The week in DV Hardware

There was lots of interesting news this week, most of it came from Intel's Developer Forum, but first I'd like to ask you for help. In the past DV Hardware used to do a few reviews a month but I can't find the time anymore to review products. So I'd like to recruit a few new reviewers among our readers. More details can be found here.
 
Firsr there's the news that Intel solved a leakage problem with its 45nm process. If everything goes well the 45nm should bring another huge reduction in power consumption. Intel also admitted the dual-core Pentium D was a rush job.

Canon went a little frantic and released a bunch of new digital cameras. This includes the new PowerShot S80, the EOS-1D Mark II N, the EOS 5D, the A620, A610 and A410 and also the SD550, SD450 and SD30. Pentax released the new *ist DS2.

Google launches the second version of its Google Desktop and also presented its instant messaging tool Google Talk.

Power supply manufacturers seem to believe the bigger the better as Enermax is now preparing a 1GW PSU.

ATI's R520 seems to be planned for October and CrossFire will come by mid-September.

Here's a short look at the things Intel (and other companies) presented at the IDF: a Voltage Regulator Board concept, processors may have thousands of cores in the future, Serial ATA 2.5, DDR3 memory from Elpida, performance per watt with Merom, Conroe and Woodcrest, more performance for less energy, some photos of Intel's upcoming processors, additional details about Intel's next-generation architecture, CE-ATA HDD specification for mobile devices.

Intel's next-generation laptop processor Merom will only use 1-2W on average with a TDP of 35W, Napa the next mobile Centrino platform, a new 100% AMD64 compatible Prescott stepping, XScale moves beyond 1GHz, really portable PCs, more details about Yonah, notebooks to have 8 hours battery life by 2008, Viiv technology for the digital home, 945 Express Callistoga chipset details, a digital home and gaming benchmark, Mitosis speculative threading, RAID for notebooks, multi-core for all segments, CrossFire support for the 955X chipset.

Here's some information about 802.11n Wi-Fi which full feature 100Mbps, Yonah's L2 cache with granularity and porting, compilers for x86 Mac OS X, early Yonah and Sossaman benchmarks, AMT and VT to make Ethernet connections more secure, Tulsa Xeon to have 1.3 billion transistors,  user-aware systems for the future, the presentation of a Pentium M with on-chip Northbridge and voltage regulator, the Pentium 4 660 and 670 will get VT, Diamond visual desktop search tool, Wireless USB and finally Network Manageability Engine. Oh and here's a discussion whether Intel's Performance Per Watt may be bad for AMD. That was a selection of all things that happened at IDF Fall 2005!

AMD challenged Intel to a duel but the latter one's CEO refused this. AMD also presented dual-core Turion 64 silicon which should be launched by early 2006 and they also sneaked out a new 2.8GHz Opteron.

New iPod minis with 4GB flash memory may come later this year and Apple also extended its PPC processor agreement with Freescale to 2008.

Sony finally launched the North American version of its PSP firmware 2.0.

A new Windows Mobile based phone from Mio, the A710, with PDA and GPS functionality.