Tech News

OCZ Launches Sabre OLED Gaming Keyboard

Back at CES, OCZ showed off a rather unique gaming peripheral… the Sabre OLED keyboard. The concept of putting OLED on a keyboard isn’t new, and it was pretty much the Optimus Maximus that put the technology on the map, but with OCZ’s Sabre, the board is designed in such a way that it’s actually going to be affordable by gamers (as opposed to the ~$1,500 USD Maximus).

The Sabre hasn’t been drowned in OLED, but rather only nine large buttons feature the crisp (amber) displays. These are situated on the left side of the board, and can be used for a variety of tasks, including program launching and also macros. Scared of a limit to such macros? Don’t be. According to the product page, each of the keys “holds the power to store limitless lays of shortcuts and macros“. Sounds good to me. Now if I can only get a macro to write out content for me…

Other features include a full 103-key layout, and as you’d expect, each are back-lit with blue LEDs – perfect for night time gaming. Each one of the sides also emits a blue glow, which might make the Sabre one of the blingiest keyboards around. As for price? I’m awaiting hearing back about that, but according to the press release the company sent just yesterday, the keyboards are “immediately available”, so hopefully we’ll begin seeing it creep up on some popular e-tailers soon.

Update: The official pricing is $199 USD.

The nine dynamic OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) user-programmable hotkeys help manage time and efficiency while surfing the web, gaming, emailing, and CAD applications or any avenue the user sees fit. The unique OLED keys can convert any digital image or text into distinctive icons, reminding the user of the personalized shortcut. Additionally, the remaining keys are backlit with glowing amber LEDs and blue side lighting, perfect for users that prefer darkened rooms or gamers frequenting LAN parties.

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Kingston HyperX Contest for Canucks

You know what Canadians don’t get enough of? The right to enter contests! It’s true… growing up, I recall that most contests that remotely interested me, were inaccessible due to me living in Canada. “Bah”, I said, and I simply gave up on contests entirely after some point. Well, Kingston’s not about to shun Canucks, and proves it with their latest HyperX contest, exclusive to Canadians.

Entering the contest couldn’t be any easier. All you have to do is head over to the Canadian version of Kingston’s homepage and click on the contest link, or you can use the shortcut URL we’ve included below. After you fill out a quick form, with information such as your name, address, digits, age, bra size (alright, maybe this one isn’t there) and other quick questions, you can be entered.

The grand prize includes a gaming system without specs, but we’re assured it’s valued at $3,000 USD. Other prizes include a Kingston SSDNow 80GB, a triple-channel DDR3-2000 6GB kit and a DataTraveler HyperX 16GB thumb drive, to be awarded to five people. Given Canada is so much smaller than the US, you’d be insane to not enter this one! The chances are what? 10x better for peeps up here?

Oh, and in case you’re worried about post-marketing: “The Contest Sponsor is collecting personal data about entrants for the sole purpose of administering this Contest. No further informational or marketing communications will be received by entrants unless entrants provide explicit permission to do so.”

“Kingston is proud to hold this contest as a thank you to all of our supporters and fans of the HyperX line of enthusiast memory in Canada,” said Jennifer Shih, marketing coordinator, Kingston Canada. “The HyperX name has become a trusted brand worldwide and continues to gain popularity with the recently released T1 heatspreaders, 12GB triple-channel kits and the new HyperX Fan which looks cool while keeping the memory cool.”

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Does MobileMark Need to Change Its Focus?

At Techgage, we take our benchmarking methodologies seriously, as evidenced by my post from earlier today. In order us to feel completely confident in our results, we need to make sure that we exhaust our methods from all angles, making sure that the room for error is as small as possible. Though earlier I was talking about CPU, GPUs and motherboard testing… there’s another product that we often test that can be just as tedious: notebooks.

Where those are concerned, we again try to handle our testing a little differently than others, but one area where that’s not the case is with the inclusion of MobileMark 2007 testing. The primary goal of this test is to exhaust the battery while running a realistic scenario, such as while getting work done or while reading an e-Book. The problem, is that it’s not entirely realistic of a typical consumer.

The ever-outspoken Pat Moorhead, VP of Advanced Marketing at AMD, has made a new blog post talking about this exact issue, and I have to say, he raises some interesting points. I won’t repeat all of what’s said there, but the idea is simple… how useful is MM07 when it uses applications and scenarios completely atypical to the regular consumer?

The new question I raise is this… what’s the alternative? It’s difficult to compare one notebook to another where battery-life is concerned with real-world testing, because there IS going to be some variance. MobileMark tests things the exact same way with each run, so the results can at least be compared. It’s a tough one. Either MobileMark is going to have to re-think how they do things, or sites like ours will be forced to write our own scripts (the former sounds great to me right about now!).

