William Henning van CPU Review heeft z'n Athlon vs Pentium III price comparison van een update voorzien. De Athlon prijzen zijn de afgelopen weken flink omlaag gestuiterd, met als gevolg dat een Athlon systeempje nu in alle gevallen goedkoper is dan een vergelijkbare PIII configuratie:

Intel has certainly responded AMD's price challange. All you have to do is to look at the chart showing the falling prices over time; the Intel prices were the hardest hit.

AMD is still sitting pretty. They have the hottest x86 chip, and they know it. Looking at the current pricing suggests that AMD is now trying to take the high-end single processor market away from Intel. Just look at the price drop on the K7-700! I wonder what that could mean? Beating Intel on price AND performance is the name of the new game.

We are no longer paying a lot more for an Athlon based system than for an equivalent clock speed Pentium 3.

Yup, kwam dit tegen op Riva3D.com:

It's beginning to look as if there may be a problem with the current miniport AGP driver on K7 motherboards using the 751 chipset. This has been confirmed by Creative Labs and AMD. It may also be a GeForce driver issue as well. We're working on getting to the bottom of this, so hang in there and we'll fill you in as soon as we can.

In de diverse GeForce reviews heb ik eigenlijk nog niets gelezen over problemen met de Athlon, dus waarschijnlijk gaat het hier niet om al te heftige conflicten.

Wow, dit is errug vet : ik kwam via AMD Zone bij deze op 1152MHz geklokte Athlon 700 van Bunny. De proc liep op een voltage van 1,85V en werd gekoelt met behulp van een watercooling systeem. De L2 cache is zo te zien enabled (wat niet het geval was bij de PIII-733 @ 1 GHz van maandag):

Videologic heeft een nieuwe geluidskaart in de professionele Sirocco lijn aangekondigd, zo lees ik bij GA-Source:

VideoLogic Systems has today announced a high performance addition to its Sirocco range. The new Sirocco Pro design brings broadcast studio performance to home studios and PC-based musicians.

Designed and built to exacting professional standards, the Sirocco Pro promises to out-performs studio monitoring systems many times its price. Sirocco Pro provides a full specification including two satellite speakers, large subwoofer, five power amps, three-way active filtering, dual shelving filter tone adjustment and a high performance 96kHz 24bit DAC (digital to analog converter). Sirocco Pro is available now from VideoLogic's network of distributors and resellers for £549 (inc. VAT UK).

GamePC heeft een review van de Sony 500PS op het net gezet. Deze 21" kijkdoos heeft een maximum resolutie van 1600x1200 en een 0,25mm dot pitch:

We hooked up the monitor with a system equipped with a Voodoo3 3500, not known for it's incredible 2D image quality, but it does the job well enough. At first we tried 1280x1024, perfect all around. Precise, perfect color, no picture flicker. When we bumped it up to 1600x1200, the picture was still pretty clear, but there was small blurring around screen text. While at first we though the Voodoo3 was at fault, we decided to try something different and use a BNC input.

The monitor has both 15-pin and 5-cord BNC input plugs, if you have the appropriate cable, BNC connections can hook up to any standard video card. BNC connections have been said to give better image quality, so we decided to grab a Solid Electric BNC cable and give it a whirl. Amazingly enough, it worked! 1600x1200 screen is now almost perfect, no blurring around text, and the colors are just as good or better than a 15-pin cable.

Hmm, vraag me af hoe deze monitor zich verhoudt ten opzichte van de 22" Iiyama...

Glenn van FPS3D.com heeft een review van de Abit BF6 op z'n site geparkeerd. De belangrijkste features van dit nieuwe 440BX plankje zijn de 6 PCI slots, de klokgenerator met support voor 134 busspeeds en de mogelijkheid om de CPU zowel via Softmenu als dipswitches te configgen:

The BF6 marks the debut of CPU SoftMenu III, the ultimate overclocking system for Slot 1 CPUs. Paired with RCM's super clock generator chip, you can select system bus speeds between 83Mhz and 200Mhz in 1Mhz increments. Stop blinking, you read it right! 1Mhz increments - that's 134 different clock speeds for you to mix and match with your setup.

