HP’s VoodooPC sister company has announced the Envy 133.  Debuted as just 1.75cm thick compared to the Apple MacBook Air’s 1.90cm thickness.  The Envy 133 will be available to market on June 20th of this year and will become the worlds thinnest consumer based notebook PC on the market.  Sporting a 13.3″  1280 x 800 LED back-lit screen with an ExpressCard 34 slot, 80GB 4200RPM Hard Drive, and an HDMI port.  Apparently the unit also comes with a USB 2.0 port and a combo eSATA/USB 2.0 connector but appear to be integrated on the AC adapter.  The AC adapter port also seems to be flexible and has the ability to addon a multi-format DVD writer.  Additionally, the Envy 133 has Bluetooth and 802.11n built-in.  The battery that comes with this unit seems to only have a battery life of 3h 45m compared to the Apple MacBook Air claimed 5 hours.  Still, this is not a bad alternative to the MacBook Air.  They could try to tweak a better battery life into the next revision.  Maybe switch over to a solid state hard drive to conserve power.  Needless to say, at least it has a removable battery, unlike the MacBook Air!

The rumors have been manifesting throughout the blogworld about an upcoming Dell Inspiron “Mini”due out later this summer.  We can only assume this model would fight the Asus Eee for market share in the ultra portable segment.  Judging by the picture’s at Gizmodoit appears the unit will have an 8-10″ wide screen display.  Although Dell has been tight-lipped about any specifications or even acknowledgement that this unit even exists, most likely it’ll sport the new low powered chips from Intel.  The Intel Atom along with Windows XP would be especially ripe considering Microsoft’s Windows XP extension for portable computers and licensing.

Intel today announced a super-small34nm process based 32Gb flash chip in a joint venture with Micron.  Intel plans to integrate the chip into solid state drives in the 80GB-160GB arena.  Unfortunately with the declin(ed)ing economy consumers will not be willing to pay extra hard earned cash for the more expensive SSD units with minimal performance enhancements.  Intel’s flash memory business has been in the dumps lately but they’re hoping this technology takes off in the enterprise sector first to drive down prices for consumers later on.  As soon as the units reach the sub $1/GB price arena with significant performance increases over standard hard drives then the consumers will jump on board.

I saw this article over at hdguru.com and thought it was worth a post.  The article explains how to research and haggle the HDTV of your dreams to an affordable price.  The members over at hdguru.com are not fans of extended warranties, accessories like overpriced Monster HD cables, or any of that nonsense.  Apparently, local and regional chain stores are the best bet as the salesmen are paid on commission.  Here you can actually haggle the price if you walk in the store knowing exactly what you want.  They all want to make a sale so chances are they will work with you.  Keep in mind, they’ll lower the price of the HDTV to lure you in but make up that lost profit by trying to sell you the extended warranty, delivery, installation, accessories, etc.  Read the article over here for more.

Google Android project leader Andy Rubin did not officially announce this type of online store but he almost guaranteed that it’s on the way.  The Android community will be a field day for open source developers but the Android store is supposed to allow consumers to purchase these applications and forward those funds to the applicable developers.  A perfect harmony of buyers and sellers uniting in one happy open source world or so we think.

“It would be a great benefit to the Android community to provide a place where people can go to safely and securely download content and where a billing system would allow developers to get paid for their effort,” he said. “We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t provide something that helps developers get distribution.

Of course, if Google opens an Android app store, there’s no guarantee it will actually show on every Android phone. There’s no guarantee any of Google’s tools will actually show up on phones.”

Samsung has announced the fastest 2.5″ SATAII 256GB Solid State Disk drive in the world.  Boasting impressive specifications that blow any other SSD on the market out of the water.  It can also hold its own on the performance side with a 200MB/sec sequential read speed and a 160MB/sec sequential write speed putting on top of even standard 3.5″ hard drives out today.  Samsung showed off that it is also the thinnest SSD unit to date with a very low power consumption of 0.9 watts while active.  SSD will eventually revolutionize the computing and mobile industries to make them faster while consuming less power.  But we are still a few years away as the prices are still out of the realm of consumers.  Samsung expects mass production of these units by the end of this year and a 1.8″ equivalent is expected by Q4 of 2008.

It was a matter of time for Dell to realize that their acquisition of Alienware would compete directly with their Dell XPS market share.  So why double up on the overhead and battle two fronts against yourself?  Dell finally comes to their senses and announces that the XPS gaming series will be no more.  The XPS series has been cheaper than Alienware models of similar specifications even before the acquisition in 2006.  Does this mean Alienware will release a more affordable model to replace the XPS line?  I guess we shall find out once all of this takes effect.

Last month, a destructive fire at an LG plant in South Korea sent inventories of batteries up in smoke at about the same time the demand for notebooks and portable PC’s went up.  A senior executive at Simplo Technology admits the shortages of Lithium-Ion batteries are badly affecting portable PC sales and will do so until Q3 of 2008.  Most likely these shortages will affect the smaller portable PC manufacturer’s as battery manufacturers have to fulfill contract quota’s with their bigger accounts.  But with this technology rat race who can tell if it will affect all laptop manufacturers in the near future.  This could possibly drive up portable PC sales this summer in addition to the rising fuel and transportation costs.  The Inquirer reports.

