MODDING: blogs

Today Adobe announced Creative Suites 4 with a lot of great new features, including native support graphics processing units (GPUs). Adobe is the latest in a trend of visual computing companies grabbing on to the massively parallel processing power of GPUs for more than just rendering pixels to the screen. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the most important addition to this trend because of its market position as the leading artistic tool suite. NVIDIA has published a few marketing slides today about Adobe CS4 performance and how it can be approved with their video cards. One of the more interesting bits of news was the fact that there is a CUDA plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that is said to deliver 7x the performance of a CPU. Very interesting and this is something that AMD can't match.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 uses NVIDIA Quadro or GeForce GPUs to create a digital canvas that is interactive in ways that are simply not possible without a GPU. NVIDIA GPUs enable real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, and make changes to the view instantaneous and smooth. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also taps the GPU for 2D and 3D compositing and high-quality antialiasing, making jagged edges of text and objects a thing of the past. Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, and color conversion are also accelerated by the GPU.

SanDisk today announced that it is now shipping an upgraded family of SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash (CF) memory cards to better meet the needs of professional digital photographers. The entire series of SanDisk Extreme IV high-performance memory cards has received a 12.5-percent speed boost up to 45 megabytes per second (MB/s)1 and the newly-released 16-gigabyte (GB)2 card is twice as large as previous capacities. A 16GB SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash will set you back $399.

SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash 45MB/s (300X) memory cards offer advanced technologies that are fully compatible with all CompactFlash cameras including the latest UDMA-enabled cameras. SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards have undergone internal testing with many leading manufacturers cameras and DSLRs, such as Canons EOS series, Nikons D300 and D3 cameras, the Sony Alpha A700, and the Olympus E500 and E3 cameras. Depending on the camera used, the increased performance of the SanDisk Extreme IV memory card line may help reduce the delay between shots, enabling photographers to take more photos overall.

Graphics is more than just fast frame rates. And with the adoption of NVIDIA CUDA technology, developers can use the power of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs in ways never before possible. Only NVIDIA GeForce GPUs offer the ability to deliver fast frame rates and more realistic, immersive experiences, which would explain why more than a million downloads of the first ever GeForce Power Pack occurred in less than two weeks.

GeForce Power Packs are freely available content that allow consumers to experience first-hand new NVIDIA technologies that are fundamentally changing the way applications are designed, played, and experienced. For total immersion, the gaming environment has to feel as real as possible, and characters must be able to move and interact with the objects in the environment that have a compelling, dramatic impact on game play. PhysX technology provides developers the ability to include effects such as trees that bend in the wind and water that ebbs and flows naturally, and additional objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience.

Results from a survey recently fielded by Entertainment for All Expo indicate some surprising trends relating to women and video games. Front and center: many women would rather play video games than catch up on sleep, according to the new survey which polled more than 120 PoshMama members on their video game habits. Responses were gleaned from the high percentage of female respondents (71%) who said that they play video games.

According to the E for All / PoshMama survey, more than one-third of those surveyed say that they play video games when they should be sleeping. Women in the survey also say they play video games in other unusual circumstances, including: while on the phone (32%); while at work/in a meeting (20%); and, while preparing for work (12%). When it comes to spare time, nearly twice as many women say that, if given an extra hour of free time at home, they would rather play video games than catch up on sleep.

In an appropriately ‘over the air’ day (ref the HTC G1 announcement), Tzer2 looks closely at how divorced S60 is from a desktop computer. In other words, do you need to be tied to a PC or Mac at all these days? The answer is largely ‘No’. Tzer2’s article will make you think and challenge the way you’ve viewed Symbian OS and S60 phones up until now.

TweakTown posted their article, “GIGABYTE shows us final design X58 Extreme mobo.” Find this and other reviews from around the web by visiting our forums!

