According to sources in Taiwan, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices will beat its main rival NVIDIA in the race for the first DirectX 11-ready GPUs. The company has reportedly been ready to unveil the new models for some time now, but the much anticipated release has been stalled due to issues with TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process , which still requires some tuning. Despite the reported problems with 40nm chips, AMD is expected to announce its first DirectX 11-ready graphics accelerators by October this year.
Just days away from the Computex 2009 kickoff, details on AMD's next-generation GPUs emerge, with claims that the chip maker has an ace up its sleeve, compared to its main rival, NVIDIA. In a recent article, Tim Smalley from bit-tech cites Taiwanese sources close to both AMD and NVIDIA, which confirmed that the very first DirectX 11-ready GPUs would be announced in October this year, pretty much in line with the release of Microsoft's next-generation Windows 7 operating system.
Codenamed RV870, ATI's upcoming GPU will be at the base of a new family of video cards, which the chip maker intends to launch in the same way as the Radeon HD 3000 and 4000 series. This basically translates into the fact that we are going to see another dual-GPU high-end graphics card from ATI featuring the company's flagship GPU.
On the other side there's NVIDIA, which is said to have already taped out its GT300 GPU, but which also has problems with TSMC's 40nm node. The Santa Clara, California-based manufacturer will try to deliver a chip that will be ready to maximize performance and energy efficiency, as well as handle the general computing tasks that GeForce GPUs are known for. Unfortunately, a release date for NVIDIA's GT300 is yet to be confirmed.
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Microsoft first introduced multi-touch in Microsoft Surface. Since then, the Windows and Surface development teams have been collaborating closely on bringing multi-touch to Windows, and last year demoed a few applications they created to run on Windows 7. Today, the company unveiled the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7.
The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 is a set of six multi-touch optimized applications and games that are designed to truly showcase the capabilities of Windows Touch in Windows 7. It consists of 3 casual games, and 3 Microsoft Surface applications that have been created for Windows 7.
Microsoft Surface Globe pretty much puts the whole world in your hands (well, kind of!). It uses the Virtual Earth 3D engine to display a 3D version of the world. Using multi-touch, you can navigate to different regions, get local information, and "pin" your favorite locations. You can even "fly" around 3D models of buildings in some cities. The Microsoft Surface Globe was one of the apps Julie Larson-Green demoed at last year's D: All Things Digital conference.
Microsoft Surface Collage! allows you to take your favorite digital photos and arrange and resize them using only your fingertips with. Once you have your photos in an arrangement you like, it's simple to save your collage and make it your desktop background.
Microsoft Surface Lagoon is a screensaver that you can interact with using multi-touch. It recreates the natural environment of water and schooling fish. It is really relaxing to run your fingers through the water and hold your finger down and watch the fish gather around.
Microsoft Blackboard is a puzzle game of physics. By creating a nifty machine on a virtual blackboard. Use gestures to rotate and resize gears, fans, seesaws and more to move balloons and balls toward the light bulbs - and victory.
In Microsoft Rebound, you use your fingers to propel a ball and annihilate your opponent. Play against the computer or challenge a friend and battle it out in the electrified court to see who the champion is.
Finally, with Microsoft Garden Pond, you can guide your origami creations to peaceful areas on the pond or direct them with gestures to complete goals that have been set for you. Gently move the origami by making ripples in the water.
In order to use the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 - you'll need a Windows 7 PC that supports multi-touch. The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 will be available to PC makers (OEMs) who will have the option to pre-install some, none, or all of the applications available in the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 on PCs designed for Windows Touch (PCs that meet the logo requirements for Windows Touch) - so you should start to see these applications showing up on some touch PCs around the time Windows 7 is made broadly available.
While companies with a consistent tradition in browser development such as Microsoft and Mozilla are taking years to advance Internet Explorer and respectively Firefox from one version to another, Google is going through Chrome releases like its has been producing it since the dawn of the Internet. Just a week after it left version 1.0 behind and launched v2.0 for the general public, the Mountain View-based search giant has kicked Chrome up a notch and all the way to version 3.0. As of May 27, Google 3.0 Build 3.0.182.2 is up for grabs via the Developer channel.