Another very unique feature is L2 cache latency adjustment. This means you can actually adjust the speed of your Level2 cache on your processor! However, you need to evaluate your cooling situation first. If you're using a Slot 1 processor with built in L2 cache (on die - i.e. Celeron) then you should be fine as long as you have some cooling on your setup. If you're using a processor with external L2 cache (onboard - i.e. P2, P3), then you should look into removing the casing from your processor and actually cooling your L2 cache directly before you "overclock" it.

Shugashack heeft een viertal nieuwe screenshots gepost:

A reader from Germany who works for one of the gaming magazines abroad was kind enough to send over a few of the Quake3 screenshots they got from Activision which were not used in their magazine articles. Check it out guys, 4 new screenshots of Quake3 to look at while we sit around waiting.

Oja, wie nog trek heeft een Lara: GA-Source heeft een zooitje Tombraider 4 screenshots neer gemikt.

HardOCP heeft een Athlon overclocking artikel gepost, waarin zij o.a. laten hoe de de multiplier en voltage settings van de Athlon middels de mysterieuze Goldfinger en een stel dipswitches geprogrammeerd kunnen worden. Errug cool en bovendien nauwelijks gevaarlijk (dit in tegenstelling tot de soldeer operaties waarin een bepaalde groep Japanners alsmede een bekende duitser erg fanatiek zijn ). Checke deze pics:

3dfx en Cornerstone hebben gezamenlijk de ImageAccel Velocity aangekondigd. Deze videokaart is specifiek bedoeld voor business apps en heeft een 380MHz snelle RAMDAC, die extra hoge resoluties en hoge refreshrates mogelijk moet maken. Hier wat blij geblaat uit de press release:

Cornerstone Peripherals Technology, Inc. (Cornerstone) and 3dfx Interactive®, Inc. (3dfx) announced today their first co-branded video graphics card, ImageAccel(TM) Velocity(TM), which pushes display resolution to new heights with the industry's first 380Hz RAMDAC.

``The higher the display resolution, the more productive users are,'' said Greg Harris, Vice President of Marketing for Cornerstone. ``3dfx and Cornerstone together have developed the first graphics card to drive 2048 x 1536 resolution at the flicker free standard of 85Hz.''

With an estimated street price of US$170 ImageAccel Velocity will be available exclusively from Cornerstone. The product is bundled with BigMonitor Software(TM) a suite of productivity enhancing applets designed to improve the performance of high-resolution monitors. Available in both AGP and PCI versions, users have maximum upgrade flexibility. The card supports true color depth (24-bit) with 16MB of video memory, and ships next month.

Ga'ash Soffer heeft een preview van de nVidia Quadro gepost. Hoewel sommigen hier zo hun twijfels over hebben (zie deze nieuwsposting), verwacht Ga'ash dat de Quadro wat betreft performance met gemak voorbij de 3DLabs Oxygen VX1 gaat:

Most expensive high-end solutions have dedicated geometry processors. The latest Wildcat solutions have them, as does the Oxygen GVX1 (Permedia 3) and older Glint GMX based solutions. Unfortunately, these expensive high-end solutions can barely pump out 5 million triangles a second; compared to the Quadro's 17 million. Now Intergraph and 3Dlabs should be sweating. The fast fill-rate of mainstream solutions has never been a serious threat to the high-end chipset manufacturers dominance; however, the Quadro looks to be faster than the high end solutions in geometry processing as well! Further, the architecture of the Quadro, which is without a doubt based closely on the GeForce 256 architecture is already proven; triangle rates of around 10 million were reached using nVidia's "SphereMark", a benchmark which should be released to the public anytime now.

