There is an e-mail going around reporting that the Windows file utility (Helps restore long file
names) called sulfnbk.exe, saying that this is a virus and that it will run on June 1, 2001 and
delete everything on your hard drive, and tells you to delete it.
Quote from story at ZDNet:
"The e-mail, which was originally written in Portugese and was reported to be
doing the rounds in Brazil last month, has now been translated and appears to be appearing
throughout the UK, advising people to delete a harmless Microsoft Windows utility--called
sulfnbk.exe--from their hard disks. Antivirus experts were quick to point out that the e-mail
does not contain a worm, and is being passed around simply by well-meaning people alarmed at
its contents.
TheInquirer says that the Dual capable Athlon has its name changed to Athlon 2P.
Quote from Report:
"The product name, which AMD's marchitecture department must have slaved over
day and night, was formerly going to be Athlon for Smart MP, but maybe that wasn't going to be
good enough, it appears. Although it's possible AMD may change its mind again.
It had better make its mind up quick though, because the launch, as we've said before, will be
on June 4th and heaps of press releases need to be readied for the wave of hax that will write
it up after the fact.
As part of Microsoft's .NET campaign, they will no longer produce new updates for their Microsoft
Office package that you can buy in the store. Instead they will push for a subscription program
that you will have to buy to get updates for it, these updates that you purchase under the
subscription you will have to download it. Don't you love how Microsoft thinks that everyone
has a broadband connection. It might also apply to all of the rest of Microsoft's
products as well.
Quote from Yahoo news:
"It may take a while to sputter out, but if Microsoft gets its way--as so
often happens--there will never be another application upgrade like Office XP. And as we wave
goodbye to big upgrades, we'll welcome its replacement: Smaller upgrades and software by
subscription.
Microsoft has already said it wants to move to a subscription model--under which customers
"buy" the right to use software for a certain period of time and get "free" upgrades during
that time.
Subscriptions are good for Microsoft because upgrades don't matter nearly as much as they used
to, as witnessed by the lengthening of customer upgrade cycles. The differences between Office
XP and whatever you are using now are mostly cosmetic and in improved ease of use
Saw this at AthlonOC. It is a report from TweakTown on how AMD is possibly going to raise the
core voltage of their 1.2 and 1.33GHz CPUs to 1.80v
Quote from the report:
"While at the VIA C3 Launch in Sydney last month, I over-heard a conversation
between John Gatt of VIA and Steven Fraser of AMD concerning instability issues of 1.33GHz AMD
Athlon processors, John had to set the core voltage on four 1.33GHz Athlons to 1.8 volts to
get them running in a stable environment stable. Many would know that increasing the core
voltage of these chips through the BIOS to 1.8 volts would fix the majority of instability
problems being experienced by many owners. While AMD Athlon cores clocked at 1.33GHz are
stable in an idle environment, when they are put in a stressful environment for a long period
of time they often tend to crash, as not enough power is being supplied to them. Moreover,
these problems have lead to retailers and systems builders getting extensive amounts of tech
support emails and phone calls reporting instability problems with partly 1.2GHz cores, but
mainly 1.33GHz AMD Athlon processors. It is rumoured that AMD are considering changing the
default core voltage to 1.8 volts on the 1.33GHz and the 1.2GHz AMD Athlons. AMD have not
officially acknowledged this problem, but it is a rumoured they will soon!"
Tuesday, May 29, 2001 - 8:05PM
Hackers to Clean-Up the Internet?
Saw this at 3DSpotlight. It is an article about how hackers created a virus to help the police
stop pornography.
Quote from story:
"An e-mail virus that seeks out images of child pornography on systems running
Microsoft Windows & alerts government agencies to positive findings, has been released by
hackers intent on cleaning up the Internet.
The worm, dubbed "Noped", encrypted as Visual Basic Script (VBS) code, arrives as an attachment
to an email entitled "FWD: Help us all to end illegal child porn now." Once executed, the virus
searches all hard drives for JPEG files possessing names that indicate they may contain child
pornography
There is a report at
ChipOnline
about a bug with two different revisions of the KT133a chipset. These are the ones with
codes of 1EA0 and 1EA4. 2EA1 revision chipsets seem to be ok. This problem depends on the
chipset, not the motherboard manufacturer.
