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Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia takes 3D to multiple monitors (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: A lot is happening in 3D in 2010, but on the PC front, Nvidia is staying at the head of the pack with its new 3D Vision Surround platform. It's like AMD's Eyefinity technology, but with 3D added. It looks great, but you'll need at least two Nvidia graphics cards and three expensive monitors to take advantage of it. Is true 3D gaming really worth thousands of dollars to you? Nvidia is betting that it is.
The Internet

Six Major 3G and 4G Networks Tested Nationwide 115

Posted by timothy from the actually-tested-locally dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently tested six 3G and 4G networks to determine which ones were the fastest (and slowest) in 18 different US cities. They focused on data, not calls, and used their own testing script and methodology, which combined various kinds of uploads and downloads. Using laptops, more than a dozen people ran more than 10,000 tests; they found AT&T is both the fastest national 3G network, and the least consistent. Sprint's 3G system was the slowest of the 'big four' carriers, but the most consistent. When the test results were broken down by regions, AT&T led on speed in the Southeast, Central, and West, but T-Mobile took the crown in the Northeast region. Sprint's 4G network was fast where it was available, but it was surprisingly slower than 3G in some cities. The fastest AT&T download seen, at 5.05 megabits/sec, was right behind Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA. The fastest connection in any of the tests was a blazing 9.11 megabits down on Sprint 4G in the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta, GA. The slowest city, on average, was Raleigh, with average 3G downloads of 880kbits/sec."
Patents

Submission + - Are Trade Secrets and Trademarks the Future? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: The Internet's perfect copying machine makes the ideas behind copyright — now in its 301st year — largely irrelevant today: once a copy is online somewhere, it's impossible to take it down everywhere. Could the arrival of low-cost, high-quality desktop 3D printers do the same for patents, by enabling anyone to download and print off analogue objects? With copyright and patents nullified, what might manufacturing companies turn to in order to fight back against these perfect counterfeit versions? How about trade secrets and trademarks?
Music

Submission + - Do You Still Use a Sound Card?

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: After reading yesterday's Slashdot story about the ages of PC music as rendered through The Secret of Monkey Island , I started wondering about this recent piece on ExtremeTech about whether people still use sound cards. Some of the driver problems they experienced at the start of the Windows Vista days turned me off to them, and it's been a while since I had one installed on my home machine. But back in the Monkey Island and King's Quest days, you had to have one. Sure, the audio is better from integrated solutions today, but is it--and the processing cycles a card saves--really worth it? Is there any point to buying a sound card with today's technology (and if so, which one), or is integrated audio really good enough for pretty much everyone?
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Steam for Mac: Hot, Hot, Hot (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Now that Steam for Mac has been released, how is it? Pretty darn good, it turns out--if really a lot like the Windows version, and with a software selection that still desperately needs to grow. But this could be the start of something huge for Mac users, and finally wipe away the one big reason PC owners so often claim their systems are better.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Shows Off Future Product Tech

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Microsoft opened a portion of its fifth TechFair to Silicon Valley residents, demonstrating more than 15 displays which included everything from real-time translation to mobile-to-mobile networking to improved image stitching. Top two which really stood out were the translating telephone which actually used no "telephone" at all; it was a test to discover how well Microsoft's speech algorithms could interpret speech, translate it, and then speak the translation using text-to-speech algorithms. And then the Manual Deskterity, a new paradigm for a user interface; a right-handed user's left hand, for example, can be used for gross manipulations of objects, with the right can be used for fine manipulation, such as with a pen. It sounds a bit simplistic, at least at this stage. Since one of the charters of Microsoft Research is that the work eventually be moved to product teams, there's a good chance that the prototypes will eventually be made available to the public at large.
AMD

Submission + - AMD Pushes Affordability With Six-Core Phenom II X (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Bat Dude
Bat Dude writes: AMD Pushes Affordability With Six-Core Phenom II X6

It's not really a surprise, but AMD today announced its entry into the six-core desktop chip market, with its Phenom II X6 chip, which had been code-named Thuban.

