PlayStation 3 Shipment Figures

Tricks On Optimizing HD Video: Saving Battery Life

More Reports Of Tight CPU Supply

ASUS To Produce PS3 For Sony In 4Q, Foxconn To Follow Next Quarter

Plastic Logic To Show 150ppi Flexible Active-Matrix Display

AOpen Unveils XC Cube EZ945(C) With Vista Support

PlayStation 3 Shipment Figures

The bad news continues to haunt Sony as its now been announced that they won't be able to meet the shipment figures which where recently announced.

Sony previously announced that they would be shipping a total of two million units of the PlayStation 3 to retail stores in the USA and Japan at the end of 2006. Jack Tretton has made a statement which spells doubt over the fact that Sony will be able to deliver the promises of two million units.

Jack Tretton made this announcement to a website called Bloomberg. He goes on to say that, "The honest answer is it's more of a target." and that they've clearly had production issues.

The source isn't sure if this will cause anymore delays for the PlayStation 3 in other countries but it does bring even more bad news for the company, as of late, they haven't had much good news.

Source: Strategy Informer

Tricks On Optimizing HD Video: Saving Battery Life

During the IDF Fall 06, Patrick Wong, Intel’s Marketing Engineer of Digital Home Group, talked about tricks for Developers to optimize HD Video playback as well as ways to saving power. Most are for developers, but there are still some tricks we may borrow to enhance our existing playback time.

First, we should play video in Full Screen Mode. Windowed mode exposes the desktop, desktop refresh rate, and Windowed mode exposes the desktop, desktop refresh rate, and composition. Thus, Windowed mode enormously increases the power and compute Windowed mode enormously increases the power and compute. It’s a burden of the compositor. If we play video in Full Screen Mode, we may get a power saving up to 1 Watt.

Second, we may use DXVA 2.0 Substreams supported software instead of old D3D mode. Microsoft will add extensions to the coming DirectX Video Acceleration Pipeline upgrade (DXVA2) to support composition and graphics streams for HD DVD. This will include support for clear-rectangle, secondary video, background images/solid color and advanced sub-title planes. This composition technique offers substantial power savings over a D3D (blend) based composition. This would further save the power up to 1W.

Intel also suggested more tricks to developers including using Bounding and Transparency Rectangles (Power save up to 0.5W), Reduced Timer Interrupt Frequency (Power save up to 0.5W), Optical Drive Read Ahead (Power save up to 2W), and Reduced primary video to 30 Hz (Power save up to 4W).

With optimizations, in fact, we can expect a further 1.5 hours playback as a result from power saving. Moreover, Intel also has research on battery with manufacturers to enhance the power capacity. In a combine of twos, even mobile may provide long duration High Definition playback. Mobile Home Theater is no longer a dream.

Source: HKEPC

More Reports Of Tight CPU Supply

Global supply of PC components has started running tight since mid-October and the situation is getting worse, with applications including lithium battery, CPU, DRAM (especially 1Gb and above) and IC seeing tight supply, according to the Chinese-language Economic Daily News.

J.T. Wang, chairman of Acer, the fourth largest PC maker globally, recently arrived in the US to secure supply of PC components while Kalvin Chang, vice president, Greater China Operations Taiwan, marketing division, Acer, said the supply for both Intel and AMD CPUs is running tight, the paper said.

Earlier this month, DigiTimes reported that unexpectedly strong demand in the notebook market has resulted in CPU shortages, sending notebook makers scrambling to secure CPU supply for the fourth-quarter high season. Notebook makers described the gravity of the shortage at that time by saying they may have to "beg" for CPU supply, the sources claimed.

However, Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobile platform group, said at IDF Taiwan that Intel has noticed the situation but now has the issue under control, the EDN report stated.

In addition, Taiwan IC design houses believe that the situation is exaggerated with IC design firms that focus on notebook solutions reporting that none of their customers have expressed any concern about shipment schedules and that the recent rumors of a CPU shortage are a reflection of downstream system makers preparing sufficient stock for a seasonal upturn in demand.

Source: DigiTimes

ASUS To Produce PS3 For Sony In 4Q, Foxconn To Follow Next Quarter

Just a brief note to inform you that ASUS will be the major supplier for Sony's Play Station 3 (PS3) for the fourth quarter of 2006, with Foxconn Electronics (the registered trade name of Hon Hai Precision Industry), to ship PS3s to Sony starting from February and March 2007, according to the Chinese-language Apple Daily.

Source: DigiTimes

Plastic Logic To Show 150ppi Flexible Active-Matrix Display

Plastic Logic will reveal its latest 150ppi SVGA flexible active-matrix display technology at the Plastic Electronics 2006 conference in Frankfurt this week.

Manufactured on its Prototype Line in Cambridge, this is the latest advance in a long line of technical successes which the company has achieved within the last twelve months, including the fabrication of the largest plastic flexible active-matrix display in November 2005. The displays utilise E Ink Imaging Film.

John Mills, COO Plastic Logic, commented, “Our plastic electronics technology is scalable in both screen size and resolution and this achievement is another important step along our path to 10” 150ppi flexible displays in mass production in 2008.”

Plastic Logic’s focus is now developing key relationships to productise the thin, light and robust flexible displays and on enabling radical product innovation using the technology.

Source: Plastic Logic

AOpen Unveils XC Cube EZ945(C) With Vista Support

AOpen Inc. is now adding XC Cube EZ945(C) as a new member to XC Cube series. XC Cube EZ945(C) supports the latest Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) CPU and is ready for the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operation system.

XC Cube EZ945(C) adapts all socket LGA775 Intel processors from the Core 2 Duo(Conroe), Core 2 Extreme to Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron D CPUs, allowing users to select CPU according to budget and performance requirement. Besides, the Intel i945G chipset of XC Cube EZ945(C) provides 1066MHz FSB and DDR2-533/667 MHz RAM up to 4GB which will fulfill all kinds of needs form different users.

To satisfy the requirements of expending functions, XC Cube EZ945(C) is equipped with 275 Watt power supply unit which is claimed to be enough for all mid/high end graphic cards and other add-on cards. XC Cube EZ945(C) also features a built-in 1GB/Sec ultra-high speed LAN connection, four SATA2, eight USB 2.0, three IEEE1394 ports, one PCI-E x16 and one PCI slot.

XC Cube EZ945(C) supports 7.1ch surround sound output, has built-in Intel GMA950 graphic engine and a video output card as an option to offer HDTV signal.

Source: AOpen Inc.

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