Marcus Pollice, Author at VR World - Page 7 of 7

Business, Software Programs

Oracle pulls the plug on Open Office

In a rather short statement ? as we are recently used to in regard to Oracle – the software outfit announced on Friday to discontinue the commerial version of Open Office. They also want to move OpenOffice.org to a "purely community-based open source project". Oracle remained silent about the interesting bits of the move. They didn’t disclose the reason for the decision other than their sudden change of heart regarding which development model is best suited for OpenOffice.org. Also they didn’t give an explanation for the discontinuation of the commercial version. If recent announcements of the company are any indication though, it might be because

Business, Hardware

AMD Beats Intel by a Year in the USB 3.0 Wars

This week a lot of media have reported that AMD announced formally and officially that their A75 and A70M Fusion Controller Hubs (FCH) are the first certified USB 3.0 chipsets in the world. This alone is not really news, as the chipsets have been in the certification list for weeks, so it’s mere reiteration of a known fact. The real fun begins when looking at the slides of a track about USB 3.0 on Intel’s IDF held in Bejing in the past week. AMD Certifies USB 3.0 Chipset on IDF Beijing 2011 Not only does Intel unequivocally state that USB 3.0 is needed and important

Graphics, Hardware

AMD Refocuses VISION Brand in tune with Upcoming Fusion Processors

With the impending launch of the desktop and mobile variants of the A-series Fusion APUs, AMD also plans to update their branding and logo stickers once again. According to a report from X-bit labs, the new products will not feature microprocessor branding. Instead stickers naming some characteristics about the CPU and GPU are added to the package. According to the materials released by our colleages, the new branding will heavily revolve around AMD Vision which is more or less product-agnostic. However there will be additional stickers denoting special capabilities. For example for a Quad-Core Llano APU, it will state "Quad Core and AMD Radeon Graphics." This

Graphics, Hardware

AMD "Llano" Fusion Socket Revealed: CPU and GPU Meet in One

Now that AMD has publicly announced that the Llano APU started shipping for revenue and will launch in the second quarter of 2011, even more information about AMDs upcoming chip gets revealed. For the first time, images of the new socket FM1, the CPU and a CPU-Z shot of the product got posted on the internet. Until now it is known that Llano will be based on the x86 core used in current K10.5 Athlon II / Phenom II / Opteron products and will feature up to 4 cores. The CPUs will feature a DDR3 memory controller with support up to DDR3-1866, which would amount

Enterprise, Graphics, Hardware

Intel Enters Professional Graphics Market

On Tuesday Intel refreshed their server-lineup top to bottom. While the high-end got a past generation refresh based on the Nehalem/Westmere architecture featuring up to 10 cores and 8 sockets, the entry-level servers got updated to Xeon E3-1200 series CPUs which are based on the more recent Sandy Bridge architecture. The chips use the same LGA-1155 as in the desktop – theoretically motherboard vendors could even add support for them. For the first time, Intel Xeon Processors bring integrated graphics; E3-1200 Family introduces Intel HD Graphics P3000 There is one thing that stands out with some of these CPUs. Unlike the desktop SKUs, only some

Hardware

Intel Core i7 995X: Saying Good Bye to Westmere

Back in March 2010, Intel launched the sexa-core processor named Core i7 980X. 980X was based on the 32nm Gulftown core clocked at 3.33GHz, featuring 12MB L3 cache and 12 threads. This way they beat AMD to market with a sexa-core desktop CPU, although AMD fought back at way more affordable price points with their Phenom II X6 offerings. One year later Intel superseded the Extreme Edition product with the i7 990X clocked at 3.46GHz priced at the same $999. But apparently this was not the last Intel wants to bring to the aging LGA-1366 platform. Leaked screenshot showing allegedly upcoming Intel Core i7 995X processor On

Business, Hardware

AMD Clarifies its "New Deal" with GlobalFoundries

The seemingly headless AMD yesterday announced an amendment to their Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) with GlobalFoundries. The WSA was originally agreed during formation of GlobalFoundries back in 2009. It sets out the terms AMD buys products from their manufacturing partner. In order to adapt the agreement to manufacturing development some changes have been implemented to reduce AMDs risk in this endeavor. In a conference call this morning AMDs interim CEO Thomas Seifert gave additional explanations to the initially somewhat confusing press release issued by AMD. GlobalFoundries 32nm Wafer with test patterns Until today, the agreement with GlobalFoundries looked as follows; AMD paid fixed amounts per

Graphics, Hardware

nVidia (Finally) Brings SLI to AMD FX Bulldozer Gaming Platform

For several years NVIDIA denied its SLI technology to be used in conjunction with chipsets of competitors. These were almost always political reasons, not technical ones as frequent driver hacks showed. This usually meant that if you wanted to use SLI on AMD platform, you needed a chipset from NVIDIA. On the Intel platform, SLI support developed into a licensing war between Intel and NVIDIA, as the company was barred from producing chipsets for newer Core "i" series of processors. Even though Intel paid a high price, NVIDIA opened SLI to select Intel chipsets in two ways: via often criticized NF200 bridge chip (thermal issues)