This chip, manufactured on Global Foundries' 45nm process (which is used in the current quad-core Phenom IIs as well) is similar to AMD's six-core Operton server chips, but designed for the desktop environment.

0
diggs
diggIn some respects, AMD's entry is similar to Intel's Core i7-980X Extreme processor, known as Gulftown, which was introduced last month. But in other ways, it points out the different approach AMD is taking to the market. While Intel is emphasizing peak performance and "hyperthreading" (allowing two threads to run on each core), AMD is emphasizing its overall chip platform, including discrete graphics, as well as affordability.

The Phenom II X6 is meant to be paired with AMD's 890FX chip set, which adds native support for 6 Gb/second SATA drives, and AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5800 series discrete graphics boards. The chip set supports AMD's Overdrive utility for overclocking, as well as "Black Edition" certified high-speed memory. The graphics boards, which are coming out in more flavors, support Direct X 11 and ATI's Eyefinity technology, which lets them work with up to six monitors. And AMD says all the initial motherboards will support USB 3.0 through an external NEC controller. But the new procesors don't require the new chipset; they were designed to also work in existing AM2+ and AM3 sockets with a software upgrade, and in the existing 125W TDP power envelope.

The new chip is AMD's first to support what it calls "Turbo Core," which lets up to three cores run faster while the other three run in a lower power state, to better support applications that don't need all of the cores. This is similar in intent to Intel's "Turbo Boost" technology, though AMD's method isn't quite as flexible. Still, the company says it should allow the 3.2GHz model 1090T to be run at up to 3.6 GHz.

While the products do not support symmetric multithreading, AMD executives have stressed that more cores are always better than more threads, saying additional threads typically provide an extra 20% performance uplift in applications that can use them, while extra cores typically provide an extra 80% improvement. So AMD will be emphasizing relative affordability, saying the initial high-end chip, that 3.2 GHz version, will sell for under $289, much less than Intel's current six-core offerings; indeed, these chips should be priced more competitively with Intel's 4-core, 8-thread chips. I'll be interested in seeing how it performs in comparison.

Update: Here are early reviews from ExtremeTech, Legit Reviews, Techware Labs, and Toms Hardware.

Intel's 6-core Core i7-980X nearly always wins the benchmarks, but it's notably more expensive. The 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T seems to more than hold its own against the 4-core /8-theread Core i7-920, but the results vary greatly depending on the application
Graphics

Submission + - New Graphics Standard Takes On OpenCL And CUDA (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou
Stoobalou writes: We already have at least two GPGPU standards jostling for attention from multi-core coders, but compiler developer PathScale has revealed that it reckons it can better both OpenCL and CUDA with a brand new open GPGPU standard.
Government

Submission + - IIPA Cries Foul over India's copyright proposal (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by knightsirius
knightsirius writes: Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica has a nice analysis of how India's new copyright proposal to get more in line with WIPO provisions has Big Content screaming bloody murder. The issue at stake is a provision that defines piracy as copying with intent to make illegal use as opposed to just copying of copyrighted works. There is the usual rant about lost profits and creativity, but more troubling is the following excerpt from the IIPA's 2010 report to the US government about the industry being "concerned about moves by the government to consider mandating the use of open source software..." Also interesting are comments by users that follow the article.
Google

Submission + - Could Intel Atom CPUs be better for search? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Intel and AMD are stuffing huge numbers of cores into their new server chips, but bigger may not always be better. Researchers at Harvard and Microsoft have authored a paper that seeks to prove Atom-like chips may be better suited for search in some circumstances. Because of problems with query latency, however, no current Atom chip would do the job—the paper recommends eight cores on a chip in a two-socket system, something Intel hasn't designed yet, but which could theoretically be competitive in terms of cost and power efficiency. The paper will be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June. Could this be part of the reason Google recently purchased chip-maker Angilux?
Censorship

Submission + - South Park Censored (southparkstudios.com) 1

Submitted by penguinman1337
penguinman1337 writes: Apparently, all is not well over at comedy central. The heavily censored version of "201" that aired last night has a lot of people angry, including the show's creators. Apparently its ok to make fun of a religion as long as its followers don't carry AK-47's and plastic explosive.

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