Intel To Develop Chips For Digital TVs

Intel plans to develop a chip that could lead to slimmer andcheaper rear-projection TVs. The move would fall in line with the computerindustry's growing attraction to the consumer electronics market, where digitaltelevision sales are soaring and profit margins are still healthy but thinningas competition increases. Intel president and chief operating officer PaulOtelliniare is expected to disclose at next month's CES Show in Las Vegas, isalready creating a stir among industry analysts. With its research anddevelopment heft, analysts say Intel could do for big-screen TVs what it did forpersonal computers: improve quality and substantially lower prices. The entry ofIntel would pose a serious threat to established consumer electronics companiesin Europe and Japan, such as Philips and Sony as well as emerging players likeTexas Instruments Inc.

Intel is exploring a technology called liquid crystal onsilicon. The technology is a hybrid between the more expensive siliconmicrochips and liquid crystal displays. A few companies already have tried tointroduce LCos products, but they haven't made any deep inroads in the market.LCoS technology competes against other new display technologies that havealready invigorated the rear-projection TV market, most notably the digitallight processing (DLP) chip pioneered by Texas Instruments. The DLP chip usesnearly a million microscopic mirrors that tilt and reflect light to create animage. DLP technology has led to models slimmer and lighter than the traditionalbulky big-screen TVs, but remain relatively expensive.

For instance, a Samsung 43-inch DLP high-definition TV is 68pounds, 15.7 inches deep, and has a suggested retail price of $ 3,999. An LCoSchip uses tiny crystals instead of mirrors, an approach that Doherty and otherindustry analysts say is cheaper to make, easier to improve upon, and thus morelikely to deliver better picture quality at lower prices. Even ultra-sleekplasma TVs, which are gaining in popularity, will feel the competitive pinchfrom LCos TVs. LCoS technology could lead to lightweight 50-inch screens for aslow as $ 2,000 by the end of 2004 and half that price a year later.

Mobile Sempron Notebooks In Mid Aug

HP, Acer, Asustek and eMachines are expected to start marketing low-cost, entry-level notebooks, running AMD’s K8-core Mobile Sempron processors in the middle of the third quarter. The K8 Mobile Sempron notebooks are likely to receive some momentum in the global notebook market in the second half, thanks to the delay of Intel’s Alviso chipsets. With simple adjustments, makers can easily upgrade their notebooks from a K7 to a K8 platform without involving any redesign to the motherboards.

Lian Li Preps TYR PC-X2000F Full Tower Case for Release

Lian Li Industrial Co. Ltd, well-known for their quality aluminum PCcases for enthusiasts, is preparing the TYR PC-X2000F full tower case for release .











Measuring 240 x 695 x 442mm and weighing 11.7kg, the tool-free aluminumcase has four 5.25” drive bays, seven 3.5” bays, eight expansion slots,2mm thick aluminum alloy side panels, holes for water cooling tubes, afan speed controller, support for graphic cards up to 340mm in length,and a top side I/O panel with one e-SATA, four USB 3.0 ports, and audioconnectors. It is fully compatible with all E-ATX/ ATX/ Mirco-ATXmotherboards and has support for up to six fans (comes pre-installedwith three 140mm fans (front) & two 140mm fans (rear)). Covered by atwo year warranty, the TYR PC-X2000F full tower case can be purchasedfrom major retailers, e-tailers and distributors at a MSRP of USD 529(price excludes tax) in end May.


Features:
Supports Extended ATX, ATX, and Micro-ATX motherboardsFour tool-less ODD bays placed either the right or left sideSeven tool-less HDD mounting racksMore cable storage space behind motherboard trayFan control-switch on the back panelFour USB 3.0 multimedia I/O ports & one e-SATA/HD audio portThree 140mm LED fans at front & two 140mm fans at rearAvailability: Arriving at local distributors end of MayMSRP : US$539+local VAT; only black color is available

News via [Techconnect]

Monster unleashes six new colors to Beats by Dr. Dre Studio Headphones

Startthe new year with thelatest and exciting additionsfrom Monster. The Consumer Electronics companyhas introduced six exciting new colour editions of Beats by Dr. Dre Studio High-Definition Headphones to music lovers. The headphones are equipped with Monsters powered isolation technology,which canactively cut external noise such that it allowsaudiophiles to experience all the rich detailstheir favorite artists want themto hear. The Beats by Dr. Dre Studio High-Definition headphones come with spacious earcups that giveextra room for a higher level of listening comfort, and plush ear cushions covered with ultra-soft breathable materials keep listeners cool. On top of that, the headphones also have an additional Monster iSoniTalk iPhone-enabled headphone cable with built-in answer button and microphone so that you can easily stop the music playback and answer your calls.

The Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Studio High-Definition Headphones retails from S$699 and is available at Audio House, Alpha Audio, Best Denki, Courts, DG Lifestyle Store, Epicentre, Farle Innovation, Harvey Norman, HMV, i Studio, iP Case, Macshop, Nubox, Stereo and all Two Bros outlets.

Leaked Sony Ericsson Xperia X7 and X7 Mini, based on Windows Phone 7

Sony Ericsson has beenquiet, except for the announcement that the company is dropping Symbian OS and the Android 2.1 update for the Xperia X10 series of phones. But it seems like whatever they are doing behind our back, has just been unveiled (well, leaked. Sony Ericsson is making smartphones based on the latest Windows Phone 7, namely the Xperia X7 and X7 Mini.

The Xperia X7 will sport a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen display (480x800 pixels) and powered by 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor. Other features include 8.1-megapixel camera with 720p HD video recording and HDMI output with Dhoby Digital Plus surround sound.

The smaller Xperia X7 mini will come with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 1GHz Qualcomm processor and also 10.1-megapixel camera with HD video recording and Xenon flash.

Both the Xperia X7 and X7 Mini are scheduled to be available in Q1 next year. No pricing information have been released yet.

Source: Techtree

Here's a video of the powerpoint slide:-

Megaupload founder unveils file-hosting replacement

Megaupload made headlines earlier this year after it was taken down by the FBI and US Department of Justice, but its founder, Kim Dotcom, has unveiled a replacement service called Mega, set to launch in January.

In order to avoid a similar fate to Megaupload, one of the worlds largest file-hosting services, Mega will adopt a number of changes to how it works, first of which is avoiding US companies for hosting any data.“The new Mega will not be threatened by US prosecutors,” Dotcom told Reuters. “The new Mega avoids any dealings with US hosters, US domains and US backbone providers and has changed the way it operates to avoid another takedown.”Encryption will also play a huge role in the new service, with users able to encrypt their files and hand out unique decryption keys to share them with others. This will not only make the service more secure, it will ensure Mega is not liable if the files breach copyright, since it will not actually have access to the files themselves.“Content owners can still remove infringing material and they will even get direct delete access if they agree not to make us responsible for actions of users,” Dotcom explained, marking a major shift from the approach used at Megaupload, where the website moderators would have to look for and remove infringing content.Dotcom claimed that the FBI was flooding the new Mega website with traffic as it was unveiled, delaying the unveiling. He still faces charges of copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering, with an extradition hearing planned for not long after Megas official launch.Source: Reuters

Japanese 'Mimi Switch' allows remote control through facial expression

TOKYO (AFP) - A wink, a smile or a raised eyebrow could soon change the music on your iPod or start up the washing machine, thanks to a new Japanese gadget.

The device looks like a normal set of headphones but is fitted with a set of infrared sensors that measure tiny movements inside the ear that result from different facial expressions.

The gizmo -- called the "Mimi Switch" or "Ear Switch" -- is connected to a micro-computer that can control electronic devices, essentially making it a hands-free remote control for anything.

"You will be able to turn on room lights or swing your washing machine into action with a quick twitch of your mouth," said its inventor, Kazuhiro Taniguchi of Osaka University.

"An iPod can start or stop music when the wearer sticks his tongue out, like in the famous Einstein picture. If he opens his eyes wide, the machine skips to the next tune. A wink with the right eye makes it go back.

"The machine can be programmed to run with various other facial expressions, such as a wriggle of the nose or a smile."

The Mimi Switch could also store and interpret data and get to know its user, said Taniguchi, chief researcher at Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering Science in western Japan.

"It monitors natural movements of the face in everyday life and accumulates data," Taniguchi told AFP in an interview. "If it judges that you aren't smiling enough, it may play a cheerful song."

Some may use the device for relaxation -- perhaps by changing music hands-free while reading a book -- but Taniguchi said it could also have more serious applications to make people's lives safer and easier.

"If the system is mounted on a hearing aid for elderly people, it could tell how often they sneeze or whether they are eating regularly," he said.

"If it believes they are not well, it could send a warning message to relatives."

The device could also serve as a remote control for appliances for physically disabled people, from cameras and computers to air conditioners, or alert medical services if a person has a fit, he said.

The Ear Switch follows on from an earlier device called the Temple Switch that was small enough to fit inside a pair of eyeglasses and also read the flick of an eyelid.

"As the ear switch is put in the ears, its optical sensors are unaffected by sunlight," Taniguchi said.

He said he was planning to patent his new device in Japan and abroad, work on a wireless version, and seek corporate funding to market it for practical uses -- something he expected might take two or three years.

Source: AFP

Metro Last Light dev says that the Wii U 'Has a horrible, slow CPU'

Despite its overwhelmingly positive critical reception throughout many professional gaming sites, Nintendos new Wii U system has been the subject of disdain and disappointment from both developers and consumers alike.