AMD in a surprising move announced today that they will have at least one 45nm processor released before the end of Q2 2008.  The next two 45nm processors won’t be released until the end of this year.  It looks like AMD is following Intel’s lead in this aspect.  Release the high end expensive processors first, then the more affordable mainstream processors later.  Taken from The Reg:

“First up, there’s the successor to the current Phenom X4 9750, a 125W beast that will be superseded later this quarter by a 45nm version of the chip. The new 9750 will only consume 95W. So say said industry sources, cited by a variety of Chinese-language websites.

The current 9750 is clocked at 2.4GHz, and contains 2MB of L2 cache and and 2MB of L3 cache. Its successor is said to contain 6MB of L3 and be clocked in the 2.4-2.7GHz range, which suggests to us it’ll have a model number somewhat higher than 9750.”

Yet in other news, AMD Phenom’s have reportedly hit a compatibility glitch.  Issues arise from the Phenom 9750 & 9850 125W models to work properly with the 780G chipset.  AMD just can’t seem to get a break.

Apple has refreshed their iMac desktop lineup with the new Intel Penryn processors.  The Penryn chips are 45nm process that provides increase onboard L2 cache memory along with lower power consumption.  The Reg reports:

“The standard three iMac configurations again include a pair of 20in, 1680 x 1050 models and a version with a 24in, 1920 x 1200 display. Moving up the line, the Core 2 Duos are clocked at 2.4GHz, 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz, respectively. All three CPUs sit on 1066MHz frontside buses and contain 6MB of L2 cache.

Curiously, Intel’s price list doesn’t currently include 1066MHz FSB Core 2 Duos that also contain 6MB of L2, so these are either 1333MHz desktop parts underclocked, or 1066MHz ‘Montevina’ laptop processors that Apple’s got ahead of the upcoming Centrino 2 launch.

Despite the faster FSB, the iMacs still come with 800MHz DDR 2 memory; 2GB of it in all but the entry-level configuration, which has 1GB. All three desktops have dual-layer multi-format 8x DVD writers, and 250GB or 320GB of 7200rpm SATA hard drive storage.”

Western Digital seems to think they can come into the enterprise market with their shiny new VelociRaptor drives.  WD has announced they will be releasing an SAS version of these new hard drives specifically aimed at the enterprise market.  Unfortunately, my personal experience with the 74GB and 150GB Raptors in RAID configurations has been grim.  Even Supermicro’s engineers recommend staying away from Raptors for RAID configurations in their servers.  They’re just too flaky to work properly in the array.  Hopefully Western Digital iron’s out these kinks and can become a contender in this growing market to add some competition.

The battle between CPU and GPU rages on.  According to this article over at The Inquirer, the VP of Sales over at Nvidia has stated the CPU is dead.  He states numerous references from this TG Daily articlein his argument that Intel and AMD are crapping in their pants because CPU technologies are a dying breed.
Here’s what he had to say:

“I don’t know how much this will mean to you all but for those that don’t know a war has just started that will likely be written about for years and which will affect everyone who owns a PC. Everyone.

Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam.The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell.

Today your PC plays video (its our chip that makes that work), you play games (its our chip that makes that work), you rip movies (yup our chip again) – you get the picture?”

Although Roy does have a point, the video card takes on a lot of multimedia tasks, but the CPU is needed to execute and run these processes.  Unless Nvidia has something up their sleeve where a next generation GPU can also take on these tasks, these accusations and rants are null.

A non existent gap that is.  These tri-core processors mainly exist for the AMD quad core processors that have a failed core off the assembly line.  They disable the failed core and re-badge it with a tri-core model.  AMD did not create these processors to be different, it was done to reduce expenses.  Instead of the failed processors being trashed and getting $0 for them, they disable the failed component and re-badge it to make up the difference.  Not bad in terms of a business strategy but the PC community begs to differ.  Looking at the benchmarks over at Toms Hardware that compares the AMD Phenom X3 8750 to a similarly priced Intel Core 2 Duo E6550, it doesn’t do all that well except in some multi-threaded applications.  Even with some of those the performance looks grim.

The quad core AMD Phenom counterparts can’t keep up with Intel’s latest quad core’s which is a serious drawback in this cutthroat industry.  If AMD can revamp these processors(later revision) and tune the performance for a Q2 release then maybe we can have some serious competition for Intel.  In the mean time, AMD’s only defense for market share is to cut their prices dramatically compared to Intel’s CPU’s.  These new processors from AMD kind of remind me of the 5 cylinder engines from Volvo, they took a different engineering approach.  But in Volvo’s case they don’t have to considerably reduce the price to compete with other manufacturer’s V6 models.