“Google Chrome 3.0.182.2 has been released to the Dev channel. Highlights for this release: Google Chrome now supports the video tag. Auto-spell-correct flag will fix common typos like "teh" for "the" in the blink of an eye. Various bits of UI clean-up (toolbar and dangerous download bar paint issues). Multiple crash fixes,” informed Anthony Laforge, technical program manager.
Laforge also pointed out that there was an issue with this release, but that the next development milestone provided via the Dev channel would resolve it. “The font in the browser's user interface is very small in most non-English languages. This will be fixed in the next Dev channel update.” Along with the delivery of Chrome 3.0.182.2, Google has also taken to the next level the browser's rendering engine and the JavaScrip engine. In this sense, the Mountain View company's latest iteration of its open-source browser took WebKit to version 531.0, V8 to 1.2.5.1 and Gears to 0.5.21.0.
At the end of the past week, Google started serving Chrome 2.0 Build 2.0.172.28 to all users downloading the browser through the Stable channel, replacing the last build of Chrome 1.0 available. It took the search giant just eight months to go from Chrome version 1.0 to Chrome version 3.0. This while Mozilla will release Firefox 3.5 at least a year after Firefox 3.0, and with Microsoft having offered Internet Explorer 8 in March 2009, after launching IE7 at the end of 2006.
Release Notes ver 3.0 (Build 3.0.182.2)
"Originally posted May 27, 2009 2:29 PM by Jon Conradt [ updated May 27, 2009 8:39 PM by Mark Larson ]"
- [r16414] Fixed video not loading properly for a WMP stream. (Issue: 8973)
- [r16428] Correctly draw toolbar bottom border when window is maximized. (Issue: 11696)
- [r16446] Fixed the "Dangerous download" bar, and certain other UI elements, drawing improperly on the screen. (Issue: 12010)
- [r16467] Implemented new tab and window API events for extensions. (Issue: 11200)
- [r16485] Bookmarks Extension API had issues processing some bookmark titles. (Issue: 11431)
- [r16632] Pressing F1 will now take the user to the correct language help page. (Issue: 5909)
- [r16672] Changed the UI for HTTP/FTP auth challenges to include the server's port. Instead of "www.foo.com" it will now say "www.foo.com:80" to be explicitly clear what the target server is. (Issue: 12073)
- [r16683] For find-in page, if a search term appears underneath the find box, the find box will move out of the way to uncover it so the value is not hidden. (Issue: 12463)
- [r16695] Fixed Google Chrome being "unable to connect to localhost" when there was no internet connection. (Issue: 5234)
- [r16737] Page elements no longer remain highlighted after being inspected. (Issue: 11766)
- [r16749] "Fonts and Languages" no longer improperly goes behind the browser when closing the "Languages" dialog. (Issue: 10923)
- [r16757] Fix sluggish omnibox response when there are hundreds or thousands of bookmarks. (Issue: 6646)
- [r16760] Middle clicking on a bookmark from the bookmark manager now opens that bookmark in a new foreground tab. (Issue: 7788)
- [r16786] Pressing F3 in a new tab will now search for the previously searched for term from any other tab. (Issue: 12468)
- [r16864] Ensure that user scripts get properly unloaded when they are deleted from the user scripts directory, without requiring a browser restart. (Issue: 12170)
- [r16878] Set focus correctly when dismissing plugin context menus by left-clicking on the containing webpage. (Issue: 8988)
Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference in Southern California, Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak said Jobs didn’t “seem to be in a health crisis.” Moreover, Woz added, Steve Jobs was “healthy, energetic” and “doesn’t sound like he’s sick,” according to the WSJ. However, Woz did mention he hadn't actually asked Apple's CEO directly about his health
During the interview, Woz suggested that we should just trust Jobs. Apple's CEO wrote an open letter to the Apple Community, as well as an e-mail to Apple staffers, saying that, “In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”
Based on these statements, Woz told NBC that, “We should just trust him, what he says is what we ought to accept.” He noted that, regardless of how much info Jobs would disclose, people would always want more, and even suggested Jobs' leave could turn out to be a potentially positive move for the company.
“What do you do when you rest, sometimes your mind floats,” Wozniak explained, suggesting that the break could allow Jobs to develop “better concepts and products and ways that the future could be, the way that we live our lives [...] more than almost any individual could, probably a great great thing for Apple.”
