Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, March 19th, 2010
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Oops! Looks like someone accident let some information out early. AMDs “Thuban” processors will be out next month, and there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there until recently. Turns out that somebody talked. Well, at least someone’s BIOS talked. Gigabyte released a couple of BIOS updates recently, and Tech Connect spotted the news: The X6 1035T will have 6 cores, and be running at 2.6 GHz, and the X6 1055T is going to run at 2.8GHz. There was some news about the new Phenom II X6 as well; the 1075T will be clocked at 3.0 GHz, which is about 333 MHz slower then Intel’s new i7 980x . Bummer for AMD, but we’ll see who the real winner is when the pricing comes out; Intel’s new chip sells for $999 right now.
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
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In case you haven’t noticed, the MacBook Pro line is starting to get a little stale with just a lowly Core 2 Duo CPU. Even the Mac Pro with it’s Quad-Core Xeon isn’t the fastest kid in town anymore with the six-core Core i7-980X making the rounds. Hopefully all this fuss concerning a supposed leak of new Mac pricing that’s a bit higher than the current MSRPs foreshadows updates coming in the near future. Look at the the MacBook Pro specs . They’re a joke compared to Windows machines now. Sure, Windows buyers have always gotten a better deal on hardware than those willing to pay the Apple Tax, but it’s really bad right now. The HP ENVY 15 specs out better with a Core i5-430M instead of a Core 2 Duo, 1GB ATI GPU, and the same hard drive and memory size for $700 less. Or you can order a custom build Envy 15 with a Core i7, 640GB hard drive, 6GB of memory, for $1949 instead of the $1999 like in a MacBook Pro. (You get USB 3.0 with the HP, too) This is sad, but a similar situation can be replicated with notebooks from Dell, Toshiba, and even Sony. PC notebooks have been rocking the Core i5 and Core i7 processors for months now, while Mac buyers are only offered older technology. It’s nearly as bad with the Mac Pro line, too. The current hardware was introduced on March 3, 2009. They were rock-solid then, as one of the first systems to come with the quad-core Xeon “Nehalem” processor. But that was over a year ago and Apple hasn’t updated anything including the base ram or hard drive size since. Now PC running the 6-core Core i7-980X have started to appear. Hopefully Apple will follow suit and out Mac Pros utilizing the 6-core Xeon 5680 chip shortly. But it won’t be the first system with that chip. Nope Dell and IBM both introduced systems on Tuesday using it. But as far as this pricing rumor goes, apparently it lists prices above the current ones. It comes from an Australian source, which apparently inflates the pricing over the US-set MSRP, though. But maybe it’s just because instead of being competitive with PCs for once, Apple tacked on the customary tax on new hardware.