Sharky heeft de vierde aflevering van z'n Private Eye column gepost, met o.a. speculaties over de Microsoft X-Box. Volgens Sharky gaat die console mogelijk gebouwd worden op een K6-III of K6-2+, vanwege de lage prijs van deze CPU'tjes (hoe wil Bill anders een prijs van $300 haalbaar maken?):

Here's a 'shocker' for you- we've been told that it's not only been the Athlon that they've been looking at but also the K6-3 450-500MHz range of CPUs. The other CPU of interest at AMD seems to be the imminent K6-2+ 500MHz, running with a 100Mhz front side bus and manufactured on a .18micron process. This CPU, which will harbor 128K L2 cache on-die will hit the market in Q1 of 2000. Is it any surprise that Microsoft is looking at a K6-2/3 as well as an Athlon? Not really, we're dealing with a 'Console' (remember that), which if successful, will require a huge supply of cheap (can't emphasize that enough) CPUs. The k6-2+ 500MHz will fit the bill nicely being cheap whilst at the same time providing enough FPU power if used correctly with 3D architecture. Neither the Athlon nor Coppermine are particularly cheap and would rocket the price sky high and out of the console market and instead into the PC-Arena. Ask yourself this question, does the Dreamcast suffer from a Hitachi-SH4 'limited' to a frequency of 200MHz? Does it heck… So don't be too worried when scouring over an X-Box spec sheet only to find a K6-2/3.

The Register schrijft dat Carrera, een grote engelse PC bouwer, begin december een Athlon systeem op 1 GHz zal introduceren. Uit de naamgeving van het systeem (FrioSuperG) en het feit dat Carrera op dit moment al Kryotech systemen in de prijslijst heeft staan lijkt het me waarschijnlijk dat hiet hier om een Kryotech Super G gaat:

UK firm Carrera Technology said that it will introduce a workstation that uses an Athlon processor running at 1GHz. The machine will be available in early December.

The £5,873.83 box is called the Octan FrioSuper G and is aimed both at the workstation and the high end gaming market.

The system uses an Athlon "thermally accelerated" to 1GHz, and includes 256Mb of SDRAM, has an 18Gb hard drive, with 3D Labs' GVX1 32Mb AGP video, a 22-inch Iiyama monitor, a Panasonic SCSI DVD-RAM drive, Aureal Vortex sound, NT 4, keyboard and so forth.

Sun heeft een reaktie gepost op de Win2k licentieprijzen die Microsoft 2 dagen geleden bekend maakte, zo bericht The Register. De in de press release genoemde prijsvergelijking tussen Windows 2000 en Solaris zou gemanipulieerd zijn:

Chris Sarfas, Sun's UK product marketing manager, was in explosive mood when he alleged that Microsoft has manipulated a price comparison between Solaris and Windows 2000 in its pricing announcement.

Indeed, we said much the same thing earlier this week (see Win2k smoke and mirrors -- how MS is hiking OS prices.)

"Any comparison between Solaris and Windows 2000 should use the same hardware," he observed testily, and went on to point out that a 100-user licence for Windows 2000 advanced server would cost $15,996 (and $3999 for each additional 25 users), compared with $4395 for a Solaris 7 licence for an unlimited number of users on an eight-CPU system. Sarfas told The Register how that Solaris 8 prices are expected to be similar to those for Solaris 7.

Moszle stuurde deze link naar een artikel van ZDNet NL, over een nieuwe lijn legacy-free PC's van Compaq. Exit ISA en ander oud spul:

Compaq houdt grote schoonmaak. Speciaal voor het bedrijfsleven brengt Compaq een pc op de markt waarop alle verouderde en overbodige technologie ontbreekt.

De laatste jaren zijn pc's uitgerust met nieuwe technologie. Er zijn slechts weinig pc's die de ondersteuning van oudere technieken overboord zetten. Het resultaat is een veelheid aan ongebruikte poorten en bussen, zoals bijvoorbeeld de 16-bit ISA bus.

PC-fabrikanten waren tot dusver terughoudend met legacy free pc's. Dit om de consument, die gewend is aan oude technologie, niet te vervreemden. Dat een compleet nieuw systeem ook succesvol kan zijn, bewees Apple met het uitbrengen van de iMac.

