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Modern PC News for the Week Ending May 5, 2003
CNet.com | Microsoft to Buy Saga? Rumors that Microsoft may be considering buying some or all of Sega are resurfacing after reports in a Japanese newspaper. Sega, maker of some of the most popular game titles, has made no secret that it's looking for suitors. And Microsoft recently bought another game maker, as it seeks an edge for its Xbox player in the super-competitive gaming world. ...Representatives from both companies declined to comment... ...Sega, maker of the popular "Sonic the Hedgehog" games, put itself up for bid a few months ago. In February, the company said it was planning to merge with pinball machine company Sammy for an undisclosed sum. But it's been entertaining other offers since then, including one as recently as last week, when Sega said Japanese rival Namco, maker of Pac-Man, was seeking to buy it. Rumors have also named Electronic Arts as a suitor. Sega of America spokeswoman Gwen Marker would not comment specifically on the report and would only say that the company held a board meeting in Japan Tuesday to talk about the Sammy and Namco deals. "Right now the only offers that are on the table are from Namco and Sammy," she said... TomsHardware.com | ATI & Nvidia Can Not Keep Up to Demand Taiwanese graphics card makers report that high-end graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI Technologies continue to be in short supply even as the market enters its slow season. In addition, the graphics chip designers are said to be prioritizing OEM orders... Reuters.com | Dell Takes Top Global PC Maker Spot from HP, IDC Says Dell Computer Corp. moved past Hewlett-Packard Co. in the first quarter to regain its title as the world's largest personal computer maker, helped by seasonal demand that rewarded the company for its large corporate customer base. Dell accounted for 17.3 percent of worldwide PC shipments, market research firm IDC said, compared with Hewlett-Packard's 15.8 percent. The next closest competitor was International Business Machines Corp., with 5.4 percent market share. ...HP has been in a fierce battle for the No. 1 PC maker spot since it bought rival Compaq Computer Corp. last May and leapfrogged over Dell to become the leader. Dell took the lead in the third quarter, only to be replaced by HP in the fourth quarter... TomsHardware.com | AMD Slashes Athlon Prices Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on April 22 announced a massive price cut on its desktop-use Athlon XP processor line along with its launch of new 64-bit K8-core Opteron processors. The discounts ranged from as high as 44.7% to 14.1%. CNet.com | Microsoft Gets Closer to Digital Rights Supremacy Microsoft dug its roots a little deeper into the music business Wednesday, as copy-protection company Macrovision agreed to license its Windows digital rights management technology for CDs. The software giant has gained considerable ground over the past few months in its bid to have its audio technology loaded on every copy-protected CD sold by record labels. While labels have yet to make any significant copy-protected releases in the United States, Microsoft is poised to have its technology onboard if they do. Macrovision said its new relationship with Microsoft could help diminish labels' reluctance to release copy-protected CDs in the United States, because it would allow consumers more flexibility to use music from those discs on computers and MP3 players.
"We're hopeful that the labels will do some test releases this summer and do some major releases this winter," said Adam Sexton, vice president of marketing for Macrovision's music technology division. "Copy protection is working in Europe, and airplanes are not falling out of the sky. The economy is still functioning, despite the doomsday predictions." ...Both companies have been talking about using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format for this purpose for more than a year. The current version of Macrovision's technology, which the company says has been distributed on more than 100 million CDs around the world, uses encrypted MP3 files instead. The Microsoft technology allows more flexibility, however. The pre-ripped, or "second session" Windows Media files added to music discs will allow record labels to specify exactly what can be done with the songs, such as burning a few extra CDs, making a few digital copies, or transferring them to an MP3 player. Macrovision's license now allows the company to sell this full package of copy-protected and pre-ripped songs to record labels. SunnComm signed a similar license earlier this year. Despite the movement on the technology front, there remains no indication from the major music labels as to when they might