Happy Birthday Windows..

The angst ridden teen we know only as Windows, the ubiquitous symbol of home computing has now reached adult hood. The 20th anniversary of the Windows OS is this month. At the time of its release, critics wrote it off as a mere late comer to the burgeoning Operating Enviroment market. Only a blip on Apple and Xerox's radars at the time. Time did tell in this case, and now the fashionably late OS has cornered a 95% market share and has become an international symbol for computing and capitolism. Check out PCMag's article on the milestone, including an interview with Bill Gates.

Dual-core Xeons hit the street

Intel has removed the protective wrapping from its late to the party Dual-core Xeon. Since the launch of the AMD Dual-core Opteron a while back, Intel fanatics and Dell have been chomping at the bit for these to reach the streets. Now they are here and the reviews are, "The dual-core Xeon is big, hot, and really expensive" and, as Intel has admitted, destined for a short life span. The current incarnation, the low-end 2.8, 800MHz/1MB supports only two processors (4 Cores) per system and will be phased out once the 7000 series Dual-core Xeons hit the streets. They will support up to 32 chips per system (64 Cores).

In my honest opinion, I feel Intel is still behind. AMD blew them away when the announce the Athlon 64s, and Intel has been hard pressed to play catch up since. The Opterons still seem to be the king of this market, and there really isn't much on the horizon that could slow AMD down.

ATI Launches X1000 Series Radeon Cards

ATI has announced the release of their new X1000 line of graphics cards. Benchmarks also hit the street the same day. The big question is; with only 16 pixel pipelines (compared to the 7800's 24) will ATI's massive clock speeds run as well as the flagship Nvidia chips? HotHardware has more here, and it seems like ATI may have delayed this launch too long. By allowing the GeForce 7800s to reach the market first, ATI's flagship GPUs find themselves still a few steps behind. And with the lack of any solid competition for Nvidia's SLI technology, it looks like ATI is destined to remain in 2nd place.

Next-Gen DVD War Steals the Show

Yahoo! is reporting that the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is playing out at Japan's CEATEC 2005 Electronics Expo. The big news is that Paramount, a backer of the HD-DVD format has now decided to back both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Article here.