Firingsquad heeft een korte preview rondom de nVidia Quadro gebouwd. Hier een stukje over de verwachten performance van deze professionele GeForce variant:

Well, according to Derek, the Quadro will actually outperform an equivalently spec'ed GeForce 256 board at any given 3D game, which makes sense based on the higher clock speed of the graphics core. The workstation-specific enhancements for Quadro won't make a difference in most general 3D apps or games, and whether they'll be implemented as a side-benefit depends on how much volume is shipped.

For high end applications, Nvidia touts the Quadro to be anywhere from 2 to 4 times faster than an equivalent GeForce. I suspect however that this is taking into account all of the subtle hardware-accelerated features of Quadro that are not implemented on GeForce, such as using anti-aliased lines and wireframes, 2-sided lighting, and shared back-buffering. With these features turned off, the benefit of Quadro would merely be in its additional 10MHz core.

Tom heeft de layout van z'n site aangepast, zo schrijft hjs. Geïnspireerd door de Televaag, zo lijkt, want er is nu nog meer space voor banners :

Intel is gestopt met de produktie van de populaire PIII-450, zo bericht The Register:

The first Pentium III to die has quietly shuffled off this mortal coil. The 450MHz part has been consigned to the chip gulag in the usual low-key manner -- no official announcement, it just stops being mentioned in despatches.

The untimely death -- the poor little thing was only launched at the end of February -- was caused by the inexorably rise of the Celeron range bringing so many bangs per buck that the slowest PIII just couldn't keep up, despite its Screaming Cindy Extensions.

Gamespot heeft twee screenies van Soldier of Fortune op het net gemikt. Dit spel zou nog wel eens erg hard kont kunnen gaan schoppen:

For those who don't know, Soldier of Fortune uses an enhanced Quake II engine that renders at 32-bit color depths. It places players in the shoes of John Mullins, a mercenary hired by the government to track down terrorist activity across the globe. Soldier of Fortune uses a mix of licensed, prototype, and fictional weaponry - and best of all, it has character models with 26 different hit-specific locations for ultra-realistic reactions and movement.

Soldier of Fortune is scheduled for a fall/winter 2000 release, but a demo will be bundled with the Razor mouse from Boomslang, which should be available by mid-November. In the meantime, however, take a look at the pair of brand-new screenshots we managed to get a hold of.

Ik was wat aan het klungelen met de webserver survey van Netcraft (waarmee je ook heel leuk kunt zien waar de nieuwe server op draait), kwam ik daar dit grafiekje tegen met het marktaandeel van de top webservers tussen augustus 1995 en oktober 1999. Het aandeel van de open source Apache server blijkt voor de 5de achtereenvolgende maand gedaald te zijn , terwijl NT/IIS een plotselinge stijging laat zien:

The Tech Zone heeft een artikel gepost over de nadelen van peltier cooling:

At a recent show in Dallas, I picked up an AOC ICEBERG AC-586 Peltier cooler for Socket 7. Nothing on the package indicated Celeron or Socket 370, but the shape looked great for a BP6. The fan was bigger than normal for this medium sized heatsink, and the baseplate was thicker too.

Overclock fever instantly got the better of my common sense. Had I known any better, I wouldn't have blown the $35. Though the ICEBERG does frost itself impressively in open air, when installed on my Celeron 366>>550 the temperature rose significantly and it crashed even at the normal speed. I immediately set out to learn the reason why.

Het waarom lees je hier. Een paar maand geleden heb ik zelf ook even met een peltier kunnen spelen en die dingen worden inderdaad errug heet. Met een simpel heatsinkje red je het niet, anders wordt de zogenaamd koude kant warm en bereik je een tegenovergesteld effect. In een dual config zou ik er sowieso niet aan beginnen ivm de enorme hoeveelheid warmte die je dan aan je systeem toevoegd.

Ik kwam via Slashdot bij deze press release over een doorbraak op het gebied van single molecule memory technologie (waarbij er dus maar 1 molecuul nodig is om een bit op te slaan):

"We've demonstrated a memory element the size of a single molecule," said Reed, principal investigator on the paper. "This is the ultimate in size that one can achieve in microminaturization. The fabrication of the molecular memory was done using a method called 'self-assembly,' which has the potential to dramatically reduce cost."

