Princeton Highlights Miniature Bluetooth Receiver

Princeton thinks small with its new Bluetooth adapter


When it comes to mobile devices, smaller is often time better. We witnessed this last month with the release of the Logitech VX Nano wireless notebook mouse.

The VX Nano did away with the traditional, bulky RF receiver for a much smaller unit that barely juts out from the USB port. Logitech's assertion with the new design was that customers wouldn't need to remove the receiver due to its small size and thus eliminated the fear of breaking or losing the receiver.

Princeton is taking that same concept to heart with its new PTM-UBT3S Bluetooth 2.0+EDR USB adapter. The adapter measures just 14mm x 19mm x 4.5mm, weighs just 5.5 grams and will happily sync with any of your Bluetooth-enabled peripherals.

Princeton notes that the PTM-UBT3S is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

The tiny device will be available in Japan this September for 2,480 yen ($22 USD). There is no word on U.S. availability although it probably won't be long before the devices show up on eBay.

Taken from DailyTech

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Sony Develops Environmentally Friendly Battery

Sony said Friday that it had developed a bio-conscious battery that is encased in vegetable-based plastic and runs on sugars. The sugars are poured into the battery, and are then broken down by enzymes in order to create electricity. It outputs about 50 milliwatts, and has enough power to run a music player and a set of speakers. The battery measures 1.5 inches on each side.

Sugar is a naturally occurring energy source, the company says. "It is therefore regenerative, and can be found in most areas of the earth, underlining the potential for sugar-based batteries as an ecologically-friendly energy device of the future." Sony hopes to eventually produce them for commercial use, although no date was given.

Taken from http://Betanews.com

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AGEIA Announces Mobile Physics Processor

New AGEIA PhysX 100M physics processor for notebooks

AGEIA Technologies this week announced it is taking PhysX technology to the mobile sector with new PhysX 100M. The new AGEIA PhysX 100M is a physics processor designed for high-end gaming notebooks. AGEIA claims the PhysX 100M delivers unmatched “power, efficiency and design flexibility.”

"AGEIA is fully committed to delivering the most intensely realistic gaming and entertainment experience to PC gamers," said Manju Hegde, CEO of AGEIA Technologies. "We are enabling enthusiasts to enjoy games their way: whenever and wherever they want. AGEIA PhysX Mobile Technology further expands our position in the gaming market and we look forward to seeing new laptops bring gamers the freedom to enjoy incredible physics action on the go."

AGEIA claims the PhysX 100M processor is available now, but does not mention any design wins. However, notebooks featuring the AGEIA PhysX 100M are expected very soon. AGEIA is also showcasing the PhysX 100M at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany.

Games featuring AGEIA PhysX technology are still quite scarce, with the biggest title supporting PhysX technology being the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series while Unreal Tournament 3 is the next big title, but still in development.

AMD and NVIDIA have both previewed CrossFire and SLI physics technologies powered by Havok FX, but neither company have delivered a hardware physics processing solution.

High-performance gaming notebooks are the latest trend in mobile computing. Technologies previously found only on desktops have made its way into notebooks. NVIDIA last year debuted SLI technology for notebooks while AMD released its ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2000 series consecutively with its desktop ATI Radeon HD 2000 models. NVIDIA also delivers its latest GeForce 8 series technology to the mobile sector. Overclocking has also found its way into notebooks, with unlocked Core 2 Extreme X7800 and X7900 processors and MSI’s Turbo button.

Notebook manufacturers are also releasing bigger and faster gaming notebooks with display sizes up to 20-inches. HP’s Pavilion HDX notebook packs ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with a 20.1-inch display and two hard drives. ASUS also has two Santa Rosa based gaming notebooks in its lineup, as well as a new do-it-yourself gaming notebook. Dell also has its upcoming Dell XPS M1730 with a 17-inch display, Core 2 Extreme X7800 processor and GeForce 8 series graphics while Eurocom manages to pack quad-core, SLI technology, RAID 5 and Blu-ray in a single 17.1-inch notebook.

Taken from http://www.dailytech.com

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Tilera Launches 64-Core Embedded Processor

MIT Spin-out creates 64-core processor based on "mesh" architecture

Tilera Corporation, 2004 MIT startup founded on proof-of-concept mesh-based computing today launched the TILE64 processor. TILE64 is the first in a family of Tile Processor chips based on am architecture that can scale to hundreds and even thousands of cores.

TILE64 Processor Block Diagram (Source: Tilera)

However, don't get too excited while dreaming of 64-core gaming. Tilera claims the TILE64 has potential uses in video processing and network applications, but the processor is designed more as 64 systems on a single chip, rather than a 64-core general purpose GPU.

"This is the first significant new development in chip architecture in a decade," said Tilera President and CEO, Devesh Garg. "We developed this new architecture because existing multicore technologies simply cannot scale beyond a handful of cores. Moreover, customers have repeatedly indicated that the current multicore software tools are very primitive because they are based on single-processor-core models. We're introducing a revolutionary hardware and software platform that has solved the fundamental challenges associated with multicore scalability."

