LaCie announces 16x DVD±RW DL drive

Intel introduces Mobile Intel Pentium 4 548

Cypress samples 4 Mp CMOS sensor

Panasonic unveils Secure Digital PRO HIGH SPEED cards: 20 MB/s + CPRM

More on GeForce 6800 pipeline management

LaCie announces 16x DVD±RW DL drive

In the nearest future LaCie will start selling its external 16x DVD±RW drive. The novelty also designed by Porsche supports DVD±RW DL media.

The bundle includes Easy Media Creator 7 (Windows XP/2000), Easy CD & DVD Creator 6.2 and DVDMAX 2.0 (USB version), while FireWire drive is supplied with Roxio Toast 6.0 Lite (Mac OS X), Easy Media Creator 7 (Windows XP/2000) and Easy CD Creator Basic 6.2. In Europe MSRP of USB version is ˆ110, of FireWire version — ˆ130.

Intel introduces Mobile Intel Pentium 4 548

Intel updated its Mobile Intel Pentium 4 series with 548 model. The 90nm novelty is designed for DTR notebooks. It supports Hyper-Threading, 13 new Streaming SIMD 3 Extensions (SSE3) and Enhanced Intel Speedstep technology, has 1MB L2 cache. The processor has real clock rate of 3.33 GHz and is supported by Intel 852GME and Intel 852PM chipsets.

In over 1,000-unit quantities the processor costs $262.

Cypress samples 4 Mp CMOS sensor

Cypress Semiconductor started sampling its new LUPA-4000-M CMOS sensor made at recently acquired FillFactory NV. The company positions the novelty for artificial vision and biometric identification systems, etc.

The sensor features:

• Fully synchronized or pipelined shutter reading one image while capturing the next
• Image windowing for improved capture
• High-contrast capture without overbrighting light areas

The sensor is sized 2K x 2K pixels, each pixel is sized 12x12mm², capture performance is 15 fps. The sensor has 10-bit digital output, parallel bus, and is encased into PGA package. Currently LUPA-4000-M is offered only in the monochrome variant.

A sample costs $960, volume production is scheduled to Q1 2005.

Panasonic unveils Secure Digital PRO HIGH SPEED cards: 20 MB/s + CPRM

Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) unveiled a new family of Secure Digital PRO HIGH SPEED cards supporting CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media). Novelties feature 20 MB/s read/write speeds and will go on sale on October 15.

Currently the series includes 1GB RP-SDK01GJ1A and 512MB RP-SDK512J1A cards (¥27,000 or $245 and ¥13,000 or $118, respectively).

Source: PC Watch

More on GeForce 6800 pipeline management

Alexey Nikolaychuk, the developer of RivaTuner, was worried about the fact that ASUS V9999GE (GeForce 6800 on 6800 Ultra PCB) had all 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines enabled after patching with 6800 Ultra BIOS despite hardware protection of disabled pipelines.

We continued our examinations and finally Alexey found the key allowing to IGNORE hardware pipeline disabling. Naturally we expected artefacts, as they don´t disable pipelines just for fun.

Thus RivaTuner gained more features (tested on ASUS V9999GE). Note that NO 6800U BIOS PATCHING. That was what we saw on the first startup:

12 pixel and 5 vertex pipelines. Let´s try and enable the rest. Note the new pipeline forcing switch near the NVStrap button:

We decided to warn users any time they decide to perform such a step:

Flag all pipelines, HW Mask column shows those hardware disabled.

That was what we got after reboot:

We did it! All 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines are enabled! Let´s bench the card in FarCry and Serious Sam: TSE.

You see, pipelines are really defective causing bad artefacts. After we uninstalled NVStrap the card started working normally again.

Other cards indicated that such disabled pipelines won´t be working stable and well. At least those we enabled. So we decided to delay the release of this feature until enabled pipelines work ok.

But this discovery would be an interesting statistics tool to understand which GPUs are good for unlocking without risking the quality.

And again, YOU DON´T NEED TO MESS WITH BIOS to perform operations above.

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