Sunday, May 27, 2001 - 10:06PM
400GB Hard Drives
Four Hundred Gigabyte hard drives may be coming soon, IBM has developed a new technology called
"antiferromagnetically-coupled", which IBM uses two extremely thin metallic layers about the
thickness of 3 atoms to increase storage densities in magnetic drives.
Quote from story:
"The key to IBM's new data storage breakthrough is a three-atom-thick layer of
the element ruthenium, a precious metal similar to platinum, sandwiched between two magnetic
layers. That only a few atoms could have such a dramatic impact caused some IBM scientists to
refer to the ruthenium layer informally as "pixie dust"."
Wild Andy has posted an
article about
SOI, or silicon on insulator.
Quote from the article:
"IBM has found in manufacturing their SOI products that heat dissipation is
greatly reduced. In fact, they have manufactured 4ns memory on the same process sizes that
they could only normally manufacture 8ns memory on. That goes to say that a 0.5µ process is
capable of producing approximatley 250Mhz components with SOI and only 125Mhz components with
bulk CMOS"
Sunday, May 27, 2001 - 9:45PM
MBM 5.07b released
Motherboard Monitor 5.07b released, some bugs found in 5.07 and 5.07a, so this version has
been released.
MBM 5.07 has been released, Go get it here:
MBM 5.07
Fixes in this version:
OSD
-Stig has totally re-done it, should have fixed the visual glitches that got reported
-Added hotkey support, (default CTRL+ALT+M) turn it on on the OSD tab, won't work if you enable
the normal OSD
-Added the OSD in a seperate thread that will update every 5 seconds no mather what you MBM
interval is
DLL
-Added support for the Dallas SM DS1780 (thank you Tim Harvey)
-Added support for the dual Dallas SM DS1780 (thank you Tim Harvey)
-Added support for the dual ADM1024 (thank you Stephen Ricciardi)
-Added support for the dual ADM1025 (thank you John Wibbelsman)
-Added option to make the DLL ignore the MBM call for a sensor reset when starting up (see
help file FAQ for detailed info)
EXE
-Fixed timer interval change not taken over until restart of MBM
MAIL & FTP DLL
-Added FTP code to the Mail dll, hence it's now the mail & ftp dll
Settings
-Added hotkey options for OSD
-Added FTP section to E-mail section
Installer
-Will remove any found mbm5mail.dll as there now is a mbm5mailftp.dll
-Will add uninstall MBM icon to program group. Seems not everybody knows there is a
"add/remove software" group in the control pannel
Help File
-Added a load of stuff again
Friday, May 25, 2001 - 12:06PM
Athlon 4 with Smart MP details
The Inquirer has details on the AMD SmartMP, and that its launch is on June 4th.
Quote from the report:
"As reported earlier, the chips will use exclusive level two TLB cache, and
its cacheing architecture is designed to use hardware data pre-fetch. The floating point unit
uses three pipe superscalar design
The front side bus runs at 266MHz with eight bit ECC. The processors will use Socket A, and
include 3DNow Professional which includes 52 additional instructions and which is aimed at
multimedia encoding and workstation enhancements"
Thursday, May 24, 2001 - 9:23PM
Internet Explorer 6 2479 leaked
Internet Explorer 2479 has been leaked, and is available for download at the PlanetNexiz forum.
The link to the thread is here, it is currently for Win2K only:
here or here
Thursday, May 24, 2001 - 9:10PM
ABIT's New KG7
ABIT has been hard at work, building a Socket A DDR Platform.
Quote and picture from OCWorkBench News:
"The long awaited KG7 should be launched shortly. KG7 RAID is based on the AMD
760 chipset. Hey, 4 DIMMs on board. Supporting Duron 600-950, Thunderbird 700-1.33G. It
features 4 x 184pins PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM support (up to 4GB). Softmenu III is supported and
can be tuned by 1Mhz from these based frequencies 66,68,75,80,83,100,103,105,110,112,115,120,
124,133,140,145 and 150 MHz.1Mhz steppings are from 0-28Mhz."
Thursday, May 24, 2001 - 8:40PM
Moore Steps Down from Intel Board
Saw this at 3DSpotlight, and they report on a story from Yahoo Daily News, about how Moore is
retiring as a one of the board of directors.
Quote from the story:
"On Thursday, the Silicon Valley legend retired from the board of directors
of Intel. He will continue serving as chairman emeritus and director emeritus but will no longer
hold any voting power.
