[06/26/2000]
Days in review
xlr8yourmac has a report on a G4 that has been tweaked to run with a 133MHz system bus and gained a lot of speed (memory bandwidth at least), of problems flashing Voodoo3 cards (the problem has been tracked down to different types of EEPROM memory) and has some pics of a Mac Voodoo5 card. On Wednesday they announced that nVidia was not going to be present at MWNY with a booth, but planned to show something "spectacular" together with Apple. Guess it'll be a prototype of their first Mac graphics card. Other notes a mostly related to drive performance and compatibility.

[06/26/2000]
3dfx in trouble
the register notes that 3dfx isn't going to meet their revenue expectations again, partly due to the fact that their Voodoo4/5 cards are still delayed, after a bug was discovered that caused some trouble on some systems. As of now, both Mac and PC versions are still unavailable.

[06/26/2000]
DRAM prices rising again
the register notes that Korea expects DRAM prices to rise considerably again by the second half of the year. Prices of 9-10$ are expected for a 64Mb (8MB) chip.

[06/26/2000]
Stuffit for the RAM
Techserver notes that IBM is today showing off a new concept for memory bandwidth improvement. Their idea is achieveing twice the performance by having an additional chip compress the data in a way so it only takes up half the space in the RAM. The idea is great, the only question that remains is how fast that chip can translate the data.

[06/26/2000]
New Celerons
TechWeb notes that Intel has released their newest gang of Celeron chips, clocking at 633-667-700 MHz. They are the fastest chips so far that are aimed at sub 1000$ complete systems. Considering even the Celerys beat the crap out of a G4 now (at least in terms of MHz), I'm starting to feel depressed:)

[06/26/2000]
Sonnet announcements
MacWEEK notes that Sonnet has released a new 500MHz/1MB G4 ZIF upgrade card (that's still plenty fast) and has also confirmed that all their products will be Mac OS X compatible, which is a relievingly good thing to know. (Although I don't have one)

[06/26/2000]
MOSR
MOSR points out that the lawsuits and patent claims Rambus is throwing in all directions might hit the future of UMA2 based Macs using DDR-SDRAM. Rambus (the company) has claimed patent rights on some technologies used in DDR-SDRAM and now demands much higher royalities from other companies than before. It is believed that they are trying to force the DDR-SDRAM market on the same price level as the ridiculously high priced RDRAM market (some 799$ for 128MB or so). Another company with Microsoft tactics. For Apple that means that Hitachi can't sell their RAM much cheaper than RDRAM, which will increase the price of DDR-SDRAM equipped Macs significantly, and that frankly sucks.
Other notes confirm more or less that Apple's new keyboard and mouse are going to be shown at MWNY.

[06/26/2000]
New iMacs
AppleInsider has the latest rumors on the new iMacs expected to debut at MWNY. Quite interesting what they expect, I wonder if we will really see a G4 400 machine.