start releasing protected titles in the United States... TechWeb.com | Intel Delays 800Mhz Bus P4 Intel was set Monday to announce the next release of its Pentium 4 processor and its accompanying 875P chipset. One problem--the processor isn't ready to ship. The company says certain "anomalies" that arose late in the testing process will keep the newest Pentium 4 in the lab for an unspecified amount of time. However, Intel has begun shipping the 875P chipset, which can be used with the current version of the Pentium 4, although it won't be able to take advantage of the new processor's proposed 800-MHz bus speed. The new processor is designed to operate at 3 GHz and increase bus speed over the previous Pentium 4 from 533 MHz to 800 MHz. The previous Pentium 4, which runs at 3.06 GHz, began shipping last November. The 875P chipset, code-named Canterwood, is designed specifically to support Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. It also supports dual-channel DDR400 MHz system memory, a performance enhancer for multimedia and 3-D intensive apps. The 875P chipset features Performance Acceleration Technology, which speeds data flow between the processor and system memory, as well as a dedicated networking bus based on Intel's Communications Streaming Architecture. This architecture works with the new Intel PRO/1000 CT Desktop Connection to double Gigabit Ethernet networking bandwidth currently available on PCI bus-based products. The 875P also includes a high-performance AGP8X graphics interface, integrated Hi-Speed USB 2.0 and Serial ATA, built-in RAID capabilities with a Serial ATA interface for accelerated disk I/O, and dual independent DMA audio engines that let a user make a PC phone call while playing digital music streams... NewsFactor.com | AMD Released 64 Bit Opteron CPU: The Processor Shot Heard Round the World After years of development and anticipation, the AMD Opteron is finally out of the gate. The question now is how the industry will react. It is probably too soon to tell exactly how well the Opteron will do, but there is little doubt that it will be at least moderately successful. In its press release, AMD describes the Opteron as "the world's first 64-bit processor compatible with the industry-standard x86 architecture." But that may not be entirely true. According to Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) spokesperson Bill Kircos, "That's a total fallacy.... Itanium has always provided 32-bit x86 support." Kircos does concede that 32-bit code running may suffer a performance hit. "If you want the world's greatest 32-bit performance, [go with] the Xeon," he told NewsFactor. "If you want the best 64-bit, Itanium." Several companies are planning hybrid systems that integrate Xeon and Itanium processors, he noted, which will allow companies to run 64-bit Itanium applications and 32-bit x86 applications natively. But a hybrid system "seems like kind of a crowbarred solution" to Barry Crume, director of the Opteron processor and platform for AMD. "You don't have to get that fancy or expensive when you do something practical," he told NewsFactor. "The Opteron is about doing something practical." No Java for You Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) is not quite ready to jump on the Opteron bandwagon, but it is evaluating the processor for its entry-level products. Sun will be supporting 32-bit versions of Java, Solaris and Sun ONE for the Opteron, according to Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software at the company, but no word on a 64-bit version at this time. AMD expects Sun eventually will offer 64-bit versions for the Opteron. "I think it's all a question of when," Crume said. "Today they're going to be focused on delivering solutions that people require today. If they make Java available in 32-bit for Opteron, that's great." ...Opteron is likely to be popular with Linux users, Reynolds pointed out. "For people running Linux, price and performance may come into play [more heavily]." But Opteron could use a killer application to really drive adoption, he said. "If Microsoft came out with 64-bit Exchange ... then that would drive change.. BetaNews.com |
Windows to Run on AMD Opteron, Athlon 64 ZDNet.com | Intel to Release Software to Speed Up 32Bit Apps on 64Bit Itanium Chips Intel will release software later this year designed to dramatically improve how well its Itanium chips run programs written for its Pentium or Xeon processors, CNET News.com has learned. The move is meant to address a weakness that hampered the adoption of high-end, Itanium-based systems. Itanium chips currently include circuitry that lets them run the 32-bit software of "IA-32" processors such as Xeon or Pentium. But that circuitry's performance has been so poor that not even Intel advocates its use.