Inside MM07, The “measured application task times” for Adobe Flash Creation is 33.6%, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is 21.8%, Adobe Illustrator CS2 is 16.7%, Microsoft Excel is 16.6%, WinZip 10.0 is 7.1%, Microsoft Word is 1.1%, Microsoft PowerPoint is 1.0%, Microsoft Project is 1.2% and Microsoft Outlook is 1.0%. I ask, when you use your notebook, do you spend 72% of your time recoding Flash videos, manipulating and compressing pictures in Photoshop and Illustrator? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that is not an accurate reflection of most of our usage profiles!

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VirtualBox 3.0 Introduces Direct3D and OpenGL Support

I’ve made my love for virtualization well-known in our news section a few times in the past few months, and the reason is obvious, but simple: it’s useful. I’ve been running Windows XP inside of my desktop Linux for months now, and haven’t had much of an issue. It sure makes Photoshop, iTunes and other Windows-only applications a lot more accessible, I can say that much.

When the time came for me to choose a virtualization app, it came down to just a few, but I ended up choosing VMware Workstation in the end primarily due to its light support of 3D graphics. For the most part, that functionality works well, and I’m even able to play my favorite MMO for a while without issue (real Windows does offer better performance, however). It looks like those who want or need 3D support are soon in for a treat though, with VirtualBox 3.

This absolutely free piece of virtualization software is widely-used and widely-enjoyed. Not only because it’s free, but because it’s robust, looks nice and works well. There are a few caveats to the program though, but it appears like version 3.0 is kicking all of the important ones to the curb, such as the addition of Direct3D 8 and 9 to Windows’ guests, and also OpenGL support for Windows, Linux and Solaris. It’s also noted that a Guest SMP is supported with up to 32 virtual CPUs, but I’m not quite sure whether that means you can have 32 different guests running at a time, or if you can dedicate more than one core to a particular guest. I’ll find out soon, I hope.

Additions like these certainly warrant a major version revision, but that’s not all that’s been changed. You can check out the full changelist in at the URL below, and probably could expect to see more bug fixes and the like prior to the official release. And if you’ve never used VirtualBox before and have any interest at all of running an OS inside of your OS, give it a try.

VirtualBox is a free virtualization application for WIndows, OS X, or Linux. Like VirtualPC, or VMWare, VirtualBox lets you run an operating system within an operating system. Say, for example, you want to test out Ubuntu Linux without installing it or even logging out of Windows. Just download the Ubuntu installation disc image, fire up VirtualBox, and load the disc image.

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The Joys of Updating Our Test Suites…

In our news section a few weeks ago, I hinted at the fact that we’d soon be revising our various methodologies and application/game choices for our performance-based articles, and we’re now knee-deep in it, and hoping to wrap things up soon (it’s a time-consuming process, trust me!). As I consider our testing practices and methodologies to be the best out there to begin with, we won’t be making stark changes there, but rather some tweaks and refinements.

What is important to update is our chosen selection of applications and games we use for our processor, graphics card and even motherboard content. Over time, our selection can either begin to stale, or favor one side too heavily, and we have two such cases of that now. Making such changes isn’t a simple process though, and last time I did it, it took me two full weeks (even I think this is ridiculous), but it’s not a process of simply picking and choosing new benchmarks… we’re actually benchmarking each and every one on various architectures to make sure that we have a fair selection.

We of course don’t rule out a particular application benchmark or game if it favors one side, but it would depend on the popularity of the said application. For example, we wouldn’t give Call of Duty: World at War the boot if it happened to favor one GPU team, because it’s an ultra-popular game that people actually play. Essentially, it doesn’t make much sense to benchmark applications or games that no one plays.

That all said, I’m in the middle of revising the game selection for our graphics card content, and I’m not opposed to receiving suggestions on our selection. At this point in time, I’ve dropped all games from our previous selection except for CoD: World at War and Crysis Warhead (I think for obvious reasons). The additions would be FEAR 2, GRID, Grand Theft Auto IV and possibly Tom Clancy’s HAWX. I say possibly only because the FPS rate in that game happens to be sky-high (no pun) as it is, so it could prove to be a pointless title to include.

Check out the thread and toss in your two cents… it’d be appreciated!

Due to the sheer amount of testing involved, I usually try to put off our testing suite for as long as possible, but we clearly are due for a change. Once we have a new game suite, I don’t expect to be able to re-benchmark every card we have that quickly, but I will get as many done as quickly as possible. I’ll mainly focus on current cards though, not last-gen, if I can help it. We manually benchmark each and every card / game configuration, and that’s obviously extremely time-consuming.