The single molecule memory effect is more robust in storing information than conventional silicon memory, which is typically 'dynamic random access memories' (DRAM). The single molecule memory has a life approximately one million times longer than DRAM, which is not capable of holding stored charges for long.

"With the single molecule memory, all a general-purpose ultimate molecular computer now needs is a reversible single molecule switch," said Reed. "I anticipate we will see a demonstration of one very soon."

Papers presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting represent the world's leading applied research in electronics. As such, the papers give important clues about where electronics technology will be three-to-five years from now. The meeting runs from December 5-8, 1999.

The Reverend Pulprit vuurde een mailtje richting Tim Sweeney, met een vraag naar zijn mening over de 3dfx Napalm:

With the press release by 3dfx about announcing Napalm at Comdex, what are your thoughts on Napalm's "one billion pixels per second" fill rate? How will that affect UT's performance? And what if its texel fill rate is one-to-one with its pixel fill rate? How will texel fill rate of 1GTPS improve UT's performance? Which would be more important in a game like UT (which stresses fill rates) - pixel or texel fills?

Unreal and UT perform optimally when the texel fill rate is 2X the pixel fill rate. Of course, with 1 GPix, there's plenty of bandwidth to spare, so I'm not so worried about 100% optimality. 1 GPix/sec means you should be able to play UT at 1920x1080 at full frame rate (assuming you have a fast CPU, say a Pentium III 500 or faster). Looking forward to it! (That is based on seeing the spec 3dfx released publically; I don't have any hardware on hand to verify its performance.)

Techweb heeft een nieuwsartikeltje getikt over de nVidia Quadro:

The Quadro uses Nvidia's four-pixel-per-clock processing pipeline, and has a core frequncy of 135 MHz, compared with the 120-MHz clock speed of the GeForce. The memory interface runs at 333 MHz, compared with 300 MHz for the GeForce, and connects to double-data-rate SDRAM. The Quadro chip outputs 17 million triangles or 540 million pixels per second, at peak rates, processing up to 200 million BOPS (billions of operations per second).

Nvidia assigned parallel design teams to architect the two chips. However, the Quadro includes advanced features, such as anti-aliased points and lines, two-sided lighting, unlimited windowing, front-buffer 3-D clipping, and shared back buffer support-all features demanded by CAD professionals, Tamasi said.

The Nvidia Quadro workstation GPU will be offered in the new Gloria II professional graphics accelerator board from Elsa. The chip is priced between $100 and $150, depending on the volume ordered, Tamasi said. The chip and board will ship with drivers for the Pentium III and Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon microprocessor, running under the Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Linux operating systems.

Techweb schrijft dat Intel in januari de Solano chipset zal introduceren, opvolger van de i810 en volgens Techweb de eerste Intel chipset met PC133 support (i810E heeft toch ook al 133MHz FSB!?).

The first chip set from Intel to support PC133 SDRAM will be the Solano, an upgraded device from within the Intel 810 chip set family that will debut in January, not a new chip set code-named Amador, as has been widely rumored on Wall Street, sources close to the matter said on Wednesday.

[...] Camino will support PC100 SDRAM -- not PC133 -- but only by using an extra Memory Translator Hub on the motherboard.

It will be left to the Solano to add a PC133 interface to the memory subsystem; the chip set will also include a 133-MHZ front-side bus that supports Celeron and Pentium processors. Industry sources said Intel has accelerated the Solano introduction by several months to meet demand for the new, faster SDRAM interface. [break] Verder hebben ze het over een (Itanium?) server chipset met DDR support. The Register schreef hier gisteren ook al over: [/break] It wasn't known if the follow-on PC133-enabled chip set is the rumored Amador, although the device isn't expected to be ready until much later in 2000. Yet another upcoming Intel chip set will support double-data-rate PC266 SDRAM for servers, but sources said the product won't be unveiled until early in 2001.