The software could make Itanium processors more appealing to customers that have been reluctant to use Itanium systems because of the difficulty of running older 32-bit software, analysts said. In addition, Intel's new strategy could undermine one of the key advantages of the Opteron processor AMD introduced Tuesday because it allows customers to gradually transition to new applications without having to discard their current applications... ZDNet.com |
BP Buys Massive Itanium Cluster Petrochemical giant BP has purchased a large cluster of Hewlett-Packard Linux servers using Intel's Itanium 2 processors to help search for oil and gas deposits. BP bought 259 HP rx5670 systems, each with four Itanium 2 processors. The systems collectively have more than 8,000GB of memory and can perform 4 trillion calculations per second, according to HP and Intel... ...The computing cluster will be used for the computationally difficult task of seismic processing, in which computers deduce 3D models of what lies beneath the Earth's surface--petrochemicals, for example. They reconstruct these interior features by analyzing how fast sound waves from a man-made explosion travel through different materials before reaching an array of sensitive detectors... ITWorldCanada.com | New e-mail Worm Exploits SARS Anxiety ...The worm, W32/Coronex-A (Coronex), is a mass-mailer worm that uses Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook e-mail application to send copies of itself to unsuspecting recipients, according to an alert from antivirus company Sophos PLC. Coronex arrives as an attachment in e-mail messages that carry a variety of subject lines and messages relating to the deadly new respiratory illness that has turned up in Asia, North America, and Europe. Greetings such as "SARS Virus," "I need your help," and "deaths virus," accompany messages containing the virus, according to antivirus software company Symantec Corp. Attachments containing the virus with names like "sars.exe," "Hongkong.exe," and "deaths.exe" also play into media reports of the illness, which is concentrated in Asia, Sophos said. When opened, the attachment launches the virus, displaying a pop-up window with the message "corona virus." The Coronex virus modifies the Windows registry, adding an entry to ensure that it is launched whenever Windows starts, changing the start page for the Internet Explorer Web browser and deriving the location of the Windows Address book. With the addresses in the Windows Address book, Coronex uses its own built-in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) engine to send copies of itself to the addresses. Sender addresses for those e-mail messages include sars@hotmail.com, corona@hotmail.com and deaths@china.com, Symantec said. Coronex is just the latest in a string of worms and viruses that use widespread interest in current events or celebrities as a subtle enticement to open infected attachments that e-mail recipients would otherwise be wary of, according to Chris Belthoff, senior product marketing manager at Sophos in the U.S. Researchers at Sophos' virus labs in the U.K. identified the new worm Wednesday morning. So far, however, there have been no reports of infections from Coronex among Sophos' customers, Belthoff said... BetaNews.com | Spring Windows XP 'Fun Packs' Arrive By Nate Mook Following up on its winter-themed add-ons for
Windows XP
released last December, Microsoft on Tuesday issued new XP "Fun Packs" to
celebrate the spring season. "These special spring-themed Fun Packs are
loaded with great extras that can help you to be even more creative while
enjoying the built-in digital media and communications capabilities available in
Windows XP," a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews. Lindows.com | Lindows Successfully Sues MS Linked Insurance Company for Leaving Lindows Without Protection Nearly everyone has heard
about our litigation
with Microsoft, which goes to a jury in December, 2003 in Seattle. (Microsoft
sued us claiming they are the only company that can use the word "windows,"
despite the fact that it has been generically used throughout the industry since
long before Microsoft adopted it.) What you haven't heard about is that for
quite some time, Lindows.com has been involved in yet another critical legal
battle. Lindows.com | Lindows Offers Unlimited Copies of Stripped Lindows for $100 / Year For $100 PER YEAR, businesses can ship an UNLIMITED number of computers with LindowsLite in  stalled.
LindowsLite is a scaled-down version of the LindowsOS
operating system, providing basic computing tasks such as email and browsing the
Internet. LindowsLite is designed to let users experience the friendly desktop
and ease of use that LindowsOS has become known for. Users then have the
opportunity to upgrade with a few clicks of the mouse, or continue using
LindowsLite. Reuters.com | Palm Unveils New Business, Consumer Models ...Palm, the dominant maker of both personal digital assistants, or PDAs, and the software that powers them, introduced Zire 71, a consumer product with a build-in camera, music player and a personal information manager. It also unveiled Tungsten C, a high-end model with built-in high-speed wireless connectivity -- also know as Wi-Fi -- enabling users to gain wireless access to the Internet, email, and messaging, and other corporate data while traveling... ...Tungsten C boasts 64 megabytes of memory and a speedy 400 Megahertz processor, and hits stores on May 5 at a price of about US$500. Analysts said the market for Tungsten C is still a niche, but may be popular within that group, which can use the device to wirelessly manage applications typically handled on a laptop computer... |
The
new software approach, called the IA-32 Execution Layer and code-named btrans,
will give the forthcoming 1.5GHz Itanium 2 the ability to run 32-bit software
about as fast as a 1.5GHz Xeon MP, Intel spokeswoman Barbara Grimes confirmed.