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Simplifying Intel’s Processor Naming Scheme

If there’s one thing manufacturers are starting to clue into, it’s the fact that product naming schemes are far too confusing for the regular consumer. Take, for example, the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. One is vastly superior to the other, but a regular consumer wouldn’t know it right off. NVIDIA is one company in particular that has vowed for better naming schemes, but now Intel has come clean about their own structure as well.

Bill Calder, Intel’s Corporate Communications Manager, has made a blog post outlining the company’s goals, and in doing so has revealed some information about their upcoming product lines. Up to this point, it’s been common belief that Lynnfield was going to be placed under the Core i5 moniker, but that’s not entirely the case. According to the posting, chances are Lynnfield will be both Core i5 and Core i7, depending of course on the feature-set.

The question to ask is… what’s going to lack on the processor to have it become a Core i5? It’s very unlikely that Core i5 is going to be reserved for Dual-Cores, because at this point in time, Quad-Cores are quickly becoming the norm. I could be wrong, however. The post further talks about Core i3, which would be dedicated to the lower-end of the spectrum, which would likely be Dual-Cores. Brands like Atom, Celeron and Pentium would not become Core i3, but rather their branding would remain in tact.

Let the speculation begin!

So the key here is there will be a range of features and capabilities within the Intel Core family – our flagship brand representing the highest performance and the latest technology – but simplified into entry-level (Intel Core i3), mid-level (Intel Core i5), and high-level (Intel Core i7). We will still have Celeron for entry-level computing at affordable price points, Pentium for basic computing, and of course the Intel Atom processor for all these new devices ranging from netbooks to smartphones.

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Minecraft: The Blocky Sky’s the Limit

Every so often, I’ll stumble on a game that seems rather simplistic and boring at first, but becomes incredibly addictive fast. When a friend linked me to “Minecraft”, I wasn’t sure what to think. Each level is generated on the fly, and it’s there for you to alter. You’re given various blocks…..

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NVIDIA’s Betting Big on Tegra

For most enthusiasts, hearing the name “NVIDIA” invokes thoughts of graphics cards, GPUS, more graphics cards and even more GPUs. But according to the company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, a few years down the road, the company is going to be known for a lot more than that. Not that this isn’t the case right now, but such technologies as Tegra, ION and others are becoming increasingly popular, at a stark rate.

Tegra in particular is in Jensen’s sights as having the most potential, and he even goes on to state that in a few years, their ARM-based processor is expected to account for half of NVIDIA’s total business. Half! If that’s not a huge shift, I’m not sure what is! That prediction does further prove just how much more important mobile computing is becoming, and its growth sure isn’t going to slow down soon.

Huang also went on to say that we’re soon going to be at a time where CPU-GPU co-processing is going to be fact, and he used Apple as an example for the claim. It’s a good one, since Apple are the originators of OpenCL and offer support for it in their upcoming OS X “Snow Leopard” release, not to mention equip NVIDIA GPUs in their entire line-up of computers.

Let’s just hope that NVIDIA keeps high-end graphics in their sights, rather than push them to the side!

“Apple is an early indicator,” Huang said during his opening remarks that were streamed over the Web, referring to the importance that Apple is placing on the graphics processor. “The MacBook Pro to the MacBook Air has a GPU,” he said. And he waxed eloquent about how the performance and power efficiency of the updated version of the Air has benefited by having co-processors: an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.

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Moore’s Law to Die Due to the Expense?

Yesterday, we posted about GlobalFoundries’ demonstration of silicon built on a 22nm node, and according to some reports, that’s just about as low as we’re going to be able to go, at least for a while. According to market research company iSuppli, Moore’s Law is going to die at 18nm. As you’re probably already well-aware, Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every 1.5 – 2 years.

To date, that seemingly simple theory has held true, so what’s going to cause a sudden halt? It’s easy to assume that dies are simply going to become too small, and impossible to build, but that’s not it at all. And no, it has nothing to do with current leakage. Rather, it appears the reason for the death of Moore’s Law is… money. iSuppli states that beyond 18nm, the fabs to produce such chips are going to be incredibly expensive, and given that 32nm fabs currently cost around $4 billion… enough said.

Producing silicon on processes of at or smaller than 18nm isn’t impossible, but thanks to the costs, whichever company can produce such products is going to belong to an incredibly exclusive club. Companies like the TSMC and Intel should have no problem stomaching the bill, but up-and-comers like GlobalFoundries may have a hard time with the financials. But the real question is whether or not there will be a true return-of-investment on such expenses. We’ll have to wait and see.

“The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nm, to 18 nm nodes,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. “At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it.”

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Next-Gen Consoles to Launch Sooner than Expected?

