ATI doesn't 'Flop' these Radeons!

Just six months ago, I would have rolled my eyes on hearing the name 'ATI'.Now however, it raises my eyebrow, to say the least!
ATI's latest offering, the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 touches speeds of teraflops!
What is a teraflop?Basically a measure of a computer's performance.If you think your calculator is fast, it operates at just about 1o FLOPS[FLoating Operations Per Second].1 teraflop =1000000000000FLOPS!!!Really fast!
The HD 4870 uses DDR5 interface, which is three times better than DDR3!!!
This is made possible thanks to ATI's tie up with AMD.ATi can now consume AMD's resources- money, processors, all.
These GPUs come in pretty cheap too, best of all!They handle DirectX 10.1.
Intel's larrabee too should be coming around soon, we have to see what that offers.........
Till then, these monsters of the HD 4 series should give some sleepless nights for rivals....if any!
Games never looked this good!!!

$200 iPhone!!!

Two things I didn't like about the iPhone initially were- 1)it's asking price and 2) lack of 3G despite it's high price.
Apple is all set to change all that, with the latest iPhone- the 3G.The new iPhone is priced at just $199!!Remarkable!
The new iPhone '3G' is half the price of the previous 2.5G entry-level one.As its name suggests-it even has 3G [Third-Generation] capabilities, allowing ultra-fast Internet surfing, downloads chatting, just to mention a few!!!
It's battery life.Best of all- it even comes with GPS!
It's going to be brought to India by Airtel and Vodafone.You won't get it's full potential till someone introduces 3G to India though.One slight let-down is the fact that it still doesn't have a front-facing secondary camera for easier 3G chatting, unlike it's rival- the Nokia N95 etc.
The 8 GB model is the one selling for $199, while the 16 GB is $299 [essentially-$200 and $300].
This is great news, considering how expensive it was when it was just launched.You'll have to wait till July 11 to go grab one though.
Now we can say- 'I phone, You Phone, We All Phone!!!'[cheaply, most importantly!].

No Dangerous Wild Cat This!

AMD has released their 'Puma' range of notebook processors.The all familiar AMD Turion was pretty hopeless against the really powerful Centrino Duo.
Strangely, I've heard that the puma range will not be able to match the Centrino range anyway?!?!Whats the use of bringing out a new range of processors then, if it can't even beat what its rival already has?!This doesn't even save power compared to the Turion range either!It uses 65-nm transistors, which was offered by Intel ages ago.This means it doesn't stand a chance against Intel, who now uses 45-nm ones.Speed, energy efficiency all go to Centrino.
Then again, the Puma does have better graphics capabilities than Centrino's current 'Santa-Rosa' platform, with better Direct X 10 capabilities.
All in all, I still think Centrino is better.

HD? Full HD?? XHD???All described here!

You must be going nuts, hearing all these terms everywhere-TVs, GPUs, Disk players and so on.
What does all this mean?Read on.
When you watch your regular cable TV or VCD, the quality of picture that you see is in SD or Standard Defenition.This has 640 vertical 'lines' of small dots called 'pixels' and 480 horizontal ones[The number of such lines is the called the resolution of the TV,in this case-640x480].This makes a good quality picture but not as well defined as what we see around us.Let us keep this as the basis for comparing the others listed below-
HDTV [also-HD ready]
This has more lines- 1080 vertical lines and 768 horizontal ones[1080x768].This provides more detail in what you watch, about 3.5 times more detailed than what SDTV offers.This is still not as good as what our eyes can see.
Full HD
This comes with 1920 vertical lines and 1080 horizontal ones[1920x1080].This can show images that are 5 times more detailed than SDTV.You can see snowflakes, grains of sand and other fine things much more clearly.This is very close to all the eye can see, but still is not all.
Extreme High Defenition[XHD][2560x1600]
This is THE best available right now.This has 2560 vertical lines and 1600 horizontal lines for, true to its name, extreme detail!This offers about 7.5 times the detail of SDTV!!!As of now, this is mainly for over-the-top computers with latest graphics cards, software etc.

Its just like using a thick tipped felt pen and a fine tipped pen or pencil for a drawing, the pencil's demarcations will be a lot more clearer than that made by a felt pen.The pencil image will be sharper and clearer.
Basically what all this means is your pixel size will be different.the smaller the pixels, the finer the image you see.
Higher resolutions enable better contrast between colours, sharper, more precise images and better detail.Movies and games appear more realistic, engrossing etc.
I hope you got an idea of what all this means now!

Core2 Quad....x2!!

Yeah!Intel's latest motherboard has arrived, with slots for two quad-core processors like the Core2 Quad and multiple GPU capbilities as well!
I dont really like the idea though, at least not for Core2 Quad processors, which are not even really quad-core.You will have 8 cores on your PC, but not 8 core performance.It would be best to wait for a real quad-core proc to arrive and then you may consider using two of them on a Skulltrail but otherwise it's gonna be a waste.If you think you will really put all the cores to good use, then go ahead but I dont recommend it otherwise.Read about the Tyan motherboard for AMD[16 cores?overdrive! ] which I wrote for further reasons not to go for this.
This could be so that Intel could compete with some of AMD's latest processors.This could be interesting to be future ready though!

Blu-Ray Reigns Supreme!

Yep, the winner of the format war has been announced, Blu-ray has won over HD-DVD.

This occured when Toshiba, the backbone of HD-DVD called it quits, obviously leaving Blu-ray to nab it all.Some movie company also stopped production of movie titles on HD-DVD too, I forget which one though, sorry!

The Blu-ray[25GB] is better in terms of storage, having about 10GB more than HD-DVD[approx 15Gb] and then there's the ultimate- the dual-layer Blu-ray disk, with a whopping 50 GB worth of storage!!!!!Naturally, Blu-ray is more expensive than HD-DVD though.All that extra space will be needed, considering the size of todays HD movies.

Chances are though, it'll be a while before Blu-rays become common.BD players are priced pretty high for now.The Sony PS3 is a good bet, it even comes with a bluetooth remote, i.e.- you don't have to point it directly at the PS3 to give a command!!!Typical of Sony to come up with such outta-this-world ideas! PS3 aside, there are others like LG, Samsung, Pioneer Etc, Etc.Most probably, people are going to take a while to get accustomed to BDs.

This makes the path into the HD era more straightforward & confusion free finally!

Nvidia 9-series has landed!

It has memory ranging from 256MB all the way upto 1GB!The prformance gains are marginal, I hear.Only the top-end 9800GX2 is slightly better than the all familiar 8800.It is somewhat faster too.Its also capable of XHD, or Extreme High Defenition, which is even more detailed than Full-HD.I still feel they could make it a lot better.It is a lot like a rebadged 8-series.It is kind of upsetting as I expected a lot more than this.Not GDDR4 or anything, this.
So dont jump to get one....yet.
I guess we could wait for a better 9900 GTX to come up soon....!