With reports of system malfunctions, massive operating system updates, consoles bricking, and of course the surprisingly unimpressive current-gen technology, the Wii U has had a less than stellar launch record so far.

Whats worse is that many games that were planned to release on the Wii U have been canceled, including 4 A Games sequel Metro: Last Light. 4 As chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, gives an explanation as to why the the game wont be released for the Wii U:

“The Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,” Shishkovtsov told NowGamer.

Shishkovtsovs colleague at 4 A Games, Huw Beynon, also confirmed that Metro; Last Light wouldnt be released for the console and had this to say:

“We had an early look at it, we thought we could probably do it, but in terms of the impact we would make on the overall quality of the game – potentially to its detriment – we just figured it wasn’t worth pursuing at this time.

It’s something we might return to. I really couldn’t make any promises, though.

We had an initial look at the Wii U, but given the size of the team and compared to where we were last time, just developing for the Playstation 3 is a significant addition.”

Developers are complaining that the system just isnt fast enough and that it constricts gameplay as a whole, making the Wii U a challenging medium and platform to develop games for. Hopefully we wont see many games canceled due to the Wii Us lack of processing power, and many cross-platform titles will most likely deliver a different experience on the Wii U.

Im personally curious to see how well Mass Effect 3 runs on Nintendos new system, and if its processing limitations will making gameplay insufferable. Lets just hope that the big AAA titles play well, considering many Wii U owners are looking forward to playing their favorite console games on-the-go.

Metro: Last Light from 4 A Games is currently scheduled for a release sometime in 2013 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. For more information please visit the games official website.

LGA775 Pentium 4 w EM64T Retail Box

LGA775 Pentium 4 retail box version with EM64T has surfaced inAkiba Japan where Intel has quietly released it earlier this week. The 64-bitPrescott comes in three speed grades; 3.2Ghz, 3.4Ghz and 3.6Ghz with S-Spec ofSL7LA, SL7L8 and SL7L9 respectively. Although Intel has said that they are notreleasing the 64-bit Prescott as a retail CPU, however, it is packed in a retailbox although the box has no color. There is no price information regardingthese 64-bit Prescott at the moment.

Ivy Bridge benchmarks brought early by Santa

If you, like us, have eagerly been awaiting the first Ivy Bridge benchmark numbers then we have good news for you, theyve arrived as an early Christmas present courtesy of Chiphell. Its the high-end Core i7-3770K thats been put through its paces in a somewhat limited selection of benchmarks, but if the results are anything close to the final CPU revision, then we can look forward to a decent performance boost over Sandy Bridge.

The CPU was fitted to an un-named Z77 chipset motherboard –an early revision with an early BIOS/UEFI – and paired up with 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory. As we know, the Core i7-3770K sports Intel HD Graphics 4000 and the integrated graphics was being used for the tests, so were looking at early graphics drivers here too, in best case were looking at an Alpha driver here, at least according to information we have at hand with regards to Intels driver release schedule and judging by the driver revision used.

Lets start with 3DMark06, not really the most taxing benchmark these days, but as you can see from the screenshot below, we got a score of 6841, a respectable improvement in performance compared to the Core i7-2600K which ends up somewhere around 5000 points, although we had a bit of a hard time tracking down some comparable figures, especially using recent drivers. Looking at the CPU score for 3DMark06 the Core i7-3770K scored 7170 which should be compared to about 6700-6800 for a Core i7-2600K, so only a minor performance increase here.

Moving on we have a couple of runs of Cinebench 11.5 where in single core mode the 3.5GHz Core i7-3770K scored 1.65 easily besting a Core i7-2600K which scores 1.53 – co-incidentally the 2700K is barely any faster at 1.54 points here – although moving on to using all available cores were looking at a score of 7.52 for the Core i7-3770K which is a decent performance bump over the 2600K which scores just under 7 points whereas the 2700K scores just over 7 points. Ivy Bridge is by no means a Sandy Bridge-E beater here where the Core i7-3960X manages 11.44 points with all cores enabled at stock clock, although due to the lower clock it only manages 1.58 points in single core mode.

The third and final benchmark is Fritz Chess and here the Core i7-3770K scores 13869 points whereas a Core i7-2600K scores around 1000 points slower. None of these numbers are that 20 percent performance advantage Intel suggested Ivy Bridge was going to offer over Sandy Bridge earlier this year, but it does seem to line up with the lower end of the spectrum that we saw from Intels own benchmark figures that were part of the leaked roadmap from a couple of weeks ago. The publisher of the benchmarks over at Chiphell is expecting Ivy Bridge to hit 5GHz quite easily, although none of the benchmarks are at anything but stock clock speeds. Weve still got another four months to wait until well know how final silicon behaves alongside final BIOS/UEFI and drivers, but wed expect a small performance increase between now and then. Hit the source link below for some additional screen shots.