Throughout the history of video gaming, we’ve always been able to expect a new console “in a few years”, and that rule of thumb has kept rather consistent. Since the turn of the century though, things have changed dramatically in the game console landscape, some for better, some for worse. Consoles are becoming more like computers with each new release, not to mention much, much more advanced.

Microsoft released their Xbox 360 in November of 2005, close to four years ago, and Sony and Nintendo followed-up with their current-gen consoles the following year, the PlayStation 3 and Wii, respectively. So the question must be begged, when will be seeing the next-gen consoles? If Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft’s claim has merit, then we may very-well be seeing them earlier than originally expected.

The reason? Services like OnLive, which aim to deliver high-quality gaming to consumers through their network connection. This method completely removes any limitations that a home console would have, as the servers for the service would be able to keep current with updated hardware if desired. What that means is that the big three may end up releasing their consoles earlier than they would have liked, and something in me tells me that’s going to be a bad thing. I don’t think I need to explain why.

Beyond a potential early release, Guillemot also spoke about the potential development costs for the upcoming consoles. Whereas it costs between $20 – $30 million today to create a top-tier game, the next-generation of consoles could skyrocket that figure up to $60 million. The game companies will have two options there. Raise the prices of retail games (which isn’t going to help piracy any), or make certain that the games they release are epic, so they’ll sell far more in volume. It’s actually kind of scary to picture what the console landscape is going to be like in the next-gen… hopefully all the changes will be good ones.

Next generation, estimates Guillemot, top tier games will likely average $60 million to make. The ramifications for that are unknown. It could mean higher retail prices or lower return on investment. Ubisoft hopes to supplement the cost by reusing assets in the film community (as it is currently doing with its game adaptation of James Cameron’s “Avatar”.)

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Apple’s Updated MacBook Pro’s Deliver Outstanding Battery-Life

At last week’s WWDC, Apple had much to show off, including OS X Snow Leopard, Safari 4, iPhone 3G S and of course, the revised MacBook Pro line-up, which introduced for the first time, a 13-inch model. One of the biggest things taken away from the conference was the fact that Apple promised up to 7 hours on the new integrated-battery notebooks… a bold claim.

It didn’t take too long before Apple-enthusiast Anand Lal Shimpi got one of the new models in for testing, and to say he was impressed would be an understatement. In his initial tests, the 2.53GHz version of the MacBook Pro lasted 8.13 hours in his wireless web-browsing tests. I don’t think battery-life alone would sell me on a MacBook, but no one can deny such results are impressive.

What’s more impressive is just how much more efficient OS X is when it comes to battery-life than Vista. We’re not talking small differences here, but differences of 25% or higher. The frustrating thing is that it’s hard to even come up with a reason for this. Vista is “bloated”, sure, but 25%? Even worse is the fact that Windows 7 delivers even worse battery-life. Anyone have any ideas what could possibly be giving OS X such a worthwhile edge? I’d sure love to know.

The situation is apparently a bit better under Windows XP but not significantly. Even more depressing is the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t appear to make the situation any better. I still have a couple more hours in my Windows 7 run but I’ll update this page once I have the results. Right now it’s looking like ~6 hours for the new MacBook Pro under Windows 7 x64 RC1.

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Globalfoundries Details Technology Aimed at 22nm and Beyond

In the fall of 2007, Intel helped kick off the 45nm life-cycle with the help of their Core 2 Extreme QX9650, and since then, 45nm has become pretty much the standard (with AMD releasing their first 45nm processors late last year). The next step is 32nm, and it looks as though Intel’s own Westmere will be the first to deliver a product on that process (hopefully in just a few months), with AMD planning to launch product sometime in 2010, or at the latest, early 2011.

Beyond that, we have 22nm processes to look forward to, and though it may come off as a little surprising, it looks like AMD’s brand-new spin-off foundry, Globalfoundries, is going to be the first out the door with such a chip, thanks in part to the fruits of the relationship with IBM and other alliance partners. At the VLSI 2009 conference, taking place in Kyoto, Japan, Globalfoundries had a live demonstration of silicon built with on a 22nm node, although it doesn’t say what it was.

Their goal was to prove that it could be done, although we’re still a long way from seeing usable chips built on the process. Not surprisingly, the press release doesn’t state what it took to produce a reliable piece of silicon, but it does state that the High-K Metal Gate is essential in the process, and that their technology allows an EOT (equivalent oxide thickness) to scale well beyond the required levels for 22nm, which means this same technique could be useful for processes even smaller. Things should get exciting…

GLOBALFOUNDRIES and IBM have developed a new technique that overcomes this barrier, demonstrating for the first time that EOT scaling to well beyond the 22nm node can be achieved while maintaining the necessary combination of leakage, threshold voltages, and carrier mobility. The results were successfully demonstrated through fabrication of an n-MOSFET device with EOT of 0.55nm and a p-MOSFET with EOT of 0.7nm.

