NEC VersaPro VA30S/AE: a corporate notebook on 3.06GHz Pentium 4M

SiS655FX officially announced

Shuttle ST61G XPC: a new cubic barebone

Olympus officially releases E-1 SLR camera

Sony introduces new PCGA-DDRW1 external DVD±RW drive

Apple officially announces the new-generation Power Mac G5 on latest IBM PowerPC G5 processors

NEC VersaPro VA30S/AE: a corporate notebook on 3.06GHz Pentium 4M

VersaPro VA30S/AE features i852PM chipset with MOBILITY RADEON 9000 graphics; 256Mb of PC2700 memory, 20Gb HDD, 24õ CD-ROM; 1000BASE-T LAN; 2 x PC Card Type I/II slots or 1 x Type II slot (depends on the model), Secure Digital/Memory Stick slot. Besides, the model has a VersaBay IVb slot for additional optical drive.

Sized 335x281x45mm, it weighs about 4.3kg. The Li-Ion battery provides about 4.2 hours of operation.

SiS655FX officially announced

SiS655FX provides 6.4Gb/s throughput (CPU–chipset–memory). SiS964 Southbridge supports Serial ATA and RAID. According to the maker, the HyperStreaming technology optimizes the system load balancing and enables simultaneous burst data processing.

Volume production of SiS655FX is scheduled to July, with boards appearing in Q3 2003.

Shuttle ST61G XPC: a new cubic barebone

• Pentium 4 Socket 478 533/400MHz FSB processor
• ATI RS300 Northbridge, IXP200 Southbridge
• Dual-channel DDR400 (up to 2Gb)
• Integrated Radeon 9000 graphics
• Realtek 650F 6-ch. sound
• Broadcom 4401/5788 10/100/1000 LAN
• AGP8X, 1 x 32-bit PCI slot
• S-Video, NSTC/PAL, 1024 x 768
• USB2.0, Advanced Firewire 400
• Serial ATA, RAID 0,1
• ICE (Integrated Cooling Engine)

Olympus officially releases E-1 SLR camera

Initially, Olympus will offer the novelty with five Zuiko Digital Specific lens:

• 14-54mm f2.8-3.5 (28-108mm in 35mm equiv.) for about $599.00
• 50-200mm f2.8-3.5 (100-400mm in 35mm equiv.) for about $1199.00
• 50mm f2.0 1:2 Macro (100mm Macro in 35mm equiv.) for about $599.00
• 300mm f2.8 Super Telephoto (600mm in 35mm equiv.) for about $7,999.00
• TC14 1.4X Teleconverter (1.4X — 1 stop in 35mm equiv.) for about $549.00

The FL-50 flash and accessorries will cost about $499.00 (the camera will work with FL-40 and other flashes, including those from other companies). PC connectivity is realized via FireWire and USB2.0.

Ôîòî — http://www.dcresource.com

The camera features 5.08-megapixel CCD (4:3 ratio, 5 effective megapixels), integrated "system" memory of 128Mb and 12 frames buffer; supports Compact Flash Type I/II, Microdrive. Image formats include JPEG, RAW, TIFF. The device is capable of 12 frame burst at 3fps in any supported formats. Resolutions include 2560x1920, 1600x1200, 1280x960, 1024x768, 640x480. ISO settings: Auto (ISO 100-400) or manual (ISO 100/200/400/800/1600/3200; ISO boost for 1600/3200). The LCD is 1.8" (134,000 pixels) supporting 15 brightness levels.

Sized 141x104x81mm, it weighs about 660g. Shipments will start in Fall, with the body costing about $2200.

Sony introduces new PCGA-DDRW1 external DVD±RW drive

Sized 144x21x154mm, it weighs about 410g. The package includes an i.LINK cable, AC adapter, software, user’s manual.

Source: CDR Info

Apple officially announces the new-generation Power Mac G5 on latest IBM PowerPC G5 processors

Initially the company will be offering three Power Mac G5 models in the market: M9020LL/A, M9031LL/A and M9032LL/A. The first two are based on 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz PowerPC G5, respectively, with the third one featuring two 2GHz PowerPC G5 CPUs. Other features include 256Mb to 1Gb of PC2700/PC3200 DDR SDRAM (up to 8Gb in four sockets); NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra (64Mb DDR SDRAM), ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (64Mb DDR SDRAM) or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128Mb DDR SDRAM) GPU; 80Gb or 160Gb Serial ATA 7200rpm HDDs; SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) combo.

The baseboard features three 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots or one 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X slots with two 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots; 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet; 56K V.92 modem; 54Mbps AirPort (IEEE 802.11g/b) slot; 1 FireWire 800 port, 2 FireWire 400 ports, three USB2.0 ports, 2 USB1.1 ports.

The standard system dimensions are 511x206x475mm, weight – 17.8kg.

As for the new PowerPC G5 processors, they are developed and produced by IBM, what obviously makes us think these are former PowerPC 970 chips.

PowerPC G5 processors support up to 8Gb systrem memory. In theory, 42-bit physical address space allows for 18 exabytes of virtual memory (i.e. 18x10²4; bytes), up to 4 terabytes of physical memory (2&sup42; bytes). The new CPU has up to 2GHz initial clock rates, supports up to 1GHz FSB, enabling up to 16Gb/s performance in dual-CPU mode. As you remember, PowerPC G5 bases on 64-bit ÿäðà IBM Power4 core, but has one instead of two cores. Its features include:

• Full 64-bit data paths and registers
• Dual-pipeline 128-bit Velocity Engine for single-instruction, multiple-data
• (SIMD) processing
• Two independent floating-point units for double-precision calculations
• Three-component branch prediction logic
• Native support for 32-bit application code
• 64K L1 instruction cache; 32K L1 data cache
• 512K internal L2 cache
• Microcoded instructions for up to four internal operations
• Support for up to eight outstanding L1 cache line misses
• Hardware-initiated instruction prefetching from L2 cache
• Hardware- or software-initiated data stream prefetching; support for up to eight active streams
• In-order dispatch of up to five operations into distributed issue queue structure
• Extended 162 SIMD PowerPC instructions
• Die size: 118mm²
• Up to 1GHz Elastic I/O throughput; 0.13µm process on 300mm silicon wafers with SOI (IBM fab in East Fishkill, NY)

To better understand the difference between PowerPC G4 and PowerPC G5 see the table below:

The new CPU can work with 32-bit software under such 32-bit OS, as Linux, Unix or Apple Mac OS X. At the same time, similar to AMD´s Hammer, 64-bit addressing enables the transition to 64-bit OS and apps.

And as finally, below are Power Mac G5 performance charts from Apple´s website (there´s no any other anyway).

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