Video professionals know that high-definition video can look great at high bitrates, but encoding such video can be a painful process. Mercury Computer Systems has announced a ten-fold improvement in AVC/H.264 encoding times with an encoding engine built on the Cell Broadband Engine, the same chip that is used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 console.
Microsoft this week launched a new plug-in for Firefox that allows its proprietary media player to run on embedded web page scripts on the Mozilla browser.
Nvidia today launched the second wave of DirectX 10 graphics cards, which now reach into the entry-level and mainstream market. The announcement comes several weeks before AMD is expected to introduce its first family of DirectX 10-capable graphics chips.
Toshiba today announced that the company has commercialized a new series of 16 GB embedded NAND flash memory devices which is compliant with the MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) version 4.2 standard for mobile consumer products.
Beijing (China) – Intel has opened its Spring IDF in Beijing with a flood of announcements. The company revealed first performance numbers of its upcoming 45 nm Penryn processors, half a dozen technology projects including a floating point accelerator, an update to its 80-core research processor and a new enthusiast PC platform that will house two quad-core processors. Can you spot the AMD angle?
Beijing (China) – Intel has begun briefing media representatives on the day before the official opening of its Spring Developer Forum, which is held in Beijing this year. Mooly Eden, one of the key personalities behind Intel’s Core 2 Duo discussed the features of the upcoming Santa Rosa platform and the 45 nm CPU Penryn, which Intel believes will become a gaming monster.
Toshiba today announced six new notebooks. Three notebooks include Intel’s 802.11n debut chipset “Kedron”, one offers a 17” screen for less than $1000 and if you need lots of storage space than Toshiba offers up to 280 GB on two hard drives.
San Diego (CA) – Intel today introduced a 2U storage server that can house up to twelve hard drives. Processing power is provided one quad-core or up to two dual-core Xeon processors.
Intel has scheduled to boost the proportion of dual-core processors in its product line up in the second quarter and will launch the quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6850 in the third quarter.
Irvine (CA) – The next generation of portable hard drive capacity has arrived. Toshiba is first to move offer 200 GB of storage space in an external, portable 2.5” hard drive.While it will be increasingly difficult for hard drives in the 1.8” class to defend themselves against approaching flash-based solid state disks (SSDs), the 2.5” arena appears to be seeing accelerating development as well as a moiré and more competitive environment.