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Commodore 64’s Latest Use: Twitter

Ahh, the Commodore 64, one of the more recognized PC classics in the world. This machine was released in 1982, and remarkably, only became discontinued in 1994. Though it’s unbelievably slow by today’s standards (1MHz processor!) and severely lacks memory (64KB!), it was a true blast to use back in the day, and even today, apparently.

With Twitter becoming a little more than just a fad (it seems), and developers not wanting to let the C64 die, what’s the most natural thing to do? Why, create a Twitter client for the C64, of course. That’s just what Johan Van den Brande did, and the result is “Breadbox64”. The client is built on top of a small OS called Contiki, and it’s capable of both reading and posting things to your Twitter feed!

I don’t know about you, but what impressed me most about this was finding out that you can actually go online with the Commodore 64… I had no idea. There’s apparently still quite the scene hovering around the C64, and hardware is still being pushed out today. To go online, you’ll first need the MMC Replay add-on and also the daughter card. It’s amazing to me to know that you can go online with a computer that was discontinued before the typical Internet even kicked off!

As an underlying OS (yes, an OS that runs on the C64 is possible), I use Contiki. Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating system for memory-efficient networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. More specific, I use their uIP stack to communicate over the Internet with the C64. It is definitely worth looking at. Actually the breadbox64 project grew out of my interest in Contiki to use it as a basis for some real projects later on.

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Virgin Media to Launch DRM-Free Unlimited Music Service

It looks like Apple’s iTunes service is soon to get some real competition, and all I can say is, “It’s about time”. But here’s the unique twist… the service soon to launch isn’t by some non-music-related company, but rather Virgin Media and Universal Music, the latter of which is largest music label in the world. And before you say there’s going to be an incredible amount of limitations and drawbacks, think again.

It’s easier to just quote a portion of the release, “The service – a world first – will enable any Virgin Media broadband customer to both stream and download as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal Music’s entire catalog, in return for a great-value monthly subscription fee.” (emphasis ours). Alright, so the downside is that this service is going to be UK-only, and you’ll need to be a Virgin Broadband subscriber.

The music will be offered as a service with a monthly fee (~$16 – $24), and with that, you’ll be able to download, stream and keep as much of the DRM-free music as you want. Seems a little too good to be true, right? We’ll have to wait and see. They certainly won’t have the selection that iTunes will, but Universal owns an almost-countless number of sub-labels, so you certainly wouldn’t get bored too quickly.

Though there won’t be any anti-piracy measures in place, the company did say it would work towards educating their subscribers about the rights and wrongs, and since this runs through Virgin’s own broadband service, if people are found to download and share their wares, then the company can suspend their Internet service for a certain amount of time. That seems fair. I’m really, really interested in seeing how this will succeed. If this doesn’t, what on earth would?

This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access. No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media.

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Fifteen of the Worst PC Designs

Throughout the long history of computing, many, many foolish mistakes have been made. When you first caught wind of one, the only appropriate response could have been, “What were they thinking?!”, and a new article at the Technologizer takes a look at fifteen classic mistakes that we can hope will never reappear in the future. Just how bad can these mistakes be?

Well let me tell you… there’s nothing minor here. Take the Apple III, for example. This business-oriented PC had a goal of quiet operation. How was that achieved? By removing the power supply fan! Needless to say, nobody was pleased with warped motherboards, or lackluster Apple II emulation. Then there’s the Mattel Aquarius… a PC inside of a keyboard. Nothing new (at least back then), but what made it stand out were its rubber (yes, rubber) keys and built-in PSU adapter cable. Geez.

One of my favorites in the list has to be the IBM PCjr, a PC that offered unique expandability and also the world’s first wireless keyboard (it can at least use that at its excuse). This box, using a vast array of proprietary connectors unique to this one machine, offered expandability via “sidecars”… clip-on components that made the machine wider. But the biggest problem was the wireless IR keyboard. Imagine using a wireless keyboard that required you to constantly keep a perfect angle and line-of-sight. Or the $20 add-on cable that turned it into a wired keyboard…

Credit: Steven Stengel

Since the wireless feature on the keyboard turned out to be mostly useless, many users wished they had an old-fashioned, wired keyboard. Surely, one could just plug a regular IBM PC keyboard into the back of the machine and be done with it? Nope, sorry. The IBM PCjr used all non-standard accessory ports, including one for the keyboard. A cable to attach the chiclet keyboard directly to the computer was available for $20 by special order from IBM; it was not included with the system.

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ASRock Also Going the 2oz Copper Route?

