So far about every major and niche computer maker has announced a Core i7 desktop platform this week and ASUS is not to be outdone. The ROG CG6190 pairs up the powerful Core i7 Extreme Edition with the Intel X58 chipset. The press release isn’t exactly clear but it seems that the box can support up to 12 GB of triple channel DDR 1333 memory and 4TB of hard drives with the graphics being provided by a 3-way SLI and ATI CrossFireX graphics. All this computing power has to come at a price but ASUS didn’t announce how much it will...
AMD has released its new Shanghai platform, signaling a move to 45nm. The first chips out the door are quad-core Opteron parts, which AMD claims will deliver up to 35 percent more performance and up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption when idle."This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world's first x86 dual-core processors nearly four years ago," Randy Allen, AMD senior VP for Computing Solutions Group, said in a statement. "Simply put, the quad-core AMD Opteron is the right technology at the right...
Filed under: Macintosh, Apple In an interview with Om Malik, the BBC has revealed that an OS X version of its much-debated iPlayer TV catch-up service is due to debut later this month. Whilst the iPlayer service has offered an online-streaming version of the service for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux since Christmas Day last year, the service's download-and-watch feature has been strictly reserved for Windows users. Earlier in the year, the iPhone (and iPod touch) both got a sprinkling of iPlayer goodness through the streaming service, however today's announcement is the first major expansion of the download service...
The New York Times continues to redefine the role of a big newspaper with today’s release of its first application programming interface (API). Using the Campaign Finance API, developers will be able to incorporate data about who donated to which presidential candidate — the same data used to build The Times’ campaign finance map (pictured below)– into their own applications. Coming up next will be an API to access The Times’ movie reviews. Releasing APIs is yet another forward-thinking idea from a newspaper that has been quite smart in its embrace of the web (and I’m not just saying that because...
Social.IM, a standalone Facebook chat application that bypasses certain restrictions of Facebook, has been acquired by iSkoot, a company that was so far into providing carrier-friendly mobile VoIP solutions. With this move, they plan to move into mobile web applications arena, and Social.IM is definitely not a bad start, although it has lost some of its luster since Facebook launched its own in-browser chat. iSkoot’s CEO Mark Jacobstein goes marketingese on the deal: ”Social.IM has served as an instant Web communications desktop platform and we see a clear consumer integration with iSkoot’s upcoming suite of Web to mobile push...
A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How? In part, because the K8 architecture is just damn good, but...
Filed under: Desktops Intel's Skulltrail gaming platform (we're still refusing to call it the "Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform") has been out for a while now, but there haven't been too many pre-built systems based on the design -- in fact, all we've seen so far is the $6,799 Vigor Colossus desktop, which Computer Shopper just had in for a review. As you'd expect from a machine powered by two $1,499 Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors and dual CrossFireX ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, it's not exactly slow -- in fact, it was the fastest machine CS...
