IN THIS PART of the GDC conversation/debate between Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards, they go into game consoles, divergence, convergence, and of course hardware vs software rendering. Can the game console makers afford to diverge in the next generation?
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STARCRAFT II IS COMING and the game is only about a month away, but it seems like we’re already seeing the first licensed peripherals arriving from none other than Razer. Blizzard and Razer’s collaboration was announced in August last year, but it’s taken this long for Razer to release any details on the new peripherals. A new keyboard, mouse and headset have been announced and all three are, of course, adorned with StarCraft II motifs.
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APPLE SURPRISED US TODAY by launching its new, completely overhauled Mac mini. The actual hardware specs haven’t been given a huge boost, but the rest of the system isn’t the Mac mini as you know it. Apple has somehow managed to shrink it down to a mere 1.4-inches (3.6cm) tall, compared to 2-inches (5.1cm) for the previous model. However, this is a small feat compared to the rest of the changes.
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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you get two very smart people, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, and Andrew Richards from Codeplay, with diametrically opposed views together in the same room to talk about the future of graphics hardware? Easy, a debate. At GDC this year, that is exactly what SemiAccurate did, and through the magic of video cameras, you too can enjoy the spectacle.
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IF YOU’RE THE kind of person that doesn’t mind lugging around a 5.6kg/12.32lb 18.4-inch notebook – not taking the 220W power brick into account – just to have the bragging rights of owning what is potentially the most powerful notebook in the world, then The Eurocom X8100 Leopard is for you.
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SEAMICRO IS A STARTUP that is attacking data center power use through a novel idea, optimizing hardware for a specific workload. For web serving workloads, the idea is simple, cram 512 Atom servers into a box with a virtual ‘shared nothing’ configuration.
Updated: Fixed wrong CPU speeds
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IT’S E3 TIME and Microsoft has unveiled the retail name for Project Natal as well as the product itself of course. Get used to Kinect as a new “word” in the world of controller free, motion and voice controlled gaming. Microsoft also unveiled its new, smaller and more feature rich Xbox 360 console which will hit retail later this week.
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IF YOU’VE BEEN longing for one last system with an AMD processor and a chipset from Nvidia, then the eMachines ER1401 is most likely not what you were hoping for. The ER1401 is similar in design to Acer’s Revo, but rather than using at Atom processor an ION graphics, this system has an Athlon Neo II processor and a GeForce 9200 chipset.
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YOU MIGHT VERY well have used one of Linpus’ Linux distributions without even knowing about it, as the company specializes in custom Linux installations for a wide range of solutions, least not netbooks. The company has also made some customized versions of Moblin, but its latest project is something that looks extremely interesting, a version of Linux for ARM based PCTVs.
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IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO cover everything from a trade show like Computex, but in this article we thought we’d try to put together some of the interesting things we saw at the show. We’ve covered most of the big companies on their own, so here we’re going to try to cover some of the companies that aren’t so familiar. Read on for some useful gadgets, interesting pieces of hardware and some more unusual bits of kit.
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LEADTEK WAS ONCE one of the big names in the graphics card industry and although the company is still selling graphics cards, including the highly lucrative Quadro products from Nvidia, the company has branched out into other segments over the years. This year Leadtek was showing off a couple of interesting products at Computex, one for notebook users and one for those that work with video files.
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SUPERMICRO WAS SHOWING off a bunch of high end servers and boards during Computex, most based around Magny-Cours, and a few Becton machines as well. Not to be outdone, they finally revealed a new line of modular racks.
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ALTHOUGH NOT NEARLY as commonplace as P67 motherboards at Computex, we did spot some H67 boards as well. The peculiar thing is, at least as far as we are aware, Intel isn’t planning on doing any LGA-1155 processors without integrated graphics, so having two different chipsets doesn’t make that much sense, but then again, Intel doesn’t always make sense when it comes to product SKUs.
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WE DIDN’T FORGET to take some snaps of the P67 boards that were on display at Computex, but rather than doing a post here and there on the various boards, we figured we’d stick them all in one story. Just a word of warning, most of these boards are not the final product and most are mock-ups made for the show and some of them don’t even have the actual chipset fitted.
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ONE FLAW WITH USB 3.0 is that you’re stuck with only a pair of ports around the back on your motherboard, but it seems like the motherboard manufacturers are getting ready to solve that problem for you. As we reported a couple of days ago, ASRock and ECS are using an internal pin-header, but both of the boards in question also feature two USB 3.0 host controllers.
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