When Gigabyte first introduced their “2oz copper” motherboard feature last year, many scoffed at their claims of better overclocking, improved power efficiency and lower board temps. ASUS was included in this mockery, and in some cases, I was with them. I failed to understand how twice the copper would improve things, but even to this day, I don’t know if there’s direct proof of improvements, so it’s hard to conclude on anything.

With Gigabyte’s recent focus on extreme overclocking, it could be that the 2oz of copper does indeed make a difference, and with a new find made by the folks at BSN*, it looks like there may be some substance to this substance after all. How so? Well, it appears that ASRock, the budget split-off of ASUSTeK, had a motherboard on display at Computex that featured text at the bottom which stated, “2oz Copper PCB”. Hah!

This move is a little bizarre given ASUS’ hardcore stance against the overuse of copper. So either the company stumbled on a fresh supply of the stuff, or there may really be value in adding twice as much to our motherboards. But, it could also simply be a way to draw some eyes away from the competition. Let’s just hope ASRock doesn’t have a 32 phase-power board on the horizon…

However, most surprising news is that ASUS seems to be joining its adversaries, so to speak, with its M4A77TD PRO board, introduced last week, during Computex Taipei 2009. The board, which is based on the AMD 770 and SB710 chipset combo, offers support for DDR3 memory and ATI’s CrossFireX technology. These things aside, the board really brings little new to the table. Oh, perhaps we forgot to mention the white letters present at the bottom of the PCB?

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European Commission Breaks Windows 7

Oi. It’s become no secret that the European Union has had fun slapping Microsoft with pointless lawsuits over the years, but the latest happenings just further proves how asinine their Commission’s thought-process is. Take one cranky browser company, Opera, and couple it with the already anti-Microsoft EU, and you have one heck of a story.

In gist, Opera complained to the EU that it’s somehow wrong for Microsoft to include only one browser in their OS, and as such, they offered a solution: have Microsoft offer multiple browsers. Yes… they did actually suggest that Microsoft should include competitor offerings within Windows. What’s next? Ford offering Toyota flier hand-outs, or an Aion screenshot at the World of Warcraft login screen?

Look… it’s simple. Microsoft isn’t forcing Internet Explorer on anyone. It’s a sub-product of their OS, which people willingly purchase. Nothing stops anyone from downloading another browser of their choice… nothing. If the EU forces this, what’s en route? Microsoft being required to offer alternate e-mail clients? Media players? Chat clients? Calculators?

“Rob, chill… what’s the big deal?” How about the fact that because due to this pressure, Microsoft will be including no browser at all in the EU version of Windows 7. That means that people will be unable to hop online immediately after installing their OS. Rather, they’d have to install a browser of their choice via alternate means (like a thumb drive), or use the included CD-ROM to install Internet Explorer. Sounds convenient, doesn’t it?

Oh, and how about the newly-introduced inability to upgrade from a previous version of Windows? That’s right. I’m not sure of the mechanics, but IE is apparently required for a smooth upgrade, and because it’s not going to be available in Windows 7 by default for EU users, it simply can’t be done. Microsoft could agree to include alternate browsers just to please the EU and Opera, but I don’t blame them for their decision. It’s their product. If consumers don’t like it, they don’t have to buy it. It’s that simple.

But since it’s just a browser, perhaps Microsoft should be a good sport and include a few alternatives. At least that way, the browser-less problem will cease to exist, and customers will be happier. I personally recommend bundling Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. You guys?

Providing it gets European Commission approval, which looks unlikely based on the Commission’s preliminary response, Microsoft will ship the browser-less version of Windows 7, to be known as Windows 7 “E”, in all EU member states as well as Croatia and Switzerland. What’s more, the browser will also be removed from the Europe-only Windows 7 “N” versions which also have Windows Media Player stripped out – the result of another EU antitrust ruling.

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Heading Home… Returning to our Regular Content Soon

Ni hao all! As I write this, it’s 4:37PM in Taipei, and I’m essentially just killing time in Taipei 101 until I can go to the airport to fly back home. Word of wisdom… don’t make the mistake of having a really late departure. It’s no fun at all to check out of your hotel at lunch time and then hop on a flight twelve hours later! Oh well, lesson learned.

Because Taiwan is on the opposite side of the planet from North America, it takes more than 24 hours for me to get back home. Because of this, things will appear slow for the next few days, where content and news is concerned. Things should get back up to speed on Friday, provided jet lag doesn’t do me in!

As I mentioned the other day, we still have two more Computex-related articles in the works, including one that takes a look at all of the products we thought were totally stellar overall. After that article is posted, I’ll soon follow-up with another that takes the behind-the-scenes look at my travel to Taiwan, to give you guys a general idea of how things go down when we’re over here.

