Gearfuse

Is the world ready for cyborgs? Apparently not, as witnessed yesterday by the “death” of pop singer Michael Jackson. I have a source that was very close to MJ and word on the street is that his death was actually a CPU failure. Apparently, the model engineer Quincy Jones implanted in the 1980s, the THRLR-116 was meant for only 10 years of full-time use. After all the plastic remodeling done to keep Michael from overheating his RAMDISK and CPU, the effort ended up being a failure as Michael collapsed at his home with “Black or White” sputtering from his prosthetic lips.

Instead of a burial, Jackson’s body will be taken to a government research lab in Palo Alto, CA where scientists will conduct what’s known as a “cyber autopsy” to determine how the CPU ultimately failed. It’s a sad day for the world of pop music and an even sadder day for the world of robotics.

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Those shady motherfuckers at Apple decided to mention a Mac Pro update an hour after I caught the original update on the iMac and Mac Mini. The new Mac Pros cost $300 less than before, feature new Intel “Nehalem” Xeon CPUs (read: hella fuckin’ fast) and better graphics cards standard. Some bullshit about DDR3 RAM and that about sums it up. Sorry, but I really doubt anyone can afford one of these right now. If you can, however, let us know how it runs.

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The holiday season is upon us and pretty soon, Black Friday is going to roll around. Why not convince your loved one to go wait overnight in a line for a deal on an MSI Wind? The ultra-hackable netbook is now on sale at Best Buy for just $350 and the specs are updated quite nicely. You’ll score a whopping 120GB hard drive and a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, as well as WiFi and a built-in 1.3-megapixel camera. 1GB of RAM tops it off. The 3-cell battery kind of sucks, but you can easily buy a bigger, longer battery for about $100.

It’s awesome that you can walk into a Best Buy and purchase a netbook, finally. Too bad it’s Best Buy.

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It’s official – laptops can’t get any smaller. If they did, reading and typing on them would be an impossible task. I thought the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was small, but the IMOVIO iKIT takes the cake. The cupcake, that is.

This thing is unnecessarily too small. It’s dimensions are 95 x 65 x 15.5 mm and it weighs almost half the weight of a Nintendo DS Lite and 20g less than an iPhone, so it’s pretty damn tiny. It also manages to pack a full QWERTY keyboard and a 2.8″ QVGA screen on this thing. For $170, you’re not getting much of a computer. It runs on a Marvell PXA270 312MHz CPU, uses a trimmed-down Linux OS and has 64MB of RAM, so don’t expect a powerhouse in the palm of your hand. For some reason this little thing even has Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g WiFi and can amazingly sustain enough juice to keep it going for three hours. Seriously, do laptops need to be this small?

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Hot damn! Believe it or not, the above display and handsets are for a new platform from Open Peak called Open Frame. It lets IP-based devices talk to each other over the network and acts as an entertainment hub. Built-in WiFi and Ethernet will let you check your calendar, YouTube, text messages, address book, email and more. All powered by a new Intel Atom processor, which helps keep the design small. It looks like a beautiful interface. Here’s to 2009, hoping that some company will use Open Frame wisely.

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This time next year, when you’re buying Apple’s newly updated Macbook Pro or Mac Pro, you’ll likely see Intel’s latest line of CPUs in your machine. It’s called “Core” and the first CPU due out under the new moniker is the Intel Core i7 and i7 Extreme Edition. Not the most exciting thing, I know, but just think back to that old 486 DX and you’ll be smiling in no time. Just don’t expect Psystar to make the upgrade.

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Late last year Intel released the Q6700, their brand new baby that was a Core 2 Quad (not duo) and had a clock speed of 2.66 GHz. So what is the difference between the Q6700 and the brand new Q6600, well, other than 100, there is a difference in clock speed of .26Ghz. The new Q6600 runs at 2.4Ghz intsead of 2.66. Also, the Q6600 is locked, meaning there is no option of overclocking this quad core monster.

The talk that quad cores are essentially two duos placed on the same chip is true, and the Q6600 is just two Core 2 Duo E6600 cores on a single socket with a pair of 4MB L2 caches and a 1066MHz frontside bus. So other than the locked state of the Q6600 and its clock speed, there is no difference between the two CPUs. So why is this new processor significant? It is really the first quad-core CPU to hit and be aimed at the mainstream market. While no solid price has been released by Intel yet, it will probably be priced a bit under the Q6700’s $999 price point.

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The first 65 nanometer chips made by AMD have just arrived. The codename for these chips is Brisbane, and they are a welcome addition to the Athlon 64 line. Probably the most significant part of these new chips is a transition to 65nm from the previously held 90nm AMD CPUs. Like nearly every processor released nowadays, the Brisbane line is being labeled as capable of faster processing with lower power consumption. These new processors will be adopted by Acer, Dell, Founder, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, and Packard Bell beginning in quarter one of 2007. With the upcoming release of Windows Vista for the individual user, AMD claims this processor will be better equipped to handle the high-resolution 3D visual effects of Aero.

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