Tilera's new architecture eliminates the on-chip bus interconnect by placing a communications switch on each processor core and arranging them in a grid fashion on the chip, which the company calls iMesh -- intelligent Mesh.

Instead of a dedicated socket interface, the TILE64 daughterboard plugs into standard PCIe. A host operating system -- Linux or Windows -- recognizes the daughterboard as a new device instead of an extra 64 CPUs.

Each of the tiles is a full-featured, general-purpose processor that includes L1 and L2 caches, as well as a distributed L3 cache. Each core is also capable of running its own operating system, such as Linux. The cores can then interact with the iMesh network, which provides extremely low-latency, high bandwidth communications between the cores, memory and the I/O.

Intel's Teraflops Research Chip carries a striking resemblence to TILE64. Indeed, Tilera and Intel even carry the same terminology to describe the tiles and their functionality. In theory, both chips behave almost identically with regard to mesh computing -- one tile or several tiles can be confgured to act in parallel.

In order to minimize total system power, cost and footprint, the TILE64 processor integrates four DDR2 memory controllers and a complete array of high speed I/O interfaces; including two 10 Gbps XAUI, two 10 Gbps PCIe, two 1 Gbps Ethernet RGMII and a programmable flexible I/O interface to support interfaces such as compact flash and disk drives.

Each core consumes approximately 170 to 300 milliwatts. While each core does not reside on a separate power plane individual cores can be set into deep sleep states. However even with this aggressive sleep state management, the process is still fabricated entirely on TSMC's aging (and relatively inefficient) 90nm node; the company has not announced plans to shrink this process technology.

Intel's Teraflops Research Chip boasts nearly two teraFLOPs of processing power on a single 80-core processor, TILE64 musters about a tenth of that. However, aside from the fact that Tilera's CPU is available today, the focus for TILE64 is high performance-per-watt, as evidenced by its sub-20 watt peak-load envelope.

The processor is ideally suited for high performance embedded system markets, such as switches, security appliances and high-definition video applications. Tilera claims the chip will be available today in 600MHz to 900MHz variants, though corporate documentation (PDF) suggests 1GHz models exist but are not commercially available. Production pricing for the TILE64-family starts at $435 in bulk quantities.

Tilera's roadmap also includes plans for a 36-core and a 120-core device.

Taken from http://www.dailytech.com

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NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX and GTS already in November?

The rumor kitchen around NVIDIAs next GeForce generation runs again on full speed. Different sources assume the new generation will come in November on us. Over leaky placing the first Specs is to have come to the daylight.

If one had assumed that first, which becomes the G92 rather a Midrange map, one goes now nevertheless rather from a High ends to model, thus to a GeForce 9800 out. With the GeForce 9800 the GeForce 8800 will already again retired have and it comes a further technology step to us.

To the unconfirmed data from the Leak sources according to the G92 is introduced in November 2007. The new GPU is over a billion (1000 million.) Transistors order. To the comparison, in the G80 there 681 millions.

The G92 will possess 9800 GTX version into the GeForce the following specifications:

- 65nm process technology RK TSMC.
- Over one trillion of transistor.
- Second generation Unified Shader Architecture.
- doubles precsion support (FP64).
- GPGPU native.
- Over one TeraFLOPS OF of shader processings power.
- MADD+ADD configuration for the more shader untis (2+1 FLOPS FLOPS by ALU)
- Fully Scalar Design.
- 512-bit MEMORY interface.
- 1024MB GDDR4 graphics MEMORY.
- DirectX 10,1 support.
- OpenGL 3,0 support.
- OD RAM for the "FREE 4xAA".
- Built in audio chip (HDMI).
- Built in tesselation unit (into the graphics core)
- Improved AA and AF quality level

Also the prices for the maps are obviously already more or less well-known. So the GTX version of the GeForce 9800 is to lie between 549 and 649 USD and the GTS version between 399 and 449 USD.

Taken from http://www.tweakpc.de

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Microsoft Reminds : No Vista SP 1 This Year

Microsoft Reminds that this year will no Vista SP1.
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"There will be a Windows Vista service pack and our current expectation is that a beta will be made available sometime this year. Service packs are part of the traditional software lifecycle -- they’re something we do for all Microsoft products as part of our commitment to continuous improvement, and providing early test builds is a standard practice that helps us incorporate customer feedback and improve the overall quality of the product," Microsoft said in a statement.

Although it wouldn't explicitly said so, Microsoft's plans put a final release of Vista SP1 -- what customers are actually waiting for, not a beta -- sometime next year. And in the meantime, the company is busy telling customers they shouldn't wait at all.

"Since Windows Vista launched, we have continued working with partners to improve overall device coverage and application compatibility. There are now more than 2.1 million supported devices and more than 2,000 logoed applications for Windows Vista. We think customers will have a great experience using Windows Vista today," Microsoft added.
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For the complete infomation visit http://www.betanews.com/.

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Microsoft Hotfix for Vista : Fix for Multiple Graphic Cards

Microsoft has made a hotfix for Vista DirectX 10. That the directx 10 does not use secondary graphic card at a computer that using multiple graphic cards.

For more information and the hotfix
Go to : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936710

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