[02/28/2002]
Intel news from IDF

the register has some interesting nes from Intel. First of all they demoed an air-cooled 3GHz Pentium 4 chip (which is no suprise, as people already got hem up to 3.5GHz with extreme cooling) and a heavily cooled 4GHz chip as well.
They also introduced "Prescott" the successor to Northwood, enabling hyperthreading and using a smaller process (0.09 micron aparently). Aparently the chip should be ready sometime in mid 2003 and will come with integrated wireless networking (wow, now that's new), gigabit ethernet (wow that's even better), USB 2.0 (about time) and Serial ATA (about time too). Of course on the motherboards, not on the chip.

[02/28/2002]
Hammer shown

the register also reports that AMD showed off its Hammer chip (or prototypes thereof) near the IDF building. Hammer, AMD's 64bit chip that is to be ready soon, features HyperTransport and an on die DDR-RAM controller at full CPU speed, as well as full 32 and 64bit compatibility.

[02/28/2002]
RDRAM news

the register notes that while Intel is dropping support for RDRAM on its Xeon based systems (the servers), it will continue to support RDRAM on future versions of the 850 and 860 chipset, featuring a 533MHz front side bus. (4x133MHz). Rambus Inc. aparently is doing well again too, demoing a 4200MB/sec RIMM module.

[02/28/2002]
GeForce 4 with older systems?

FiringSquad reviews the GeForce 4 line of graphics cards using Pentium 3 based systems, to see how they compare against the GF3 and GF2 and whether they're worth the money. Now this may not seem very interesting to Mac users, as they don't have Pentium 3 systems, and are probably mroe interesting in the performance on Athlon XP and Pentium 4 based machines, but then again it might be an interesting article for those of you considering upgrading their current G4 with a GF4 in the near future, as these systems perform about the same.

[02/28/2002]
iMacs in short supply (again)

MacUser UK reports that aparently Apple is facing trouble producing enough iMacs once again. As always when they have something that sells like warm hot-dogs, they run out of weeners. Stock took a 7% dive aparently. Affected are mainly mid- and low-range configurations and relief is not excepted before April. Apple, sometimes you just SUCK.

[02/28/2002]
Gaming on Linux

FS also has an article on gaming with Linux and why Linux is having such a hard time getting anyone to develop for it. A problem not quite uncommon to the Mac either.

[02/28/2002]
Microsoft gets another kick in the ass

Macobserver reports that some industry experts and leading software companies for security products have serious doubts in Microsoft's claims about wanting to make their products secure. That pretty much matches my own opinion: They can't fix mistakes in a product that has evolved during the last 20 years, while never taking care of security. they'd have to totally rewrite everything - and that they won't.

[02/28/2002]
The ultimate Mac Advocacy

MacCentral takes note of a 50 page Mac vs PC pdf file that is now available for download, written by John Droz Jr. (never heard of him). Might be quite funny to read those raves.

[02/28/2002]
Mobile Graphics: Who's fastest?

TomsHardware and InQuest both report that in a recent comparison between the GeForce 4 Go and the Radeon 7500 Mobility, both cards performed equally fast, however, ATI's chip still draws considerably less power and thus gets the crown for the time being. I'm looking forward to seeing this chip in a future PowerBook G4.

[02/28/2002]
MOSR

MOSR has rumors on PowerBooks and others.

[02/28/2002]
Radeon 8500 preview

IMG previews the ATI Radeon 8500 in a lenghty article with poor benchmarking (almost non actually). But still it turns out to be a nice card.

[02/28/2002]
Dual 1GHz review

MG in the mean time posted a review of the PowerMac G4 1GHz DP. Here the benchmarks are already better, yet quite strictly game related.