After the company's annual meeting - during which former Federal Communications Commission
(news
- web
sites) Reed Hundt was elected to the company's board - Moore said he has no regrets about
instituting a mandatory retirement age for directors.
Dell seems to think that for Desktops, Linux is too complicated for us, but is just right for
servers, and graphics workstations.
Quote from story:
"The initial optimism over Linux as a client desktop environment has given way to more
sedate projections, even as Linux continues to make significant inroads into servers. The
closure last
week of Eazel, which was working on an easy-to-use Linux graphical user interface, was a
sign to many in the industry that the Linux desktop promise has failed to pan out. Linux has
less than 2 percent of the desktop market, according to industry analysts"
Saw this at ZDNet, it is a report on how the higher prices for internet access might have a
negative affect of increasing the amount of people using the internet.
Quote from report:
"On Tuesday, AOL Time Warner's America Online unit raised its monthly fee for
U.S. members by roughly $2 to $23.90, its first price increase in more than three years.
Industry watchers say competitors such as EarthLink won't be far behind in trying to boost
rates.
Such a trend could have an adverse effect on consumer Net adoption, which has already shown
signs of cooling in the first part this year. According to a recent survey by Telecommunications
Reports International, the number of U.S. homes with Internet access dropped slightly during
the first quarter of 2001, marking its first decrease"
Saw this at The Inquirer. It is a report on how VIA may want to sue NVIDIA for what they feel
infringe on some of VIA's patents.
Quote from report:
"RUMOURS ARE CIRCULATING in old Taipei, that Nvidia and Via are heading
for a legal fight over alleged patent infringement in the Crush 11 chipset.
The rumours, which cannot be substantiated as we write this story, suggest that Via is
considering taking action because technology incorporated in one of its chipsets which uses
S3 graphics extensions"
"Beginning in the July billing cycle, AOL said Tuesday it will charge subscribers $23.90
for its monthly unlimited-use plan, a 9 percent increase from the current rate of $21.95. AOL
has not raised the price of its unlimited-access service since April 1998"
Saw this on an Intel pdf document. Intel has put it on paper saying that Slot 1 is dead.
Link to the document
here
Monday, May 21, 2001 - 10:30PM
Apple to Ditch CRT Monitors
Saw this one at Icrontic (Also a more detailed look into this at
Arstechnica)
Quote from Icrontic:
"In yet another retarded move by Apple Computer, they have completely ditched
CRT monitors in place of LCD. They now offer ONLY LCD monitors with all of their computers,
driving the price up by thousands. Good move Apple... (sarcasm) let's see how much crap we
can put in a computer to get it up to $10,000 so NO ONE will buy it."
Monday, May 21, 2001 - 10:15PM
Micron Announces Cas 2 PC2100
Micron has
announced thier
CAS2 PC2100 DDR Memory
Quote from Micron:
"Micron's PC2100 CL2 DDR SDRAM modules are compatible with all chipsets using PC2100
industry standard CL2.5 DDR SDRAM modules," said Kit Fawcett, DRAM Product Marketing Manager.
"These faster DDR SDRAM modules provide a simple way to improve the system-level performance
of platforms using existing PC2100 DDR SDRAMs. Micron's reduction in CAS latency on these
PC2100 parts effectively boosts chipset performance without any design change required."
Sunday, May 20, 2001 - 10:30PM
X-BOX Crashes at E3
Saw this at Gaming Intelligence Agency. They report on the X-Box Impressions
Quote from the report:
"There were also indications that the hardware is not entirely stable yet - a
crash during Nightcaster revealed a familiar looking PC boot screen, and a Microsoft
representative explained that the memory configuration on the floor models was different than
that of the final version."
Sunday, May 20, 2001 - 9:40PM
ABIT KT7E Reviews
The ABIT KT7E is being reviewed by several Websites. Here are the links to them.
More will be added.
New HighPoint 370 ver. 1.11.0512 drivers available
There are a new version of Highpoint drivers for the HPT370 controller. Use at your own risk.
Go get them at Icrontic's KT133 faq
here
Saturday, May 19, 2001 - 3:30PM
NVIDIA Denies Crush Chipset
Saw this one at AMDZone. They report on how NVIDIA denies that they ever had the Crush chipset
in production. They will have more details in their E3 wrapup as well as other things.
Friday, May 18, 2001 - 4:30PM
CyberRebate files for bankruptcy
'Tis a sad day. Cyberrebate files for bankrupty, and has suspended sales, and only has a
skeleton crew to until its bankruptcy is final.
