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OCAU News |
Wednesday Afternoon
(11 Comments)
(link)
Wednesday, 18-February-2004 18:16:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Big news for the day is, unsurprisingly, Intel announcing a change to their 64-bit strategy at the Intel Developer Forum currently underway. If you recall, Intel's approach has so far been through Itanium, a pure 64-bit CPU which has had only limited acceptance by the market. AMD's approach has been to make a CPU (Opteron, Athlon 64) which can run both 32-bit and 64-bit software - this has been accepted much more widely by the market. Intel's new news is that they will be producing a Xeon chip based on Prescott (the latest P4's) which can handle 32-bit and 64-bit code, in a similar strategy to AMD. Anyway, more info and lots of other stuff from IDF on Hexus (and here), VR-Zone and News.com with no doubt lots more to come.
On the other side of the fence, Mac.Ars look at Apple and 64-bit computing.
Ken says we can order a free Windows security update CD from Microsoft, but it's not clear if Australian users will get the CD or just see some information online.
Seagate has kicked off the move to 2.5" hard drives in servers with its Savvio range. Makes sense, as servers themselves become smaller, fitting 3.5" hard drives into them is becoming more of an issue.
Dan has more letters.. no, wait, glowing things this time. And porn, of course.
Tee noticed an ATI roadmap for its next video chipsets, with native PCI Express support. ATI demonstrated a PCI Express video-editing card with Pinnacle and Intel at the IDF.
Intel will apparently soon be showing off a high-performance, low-power ALU that runs at more than 7GHz in 32-bit mode and at 4GHz in 64-bit mode. Compared with existing Intel ALUs, the prototype unit increases performance by 20 percent and reduces power consumption by 56 percent, Borkar said. In the Pentium 4 family, the ALU runs at twice the speed of the chip, so the part would fit into a Pentium 4 style chip that would run at 3.5GHz.
I don't really know what to make of this page which questions NASA's motives and highlights some odd behaviour on Mars. There's a similar take on it here. Quite a few people have submitted it now and it's certainly thought-provoking, so, well, make up your own mind.
Ohls-Place have some Prescott overclocking results.
DriverHeaven wonder how much difference the new Reactor Driver 1.02.05 make to performance on a Volari Duo V8 video card.
D-Silence have an article about how bandwidth has increased over time.
Rage spotted an article about funny comments buried in the Win2k source code.
LinuxHardware have an article about watercooling dual Opterons.
From Roland: This is what does a trio of Australian musicians from Canberra. The musicians of the group, named Hypersense Complex, create their digital music using sensors attached to their hands. This generates sounds through a laptop network of Apple PowerBooks running a Python script. Pretty exotic, isn't? In "Music trio's sensors working overtime," PC World tells us more about the group and the hardware and software they designed. "The musicians load sound samples into a laptop and play them using bendable flex sensors, worn on four fingers on each hand, connected to the computer." This overview contains more details and references about this new way to create music. You can also see the sensors on a photo of the trio rehearsing in studio.
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