213w ago - A novel transcoding tool Fixstars (PDF) allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a PlayStation 3 in real time, is coming in June 2009.

To quote, roughly translated: The conversion of video footage in Full HD movies at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 provides current desktop CPUs with a lengthy task. This allows the transcoding of a movie sometimes half a day.

In comes Linux Developer Fixstars with a video converter called CodecSys CE-10, which was to encode movies into MPEG-4-AVC format (H.264)

The Cell processor uses a PlayStation 3 - this format will be predominantly on Blu-ray media or IP-TV via video-stream uses. The CE-10-encoder sends out from a Windows PC, the output data via Ethernet to the console, which finished the encoded data back to the PC sends back.

According to the announcement of Fixstars reached the Cell processor of the PlayStation a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion - the cell has a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX-285.

By comparison,...

241w ago - Powered by Intel's new £1,000 Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, the YoYotech Fi7epower MLK161 was configured with one purpose in mind: to break the world record in the benchmark that many consider is the de facto metric of overall CPU performance, SPEC CPU2006.

Thanks to Core i7's HyperThreading feature, that means a minimum of 8GB of extremely pricey high performance DDR3 memory is inside too.

However, due to the novel triple-channel layout, the system actually packs 2GB plus 1GB per channel for a grand total of 9GB.

So the CPU and memory alone have a face value cost of nearly £2,000.

252w ago - We had a chance to take a picture of a fully operational Nehalem, Bloomfield sample at 3.2GHz.

We managed to take the picture from both sides, and we can tell that the chip looks pretty much like any other Intel chip.

The socket 1366 has pins while the CPU doesn't. This baby will be known as Core i7.

Enough said, here is the real deal.

253w ago - If the rumors are to be correct, the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors will officially be announced August 11 with an expected launch date of Q4 2008.

Nahalem is expected to be initially manufactured with a 45nm process and be available with two, four, or eight cores, for up to 731 million transistors in the quad core variant. A very exciting aspect of the new architecture is the new integrated memory controller, called the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, with DDR3 SDRAM support, which will eliminate the bottleneck that was the front side bus and which had been haunting Intel for years.

This should result in a substantial performance increase despite Intel's competition, AMD, having been using an integrated memory controller in their processors for years.

Another feature of Nahalem will be the re-introduction of Hyper-Threading technology, which was used previously in the Pentium 4 series of processors. Hyper-Threading allows a single core to run an adjacent virtual core, allowing for two threads per actual core, making for potential performance gains. With all the added performance of the upcoming Nahalem processors, power usage is not expected to rise much, providing for greater performance-per-watt efficiency.

Nehalem will come in variants for desktops,...