Despite of the “evil” number 666, Apple is likely to launch its first Intel-based PC on 6th June, 2006. The launch will be held in Taiwan. This fascinating news was leaked by Taiwan PC distributors.

Quoted:
Intel processors will be initially adopted in Apple Computer’s entry-level Macintosh PC lineup, including the Mac Mini, iBook, and iMac series, with a launch in Taiwan slated for June 6 2006, according to sources at Taiwan PC distributors.

However, Apple Taiwan refused to comment on the speculation and will only disclose the launching schedule according to the company’s official statement.

Hopefully, if the speculation is true we will see Intel-based Macintosh PC in June next year and full Macintosh product range will be converted to using Intel processors by the end of 2007.

Just few days ago, a report from the analysis done by Current Analysis suggested that AMD has overtook the market leader Intel in October as the leading supplier of computer processors for the US retail personal computer market. Current Analysis is an analysis company that delivers critical market share analysis for various industries including Computing, Consumer Electronics, Telecom Infrastructure and Printing & Supplies.

Current Analysis announced a press release regarding the analysis. According to Current Analysis, based on the data derived from the Current Analysis Retail Panel, a panel comprised of the United State’s leading consumer electronics retailers, they concluded that:

Quoted:
In October 2005, 49.8% of the personal computers (desktops and notebooks combined) sold in the US retail market utilized AMD processors, thus allowing AMD to narrowly surpass Intel, which accounted for 48.5% of the market.

Continue Reading »
AMD Overtakes Intel in the U.S. Retail PC Market

The highest speed of Intel’s Pentium D processors currently in the market still remain below 4GHz. In very near future, we will see dual-core Intel Pentium D processors using 65nm process technology available as Intel is now ready to ship them.

Well, some hardware reviewers have already received some of the latest chips to measure their power consumption and investigate its overclock-ability, AnandTech is one of them. According to them :-

Quoted:
“The new cores do definitely overclock much better than their predecessors, and they will allow any serious overclocker to reach speeds greater than 4.0GHz effortlessly. Most exciting to us was the 4.25GHz overclock that we saw on Presler, as a 4.25GHz Pentium D will truly be a formidable opponent to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2. Cedar Mill offered reasonable overclocking headroom as well, but we would have liked to see a 5.0GHz overclock on standard air cooling, given that reaching 4.0GHz is possible today on Prescott.”

However, despite the impressive reduction in power consumption, Pentium D still does not give Intel the advantage to outperform AMD.

Have you ever wonder of how those big companies come out with the idea of how to name their companies? Like me, probably you might think some of the big names are just a common word that we speak everyday like Yahoo!, or the company just simply comes up with such a name.

Well, this page gives you a better idea of knowing how the big names are created. I am not too sure about the validity of the creation of the names, but I felt it is something really interesting to share with you all. Of course, if you know the original idea of naming those names listed, feel free to tell us in the comment area. :)

I will just list down some of the famous ones :-

• Yahoo!
  It’s actually an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. See the name history. Before this, I thought it is just a simple word “Yahoo”.
• Sun Microsystems
  Now only I know it means the acronym for Stanford University Network.
• Microsoft
  Originally called Micro-Soft, which is the suppose to be a short form of MICROcomputer SOFTware. The ‘-‘ was then removed.
• Intel
  I thought it means Intelligence, but in fact it is the acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
• Hotmail
  Named as such was not because the email is hot, but because Hotmail includes the letters “html”, which is the most widely used programming language on the Internet. Initially, HoTMaiL was the way how it is written.
• Cisco
  Actually it’s the abbreviation of San Francisco, and the company logo is the image of Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Before knowing the real reason, I thought the logo is some form of signal wave. :D
• Apple Computers
  Apple is the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. LoL … This is classic !

I have just come across a very well written article comparing mobile processors, both Intel Pentium-M (Dothan) and AMD Turion64. I know, there are tons of articles comparing the two, but I found this selected review is comparing as scientifically fair as possible. In other words, the review picked laptops with the specifications as close as possible and running benchmarks more than once to produce reliable results, not like some other reviews comparing totally different laptop setups (like this one).

Of course, there are limitations of the review (which doesn’t?), such as running most of the benchmarking off the AC plug. This is because running off AC plug and off the battery would possibly results in difference on performance of the laptop.

Furthermore, you will definitely be surprised of some benchmarking results like file compression, multimedia and battery life. After reading through the review, I can’t agree more with some of the conclusions made.
Continue Reading »
Intel Pentium-M vs AMD Turion64

Ok guys, this is definitely a stunning news for anyone using Intel Pentium D processor (actually it is as stunning for everyone else :p ) !!

Intel Corp. recently revealed that its Intel Pentium D processor is actually 2 Intel Pentium 4 cores on the same package !! This announcement was made by Jonathan Douglas, a principal engineer in Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group (responsible for making chips for office desktops and servers) at the conference at Stanford University.

Quoted:
“Intel was unable to design a new memory bus in time for the dual-core chip, so it kept the same bus structure that older Pentium 4 chips used”

“We’re putting two cores in one package; it’s like trying to fit into the pair of pants you saved from college” =))

In fact, Pentium D’s bus could support two separate single-core processors, but it was far less efficient than either the dual-independent buses that will appear on the Paxville processors (Intel forthcoming server chip) or the integrated memory controller used on AMD‘s chips (a true Direct Connect Architecture !!).
Continue Reading »
What? Intel Pentium D Is Actually Two Pentium 4 !!