As seen on its website:
Wednesday, May 16, 2001; 11:00am EDT CyberRebate.com, Inc., an on-line
retailer headquartered in Long Island, NY, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11
in the Eastern District of New York at 10 a.m. today.
As of the filing time, CyberRebate.com suspended operations on its Web site.
Questions regarding customers, vendors and others affected by today's action will be resolved
as the bankruptcy process proceeds.
Sadly, most employees were released this morning. A small staff will remain to take the
company through bankruptcy.
More information will be available once the bankruptcy process gets underway.
Customers will be contacted regarding their rights and remedies.
Friday, May 18, 2001 - 4:15PM
Official VIA 4in1 4.31 Final posted
VIA has posted their official 4in1 4.31 on their website.
Go get them here
Friday, May 18, 2001 - 4:00PM
Icrontic puts up KT133 FAQ
Icrontic.com has put up there own KT133 FAQ, although, I like Paul's better.
Link to Icrontic's KT133 FAQ
Here
Thursday, May 17, 2001 - 4:32PM
KT7 FAQ Website updated
Paul's KT7 FAQ Website has been updated once again.
New Information in this update:
17 May 2001
- Added modbin6 to downloads page
Thursday, May 17, 2001 - 4:32PM
NVIDIA Version 1.0 Linux Drivers
There are new Linux drivers for NVIDIA video cards. Go get them
here
Changes in this version
- Preliminary GeForce2 Go support
- Added support for GeForce3 OpenGL and GLX extensions
- Fixed many SMP bugs
- Added TV-Out support
- Fixed DGA depth change bug
- Rewrote 2D offscreen memory allocation
- Fixed X-Video in TwinView
- Acceleration for X-Render extension
- Fixed up GLXPixmap rendering
- Fixed problem with make current to same drawable but different dpy
- Fixed problem in which OpenGL would segfault when reading X atoms
- X now gets the DPI (dots per inch) from the monitor's EDID (rather than just defaulting to
75 dpi)
- All DPMS modes are now supported. There are still issues on flat panels and on the second
head of a TwinView system (please see the list of problems above)
- Fixed support for AGP on systems with 1 GB or more of memory
Thursday, May 17, 2001 - 4:32PM
Version 6.0 of the BIOS Optimization Guide
Version 6 of the BIOS Optimization Guide is now out from
Rojakpot
New items in this version:
- PCI Latency Timer
Also rewritten in the Guide
- AGP Aperture Size
- Spread Spectrum
- SDRAM CAS Latency Time
- SDRAM Cycle Time Tras/Trc
- SDRAM Cycle Length
Wednesday, May 16, 2001 - 6:28PM
The CAD Sells To M3DZone
Saw this at Icrontic.
"What a DAY! The CAD has SOLD OUT to M3DZone! WTH? I was told they sold the
whole site to them, so now M3DZone owns the entire thing, as evident by the new copyright text
at the bottom. They also felt the need to switch out the banners while still being hosted on
the Icrontic Network. Weric put a write-up of the sale
here.
Wednesday, May 16, 2001 - 6:28PM
AMD Roadmap
PC Watch Japan has a
roadmap for
AMD that includes 2002.
You might need to use AltaVista Translator for
this one.
Tuesday, May 15, 2001 - 3:15PM
Download Opera 5 for Linux
Opera 5 is now available for Linux, for those 2.6% of you who visit this website.
Go download it here Opera 5
Tuesday, May 15, 2001 - 2:55PM
AMD and Dell
Saw this at AMDZone. They link a report on how AMD just might have gotten Dell to use thier
CPU's to build AMD systems.
Quote from report:
"AMD has finally won over Dell. The PC vendor will end its exclusive use of Intel CPUs
in June when it announces that it will use AMD's mobile Athlon 4 in an upcoming high
performance laptop.
That, at least, is what Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Eric Ross claims to have been told
by sources. In a pro-AMD report issued to investors today, Ross said AMD will announce
Dell's support at the Computex Taipei show early next month"
VIA has posted a new set of chipset drivers, version 4.31. They also include a fix for the
686B chipset bug (that occurs with Creative Sound Blaster Live cards).
Saw this at Insane Hardware.
They report on how the Mobile Athlon 4 (Palamino) is now out.
