Saturday, March 27, 2010

IT News HeadLines (techPowerUp) 27/03/2010


techPowerUp!
(PR) Victorinox Launches Un-Hackable Secure Pro USB drive
Victorinox, the family company behind the famed Swiss Army Knife, has launched a pioneering memory stick design at an event held at its European flagship store on London's New Bond Street. The device is, says the company, the most secure of its kind available to the public. It uses several layers of security including fingerprint identification and a thermal sensor - so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents. The Victorinox Secure has also been made tamper-proof. Any attempt to forcibly open it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that irrevocably burns its CPU and memory chip.

Victorinox was so confident of its new product's elite security standards that it offered a £100,000 prize to a team of professional hackers if they could break into it during the two hours the launch event lasted. The money went uncollected. The event was attended by Victorinox's CEO Carl Elsener Jr. and the Victorinox Secure's designer Martin Kuster, a technology security specialist. "Life is becoming more digital every day," says Kuster. "And yet people do so little to protect their data. The world's most common password is '12345' - and even encryption can be broken given time."


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(PR) ASUS Readies Latest Motherboards for Upcoming Six-Core Processors from AMD
ASUS today announced a full range of motherboards that are ready to support the upcoming six-core AMD Phenom II X6 processors to herald a new era in ultra-powerful personal computing. The AMD six-core processor-ready ASUS M4 Series motherboards deliver maximum performance on a mainstream platform. Joe Hsieh, General Manager of ASUS Motherboard Business, said, "Besides being ready to support six-core processors, the ASUS M4 Series gives users of every level the best performance and value with its Core Unlocker feature. This has received notable recognition from many of the world's top media organizations for delivering a phenomenal boost in performance." M4 Series motherboards with the exclusive Core Unlocker technology have also garnered global media accolades for being the best motherboard for AMD processors.

ASUS' M4 Series motherboard is ready for the AMD Phenom II X6 processors. To enable six-core CPU and achieve maximum performance, users simply need to update the BIOS of their existing M4 Series.


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SilverStone Readies New Value Precision Series Case
SilverStone is preparing a new value case, the Precision series PS05. This mid-tower ATX case measures 190 x 456.5 x 501.2 mm, with extensive use of plastic and SECC steel. The features are basic, including four 5.25" and two external 3.5" drive bays, a drive cage room for another four 3.5" drives, partly tool-free design, all-black interiors (though there are no windows), motherboard with hole to manage certain kinds of CPU coolers, and a ventilation system which includes fans and fan-slots for the front, rear, and top. There is an air inlet on the side-panel behind the motherboard tray. The PS05 is expected to go for 41.50€.



Source: CowcotLand
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AMD First with OpenGL 4.0 Compliant Graphics Driver
Shortly after the Khronos group announced the OpenGL 4.0, the newest version of the multi-platform graphics API, AMD is out with a preview graphics driver for its ATI Radeon, FireGL, FirePro, and Mobility Radeon graphics accelerators, which includes the OpenGL 4.0 ICD (installable client driver). The driver is available for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux. OpenGL 4.0 is comparable and up to times with Microsoft's DirectX 11 API, it makes use of hardware features such as tessellation on the GPU, per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions, 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations, etc., and has no restrictions on which later version of Windows it can run on. With OpenGL 4.0 for example, one can expect 3D graphics with the complexity comparable to DirectX 11 on Windows XP.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst OpenGL 4.0 Preview Driver for Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP, and Linux.
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(PR) Walton Chaintech Rolls Out Industry's Optimum High-Speed Computing Platform
Walton Chaintech, one of the world's most well-known memory and storage device manufacturers, announces the availability of its latest memory clock that can reach a memory speed of 2400MHz. To address consumers' diversifying high-speed computing platform needs, this new clock is the industry's fastest computing clock with a transmission bandwidth of 19,200MB/sec per transmission. No more will users be restricted by memory bandwidth when faced with system overclocking, they will be able to maximize their computing systems' performance and potential.

The all-new APOGEE GT DDR3-2400 memory utilizes a 1.6V voltage and 9-11-10-27 timing operation process. Not only is this more powerful than many products currently in the market, different users' requests can be met as Walton Chaintech provides two-in-one KIT packs that are compatible with the widely-used dual-channel motherboards. Users do not have to worry about modular selection; system compatibility is enhanced because the KIT provides two types of capacities, 1GB x2 and 2GB x2, giving users more flexibility.


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New Roadmap Shows AMD's Desktop Processor Portfolio for Rest of 2010
A set of new slides by AMD to sections of the industry spills the beans on AMD's processor offer outlook for perhaps the rest of the year. It shows AMD to maintain focus on value-oriented models that etch away Intel's market share on grounds of price/performance, while the higher-end of the spectrum keeps up with the latest technologies including the industry-wide advent of the six-core processor era, as well as new power-state management technologies such as TurboCore, which steps up clock speeds of certain cores of the processors while powering down others, which the load is low or less-parallel.

Front-line processor lineups include the Phenom II X6, and Phenom II X4, including a new T X4 series that includes TurboCore support. AMD's transition towards these chips from the existing Deneb-based quad-core ones starts within this quarter lasting throughout Q2 and part of Q3 2010. It includes Phenom II X4 960T, a 3.00 GHz (3.40 GHz turbo) chip based on the Zosma die. It goes up with the Phenom II X6 1035T, a six-core chip clocked at 2.60 GHz (3.10 GHz turbo). A notch higher up is the Phenom II X6 1055T, clocked at 2.80 GHz (3.30 GHz turbo), which comes in 95W and 125W variants. At the top is the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, an overclocker-friendly chip that runs at 3.20 GHz (3.60 GHz turbo). A little later in Q3, AMD will add in the Phenom II X6 1075T, clocked at 3.00 GHz (3.50 GHz turbo).


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(PR) Fujitsu Develops New NOR Flash Memory Macro
Fujitsu Microelectronics Limited today announced the development of new flash memory macro that enables NOR flash memory circuits to achieve high-speed read operations while operating at low power currents. The new flash memory macro is guaranteed to retain program data storage for 20 years, or 100,000 write/erase cycles for data storage, while improving access speeds by 2.5 times to 10 nanoseconds (10 ns), and reducing the required operating current per cell by two-thirds to 9 microamperes (9 µA), compared to Fujitsu's past technologies. This technology will be implemented in microcontrollers featuring embedded flash memory in automotive, industrial, and consumer electronics applications for which high speed, low current, and high reliability are all priorities, thus contributing to a reduction in the burden on the environment.


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ASUS Prepares Pair of Calpella-based Mid-Range Notebooks
ASUS is preparing two new Calpella platform-based mid-sized notebooks, 14-inch N82JV-VX020V and 16-inch N61JA-JX008V. Both notebooks are driven by an Intel Core i5 520M processor, aided by 4 GB of DDR3 memory, and with 500 GB of storage. Both models have screens with 1366 x 768 pixels resolution. Connectivity options are also similar: Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, USB 3.0, FireWire, and Bluetooth. A 6-cell battery is used on both models. The differences kick in with the 14-inch N82JV-VX020V having NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M 1GB graphics which makes use of NVIDIA Optimus technology to minimise power idle draw, while the 16-inch N61JA-JX008V goes all-out for performance with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 1GB graphics. The N61JA-JX008V and N82JV-VX020V are expected to reach Europe in mid-April, each costing 1049 EUR.



Source: TechConnect Magazine
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