Tech News Compilation

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1. Fujitsu user hurt by laptop battery

Hand-wringing all round

By Martin Veitch: Friday 27 October 2006, 14:43

A SONY MADE battery in a notebook gave off sparks and injured the hand of a user in Japan earlier this week, Fujitsu has confirmed.
Fujitsu said this was the first such incident it had discovered. The company is already in the process of recalling hundreds of thousands of units.

Although overheating batteries has been a constant theme running through the year, actual injury reports are still rare.

2. AMD can't make enough chips

Bigger is not better

By Nick Farrell: Friday 27 October 2006, 07:11

MERCURY RESEARCH is warning that AMD will have problems shipping its chips for a while.
According to News.com, Mercury Research says that AMD is facing a crisis where its overall demand is rising before new manufacturing technologies were completely ready to cope. Analyst Dean McCarron said that AMD needed more factories to match the outfit's design strategy for the quad-core era. It also had to shift to smaller transistors at the same time it gets new factories up and running.

McCarron said that demand for AMD chips was high, but the outfit's dual core processors were still stuck in a 90-nanometre time warp.

Opteron and Athlon 64 processors with their two processing cores integrated onto a single piece of silicon have an olde worlde charm, but were fast being eclipsed, he said. AMD's chief financial officer Bob Rivet says that the outfit will not be able to see a cost benefit from its move to 65-nanometre processors until the fourth quarter. But AMD still hasn't made the full transition to 300-millimetre-wide wafers from 200-millimetre wafers either so a lot of these upgrades are not ready for the big time.

Perhaps AMD is starting to regret making Dell its 'strategic partner', angering its existing channel and being forced to supply Michael's tin boxes with chips it has not got. The Dell deal, while looking good on paper, is soaking up most of the outfit's capacity.

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3. BitTorrent admin jailed for five months

First US torrent conviction

By INQUIRER newsdesk: Friday 27 October 2006, 11:37

ACCORDING TO TorrentFreak.com, a bit torrent site admin has been sent to prison for five months.
23 year old Grant Stanley was involved in private torrent tracker Elitetorrents. For his involvement with the website, he has received five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention and a $3,000 fine. Grant pleaded guilty earlier this year to "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and criminal copyright infringement.

US attorney John Brownlee said in response to the case: "We hope this case sends the message that cyberspace will not provide a shield of anonymity for those who choose to break our copyright laws."

Apparently this is the first torrent related conviction in the US and has happened under the FBI's Operation D-Elite, focusing specifically on Elitetorrents.

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Meet Intel's Tigertown

Words and pretty pictures

By Charlie Demerjian: Friday 27 October 2006, 16:25

WE FINALLY GOT to see a Tigertown based server at Intel yesterday, and let's just say it is pretty fast.
Imagine a four way Woodcrest, and you have an idea of what you are in for. The interesting things are not in the macro structures, it simply looks like many other four ways, but in the details.

First, look at the north bridge on the mobo, it is huge and made of solid copper. Other than being a dead ringer for a landing pod from several anime series, it is meant to dissipate a good deal of heat. The chipset is basically Blackford extended to four ways. Blackford was about a 35W part, so if you extend it out to four FSBs, crank up the speed to switch between four of those, and possibly up the clock a little, you end up with a lot more than 35W.

On the positive side, you don't need more FBD channels, and you can lose a lot of duplicate functionality. The added snoop filter cache doesn't eat much power, and process tech has moved on. Factor in a shrink, and you are at 50 or so watts.

One other thing that stands out is the HSFs on the CPUS themselves, you will notice that they are not copper monsters,they are interlocked aluminium monsters. That should tell you a bit about the power consumed, about the same as a Woodcrest or Clovertown.

Last up comes our biggest fear for the system, board cost. This is due to the pin count of the north bridge, and the problems routing four FSBs, all that power, and the lights for the landing pod. This thing is going to have a lot of pins, which means a lot of layers. As you can see, it is a big board, and big with a lot of layers means expensive.

A visual inspection of the edge of the board showed it is pretty damn thick, I would say easily 10 layers, maybe 12. Tigertown will sell into a very cost insensitive market, four ways are not cheap, but if it performs as I think it will, this becomes much less of a problem. Still, look for easy four figure mobos.

Wow! its 16 cores, in a 4 by 4 clovertowns! Shocked