VIA Technologies, seeing that adoption of its self-developed C7 processor by industrial PC (IPC) makers in Taiwan has been short of expectation, is seeking to deploy its processor in other markets such as digital consumer electronics, entry-level notebook PCs and thin-client PCs, according to industry sources.
It is our final processor price/performance article of the year - and what a year it was! 2006 not only saw dual-core processors entering the mainstream, it was also a year of new milestone releases and fierce price battles. In short, the heart of your computer deserves your attention again.
As our last installment for 2006, we're going to take a look at the big shifts that happened this year, how we got to where we are today and what we can expect for 2007.
Sunnyvale (CA) - OCZ announced that it will expand its product portfolio from enthusiast memory into the graphics card space. The first device is a card based on Nvidia's 8800 GTX graphics processor with G80 core.
Nvidia's Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS in pictures ...
VIA Technologies has announced VIA EPIA EX-Series Mini-ITX motherboards, the company's first series of platforms featuring the new VIA CX700M2 system media processor.
According to industry sources, plans to produce CPUs for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console on 65nm at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing will be pushed back until the middle of 2007, at least one quarter behind the original schedule.
In its first introduction to Microsoft's new operating system, Kaspersky Lab has announced support for Windows Vista in its Anti-Virus 6.0 and Internet Security 6.0 personal software products.
Hitachi Displays started mass production of 800 x 480 2.9" LCD panels for use in mobile phones, which the company claims is "the industry's first 800 x 480 product as a mobile phone display panel."
On the heels of the first full year of the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle, a new wrinkle has appeared, as a hacker has claimed to have dug into the high-definition format's encoding and decrypt the security measures that prevent the video from being copied.
Art Lebedev, developer and designer of the Optimus-103 keyboard, indicated in a recent post on the Optimus project blog that the OLED keyboard could be shipping in the first half of 2007.
AMD Live! will start supporting Blu-ray and HD DVD in the third quarter of 2007 in line with AMD's hopes to take a bigger share of the multimedia market, according to industry sources.
VMware recently released a new beta version of its virtualization software Workstation 6.0. According to the release notes, the current build 36983 includes support for Windows Vista and multi-monitor systems.
Cyberlink announced a new version of its PowerDVD video playback software. The big news about the "Ultra" version is that it can play movies on HD DVDs as well as Blu-ray discs; but the fine print also reveals that Cyberlink has developed a driver for Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD drive.
Seoul (Korea) - Samsung claims that it has developed the world's first mobile DRAM chip with a density of 1 Gbit. The 80 nm low-power DDR device is aimed for integration in handheld devices such as digital cameras or portable media players.
According to the manufacturer, the chip is about 20% thinner than previous generations, which allows for more headroom when stacking the memory. Also, the company claims that power consumption is down about 30% "over conventional memory chip designs."
Redmond (WA) - Even though it has not yet been released to consumers, a security flaw has been spotted in the Windows Vista operating system, which the Associated Press is calling the first one to plague Microsoft's next-generation platform.
Click through the Windows Vista RTM gallery ...
Posted by Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, Enderle Group
You had to have your web browser on speed dial to keep up with Apple news in the past week: Contradicting and quite controversial reports made headlines, surprising with crashing iTunes sales and alleging that Apple owners are 55 years old, on average. Apple saw little need to refute any of the claims and there is a simple reason: Apple does not care - and doesn't have to.
Adobe has released a beta version of the next version of its image editing software Photoshop. We've had some time to play with the software and are quite certain that it is one of the most significant updates in Photoshop history.
