Krome Spy PDA with 1.3 megapixel camera

On Intel´s high-end Napa chipset

A supercomputer on 562 Intel Xeons finished in China

MP3 to celebrate 10th birthday

Krome Spy PDA with 1.3 megapixel camera

Australian company Krome has launched a reduced size Windows Mobile PDA/Phone to be launched globally next month. Just adding the word "spy" to any devices name will make people more excited about it, that’s why they called this one the Krome Spy.

What makes it so Spy-like is obviously its small size; measuring 2.28 x 4.25 x 0.71-inches and weighing a mere 150 grams while still packing in all the features you would expect to have in a PDA. Since it runs on Windows Mobile Phone Edition you have MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Organizer and Windows Media Player 10 bundled with the device.

The 1.3-megapixel camera lets you take your spy photos while the tri-band GSM/GPRS antenna lets you setup rendezvous with your colleagues and send your top secret snap shots back to headquarters.

The display is a 2.8-inch LCD touch screen, inside is a powerful 416MHz Intel PXA272 processor with 64MB RAM and unknown expansion capabilities. The removable lithium-polymer battery will get you about 3.5 to 5 hrs of talk-time with 180 hours standby. The price is set at RS 28,999 (US $667).

Source: MobileMag

On Intel´s high-end Napa chipset

Intel plans to cancel development of the high-end 955XM chipset for its next-generation mobile platform, codenamed Napa, but beef-up the DDR2-memory support for the two remaining Napa chipsets still on its roadmap, according to sources in the motherboard industry.

Intel had originally planned to launch three chipsets for its Napa platform, with the 945PM and 945GM slated to support 2GB of dual-channel DDR2 memory and the high-end 955XM scheduled to support 4GB of memory, sources at motherboard makers noted. However, the chip giant has removed the 955XM from its Napa chipset lineup, and increased the amount of memory supported by the 945PM and 945GM to 4GB, the sources stated.

In related news, Intel server-use dual-core Itanium 2 and Xeon processors, including the Montecito Itanium 2, Xeon MP and Xeon DP, are expected to begin hitting the market in the third quarter of this year, the sources indicated. The Montecito chip will be unveiled as the Intel Itanium 2 9000 series, and the Xeon chips will include the Xeon MP7000 series based on the MP Paxville, and the Xeon DP5000 based on the DP Dempsey, the sources hinted.

Source: DigiTimes

A supercomputer on 562 Intel Xeons finished in China

Having installed successfully in Nov. 2004 a GT1000 Supercomputing Blade System (1 Teraflops) at Beijing Biomedical Research Institute, Galactic Computing just completed another GT4000 Supercomputing Blade System (281 blades, 562 Intel Xeon processors) which has attained the world rank of 100 according to the 2005 June 22nd release of Top500 supercomputers list. The peak performance of the entire system is 4.046 Teraflops and the HPLinpack performance is 3.413 Teraflops which corresponds to the efficiency of 84.35%.

GT4000 result demonstrates the highest HPLinpack efficiency in the world among teraflop s scale supercomputers based on x86 processors which have been announced to date.

Also, this is the one and only supercomputer in China with completely embedded end-to-end InfiniBand 10Gb from blade-to-blade and blade-to-storage with 4 microseconds latency (instead of 50 milliseconds as most 1Gb Ethernet networked server clusters) and can achieve storage data throughput rate up to 820MB/s (two to three times faster and yet cheaper than Fiber Channel SAN).

Source: Mellanox Technologies

MP3 to celebrate 10th birthday

On July 14th, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Soon MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3".

.mp3 emerged as the unanimous winner of an internal poll at Fraunhofer IIS. This naming can be seen as the conclusion of years of research and development in a team of up to 40 engineers. The format´s international standardization in 1992 ensured worldwide compatibility – this fact and the public MP3 source code guarantee that billions of existing MP3 files can still be played by generations of audiophiles to come.

In 1992 MP3 was in fact so far ahead of its times, that the industry considered the technology far too complex for practical application. It turned out, however, that its development was the bottom line advancement in audio coding – no other coding method so far could uncrown MP3 as the standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.

With the MP3 player, a brand new market was created. In 2004 more than 3 million MP3 players were sold in Germany alone. And the success story will continue: the prognosis for 2006 estimates over 80 million MP3 players to be sold worldwide.

Source: Fraunhofer IIS

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