Voodoo Extreme's Reverend Pulprit heeft een speculaties over de 3dfx Napalm (lijkt erop dat 3dfx die naam zal handhaven, dus geen 'Voodoo4') gepost:

'll throw in my own little speculation as to how the Napalm will be, in terms of technology, some specs and well, other things cropping up in my mind. Bear in mind, the following are just my "suspicions" and is MOST DEFINITELY not something privy to me :

Clock speed: Probably somewhere around 250MHz per chip. Possibly based on 0.22micron fab, perhaps even 0.18micron due to the delay till Q1'2000.

Fill Rates and Pipelines:

Probably dual pixel and dual texel per clock cycle pipelines (unlike their current Voodoo3, which has dual texel but single pixel per clock pipeline). This would result in similar specs for pixel and texel fill rates. Also, probably multi-chip solution. Works just like the Voodoo2-SLI capability, with possible single chip, dual chips and quad chips configurations (tri chips may not be technically feasible). Thus, perhaps three different retail board configurations. Or perhaps, additionally, the possibility of "upgrading" a single chip board to dual and/or quad chip board by way of adding on chips to existing board (hey, if I speculate, why not all the way? :-) And so, with the two assumptions above, fill rates could theoretically be :

Single-chip - 250MHz x 2pipelines = 500MegaPixels/MegaTexels per second
Dual chips - 250MHz x 2pipelines x 2chips = 1000MegaPixels/MegaTexels per second (1000Mega=1Giga=1 billion)
Quad chips - 250MHz x 2pipelines x 4chips = 2000MegaPixels/MegaTexels per second

On board memory: Possibly 32MB, 64MB or 128MB fast speed SDRAM or all three as options/configurations. 32MB may seem remote possibility due to other technologies like T-Buffer and FXT1. May not have DDR memory, possibly "just" memory speed equal to chip clock speed Technology

Most probably includes all of the following :

- T-Buffer
- FXT1 texture compression (compatible with DirectX's
- S3TC texture compression) 32bit internal and external rendering output

- Large texture size support (possibly, but not probably, up to 2048x2048) AGP4X

- Bump-mapping : Emboss definitely, dot-product possibly, environment-mapped unlikely. All should be performed single cycle, if exists. Possibly separate power supply or a connector for such due to multiple chip configuration power needs/consumption Probably 10 million triangles per second, or more

...and very probably this - NO on-board geometry (T&L) processor :-(

3DLabs heeft nieuwe Powerthreads drivers voor de Oxygen VX1 gereleased, zo schrijft marowi. Deze drives zijn leuk voor gebruik in SMP configuraties:

3Dlabs®, Inc. (NASDAQ:TDDD) today announced the release of PowerThreads™ SSE - a new generation multi-threaded OpenGL® driver for its Oxygen™ VX1 entry-level workstation graphics accelerator. PowerThreads SSE leverages multiple CPUs to transparently boost geometry and lighting performance for all single- and multi-threaded OpenGL applications and uses Intel®'s Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) to accelerate geometry transform and lighting calculations on Windows workstations equipped with Intel Pentium® III and Pentium® III Xeon™ processors. Additionally, through close cooperation with Autodesk, 3Dlabs has implemented seamless driver optimizations for 3D Studio Max® that boost application performance by up to 300%. The PowerThreads SSE drivers are available for immediate download and will be included as standard with all future shipments of Oxygen VX1.

PowerThreads SSE is a key component in 3Dlabs' comprehensive range of hardware and software geometry acceleration solutions for Windows NT workstations. By combining the workstation-class quality and performance of the low-cost Oxygen VX1 with the geometry throughput of multiple CPUs, including Intel's Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon™ 733MHz processors announced today, workstation users can configure machines that cost-effectively deliver high modeling and back-end rendering performance.

3Dlabs and Autodesk have undertaken a close technical cooperation, as part of 3Dlabs' extensive Developer Relations Program, to ensure that 3D Studio Max and the PowerThreads SSE drivers operate seamlessly to boost performance by up to 300%. 3Dlabs' higher-end geometry accelerated boards also benefit from these application specific optimizations. The PowerThreads SSE drivers also include 3DNow! Optimizations for AMD processors. The PowerThreads SSE and 3DNow! Code optimizations provide geometry performance benefit on both single and dual-CPU systems.