Enterprise, Technology Security

Oracle ditches "Itanic", Starts War of Words with Intel and HP

It is no secret that Intel Itanic fail to lit the markets and push themselves onto the high end market. In fact, some of companies we work with even received offers from Intel in "buy one, get one free" or selling extra Itanium CPUs for as low as one cent (not an error), just to adopt the Itanium platform. Thus, we were not surprised to see Oracle releasing a rather short press release on Tuesday. Oracle is the latest to abandon Intel’s HMS Itanic ship, following Microsoft, Red Hat and co. Original Picture credit: Fachhochschule Nordhausen The company stated that they are done with developing

Software Programs, Technology Security

Firefox 4: Top Reasons Why You Want to Upgrade

Pressured on the innovation front from Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla dug deep and came out with a set of innovations that radically change world’s #2 browser. We have already reported about the imminent release of Firefox 4, the next iteration of the popular open source web browser. Here we will provide an overview of the most important changes added to the browser. Note that some of the described experiences may depend on the operating system. While we tried to explain such differences, do note that the article is written from the perspective of a Firefox 4 Beta/RC user on Windows 7

Hardware

ASUS vs. AMD: Bulldozer Support on Old Motherboards via BIOS Update

For as long as AMD had fought Socket Wars with Intel, the company kept the mantra of cross-socket compatibility. In reality, the company would break compatibility not just in order to switch to a new technology (DDR2 to DDR3 in case of AM2 and AM3), but also introduce incompatible steps such as AM2+ and now, with the upcoming AM3+. We talked to AMD on numerous occasions about the upgradeability of AM3 platform and it was explicitly mentioned that both the old Bulldozer CPU architecture (canceled way back) and the new Bulldozer CPU architecture would be compatible with existing platforms (AM2/AM3). Companies in AMD’s ecosystem, such

Business, Software Programs

2,000th Story: Nokia Withdraws from Qt Licensing Business

A few days ago Digia announced that they have acquired the Qt licensing business from Nokia, staring the projected withdrawal from open source technologies which are no longer needed for Nokia’s operating business. The change is expected to come through before the end of March. Qt Developers might have to get used a new logo describing the Qt platform Neither Digia nor Nokia disclosed the financial details of the transaction, but it is confirmed that 3,500 existing customers will be transferred over to Digia. Nokia, however, committed to support them during 2011 in order to ensure a smooth transition. As a part of the transaction,

Business, Hardware

Western Digital Acquires Hitachi GST, Moves to #1 Place in Storage Biz

The details of the agreement look as follows. WD offered $3.5 billion in cash with the rest of the sum settled with 25 million WD shares. These have a market value of $750 million based on the stock price of $30.01 (market closing March 4, 2011). As a consequence, Hitachi will hold about ten percent of Western Digital. The company will to raise $2.5 billion of loans in order to carry out the acquisition, meaning the company will invest "only" around one billion dollars from its own financial reserves. Additionally, two Hitachi representatives get a seat in Western Digital Board of Directors, with the former

Hardware

Demystifying Intel Thunderbolt: Is it Really That Good?

Intel recently introduced the Thunderbolt connectivity technology. In a 12-month exclusive deal, Apple is the first company to utilize the technology inside the new generation of MacBook Pro notebooks. which is already available for sale. Both companies proudly touted the benefits and advantages of the technology that combines both PCI Express and DisplayPort in a single interface delivering up to 10 Gigabits per second per channel (1.25GB/s). This means you can have up to 20 Gbps, 2.5 GB/s bidirectional bandwidth at each given moment. Even though these numbers look much better on paper than for instance, eSATA or USB 3.0, this article offers a bit

Hardware

Why nVidia?s Tegra 3 is faster than a Core 2 Duo T7200

During Mobile World Congress 2011 held in Barcelona, NVIDIA announced the Tegra 3 SoC (System-on-a-Chip), codenamed Kal-El. The company also disclosed a roadmap that boldly promises to deliver 100x the performance of a current Tegra 2 chip by 2014. Bear in mind that NVIDIA factors in both CPU and GPU performance in this number, so it’s not that easy to compare it to other chips. However, they also provided a performance comparison with a Core 2 Duo CPU using CoreMark and it was exactly those benchmark results that stirred quite a controversy. It didn’t took long until someone found out about a nasty little detail

Business, Software Programs

Analysis: How Microsoft Nokia Deal Affects Open Source

A lot has been said already about the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft. We have already heard the good, the bad, so here is the ugly. Where there are winners, there are losers as well. In this case the winners are clearly Microsoft and possibly Nokia, depending on how well the deal works out. On the loser side we have a couple Open Source projects and Intel. This is not going to be yet another rant on how good or bad the decision of Nokia was. A change was necessary as the previous offerings didn’t deliver and going with Microsoft was one of a few