Quote from story:
"AMD is readying themselves for the launch of their new mobile processor, the
Mobile Athlon 4. The "4" has come about as a way of competing directly against
Intel with their Pentium 4. I think AMD see this as a way of telling the Joe
Public people that they are upto number 4 in their Athlon series of processors,
which will put AMD on the same playing field as Intel when it comes to big brand
name PC purchases by the novice consumer"
Sunday, May 13, 2001 - 6:18PM
ABIT KT7E Review
Over at Overclockers Online they have a review of the ABIT KT7E with the KT133E chipset.
Quote from story:
"So what exactly IS the VIA KT133E chipset? Well, the KT133E can be compared to the
famous KT133A chipset but without official 133MHz FSB support. You'll find out later in
this review that the FSB on our Abit KT7E even went up a 'little' higher than 133MHz, so
I'm thinking ... Man, what's all this "no official 133MHz FSB support" crap?? One other
interesting thing there is to know about the KT133E chipset is that it's quite a bit
cheaper than the KT133A. Doesn't that sound tempting for manufacturers of low budget
mainboards?"
Set above options to Disabled/Disabled/0 may help SB Live 5.1 soundissue.
If the system experiences low performance after these settings, enable the
"PCI master read caching" please.
2. Fixes the issue Athlon 1.3G(100) wrongfully recognized as 104x12.5.
3. Adds an option "State after power failure".
4. Set all four IDE devices to "AUTO".
5. Set the default year to 2001.
6. BIOS compile date: 05/11/2001.
The one really cool feature of this BIOS is the "State after power failure". If the power
goes out when using your computer, it will turn itself back on. It really does work.
Over at M3DZone they have the new beta release of Internet Explorer 6. The build is 2469
and as usual, use at your own risk. You need WinRAR or a archiver that can open *.rar
files.
Over at the Inquirer, they report that AMD might be supporting the SSE instruction set.
Although this might not be true, so just take it with a grain of salt for now.
Quote from report:
"The Athlon H-Series includes SSE+, which may or may not be called 3DNow! Pro, and
extensions to the instruction set include Intel Screaming Sindie 1 and 2 single and double
precision floating point instructions. AMD will continue to support 3DNow, even in Hammer,
when it arrives"
Also, about the Athlon board with dual 1.8GHz CPUs:
"And very interesting reading it makes for too. The Tyan Thunder K7 mobo, which supports
dual Athlon H-series microprocessors, offering up to 2.1GB/s per CPU, supports four PC2100
registered DIMMs, ECC scrubbing, 4X AGP Pro, on board SCSI, two network interface cards
and on board graphics. One of its nicest features is its codename - Guinness
The power supply is actually 460 watts, not 450 watts as we previously reported, and
couple of suppliers are likely to be ready at launch date.
The document we saw mentions Palominos running at 1.8GHz but 1200MHz and 1400MHz Palominos
are also in the frame. Heatsinks suitable for the 1200MHz Palominos will probably be fine
with the higher frequencies"
This is an interesting story from
HardwareCentral. Here's a quote from the article:
"Wed 5/9/01 -- Addiction is a dreadful thing. It can turn a loving parent into a fiend,
frightening the children and robbing their piggy banks to get a fix. It can drive a capable,
confident business exec to crimes like embezzlement. And it's making Microsoft Corp. lash
out at its own customers."
Over at TechReport, they have a story on how RAMBUS was found guilt of fraud and also owe
Infineon $3.5 Million (USD). There is also a link to EBNews as well.
Quote from story:
"The jury in the Infineon/Rambus trial has found for Infineon on two counts of fraud,
and has awarded punitive damages. Because of Virginia law, damages cap at $350,000. The
jury did not find RICO violation.
The money is negligible, of course. However, because of this fraud finding, Infineon now
can (and will) make a motion next week for the judge to grant "equitable estoppell", which
in essence means that Rambus will be enjoined against attempting to collect royalties on
SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM in the US. It amounts to a partial nullification of the patents, which
would henceforth only apply to RDRAM."
Saw this at [H]ard|OCP that AMD plans to call its new Athlon, Athlon 4. Go Figure, earlier
this week I thought they were going to call it Barton. Oh, and at Ace's Hardware they say
that this is the Palamino, and will be named Athlon 4 for those who are a less technically
inclined consumer so that it will convince them that the Athlon 4 is an valid alternative
to the Pentium 4 (which it is).