Today we got a close up look at the final design that will ship to customers, besides the heatsink cooling setup, which GIGABYTE is still keeping under wraps for the moment - and this one is an actual working live sample. Besides the physical changes to the board layout, on this board and others, GIGABYTE will be introducing Ultra Durable 3. GIGABYTE has already tweaked their boards to what we thought was the max and we really thought there wasnt much more left to improve, but we were wrong.

UD3 adds two 2 ounce copper layers to the 12-layer PCB motherboard one is a ground layer and the other is a power layer. We got a chance to see the actual copper layers that slot into the regular PCB compared to normal one ounce copper layers, but we are not allowed to show you until the actual launch tomorrow. These thicker copper layers create less resistance (impedance) by up to two times, creating better electrical current flow according to GIGABYTE. In their labs, engineers measured a 50 degree Celsius drop in temperature in the hottest parts of the motherboard (mosfets around the CPU).”

TweakTown posted their article, “GIGABYTE shows us final design X58 Extreme mobo.” Find this and other reviews from around the web by visiting our forums!

Today we got a close up look at the final design that will ship to customers, besides the heatsink cooling setup, which GIGABYTE is still keeping under wraps for the moment - and this one is an actual working live sample. Besides the physical changes to the board layout, on this board and others, GIGABYTE will be introducing Ultra Durable 3. GIGABYTE has already tweaked their boards to what we thought was the max and we really thought there wasnt much more left to improve, but we were wrong.

UD3 adds two 2 ounce copper layers to the 12-layer PCB motherboard one is a ground layer and the other is a power layer. We got a chance to see the actual copper layers that slot into the regular PCB compared to normal one ounce copper layers, but we are not allowed to show you until the actual launch tomorrow. These thicker copper layers create less resistance (impedance) by up to two times, creating better electrical current flow according to GIGABYTE. In their labs, engineers measured a 50 degree Celsius drop in temperature in the hottest parts of the motherboard (mosfets around the CPU).”

With Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s cash reserves dwindling and the chip maker's overall financial health deteriorating to dangerous levels last year, the company was thrown a lifeline by Lehman Brothers, the investment bank now in bankruptcy. The $1.5 billion in AMD debt that Lehman scooped up in August 2007 demonstrates the important role that banks like Lehman and other investment firms play in helping prop up wobbly companies by pouring money into them when they're down.

In AMD's case, Lehman's problems won't affect the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's balance sheet, which at the end of June showed AMD holding about $1.6 billion in cash while carrying $5.3 billion in debt. That's because AMD has already spent the proceeds, and its debt offering was sold off by Lehman to other banks or held by its subsidiaries that are now being sold to other firms.

Microsoft has informed some of its partners that it has had to delay Windows Mobile 7, a much anticipated update to its cell phone operating system. Although Microsoft has not publicly said when to expect Windows Mobile 7, partners who had expected to have a final release in their hands by early next year have been told now that it won't be ready until the second half of next year.

The delay is a significant blow for the software maker, which has been counting on the next version of Windows Mobile to enable devices that better rival Apple's iPhone. Among the features widely expected to be part of the release is advanced gesture recognition, perhaps along the lines of the iPhone, but possibly also using the camera as a means for reading gestures. Microsoft's Tellme unit, which focuses on speech input, has also been working on Windows Mobile 7 features.

Micron's investigation into acquiring Qimonda has progressed and a deal is likely to happen, according to a note from analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research. One of the key drivers for the deal is the fact Micron will be able to leverage Qimonda's Inotera joint venture, which would add additional Taiwan facilities and IP revenue opportunities for Micron, in addition to its existing MeiYa joint venture with Nanya Technologies.

Qimonda's fab assets are also more valuable to Micron, compared with other potential buyers, such as Hynix or Nanya, as their common geographies allow logistics synergy, Freedman noted. Since Qimonda cannot fund projected losses through fiscal year 2009, Freedman expects that a deal could be done for US$350 million, near US$1 per share, or 25% of the US$4 per share book value. Freedman estimates an additional cost of about US$100 million would be required to convert Qimonda fabs to Micron processes.