HP Rumored to be Closing VoodooPC

According to an insider close to the situation, VoodooPC as we know it might not be around for much longer. An e-mail is apparently being circulated throughout the company noting layoffs, although the number of people to be culled is unclear. However, VoodooPC itself wouldn't have that many employees to begin with, so any layoffs could be a sign of what's to come.

In addition, it's become known that VoodooPC has been returning product to their suppliers, such as Topower, their provider of power supplies. Topower has received over 300 of their supplies back, which doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme, but Voodoo is known to sell less than 100 of their Omen desktop machines per month, and that's the only product where a full power supply would be used.

This rumor comes at an ironic time, as the two-year anniversary of HP's buying of VoodooPC comes on Sept. 28th. Since that time, fellow canuck and VoodooPC founder Rahul Sood has become an integral part of HP's gaming and luxury operations, resulting in such products as the Blackbird 002.

The closing of such a well known boutique would undoubtedly be surprising, but it's become obvious in the past two years that HP has far greater interest in promoting their own products, and with the help of Rahul and his crew, they can further develop their own brand rather than focus on their newly-acquired one. As it stands, VoodooPC offers two different models, the Omen desktop and Envy notebook, and neither deliver sales numbers that HP is looking for. The name might be well-known, but if it isn't generating pleased investors, then keeping it around would be questionable.

Whether or not HP has offered a sell-back to Rahul is unknown, but it's doubtful. Rahul built up a well-known boutique that offered incredible products, so it's unlikely that HP would want to part with him just yet. For now, this is still a rumor, and neither HP nor HP have responded to our queries. We'll update you once we know more.

Update: We didn't receive responses from HP or Voodoo ourselves, but our friends at Gizmodo did, and Rahul had this to say: "HP is working on a plan to better leverage its existing resources to bring Voodoo products to market faster and make them more accessible to consumers. I can assure you that Voodoo employees and champions of the brand will continue to work on the conceptualization, design and development of Voodoo products."

C|Net's Crave blog also received a response from an HP spokeswoman, "We continually assess and rebalance the size of our work force relative to the business environment and market conditions."

These quotes confirm that changes will be happening, but neither go into enough detail to let us know whether Voodoo as a company will still be standing in a few months, or if it will become a brand of HP instead. We're sure to find out soon enough, and we'll keep you up to date as soon as we find out more.

SanDisk Unveils 'slotMusic' - Smallest Albums Ever?

I realize full-well that I'm in the minority, but I love walking into a music store and picking up a fresh shrink-wrapped impossible-to-open-without-a-knife CD and going home to jam out. It's just one of those things. I'm a purist, so I cannot bring myself to download lossy music, or even download lossless music if the option was there. I like ripping my own music and being done with it. But again, I'm in the minority.

Who's not in the minority are the millions of people who LOVE services like iTunes and Amazon music, and in truth, I have no reason to blame them. Convenience is key, and it's hard to disagree with. It sure does hurt hard-copy music sales though, which is one reason SanDisk is partnering up with four major music labels to launch a new format, called slotMusic.

slotMusic is music sold on a microSD card... and nothing more. I wish it was more interesting, but that's it. Full albums will be pre-loaded in MP3 format (non-DRM!) and can be immediately played in your cell phone or MP3 player. Each "album" will include a USB sleeve so you can access the music on Windows, Linux or Mac, which leads me to assume you could also take the music off with no issue.

Definitely not to scale.

"slotMusic offers consumers an immediate, tangible, and high quality alternative to CDs and digital delivery," said Danielle Levitas, vice president, Consumer, Broadband & New Media, IDC. "This year, more than 1.2 billion mobile phones will ship globally, outstripping portable media players by nearly an order of magnitude - and this trend is accelerating."

Source: SanDisk Press Release

Tilera Launches TILEPro64 Processors

Tilera isn't a name you see on our pages too often (alright, never), because their products almost have nothing to do with what we normally deal with, such as desktop CPUs... or products you'd have in your machine at home. Their processors are interesting, though, because although they are designed for certain purposes (embedded, DSP, FPGA, x86), the numbers they boast can catch anyone's attention.

According to the company, the new TILEPro64 processors are twice as fast as the previous generation, and offer a 35x better performance/watt ratio over Intel Xeon Quad-Cores. Despite the hefty jump in performance over their previous generation, the new processors manage to increase power consumption by only 5%.

The reason that Tilera's processors excel in what they do is because the "64" in the name doesn't denote 64-bit integer support, but rather the fact that it contains 64 cores. Squeeze 700MHz into each, and it's easy to understand in theory just how whipped a Xeon processor could be. It's far faster, and uses less power. It might make you wonder why their processors aren't being used in desktops, but it comes down to the fact that Intel and AMD processors are far more robust, and are designed for general purpose, not a relatively set purpose, like is needed in the industry.

Another note of interest, is that while the architecture itself is different, standard C/C++ code can be written, and since most of Tilera's customers use Linux in some way or another, their processors work with the OS relatively simply. The downside is that not anyone can go ahead and code for the platform, or even purchase the tools required unless you want to pony up some cash. As it stands, Tilera is a relatively small company, but if their products continue to impress, maybe we'll be hearing about them a lot more in the future.

Just over a year after launching the world's highest performance embedded processor, Tilera Corporation today announced its TILEPro family of processors, setting a new benchmark for performance. The TILEPro family includes two new processors: the TILEPro64 delivers 35X better performance per-watt over the Quad-Core Xeon, and 15X the performance of the DaVinci DM6467 series DSP; while the TILEPro36 carries Tilera's performance, power efficiency, and programmability into mid-range applications.