With Computex behind us, our regularly-scheduled content will get back on schedule soon, and we have a lot of cool things planned. One of the most important is a total revising of our testing methodologies, which will target our CPU and GPU reviews, and possibly also our motherboards. We’re a little overdue for these, so I look forward to sitting down and getting them all taken care of.

Of course, that’s not all, but it’d be no fun to spoil everything for you!

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Intel’s “Skulltrail 2” to Feature 16 Cores?

It looks as though Intel’s next dual-socket platform might not be a straight-forward dual desktop CPU setup like the original Skulltrail. Bright Side of News is reporting that “Skulltrail 2” will instead be comprised of Octal-Core (8) processors based on Nehalem-EX. That’s right… 16 cores, and 32 threads.

When I questioned Intel regarding the validity of this claim, I received back an answer that neither denied or confirmed it, so I’d be willing to believe that Intel is indeed considering moving to a 16 Core Skulltrail 2 rather than an 8 Core version. For what reason is unknown, but chances are it’s simply because a) it’s not going to be in high-demand, and b) that is a lot of power to brag about. But, it’s important to note that even if they are considering that particular move, it doesn’t mean it will happen.

The question of course arises… “who could touch all that power?” and in truth, I don’t think the answer is a simple one. After all, even with our original Skulltrail article, we had a difficult time finding ways to properly push all 8 Cores / 8 Threads. Just imagine how challenging 32 threads would be! If the original Skulltrail was the “ultimate” multi-tasker’s PC, I think we’re going to need to invent a new word to describe Skulltrail 2.

Here’s Intel’s official stance: “We have not announced any plans to bring a new ‘Skulltrail’ board to market.  We are always researching and looking at new technologies for various segments, so we are not saying we would never come out with this board.  But, at this time we have no public plans to do so.“

Many OS and apps code paths would now nicely fit in that huge cache, but high speed memory would still be useful for streaming and HPC apps. Every Nehalem-EX Beckton processor has a quad-memory controller, e.g. 256-bit interface. With DDR3-1333, you will get 85.3 GB/s. But with DDR3-1600 you would get 102.4GB/s e.g. CPUs would have more than 100GB/s of system bandwidth for the first time in history!

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Apple Announces Updated MacBook Pro Line-up, OS X Snow Leopard

When Apple’s annual WWDC rolls around each summer, people stop and listen. The reason is simple: new product launches. Between the new iPhone 3G S, Max OS X Snow Leopard (desktop and server), Safari 4 and an updated MacBook Pro line-up, I think it’s safe to say that nothing at all has changed this year in that regard.

Probably the most interesting for Mac OS X users is what’s been unveiled for Snow Leopard. More than just an upgrade, Apple claims that they’ve refined over 90% of the 1,000 “projects” in the OS, so not only will the updated applications be faster, but they’ll offer even more functionality.

The best part might be the pricing for current Leopard owners… $29. Still, I shrug when I picture the incoming ad campaigns that point this fact out. OS X might cost less, but their hardware is undeniably far more expensive. Either way, the cheaper upgrade path for current users isn’t going to go unappreciated.

The depth is too great to get into all of the updates here, but Apple have revised their entire MacBook Pro line-up as well. This means more powerful machines, but also less-expensive machines, such as the $1,199 13″ model. With their new built-in battery, Apple promises up to 7 hours of battery-life, and that’s without the use of Intel’s latest ULV processors.

Check out the press release URL below for all the updates.

Apple today unveiled Mac OS X Snow Leopard, an even more powerful and refined version of the world’s most advanced operating system and the foundation for future Mac innovation. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies, out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange and new accessibility features. Snow Leopard will ship as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users in September 2009 for $29.

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Tony Hawk’s “Ride” Introduces Skateboard Peripheral

It’s not all too often I bring a rant about a console game into our main news section, but when Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground came out in late 2007, I felt like I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. As a huge fan of the series since the original game was released in 1999, I felt like something had to be done in order to keep the franchise alive.

A while after that was posted, Activision came out and said that no new Tony Hawk game would be published in 2008, which marked the first time since the original title that the one-per-year cycle was broken. The reason was simply because they wanted to spend more time on the next one, and what that probably meant was a full overhaul, and it looks like that’s exactly what we’re getting.

Being a fan of every game in the series so far, I was a bit worried about this new one, because after all, it’s the current game play I’ve come to enjoy, so an overhaul didn’t exactly excite me. But Ars Technica gave the new game a go at E3, and it actually looks to be quite a bit of fun. While .skate revolutionized the skateboard genre, Tony Hawk’s Ride actually puts you IN the action. Well, it at least puts you on a skateboard peripheral.

I’m doubtful I’ll enjoy the new game as much as the classics, but I still can’t wait to see this come out. If anything, I’ll finally get my much-needed workout.