Quote from HardOCP from CNet:
"As part of its ongoing rivalry with Intel, AMD will call its new chip, coming out next
week, the Athlon 4, according to sources. Presumably, the name change comes as a way to
better market the chip against Intel's Pentium 4. There is no Athlon 2 or 3. Since 1999,
all of the chips in the family have been called Athlon. The naming scheme will also let
AMD claim a partial marketing victory in that its No. 4 chip will appear in notebooks in
May. Intel won't squeeze a Pentium 4 into notebooks until the first
half of 2002."
"AMD (NYSE: AMD) today introduced the Am29PL320 Flash memory device with the industry's
widest databus and with page access times as fast as 20 nanoseconds. The new 32 Megabit
device combines AMD's high performance Flash memory technology and 32-bit Page Mode
architecture to deliver the industry's fastest asynchronous solution"
Saw this at 3D Spotlight. It is a report on how Intel may hit a speed bump due to an
inability to meet demand for the PIII 1GHz mobile chips among other things.
Quote from story:
"A delay in the delivery of a key chip-making machine to the Santa Clara, Calif.,
semiconductor company could disrupt its plans to ship later this year a 2GHz-plus version
of the Pentium 4, code-named Northwood. An upcoming mobile chip, code-named Tualatin,
should be released on time this summer, but volumes could be affected by the problem. As a
result, corporations hoping to get the latest PCs this fall could very well be out of
luck"
Saw this at TheRegister. They report that AMD is going to name the Athlon successor Barton,
after a Judge
Quote from report:
"Then we remembered. February 2nd, 1992, Judge J. Barton Phelps
signs off his adjudication of the five year AMD versus Intel case. Briefly, he gave AMD
rights to the 386 in a bid to end the companies' titanic battle, and the adjudication made
it clear he though, first, AMD were a bunch of chimps, and second, that Intel's Andy Grove
and Dave House (in particular) were a couple of snakes"
Saw this great one at EBN. They report on the final RAMBUS claims against Infineon being
thrown out. Most likely we'll see cheaper SDRAM and DDRAM since RAMBUS had a 3.5% royalty
fee on all DDR.
Quote from EBN story:
"By continuing the trial on the issue of Rambus' alleged secrecy at the industry JEDEC
standards committee, Judge Payne left the door open for the synchronous patents to be
declared unenforceable on the grounds of antitrust violations.
Judge Payne dismissed infringement claims against Infineon on the grounds that the German
firm's SDRAM and DDR chips didn't use a multiplexed memory bus.
In March, the judge had ruled Rambus' synchronous patents only covered memory chips
connected to a multiplexed bus. That set a precedent likely to be cited in other pending
Rambus patent litigation trials in the U.S. and in Europe.
Micron Technology, which is suing Rambus in Wilmington, Del., federal court, has already
asked the judge in that case to adopt the same narrow multiplexed bus coverage that decided
the Infineon case."
Creative is selling new versions of GeForce series video cards. The model lines are:
3D Blaster GeForce2 MX200 AGP (32MB 64bit SDRAM) - $99;
3D Blaster GeForce2 MX200 PCI (32MB 64bit SDRAM) - $99;
3D Blaster GeForce2 Pro (64MB 128bit DDR SDRAM) - $199;
3D Blaster GeForce3 (64MB 128bit DDR SDRAM) - $399.
However X-Bit
Labs reports however that these cards are being manufactured by MSI and Creative is doing
nothing else but selling the cards under their brand name.
Saturday, May 5, 2001 - 12:10PM
WindowsXP to ship in August
Over at 3DSpotlight they have a report from CNet news about WindowsXP to be shipped in August.
Quote from 3DSpotlight:
"Microsoft's delivery date for Windows XP has been a moving target in recent
weeks, say sources close to computer manufacturers. A little more than two weeks ago, the
software maker told some PC manufacturers that it would deliver final, or gold, code in
June--in time for the late half of the back-to-school buying season. Gold masters are used
to make copies of the operating system for new PCs.
One week ago, Microsoft revised the date, promising delivery of gold master copies by the
first week of August. But, as first reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft also warned PC
makers that if it missed that date, Windows XP's launch could be pushed back until next
year."
SharkyExtreme has a review on the CDI Inwin computer case. Go
here to
read the review.
Friday, May 4, 2001 - 1:38PM
AMD/UMC Commentary
Over at JC news, they have a report on AMD and UMC about the outsourcing.
