IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 31/10/2011

Siri Gets Hacked: Running on iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G

When iPhone 4S was announced earlier this month, one of the mightiest features was definitely Apple's new voice control software: Siri. Siri understands normal speech, so you can send text messages and set alarms and so on by speaking to your phone. While Siri is purely software, Apple has limited it to iPhone 4S. Other supported devices can upgrade to iOS 5, but Siri will not be included. However, it has been widely expected that Siri will soon be hacked to run on unsupported devices - and that day has now come.
Developers Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) and @chpwn have managed to get Siri to run on iPhone 4 and fourth generation iPod Touch (uses the same A4 chip as iPhone 4, but has only 256MB of RAM). Even without the dual core A5 chip, Siri appears to run smoothly. Troughton-Smith said that Siri runs as fast on iPhone 4 as it does on iPhone 4S. The iPod Touch has some problems due to the inferior microphone (iPod Touch wasn't designed for calling like iPhone), requiring you to talk very loudly but the actual Siri software runs flawlessly. Below is a video of Siri running on the iPod Touch.

Owners of iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G shouldn't get too excited though, as Troughton-Smith says a public release should not be expected anytime soon. There may also be legal issues of distributing Apple's code, making a public release impossible.


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Bulldozer Breaks Frequency Record Again: Overclocked to 8.46GHz

Just before the launch of Bulldozer, AMD demonstrated it at 8.43GHz, which was the world record back then. Now an overclocker named Andre Yang has achieved an overclock of 8.46GHz, beating AMD's record by ~30MHz.

Gallery: Bulldozer Breaks Frequency Record Again: Overclocked to 8.46GHz

Above are the CPU-Z screenshots of the new and former record. The exact frequency is 8461.51MHz, which is 32.13MHz faster than the previous record. As shown in the pictures, both CPUs had only two cores enabled and ASUS's Crosshair V Formula motherboard was used. Andre applied a core voltage of 1.992V, whereas AMD had a voltage of 2.016V in their setup. Cooling method of Andre's setup is unknown, but most likely either liquid nitrogen or helium was used.


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