Gartner, the fat lady of research firms, is singing HD DVD’s swan song this morning. Hiroyuki Shimizu, Principal Research Analyst in Japan, says in Gartner’s Semiconductor DQ Monday Report that, “Gartner believes that Toshiba’s price-cutting may prolong HD DVD’s life a little, but the limited line-up of film titles will inflict fatal damage on the format.” He goes on to call the recent price cuts “useless resistance” in avoiding the inevitable.
According to a report, Intel decided to postpone launch of 45nm quadcore CPUs due to lack of competition from AMD. AMD’s upcoming Phenom is not really that phenomenal.
ACCORDING TO A REPORT, Intel has decided to postpone the launch of its 45nm quad-core CPUs because AMD is in such a mess.
Digitimes said it learned from motherboard makers that the chippery was scheduled to launch in January next year. But now the mobo mob have coughed that the launch will be put back a month or two.
Apparently, Intel will flog its 65nm quad-core processors for a while longer since AMD’s triple-core and upcoming Phenom CPUs aren’t ready.
The chips we’re talking about here are the Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550, Digitimes said.
Source: The Inquirer
I guess Intel can rest for another 3 months. Not a good news for technology lovers though. I have at least 2 friends waiting quite impatiently for Intel Core 2 Quads.
FIA has just announced a 10-year ban on engine development in Formula One. Teams will have to submit an engine to FIA by March 31, 2008, which they will then have to use through 2017. Speaking about the decision, FIA President Max Mosley said, “There is no need to develop an F1 engine any further. The engine runs at 19,000 rpm, which is far faster than any comparable engine. It sounds good, it’s reliable and amazingly the six partially frozen engines of the current manufacturers are really evenly matched.”
Wouldn’t this slow down innovation? This just doesn’t make sense to me.
I always welcome faster speeds and better power efficiency, USB 3.0 promises 4.8 Gbps. I probably won’t need that kind of speed, but it still kinda excites me anyhow.
USB 3.0 – 10 Times Faster – In the Works for 2009
Well, USB fans, things are going to get even more interesting and soon. USB 2.0 may be fast enough right now, but with more high-definition video products arriving and bigger and bigger files being transferred, that won’t be the case forever. Enter USB 3.0, which moves the bandwidth needle from 480Mbps to roughly 4.8Gbps, 10 times faster than the current version.
The new standard, which was recently demonstrated using a new optical cable (but the same connector), will be backward compatible with older USB formats and promises better power efficiency, too, in order to decrease the load on portable devices. Possibly in the works: Better ability to charge devices over USB, some of which still require an A/C adapter or two USB connections to draw enough juice.
Specs are planned to be delivered early next year with commercial availability for 2009.
Source: Yahoo! Tech
However, power efficiency improvements are always great.
We all welcome better laptop batteries don’t we? News regarding extra longer lasting batteries excites people a lot but I doubt that it would come so soon.
Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they’re neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste). Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current.
The profile of the batteries can be quite small and thin, a porous silicon material is used to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium which is generated in the process. The reaction is non-thermal which means laptops and other small devices like mobile phones will run much cooler than with traditional lithium-ion power batteries. The reason the battery lasts so long is that neutron beta-decay into protons is the world’s most concentrated source of electricity, truly demonstrating Einstein’s theory E=MC2.
The best part about these cells are when they eventually run out of power they are totally inert and non-toxic, so environmentalists need not fear these high tech scientific wonder batteries. If all goes well plans are for these cells to reach store shelves in about 2 to 3 years.
Source: Next Energy News
Huh? 2 to 3 years? Make it 20 to 30 years. Somehow things are just going to not get approved and blah blah. It probably never get rolled out. I think technology news has owe us a lot of promised products.
[via Digg]
Sony Pictures has openly invited Toshiba and Microsoft to join the Blu-ray Disc Association. The IFA event saw an official announcement from Toshiba and the HD DVD Promotion Group about the lowering of prices for both HD DVD stand-alone players as well as for laptops with HD DVD drives, trying to fight the format war on price points.
Here is some of the points Blue-ray camp brought up:
“Never thought the price was an issue… when it comes to investing in a state of the art entertainment system with HD-Ready television and surround sound system, having to spend a bit extra to get Blu-ray, we feel, isn’t going to drive customers away. It’s the bigger picture we are looking at”.
Never thought that price is an issue? Someone should be fired here.
“The DVD format was good, but profitability only lasted for a couple of years before there was no money to be had in the hardware market”, said Marty. “We believe consumers are smart enough to realise the benefits and pay the extra accordingly.”
Actually the Blue-ray camp is being rather honest isn’t it. Everyone wants profit. The point that “consumers are smart enough to realize the benefits and pay the extra accordingly” irks me though. I am apparent quite stupid so please enlighten me.
“People aren’t interested in downloading videos at the moment. The internet is a good way of delivering music but not video”, said Eklund. “Blu-ray has a good 8 to 10 years before the Internet catches up.”
What?! People not interested in downloading videos? They actually wanted to if the price actually is more friendly. Look at what they’re doing with BitTorrent. And YouTube, which streams video is quite popular isn’t it? I conclude that this guy don’t use the internet, spend all his fortune on Blue-ray disk and is stabbing a HD-DVD voodoo doll right now.
Full report at Pocket-lint
Just last week Venturer Electronics announced a US$199 HD-DVD player. HD-DVD is region free. I don’t support either formats, but I certainly feel paying a thousand for a player is ridiculous. We shall wait and see.
In the following video, Institute for Creative Technologies shows you how they create a visual effect that resembles that of the Star Wars hologram. Neat!
360° Light Field Display
We describe a set of rendering techniques for an autostereoscopic light field display able to present interactive 3D graphics to multiple simultaneous viewers 360 degrees around the display. The display consists of a high-speed video projector, a spinning mirror covered by a holographic diffuser, and FPGA circuitry to decode specially rendered DVI video signals. The display uses a standard programmable graphics card to render over 5,000 images per second of interactive 3D graphics, projecting 360-degree views with 1.25 degree separation up to 20 updates per second. We describe the system’s projection geometry and its calibration process, and we present a multiple-center-of-projection rendering technique for creating perspective-correct images from arbitrary viewpoints around the display. Our projection technique allows correct vertical perspective and parallax to be rendered for any height and distance when these parameters are known, and we demonstrate this effect with interactive raster graphics using a tracking system to measure the viewer’s height and distance. We further apply our projection technique to the display of photographed light fields with accurate horizontal and vertical parallax. We conclude with a discussion of the display’s visual accommodation performance and discuss techniques for displaying color imagery.
More details at Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab
Not really practical unless you do 3D modelling, but very cool nonetheless.