Tag: Intel

ARM CPUs and Windows 8 – What Does it Mean?

It’s no secret now that Windows 8 is going to be compatible with ARM CPUs. This is an interesting move as the general belief in the technical ranks was that Microsoft would scale up Windows Phone to the tablet form factor rather than have another tilt at shoehorning its desktop operating system into low powered …

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nVidia SLI to Appear on AMD Motherboards: Will You Jump Ship?

For quite a while there has been little choice for gamers should they be wanting an SLI setup for their computer as SLI has only ever been licensed to motherboards built upon the Intel platform whilst AMD CrossFire has been available on both AMD and Intel based motherboards. This left people wanting to use nVidia …

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Would You Pay to Unlock the Full Potential of your CPU?

In an article published on Neowin, it appears that Intel is looking at shipping some processors with some capabilities initially locked that can be unlocked later on for a nominal fee. It does look like this is being aimed at the low to mid-range market where a performance boost might be more readily noticed than …

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Intel Buys McAfee… But Why?

Just a quick one for tonight. A few days ago, it was announced that Intel had bought McAfee for under $8 billion. McAfee was not in any financial trouble despite sending out an update to its antivirus software that rendered computers inoperable when a critical system file was quarantined. The question here is what is …

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Graphics Cards Need Rethinking

In recent years, the graphics card industry has been pretty much a two horse race. nVidia has been around for a while after having taken out and absorbed 3dfx and has been sparring with ATi for most of the last decade. What has become apparent to me, at least on a basic level, is that …

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iTunes for Windows – Good, Bad or Ugly?

Apple iTunes APIs

Not too long ago, Steve Jobs made a general comment regarding platforms in defence of the changes to the iPhone SDK agreement, specifically: We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform. Somehow, the extrapolation has been made that Steve …

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Light Peak – Beyond USB 3.0

USB 3.0 has barely made an appearance in desktop computers (personally, I am yet to see a USB 3.0 port though) and Intel is already looking at a superseding technology. Just to put things in perspective: USB 1.0 is capable of 1.5Mbps (Low-Bandwidth) and 12Mbps (Full-Bandwidth), USB 2.0 added a new higher maximum speed of …

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64-bit or Bust – Don’t Settle For Less

Casting my mind back over the last decade with regard to the development of 64-bit computing, I’ve realised that it really has taken a while for 64-bit platforms to become the mainstream. Certainly from the perspective of x86 (which is the instruction set architecture that many desktop and servers systems have used for just over …

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Earth Hour – What are you doing?

With Earth Hour upon us this year many people may be giving some thought to energy consumption, consequential bills and the potential impact upon the planet (although people debate for and against the existence of global warming). I am always looking for new ways to cut the use of energy and thought I’d share a …

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