3Dlabs cards with hardware geometry acceleration, such as the Oxygen GVX1 and upcoming Oxygen GVX210, benefit from PowerThreads technology that dynamically load-balances geometry processing onto host CPUs during periods of intensive loading, when on-board geometry could become the performance bottleneck. [break] Verder hebben ze een vergelijking tussen de Permedia3 en G400 op hun site gezet, waaruit natuurlijk moet blijken dat de P3 beter is... [/break] Considering purchasing a Matrox G400 MAX? Think again, the Permedia3 Create! is a better choice at a lower cost! Please visit http://www.3dlabs.com/products/p3vg400 for a full comparison between the Permedia3 Create! and the Matrox G400 MAX. See for yourself that the Permedia3 Create! is the choice for business graphics and web professionals.

Beetje onzinnig aangezien de GeForce inmiddels al te koop is, en die kaart geeft waarschijnlijk ook de Oxygen VX1 een harde trap op het achterwerk (en wat betreft multi-threaded drivers kunnen we waarschijnlijk het een en ander van Elsa verwachten).

Hmm, weer eens wat anders dan de 10.000ste GeForce review: 3DHardware.net heeft een review van de Probotics Cye Robot online gezet. Echt functioneel is het apparaat volgens mij nog niet, maar het idee is leuk:

Obviously, there's more to the Cye than just the robot. Probotics wanted the Cye to be very versataile and expansion friendly, thus they included a mounting hole in the center of the Cye, so that the user could attach extra equipment to the robot for further functionality. There's a vacuum cleaner available for the Cye which effectively turns it into a robotic housemaid, vacuuming the areas you've marked out for it. A cordless vacuum cleaner model is also available due to the fact that Cye can end up tangling itself in the cleaner cord. In addition to the vacuum cleaner, a wagon can also be ordered from the website. The wagon mounts to the Cye robot and has two support wheels on the back for stability. With this wagon Cye can carry mail, coffee and cookies, books and anything else that will fit in the tray. Imagine the Cye serving you breakfast on the bed in the morning plus fetching the morning newspaper. Okay, so it doesn't exactly serve you the breakfast but it can bring it to your bed.

Ik kwam bij HardOCP deze pics tegen van het watercool systeempje dat Compaq gebruikt om hun Xeon servers koud te houden:

"We just got our eval 8-way Compaq 8500 server. Here is the cooling technique that Compaq uses on Xeon. According to Compaq, the 2 copper tubes contain water. If there is any chance that leaking occurs, the Xeon will run so hot that water will be vaporized immediately."

3DChipset.com heeft een case cooling artikeltje neer gemikt. Hier een stukje over het wegwerken van de (zwaar irritante) IDE en SCSI flatcables:

This is probably the most important thing to worry about to get the maximum airflow in your case to cool down to ambient temperature the best. On this case I use, I got creative and cut cable holes next to the motherboard to run the cables from the SCSI card I use to remove the cables from within the case to the outside of the case. Now most of you are using your EIDE connections on your motherboard simply because SCSI isn't really that cheap. For this method you can cut the slots next to the connections of the motherboard and run them on the backside of the computer case as you see in my example with the SCSI controller. Or you can just tape the cable ribbons to the side of the interior of the computer case as well. But make sure that the cables are not in the way of any fans you put in the case.

System Logic heeft een preview gepost van de Intel Itanium, de eerste processor die gebouwd is rond Intel's nieuwe 64-bit IA-64 architectuur. Hier een korte opsomming van de (op dit moment bekende) specs:

Before getting into the inner workings of the Itanium, here is an overview of the details that have been recently made public:

- Contains a 10 stage pipeline and EPIC design for increased parallel processing
- Contains 128 general purpose registers, 128 floating point registers, 64 predicate registers, and 8 branch registers.
- Includes 4 integer units and 2 floating point units
- Includes LI and L2 cache on chip
- Supports up to 4 MB of L3 cache, which is off chip but still in the Itanium package
- Capable of dealing with 16 GB of main memory
- It will initially ship with the 460GX chipset and use standard PC100 SDRAM at 100 MHz