Het gaat niet echt lekker daaro bij Nec: een 1,25 miljard verlies. Massaontslagen zullen volgen:

EC Corp., Japan's biggest chipmaker, pledged on Friday to slash 15,000 jobs from its work force and shore up its faltering U.S. personal computer subsidiary after announcing the biggest loss in its history. One of the first employees to go will be NEC President Hisashi Kaneko, who said he would resign effective March 26 to take responsibility for the company's expected 150 billion yen ($1.25 billion) consolidated net loss in the business year to March 31

ZDNet heeft meer info.

The Register heeft wat info over de nieuwe Acorn StrongARM processor, die vooral toegepast worden set-top boxes:

Acorn Cybervillage has published some tantalising details of the roadmap for the SA-220, Intel's next generation StrongARM.

Codenamed the Coyanosa, the SA-220 will ship in Q2 2000. The new StrongARM family is built to 0.18 micron spec, and various flavours run from 100MHz to 600MHz

They retain the low-power features of the first generation StrongARM family, Cybervillage's Stuart Halliday, says.

The Sanctum heeft een artikel over de PIII op z'n site geparkeerd. Hier wat KNI/SIMD spul:

Intel’s highly touted KNI instructions come to mind when thinking Of the PentiumIII(Katmai). The only problem with these instructions Are developers must take advantage of them. The big test for the Early PentiumIII’s are that support. Without that support you are Left with a faster CPU, and getting tailed from someone that paid Twice as less for a Celeron (a) running at or almost the same speed.

KNI at this time is only supported through DirectX 6.1, and the Benchmarks don’t show much of an increase. NVidia released a Driver set that is supposed to take advantage of KNI. The numbers There don’t show that much increase either. Hopefully these Downfalls can be made better with updated releases.

Hot Hardware heeft de Shuttle HOT-649A dual PII moederplank aan een testje onderworpen. Hier wat overclocking related stuff uit hun review:

t this juncture, I feel this board is my personal favorite in this department. Although I would have liked to have been able to tweak the voltage a little higher than just 10% over default, Shuttle really only has made me more cautious about protecting my investment in a Hand Selected Overclockable CPU. Throwing too much voltage at an overclocking stability issue usually doesn't help much and will definitely put you at risk.

On the other hand, because of the endless selection of front side bus speeds, the test results for this review were prepared at the 105X5 speed setting for a zippy 525 Mhz.! This is a speed we have not been able to get our P2-333 SL2TV Irish CPU to run at before. This board allowed us to squeeze just a few more clock cycles out of the P2 with total stability. The Shuttle HOT-649A really kicks!

Ok, dit was al wat langer bekend. C|Net heeft nog wat meer info in een nieuwsbericht verstopt:

In a major win for Advanced Micro Devices, PC maker Gateway said it will use AMD's chips in upcoming systems in addition to processors from Intel.

Gateway said the move would help it offer affordable computers to its customers.

"Both Intel and AMD offer a broad range of high quality and competitively priced product lines," said Jim Booth, Gateway's vice president of Global Materials and Supply Management in a prepared statement. "We made the decision to take advantage of AMD's offerings to add flexibility to our product line and to give our clients choices."

The company recently said it would ship systems in Japan with AMD chips, but today's move represents a more significant blow against Intel.

Tweak3D heeft een review gepost van de Card Cooler, een koeler waarmee je kaarten kunt koelen (sure...). Hier wat info over het ding:

The Card Cooler is a simple but effective cooling device developed by an overclocker. The Card Cooler is designed to cool video cards, but will work with any card, or it can even be mounted over no card at all. Heat is one of the biggest problems with video cards and when you want to fight the heat there is no alternative as far as simplicity and price to a good fan. (or in this case, 2 fans)

The Card Cooler is a preassembled set of metal racks with two giant 80mm case fans attached. The air flow of the fans is not listed but the power usage is 12V.

Meer spul + pics in de review van T3D.

Er is weer een nieuwe versie released van SoftFSB, het mega handige proggie waarmee je on-the-fly je FSB kunt veranderen (maar dat helaas niet op alle mobo's werkt). Hiermee zijn we aangekomen op versie 1.5. Download de .exe hier (50 kilobijten).

AOL Europe vind dat de telefoonkosten in Europa way te hoog zijn en eist daarom flat-rates! Hier wat spul uit een artikel van The Register:

High telephone call charges are smothering the development of an Internet-based economy in Europe, according to leading Internet access provider AOL.

In an unprecedented and outspoken statement issued today, the world's largest Internet access provider lent its full support for a radical overhaul of the telecom pricing structures in Europe.

Without immediate change, Europe risks falling behind other regions such as the US, the company maintains, something AOL believes would be lamentable.

"We must overhaul the outdated telecoms pricing structure which sustains artificially high call rates for consumers," said Andreas Schmidt, president and CEO of AOL Europe.

"The EU has an historic opportunity to build an information-based economy -- one that will fuel job creation and provide consumers and businesses with an unprecedented array of new choices."

"However, this will only happen if Europe takes action now to eliminate high local call prices and per minute charging for consumers.

Ja! Meer info is hier.

Creative heeft een paar nieuwe drivers voor z'n Graphics Blaster TNT op z'n site gedumpt. Je kunt ze hier neerladen.

Next Generation Online heeft wat info bij elkaar geraapt over de Sony Playstation 2. Hier een stuk over de PSX2 vs de Voodoo3:

For example, are Sony's numbers comparable to the current highest benchmark in the industry -- the Voodoo3 3500? That card is able to draw 8 million flat, shaded polygons a second. According to Brian P. Bruning, 3dfx's Developer Relations Manager the numbers are not comparable. "Those are 8 million fully spec'd-out polys," meaning that the hardware's effects like lighting will not reduce the cards drawing power -- meaning that the 8 million per second is comparable to Sony's 30 million per second with effects figure. Bruning went on to point out that the roadblocks the Voodoo3 runs into are whether the CPU can send the info to the card, or whether the AGP bus can handle that much info. But within the isolated world of the Voodoo3 card, with no interaction with other parts of the system, the card can actually draw 8 million polygons. Bruning's implication is clear: perhaps the "Emotion Engine" can calculate 30 million polygons a second with full effects. But will the system have the throughput to actually get those polygons onto the screen? There is a technical Grand Canyon between polygons calculated and polygons drawn, and this system could easily have a serious bottleneck along the line -- just as the Voodoo3 will run into the PC's bottlenecks when it is released in March.

De rest vind je in dit artikel van NGO.