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Even if they won’t say it publicly (and they aren’t), Apple appears pretty juiced at the prospect of developing its own chips. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal Online, Apple has been hand-picking people from all over the semiconductor industry, which also includes engineers for creating multifunction chips for use in cellphones.
One such hire includes Raja Koduri, the former chief technology officer of the graphics group at AMD. Koduri started his new position this week, while other online job postings include a call for several chip-related positions, some of which are described as "verifying functionality correctness of a high performance chip design."
While Apple is keeping silent on the subject, the company’s tight-lipped approach might be one of the reasons they’re looking to develop their own chips. Citing people familiar with the situation, WSJO says Apple not only wants to beat its rivals to market with new features, but also wants to keep a lid on its technology plans with external chip suppliers.
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 Those European Union Antitrust regulators are having a busy week, folks, and today reports suggest the EU could impose its biggest ever market-dominance related fine on Intel. [...]
 Despite its age, Windows XP is still widely used for several reasons – speed and compatibility being two of the leading ones. [...]
Two new nettops based on Nvidia’s Ion platform have been unveiled in Taipei this week, one by ASRock and the other by Pegatron Technology. ASRock’s Ion 330 trades in the oft-used single-core Atom processor for a dual-core variant, the Atom 330 CPU (1.6GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 533MHz frontside bus). Not much else is known about the PC, other than it comes with an integrated DVD optical drive.
Taking up a slimmer form factor, Pegatron’s Cape 7 comes encased in white plastic and has four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, HDMI port, 3.5mm audio jack, and a power connector for an external power brick. It doesn’t come with an optical drive, nor are there any details regarding the processor.
While these are some of the first dual-core Atom 330 based nettops to be spotted in the wild, they won’t be the last. According to web rumblings, Nvidia expects around 40 Ion platforms to show up on the markt by the end of the year, some of which are bound to come with dual-core Atoms.
Image Credit: Slashgear
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 Does this count as cheating at Jeopardy? [...]
Most parts of the country aren’t expected to see any more snowfall until next winter, but the relationship between Nvidia and Intel couldn’t be any more chilly. At odds with each other over Nehalem licensing, netbook platforms, and other tech related spats, the two sides seem all to happy to take digs at one another when the opportunity arises. For Nvidia, that means calling to question Intel’s claim that its Core i7 processor can improve game performance by up to 80 percent.
"I have a copy of Intel’s latest deck that they share with press and customers, and on there they have a slide that is called The Intel Core i7 920 Processor, where they claim that gaming performance goes up by 80 percent when you use a Core i7, said Tom Peterson, Nvidia’s technical marketing director. "Now, I was impressed by that claim, and I was trying to figure out how they could possibly say such a thing, and it turns out that Intel is basing that claim on only 3DMark Vantage’s CPU test."
Peterson went on to point out that the synthetic benchmark’s CPU test doesn’t actually measure game performance, and to say otherwise would be disingenuous. To drive his point home, Peterson showed Nvidia’s own benchmarks of a Core 2 Duo E8400 machine outfitted with a GeForce GTS 250 videocard. The PC averaged 41.6 FPS in Nvidia’s testing, and only increased to 42.4 FPS after upgrading to a Core i7 965. But after upgrading to a pair (Read more...)
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Sure, you can buy a quad-core CPU… but do you need one? Software has come a long way to support multi-threading since the first multi-core CPUs were released, but how much better are four CPU cores than one, two, or three?
