By: Tim Gideon 08.30.2010

What if Apple killed off the iPod line and decided that everything from the nano to the touch is now an iPad? It sounds crazy, but it’s possible. If the leaked photos of cases for the upcoming sixth generation iPod nano are actually leaked photos and not, say, completely fabricated, then Wednesday’s Apple event in San Francisco is going to be interesting. In the past week, two separate leaks show a case that is far smaller than the current nano, and another that is a tad larger than the iPod shuffle. The cases seem to leave space for a touchscreen, which raises several questions. If the nano is the same size as the shuffle, is the shuffle no longer? And if the new nano features a touchscreen, is this is the end of the iPod name? The iPad is basically a large iPod touch, and if the shuffle is eliminated, or rather, combined with the nano, the entire line has finally morphed from a screen-and-click wheel design to a touchscreen line. They could all be renamed as iPads.

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By Agam Shah August 30, 2010

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said it will remove the ATI name from its products by the end of the year, killing a brand name synonymous with graphics enthusiasts for 25 years. AMD offers a range of graphics products under the ATI brand, including the Radeon, FirePro and Eyefinity offerings. The chip designer will instead attach the name AMD to those products by the end of the year, said Drew Erskine, an AMD spokesman. The change in brand name won’t affect the company’s graphics product offerings or plans, Erskine said. ATI was originally established in 1985 as a graphics company and was acquired by AMD in 2007 for US$5.4 billion. At the time of the acquisition, ATI was the one of the largest graphics chip providers for consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles. AMD said at the time it would continue to offer ATI products, and it also announced a next-generation processor design called Fusion, which would combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single piece of silicon.

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By Lawrence Latif Aug 30 2010

MICROSOFT CO-FOUNDER Paul Allen has decided to wage a legal battle against just about everyone by claiming patent infringement against a number of the Internet’s biggest names. The saga revolves around a company that Allen founded in 1992, Interval Research. Now little more than a patent holding outfit, Interval has alleged that AOL, Apple, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Officemax, Staples, Yahoo and Youtube are all using up to four of its patented inventions without licences. Allen invested tens of millions into the outfit some years ago and it employed some notable researchers to come up with ideas that one day might be profitable. Interval filed many seemingly wide ranging patents which it now says are “key processes in e-commerce”. Allen has left Microsoft out of the complaint that claims patent infringements which, according to Allen’s spokesman, relate to “key pieces of the Internet”. Most of the defendants named are e-commerce firms, but perhaps the largest e-commerce company, Amazon, is not among them. However, like Microsoft, Amazon is headquartered in Paul Allen’s home town of Seattle, Washington.

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By Michael Corkery AUGUST 30, 2010

There aren’t a lot of companies that achieve such heights of popularity that their brand gets used as a verb. There is Google, of course, which is synonymous with Internet searching. Then, there is Skype, now synonymous with video conferencing among far-flung families. (“Let’s Skype with Grandma.”) The company’s popularity–Skype has 560 million registered users–is both a function of its design and the fact that it is free. The company has posted losses in four of the past five years. The money Skype does make ($406.2 million in revenue in the first half of the year) comes from charging for its inexpensive land-line and mobile-phone service, not for its video conferencing, which is free. But there are only eight million of these users, a tiny fraction Skype’s overall user base. Skype is planning an IPO for sometime this fall. But today there is a news report that Cisco may short circuit that offering by making a bid for Skype. TechCrunch, citing a “reliable” source, says Cisco has expressed interest in acquiring Skype. TechCrunch says, citing Skype insiders, that any deal would be valued at about $5 billion. The irony is that Cisco built its empire providing inexpensive networking and phone technology to businesses.

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by Anton Shilov 08/24/2010 

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday revealed numerous details about the Bulldozer micro-architecture, which will power the company’s next-generation central processing units (CPUs) for desktops, servers and workstations. Apparently, the main goal of AMD’s designers when it came to Bulldozer was to ensure maximum sharing of resources within multi-core microprocessors to get high performance amid moderate low power and die sizes. Traditional approach to creation of multi-core microprocessor is very straightforward: each core acts independently and shares only the most obvious resources with other: L3 cache, memory controller, processor bus, etc. In Bulldozer designs cores will be able to dynamically share fetch and decode blocks, caches and other units. At least in initial designs, multi-core chips will consist of several major blocks, each of which will have two independent integer cores (that will share fetch, decode and L2 functionality) with dedicated schedulers and two 128-bit FMAC pipes with one FP scheduler. This means that each major block is, according to AMD, essentially a tightly-linked dual-core microprocessor with shared fetch, decode and floating point units.