Quote from report:
"At this point, I should remind you that, as noted last week, AMD's Jerry
Sanders stated that they are by contract with Intel limited to having no more than 20% of
their total unit output produced from external sources. This means that UMC could increase
AMD's unit output by 25% compared to if they were to just keep their current capacity
plans.
There is a negative side to this, though. Not all processes, even those with the same drawn
line widths, are the same. It's generally considered that, in terms of transistor performance,
processes made by Intel, AMD, IBM, and ... one or two other manufacturers whose names I
cannot remember are generally better than those made by other companies such as VIA."
Saw this at TheRegister. Intel is trying to keep potential customers from using Transmeta
Crusoe Chips.
Quote from story:
"Intel is putting "pressure" on Western computer manufacturers to ensure they don't use
Transmeta's Crusoe CPUs, Transmeta's CEO has claimed.
Speaking at a Merrill Lynch technology conference this week, Transmeta's chief, Mark Allen,
said: "I'm sure there is some pressure applied to them, no question."
Allen cited Dell as an example. "AMD has been trying to crack Dell* for quite some time," he
said, claiming that Intel gives the PC vendors "very preferential treatment, very
preferential pricing".
He could also have mentioned IBM, which last year decided not to base its ThinkPad 240 on
Crusoe and chose to use an Intel Mobile Pentium III instead."
Saw this at AMDZone, they report on a story at CNet, that Dell is laying 3000 more employees
and still refuse to build computers with AMD chips. Yet Dell is also still building a plant
in Austin at Parmer Lane.
Quote from CNet story
Also not in the near future is a deal with Advanced Micro Devices, Meredith
said, echoing a statement by AMD CEO Jerry Sanders on Wednesday. Meredith said that using
AMD chips may create too much complexity with outsourcing partners and other behind-the-scenes
functions such as procurement.
Until there's a "significant disparity between price and performance" between AMD and Intel
chips, Meredith said Dell will stick with Intel. "It doesn't mean AMD is a bad company, but
it doesn't give us a significant leveraged advantage," he said."
OK, whatever, Dell used to be such a good company. Apperantly Dell still thinks that Intel
is better than AMD, and seems to be ignoring everything out there about AMD. Link to story
here
Thursday, May 3, 2001 - 11:32AM
VIA Points finger at Creative
VIA Hardware posted VIA's response regarding the problems with the SoundBlaster Live card on
VIA chipsets.
Here's a quote from the response:
"During the past few weeks, problems were reported on several web sites
stating that one of VIA’s chipset has compatibility issue with Creative SoundBlaster Live PCI
Sound card. After debugging, verifying, & checking compatibility between our VT82C686B &
other devices, we concluded that the problem is not totally related to our chipset. We found
that the system problem will happen only under certain configurations & certain procedures, &
only occur under Athlon processor based systems with VT82C686B chipset & Creative SB Live card.
We also checked whether our chipset has any compatibility issues in other configurations, &
the result was we did not find any such compatibility issues."
Saw this at Icrontic. They have a quote from the MaximumPC editor. Editor's quote:
"Due to the poor economy, here and in the UK, Imagine was forced to lay off
the Daily Radar and online computing site staffs. Maximum PC magazine is not
affected. We have yet to decide how maximumpc.com will change. That stated, I
personally would like to have a website that hosts reader forums, a reviews
database, and a listing of what's available in the current magazine......
....The upshot is that maximumpc.com was not showing any signs of bucking the
overwhelmingly brutal dot.com trend, so it's being dramatically cut back in
scope to weather tough times...."
Also a story at the Inquirer saying that the CNet story may not be all that true.
Link to that story Here
Tuesday, May 1, 2001 - 5:03PM
VIA's profit more than doubles in 1st Quarter on Chip sales
Saw this at The CAD from bloomberg.com, quote from the news:
"Taipei, April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Via Technologies Inc., the second-largest
chipset maker, reported that profit more than doubled in the first quarter as it expanded
sales at the expense of Intel Corp., its biggest rival. Net income for three months ended
March 31 rose to 2.3 billion, or NT$4.01 a share, from NT$939.7 million, or NT$1.67 per
share, last year."
Over at 3DSpotlight, they report on how RAMBUS is doing in court from a news article at EBNews.
The judge that handled the case dismissed most of the allegations that RAMBUS had against
Infineon. Also RAMBUS couldn't state just how valid those allegations were.