In the first demo I have to manual-or balance on the rear wheels-for fifty feet. This requires the player to lean back on the board, causing the front to rise up from the ground. Balance is tricky, and I instinctively bring my arms up to held stay in this position. To ollie-or jump with all the wheels off the ground-you have to lean back quickly to bring the front up and back down. I try this and land on a rail, balancing my grind by leaning back and forth.

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Windows 7 Launch Date & Box Art Revealed

Alright, so this isn’t new news, but for the few people who don’t know, Microsoft announced the Windows 7 launch date last week, and that happens to be October 22, a Thursday. This is semi-odd placement, as it misses the “back-to-school” rush and also lands a bit short of the holiday season, but hey, at least they aren’t rushing things.

Although the release date has been unveiled, pricing has not. We can expect that to fall in line with what we saw with Vista, if not a little bit lower. Also similar to Vista, 7 will become available in a variety of editions, the most popular on these shores of which will be Home Premium, Professional (Business) and Ultimate. For netbooks, Home Basic is sure to be a popular option.

Along with the new launch date, Microsoft has also revealed the box art on their store, and I have to say, it looks quite good. It’s modern, clean, and doesn’t say Vista on the cover (haw haw). In all seriousness though, I don’t even use Windows as my primary OS, but I’m still excited to see this thing launch.

Windows 7 was built around your feedback, so you’ll see a lot of things you’ve asked for. You asked us to make everyday tasks faster and easier, to make your PC work the way you want it to, and to make it possible to do new things. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. See how it’s come to life.

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Google Releases Mac OS X and Linux Chrome Developer Builds

When Google’s Chrome browser hit the market last September, very few seemed to be not impressed. For the company’s first shot at a commercial browser, it worked well, was incredibly fast and was the furthest thing from being bloated. The biggest caveat though, was the lack of support for both Mac OS X and Linux.

That has changed, just a little. The company has finally released “developer builds” of the browser for each platform, although it’s not really recommended that end-users touch it, much less use it as their primary browser. As it stands right now, YouTube videos don’t function, and neither does the ability to print.

In addition, you can’t change your privacy settings, or even your default search provider. So overall… quite incomplete. It’s great to see proof of active development though, and hopefully it means users of alternative OS’ are soon going to have another choice of web browser. For those interested, Chrome owned 5.49% of Techgage site viewage last month.

In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

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Jobs Set to Return to Apple Later this Month

This past January, it became known that Steve Jobs was going to take a ~six month hiatus from Apple in order to focus on getting better. Probably a good thing, too, given that his health was noticeably taking a toll. Well, we’re just about at the end of that six-month stretch, and it appears that all is going according to plan.

It even appears that Jobs has recently made a few trips to the Apple Campus, which somewhat reaffirms the rumor that he is indeed ready to return to work. Since he’s left, not much seems to have been affected, but I’m sure many will be glad to see him return back to his position as CEO.

With these recent reports, some are speculating that we might see Jobs appear at the upcoming WWDC conference, taking place this week. That seems a little doubtful, but it would be possible. No one except Apple knows just how good of health Jobs is in, and chances are he’d prefer to wait until he’s 100% again before making another appearance.

A better theory would be that Jobs will make a surprise appearance near the launch of the as-yet-unannounced next-gen iPhone (admittedly, we jacked this theory from former Apple PR guru Anuj Nayar, but it truly is the best one). Either way, it’s clear at this point that Jobs will definitely be making a comeback to the company, and he undoubtedly has “one more thing” up his sleeve.

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Computex 2009 Coverage Wrapping-Up

Computex 2009 is long done, but our coverage isn’t quite complete. Sometime this week we’ll be posting a “Best of” article, taking a look at a handful of products that left a great impression on us. This year, it was a little difficult to spot such stellar products, but they were definitely out there.

Of course, if you haven’t yet taken a look at any of our coverage, I have to ask… what the heck? Be sure to look through our overall coverage article, which lists every-single thing we reported on during the show. That includes our booth babe article, and also our look at the GO OC 09 final, which took place in the Taipei 101.

Also sometime this week, or early next, I’ll be posting a “behind-the-scenes” article that I mentioned in our Computex thread. It will serve no other purpose than to show you what we see when going to the show. Taipei and Asia in general is unlike North America in almost any regard, so you can expect to see a lot of unique pictures and information. If that article is well-received, we’ll consider doing a similar article for each major trade show we attend. Stay tuned!

I don’t recall too many product models at last year’s Computex, and I specifically remember considering to publish an article like this, but decided not to since I didn’t have enough pictures to work with. This year was far different, and in a way, the sheer number of gorgeous women all over the place was a little overwhelming (but how on earth is that a bad thing?).

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