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By Maggie Shiels 24 August 2010

ITunes accounts linked to Paypal have been targeted in a scam with a number of users complaining that they have been cleaned out. Apple and Paypal refused to discuss the details of the incident. Experts told the BBC that victims had most likely fallen for an e-mail scam, rather than being targeted via a flaw in iTunes or Apple servers. “I just got hacked for $1,000 worth of software, videos and music,” tweeted one victim. Another told the technology blog TechCrunch: “My account was charged over $4,700. I called security at Paypal and was told a large number of iTunes stores accounts were compromised.” Another turned to Facebook to post details. “My iTunes account just got hacked and someone made about $700 worth of purchases. I contacted Paypal and they said Apple has gotten so many attacks since June, they can barely keep up with reporting them all.” Apple would not comment but said that they had recently implemented new security measures. In a statement to BBC News, Apple said: “iTunes is always working to prevent fraud and enhance the password security of all of our users. “But if your credit card or iTunes password is stolen and used on iTunes we recommend that you contact your financial institution and inquire about cancelling the card and/or issuing a chargeback for any unauthorised transactions.

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By Mike Swift 08/24/2010

The results of a Yahoo search on Tuesday looked no different from an equivalent search a week ago, with the exception of three words in tiny script at the very bottom of the page — “Powered by Bing.” Tuesday, nearly 13 months after Yahoo and Microsoft announced plans to collaborate on Internet search in hopes of challenging Google’s market dominance, the two companies announced that the results of all Yahoo English language searches made in the United States and Canada are coming from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The two companies are still racing to complete the transition of paid search, the text advertising links that run beside and above the standard search results, before the make-or-break holiday period — a much more difficult task. “There were some virtual high-fives and some physical high-fives” between Yahoo engineers in Sunnyvale and Microsoft engineers in Redmond, Wash., said Adam Sohn, senior director at Bing. “It’s a great momentum booster.” Tuesday was significant, both for Yahoo and Microsoft as well as in the history of Internet search, observers said. With results from the roughly 30 percent of U.S. searches made from Yahoo sites or Bing now flowing from one search engine — Microsoft’s — the clock starts now on whether the alliance will be able to compete with Google in a way Yahoo and Bing could not individually.

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No, this is not Apple’s SSD… unless it ends up in a Mac.
by Marcus Yam August 23, 2010

SanDisk has announced what it claims to be the world’s smallest SSD. Of course, with SSDs being made up of flash memory, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine just how much storage one could fit on a drive the size of a postage stamp. SanDisk calles it the integrated SSD, or iSSD for short, and it’s designed for tablet PCs and ultra-thin notebooks. The iSSD is the first flash SSD device to support the industry standard SATA interface in a small BGA (Ball Grid Array) package that can be soldered onto any motherboard, and is fast enough to use as a boot drive. The iSSD is advertised by SanDisk as offering 160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds. It measuring 16mm x 20mm x 1.85mm and weighs less than one gram.

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By Pete Mason Monday 23rd August, 2010

To those that take their online gaming seriously, having a low ping is crucial.  Unfortunately, the internet is a pretty crowded place these days and other users’ traffic can easily get between you and your server of choice. Demon Internet may win over a few fans in the gaming community, though, by launching a service that prioritises packets from games over other traffic on its network.  The new Demon Game Pro broadband package will try to offer the lowest latencies while providing speeds of 20Mb downstream and 1Mb upstream. Demon’s Matt Cantwell added that “we know how important a good broadband connection is to the gaming community, and we are excited to be launching this product which has been designed to meet the specific needs of gamers”. The company is even actively promoting the service for user-hosted game servers by providing customers with a static IP address. The price of being the number one priority in the eyes of your ISP is a relatively reasonable £21.99 per month on a 12-month contract, or £23.99 on a three-month contract.

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by Brooke Crothers August 23, 2010

Intel announced on Monday the first dual-core Atom processor targeted specifically at Netbooks, finally putting the same number of processing cores inside these tiny laptops as found on larger mainstream laptops. Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba, among others, are expected to follow with new dual-core Netbooks in the coming weeks and months, according to Intel. This is a big step for the Netbook market. Since their inception back in spring 2008, Netbooks have been powered by single-core processors. This allowed Netbook suppliers to design 10-inch-class laptops that were relatively power efficient and cheap, typically around $350. The widely reported downside has been lackluster performance, since all processing must be funneled through one processor. The Atom performance gap with mainstream Core 2 Duo and Core i laptop processors is also due to design differences. (Mainstream laptop processors have the architecture to deliver higher-level performance.) But the fact that the Atom for Netbooks has always been single core has exacerbated the performance gap. Intel has other reasons for moving to dual core. Low-power dual-core processors from rival Advanced Micro Devices are already appearing in Netbook-class laptops. The Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dm1z, an 11.6-inch Netbook, uses an AMD Turion II Neo dual-core processor K625 (1.5GHz) and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 graphics processor, offering potentially stiff competition for single-core Atom Netbooks.

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