On the eve of AMD delivering Istanbul, its first six-core chip, months ahead of schedule, Intel did a bit of thunder-stealing and started talking up its coming eight-core MP chip, the Nehalem-EX, which won't be available in systems until early next year. That's around the time AMD is supposed to start shipping a 45nm Opteron part called Magny-Cours with eight to 12 cores, figuring that OEMs could have 2P and 4P systems out in the first half of next year. Intel is shooting for bigger game than Istanbul. It wants the 45nm EX to take a big bite out of the small but profitable RISC market, where Sparc and Power live, even if it cannibalizes some of Intel's own high-end Itanium business in the process. Intel brought IBM along to the preview Tuesday to say that it'll be selling eight- and 16-socket "eX5" systems built out of the Nehalem-EX around this time next year. IBM is apparently one of 15 eight-sockets-and-above design-wins that Intel has gotten so far from eight OEMs for the chip. Intel already claims RISC migrations to its first quad-core MP Xeon, the 7300, as well as its first six-core Xeon, the 7400, citing accounts such as Aviza, BMW, Lockheed Martin and VeriSign. It claims a major industry shift to x86 systems above four sockets and figures the EX will simply expand its addressable market. To push the shift, Nehalem-EX borrows RAS features from its cousin, Itanium, such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery, which will ensure that data errors are fixed without restarting the system. It says the facility is particularly important in virtualized systems. All the live VMs won't have to be migrated to fix a rare but confounding error on the CPU, memory or I/O in one of them. The feature requires negotiations with the operating system or virtualization software and Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell and VMware have signed up to enable it. Intel, meanwhile, has delayed its next-generation Itanium chip Tukwila by maybe nine months to enhance its application scalability so it can reportedly capture at least one very large high-end Sparc server customer looking to bolt because Sun is getting sold. Intel's using the Nehalem and Itanium like a pincher to squeeze the RISC market. The Nehalem-EX is advertised as "the greatest Xeon performance leap in history." Compared to the company's current top-of-the-line part, the six-core Xeon 7400 that it delivered in September with an old, slow front-side bus, the EX is supposed to deliver 9x the memory bandwidth and better than 2.5x the database performance, 1.7x the integer throughput and 2.2x the floating point. The single EX chip will support 16 threads with Hyper-Threading and 24MB of L3 cache, all more than Dunnington. It will also double memory capacity with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket and offer four high-bandwidth chip-to-chip QuickPath Interconnect links. Like the existing Nehalem EP, aka the Xeon 5500, which is limited to two sockets, the EX offers Turbo Boost so users can tinker with the clock speeds of individual cores. Otherwise Intel wouldn't talk clock speeds. Nehalem-EX will be able to produce large-memory two-socket through eight-socket systems capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously without third-party chips to glue the platform together. Greater socket counts like, say, 32, will come with third-party chipsets like IBM's eX, which already lets it go to 16 sockets with Dunnington. Server platforms group marketing general manager Boyd Davis said Intel will keep pushing the Xeon. Itanium, despite continued poaching, is expected to continue on the strength of the Unix, OpenVMS and NonStop software that runs on the thing. Nehalem-EX is supposed to go into production later this year.
Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices is expected to update its series of Opteron processors with the introduction of the first 6-core chips for server systems. According to a recent report, the chip maker is planning the release of 'Istanbul' for later this week, which will allow it to gain more market share from its main rival, Intel. The report suggests that the company's first 6-core Opteron processors will be launched as part of the new Opteron 2400 series.
"All the videogame parlours went the way of the Dodo bird and now we're all playing at home, and someday we'll be playing directly on our TV sets, bypassing all of the platforms,"Famed movie director Steven Spielberg told the Guardian.
"In the short term I would love to start seeing 3D games being developed with a good pair of glasses [where] we get a real three-dimensional experience in front of an appropriate monitor that is designed just for 3D," he added.
In addition to his impressive list of movies includes Jurassic Park, Jaws E.T. and Indiana Jones, Spielberg is also the creative mind behind the Wii Boom Blox series.
"And after that will certainly be virtual reality, which just like 3D, that came and went in the 1950s, and now it's here to stay in movies. I really think virtual reality, which experimentally came and went in the eighties, is going to be redeveloped, just like 3D is being redeveloped today, and that's going to be the new platform for our gaming future."