Source: Chiphell

Intel To Lower 915 Chipset Prices In Sept

Intel plans to cut prices for a complete lineup of its chipsets, including the 915 family, in the September, aiming to boost the relatively lukewarm sales of its 915 chipsets. The planned chipset price cuts, along with the forthcoming August 22 reduction of prices for Intel’s socket LGA 775 Pentium 4 and Celeron D processors, should administer a shot in the arm for the PC industry as it migrates to the 915 platform. Current sales of devices that support the 915 platform, including sales of socket LGA 775 CPUs, 915 chipsets and PCIe graphics cards have lagged far behind expectations, with PC users reluctant to adopt the new platform.

Light Peak to be future successor of USB

If Intel were to have its way, all our devices will soon be connected to our computers via a single interface, and not with copper wires, but with optical cables.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, senior Intel fellow Kevin Khan outlined Intel's plans for Light Peak, stating that the technology will be made available in the later part of the year, and that “they were expecting partners to start shipping devices with the technology by next year”.

It seemed that Intel also had lofty ambitions with Light Peak technology, with Kahn calling it a “logical future successor to USB 3.0”, even though the new USB 3.0 standard has yet to reach mainstream status, and that Light Peak had the potential to be “the last cable you'll ever need”.

While current standards today dictate a dedicated cable for most protocols, head of Intel Labs Justin Rattner believes that Light Peak will do away with the need for having individual cables, as the technology is capable of serving multiple protocols with a single Light Peak optical cable all at once, greatly reducing the need for extra wiring.

However, Kahn was insistent that Light Peak and USB 3.0 would not be conflicting technologies; instead, he sees both of them as complimentary, as “Light Peak enables USB and other protocols to run together on a single, longer cable and at higher speeds”.

Kahn also said that the USB 3.0 port will be the most likely interface for Light Peak to start with due to its widespread usage, but said that in time, it may allow for much smaller ports to be used, a vital aspect of mobile device designs like notebooks and handheld computers.

This would make sense, as Intel had previously demonstrated Light Peak running through USB port, as shown below:

He also said that Intel would consider having built-in support for Light Peak it its own chipsets, but that would be dependent on the rate of adoption for Light Peak.

Either way, it is clear to all that Intel is banking on optical technology, having argued that copper cables are fast reaching the threshold of their capabilities. And if Intel does manage to pull it off, the dream of ultra-high-speed client computing may not remain as a dream for long.

Source: PC World via X-bit Labs

Internet Explorer 8 falls in 2 minutes

When it comes to computer security, your system's protection is only as strong as the weakest link in your defensive chain. And for most computers, the weakest link is usually the web browser, which serves as the gateway to a whole world of information and malware.

Naturally, the browser is often the target of various exploits, and this year's Pwn2Own competition was no exception, with web browsers being put up on the firing line for hackers to pit their skills in uncovering bugs and security vulnerabilities.

The first casualty of the browser exploits was Internet Explorer 8 running on a fully-patched and updated copy of Windows 7 (x64), where freelance vulnerability researcher Peter Vreugdenhil utilized a “two-exploit combination” to gain access into the machine, first by circumventing Windows' much touted Access Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), which randomizes memory areas to make it much harder to predict where the attacks will land, to obtain a .dll file which Internet Explorer 8 loads into memory.

He then proceeded to make use of the obtained .dll file to bypass Windows 7's Data Execute Prevention (DEP), a security feature which “prevents malicious code from running in sections of memory not intended for code execution”.

And it was done in all of 2 minutes.

Vreugdenhill described his exploit as a case of using Microsoft's own system code against itself. “You can reuse Microsoft's own code to disable memory protection,” he said in an interview.

However, Internet Explorer 8 was not the only Windows-based browser which fell to the might of hackers: under the hands of a Nils, a German researcher, Firefox 3.6 was also compromised with the same method Vreugdenhill utilized: by bypassing both ASLR and DEP.

Little is known about Nils' exploit and his method of achieving it, but Portnoy, the organizer of Pwn2Own, said that Nils' exploit “was very thorough”.

Meanwhile, Charlie Miller, the 3-time winner of Pwn2Own, had announced that he would not be handing over any of the vulnerabilities he found on Adobe, Apple and Microsoft's software to the respective software makers, claiming that it was time that the software makers start finding their own bugs instead of waiting for security experts to find exploits and loopholes in the software.

He hopes that by withholding information about the vulnerabilities he had exploited, software makers “would be motivated to do better” by “duplicating his work” in an attempt to write more bug-free software.

Each of the winners won S10,000 along with the notebook that was successfully compromised as the prize of their efforts.

Source: ComputerWorld, ComputerWorld