Apple Unveils Mac Pro

Today at WWDS, Apple unveiled their newest workstation and server level machines. The new Xserve and the Mac Pro feature Intel Woodcrest powered Xeons for a total of 4 64-bit cores per machine. There was some argument about weather or not the Mac Pro would feature Xeons or Conroe CPUs at their center but all arguments have been layed to rest.

The bad news is the as of right now all third party memory vendors are behind due to Apple's inclusion of a proprietary heatsink design on their memory chips. These are to help reduce fan noise. According to a press release the use of improperly heatsinked memory willcause more noise and heat to be generated. Not only that, but the memory is installed onto two daughter boards that come off of the motherboard. There must have been a better way to do this, not really sure what they were thinking with that.

For now that is all the news we have. Here is a link to the specifications on the new machines.

Mac Pro
Quad Core Xserve

AMD & ATI: What does it mean?

Anandtech is running a story about the effects of the AMD & ATI merger from many points of view. Good story, I found it interesting.

Check it here.

802.11N Products Reviewed

eWeek.com has a first run review of Linksys' 802.11N draft router. From what they have discovered, the draft run products seem to have problems with legacy network devices. There was also some concern regarding the range tests. According to the article the tests show promise, but the fact that they have only tested one product doesn't really show too much.

Netgear has a draft product out that eWeek couldn't get their hands on, lets hope that performs better or else the move to 'N' maybe a step backwards. At least until the committee gets all the bugs worked out.

Read more here.

Microsoft Ending Support for 98 & ME

Microsoft is finally ridding itself of its old children. The handy but now dated Windows 98 & 98 SE, and the absolutly awful Windows ME. Support officially end on the 11th of July. We have known this to be coming for a while now, but the time has finally arrived. Check out more here.

Apple Releases "Boot Camp"

Apple has helped facilitate its hardware customers in installing Windows on their new Intel Macs. They released a new boot loader called boot camp that will allow the user to choose which OS they want to boot. Check out more here.

100th Post !!!

100th post.... woot !!

MacBook Pro: Windows Benchmarks

Now that the race to get Windows XP dual booted on a Mac is over, benchmarks of course will follow. GearLog seems to be the first out of the gatew. They took the results of their study, benchmarking Windows Media Encoding, Photoshop Scripts and compared it to an PCMag benchmark of native Windows Core Duo laptops. From the looks of it, the MacBook is a tiny bit faster than an equivalent Acer offering in the photoshop test, and a little bit slower when it comes to Windows Media Encoding. Interesting stuff, check out the links above.

AMD v Intel Follow-Up

InfoWorld is running a quick and dirty Op-Ed article (click here) about the new AMD v Intel CPU news. This doesn't even touch on the lawsuit between the two.

Portable Graphics Machines Weigh In

Desktop replacements have been around for a while now. Laptops with the power of a desktop. However the graphics have always scared away hard core gamers, 3D modlers and any other users of heavily graphics intesive software. This is all slated to change with the upcoming release of nVidia SLI enabled laptops. These behomoths will sport dual nVidia 7xxx series GPUs and massive screens.

Pictures are starting to surface around the net of these machines. Bit-Tech has an article about the Rock Xtreme SLI which sports an AMD Turion ML-42, a 19" screen (1680x1050 resolution) and dual GeForce Go 7800 GTX. VoodooPC also has an offering that they are saying will ship in 45 days that sports similar specs.

These 10 lbs (low end) machines will be the beginning of the end for desktop PCs as we know it. It has long been thought that the longer laptops are around the more people will migrate to using them as their primary PCs. Once we can get the same power out of a portable machine, the demand for desktop machines will begin to fade. It is already evident in the growth the portable market has seen over the last year.

Check out more here and here.