Source: Tilera Press Release

Not-So-Fun Stuff Found on Some ASUS Notebooks

I've mentioned in the past that ASUS makes some killer notebooks, and I stand by that, since almost every one I've ever touched has pleased me. What I never saw on any of the notebooks, though, were software cracks, employee résumés or internal company documents. No, I wouldn't be so lucky. Some folks in the UK were though, and it didn't take long before the news exploded all over the net.

The obvious question was "how?"... how on earth could illegal files, résumés, internal documents and even source code find it's way onto thousands of notebooks all over? Well as it turns out, one employee came out in an interview to explain how it happened, and sadly, it's not that exciting.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that due to how Windows is mass-installed, files found on the same source thumb drive as the required XML file will get copied over to a set folder without confirmation. So, some unwise employee had more than he should have had on his thumb drive, and soon enough, thousands of customers had the data also. Woops... bet that mistake won't be made again.

An OEM employee (name not mentioned here) discussing the matter said that during the vista installs, the generic vista disc installing the OS looks for an XML file (unattend.xml) on a flash drive, and upon finding it the installation parses it and runs the XML code as installation instructions so nobody has to go through the installation menu for the hundreds of synchronous installations (hence the unattend).

Source: The Coffee Desk, Via: Slashdot

Intel Updates Processor Discontinuation List

With Intel's upcoming Core i7 launch happening within the next few months, it's little surprise to hear about the discontinuation of multiple products currently on the market. According to industry-tracking site DigiTimes, Intel has plans to discontinue all of the current high-end processors in the first quarter of the next year, with them phased out completely in Q2. Those include the QX9650 and QX9770.

It's also noted that November will be a huge month for sending out the discontinuation notices, as they have plans to pull ten Dual-Core, the Quad-Core Q9450, three Pentium and the Celeron E1200 to make way for new product. Next month, both the Quad-Core Q8300 and Q6600 are due to have price cuts, in addition to the E7300. At the same time, they'll launch the E7400, a 2.8GHz (3MB L2, 1066MHz) part.

As mentioned multiple times before, Intel will be launching three Core i7 models in the coming months, with the smallest model being priced at $284 in quantities of 1,000. Intel hasn't announced an exact launch date as of yet, but given the end of the year is so close, it'd probably be safe to say that early to mid-November would be likely.

The company is planning PDNs for the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and 9650 in the first quarter of 2009, and the two CPUs will phase out of the market in the second quarter. The company will also send out PDNs for four quad-core CPUs including the Core 2 Quad Q9450, ten dual-core CPUs including the Core 2 Duo E8300, three Pentium CPUs including the Pentium E2220 and the Celeron E1200 starting in November, and all products will phase out between the first and second quarters next year.

Source: DigiTimes

EA Loosens Up Spore DRM, But is it Enough?

Early last week, I posted about how Spore's asinine DRM protection wasn't paying off. After all, despite the fact that Will Wright's game has become a relative masterpiece, for the past two weeks it's been best-known for being the "game with DRM", which isn't good at all. It was immediately found out that gamers were none-to-pleased, and who's to blame them? Not me, as I've made clear way too many times.

Well as surprising as it may be, EA has heeded the call of their customers and decided to lighten up the harsh restrictions the game carried. Instead of being required to call EA after every three activations, they increased the count to five, which they consider to be way more than enough. According to their internal statistics, only 0.4% of Spore gamers have tried to activate on more than three machines.

That in itself is valid, but the fact of the matter is, the restriction shouldn't be there in the first place. If you boot up to play a game, you shouldn't feel like you're being watched over, especially after you paid for the game with your cold-hard cash. What's ironic might be the fact that the people who aren't dealing with the pesky DRM are the ones who've downloaded the game off of torrent networks - the non-paying customers. The paying customer sure has reason to feel special, aye?

All that aside, what is important is this quote: "If we were to ever turn off the servers on the game, we would put through a patch before that to basically make the DRM null and void". Good to know.

While these movements into less-restrictive DRM are nice, the game has already lost quite a bit of momentum, not to mention good will. Gamers made this displeasure clear by carpet-bombing Amazon.com with one-star reviews, and the install limit of Red Alert 3 has also been receiving negative press. Even worse for PR, the name Spore now has many negative connotations, very few of which have anything to do with the game, aside from the install restrictions.

Source: Ars Technica

Tech Roundup - September 22, 2008

• ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi & P45R2000-WiFi - Phoronix
• Asus M3N78 Pro - InsideHW
• ASUS P5Q Premium - Overclockers Club

• EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked - Legit Reviews
• Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition - Benchmark Review
• Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 - Overclockers Online

• QNAP TS-209 Pro Turbo NAS - Ninjalane

• Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave - Red and Blackness
• Razer Salmosa Mouse - techPowerUp!
• Silverstone RVM01B RAVEN Gaming Mouse - Hardware Canucks

• Auras TwinW SMF660 Intel CPU Cooler - Madshrimps
• NZXT Cryo LX Notebook Cooler - i4u
• Zaward Gyre ZCJ010 CPU Cooler - TweakTown

• Antec Signature 850W - Overclockers Club
• GlacialPower GP-AL650 650 Watt PSU - Bjorn3D
• Icy Dock MB672 Internal Hard Drive Enclosure - Think Computers
• Thermaltake Xaser VI MX - DragonSteelMods

• ASUS EeeBox Mini Desktop PC - TweakTown
• Epson WorkForce 600 All-in-One Printer - Test Freaks
• T-Mobile Sidekick 2008 - Digital Trends