System diary blog

Core 2 Extreme X9000 was announced on CES 2008. This is extreme version of mobile processors. Core 2 Extreme will be released in the end of February and new laptops based on this processor will come out in March.

New dual core cpu from Intel is built on 45 nm technology and has 6 Mb of cache memory. Also it will have 800 Mhz FSB speed and total speed is equal to 2.8 GHz. This will allow many users to move from desktops to the notebooks and would not see the difference in performance.

The main disadvantage of this new technology is the price - $800 per each unit. This price does not allow average computer users to buy Core 2 Extreme X9000.

According to the technology news eBay will change the rules of the online auctions.

The changes will affect eBay site on February 20, 2008. From that day seller would not be able to give rating marks to the buyer. On other hand buyer will have ability to give feed back to the seller in wide range of stats. Depends on these stats seller will move along the seller’s rating/search list.

Also eBay will decrease the price for the product posting by 20-25%. Further more sellers with high rating will receive some discounts. They plan to implement this new technology very soon. All of this changes should increase the eBay’s profit and increase the quality of the service and products which sells on eBay.

IBM may buy Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is the current technology news.

According to the message from AMD and IBM both companies may create a union in creation of polymer devices on the market. Many technology news sites say that these companies are working close together to create competition for Intel.

Also according to new technology, IBM may buy AMD in first quarter of 2008. This announcement affected AMD stocks which raised by 10% in one day. Total losses for AMD in past year was 3.38 billion dollars.

Several months ago Intel showed new dual processor motherboard Skulltrail, but when they released the motherboard it looks different.

First difference is that instead of the regular sinks on the South and North Bridges, which are NVIDIA nForce 100 MCP SLI chipsets, Intel placed cooler. Also according to the picture we can see that motherboard has four PCI Express x16 slots and two PCI. This motherboard has two Socket LGA 771 which can be used for couple of Xeon processors or two Quad Cores with 45 nm technology.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 specially designed for the users who work with CAD (Computer-aided Design) and DCC (Digital Content Creation). This card built on 65 nm technology and D8P core.

New card twice faster then previous models because 112 line processors and 512 Mb of RAM which allows it to create enormous output of 51.2 GB/s. Also Quadro FX supports such NVIDIA applications as Application Configuration Engine (ACE), NVIDIA SLI Technology and NVIDIA CUDA Technology. This card will sell on the US markets at $1600 dollars per unit.

Motorola introduced new smartphone called MOTO Z10.

MOTO Z10 supports 3.5G networks and works under four different standards - SM, GPRS/EDGE, UMTS 1200 and HSDPA. The main feature of this model is 3.2 mega pixel camera that has ability to create video files with 30 frames per second. I think company tries to create portable video studio out of this phone, because they also installed video editing software.

Overall phone operates under Symbian UIQ and has expansion slot for SD cards which can support up to 32 GB. Design of this model remind us older version Z8 which has a bit bended forms and “kick-slider” form factor.

Sony Electronics introduced new Blu-ray drive BDU-X10S which supports Blu-ray, DVD and CD formats. Price for this drive is very affordable - $200.

BDU-X10S built on 5.25′” standard and has SATA interface.

New drive will be available in January 2008.

First Hewlett Packard model has auto feeder for 50 or 100 pages and slot for the business cards which has ID format. Scanning speed of new device is 35 pages per minute and up to 1500 pages per day. Both models allow working with original double sided papers.

Scanning speed for the HP N8420 model is 25 pages/ 50 images and for the N8460 model is 35/70. Package includes ISIS, TWAIN, Kofax VirtualReScan and Scansift PaperPort drivers. Also package has HP Smart Document Scan software which allows automatically skip blank pages.

Facebook service was created in 2004. Today Facebook has around 50 millions users and this number grows. Facebook is one of biggest social online services.

Last month Microsoft Inc. announced that they will buy 1.6% of all stock for 240 millions. The estimated price for the whole Facebook is 15 billions. This purchase allows Microsoft put advertisement on Facebook pages which helps company create strong positions on the market.

Prices for the single Google stock jumped over 700 dollars.

For the past month Google stocks raised by 100 dollars. From the beginning of the year price raised 51%. According to this Google’s profit increased 1.5 times which means that expected price is 55 times higher then expected.

Some of the analytics say that stocks will still rise up to 850 per one unit. Google placed their stocks in 2004 for 84 dollars each and after the first day of the market price raised to 100. Google stocks is great investment.