Mozilla, the open-source organization behind the Firefox web browser, released the first update for the recently released Firefox 3 web browser and, in parallel, updated the aging Firefox 2. The two updates deliver minor user-centric improvements and important security and stability fixes. “We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release,” Mozilla said.

Firefox 3.0.1 fixes three critical security issues, improves stability, resolves printing issue, squashes bug with offline browsing mode under Linux and fixes SSL certificate problems and malware/phishing database issues. Firefox 2.0.16 plugs two critical security holes and resolves an instability issue that occurs when the browser is installed into the same directory as Firefox 3.

Both Firefox 3.0.1 and Firefox 2.0.16 are now posted for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Users of both Firefox 2.0.x or 3.x may have already been notified of the update through the browser’s automated update notification system. If you did not receive such notice, Mozilla recommends that you initiate a manual update check by choosing the “Check for Updates…” option available in the Help menu.

Before you allow Firefox 3 to download and install the update, the browser will inform you of possible add-on incompatibilities. It is a good idea to review possible conflicts before updating, because incompatible add-ons will stop working when you update to Firefox 3.0.1 until their authors release updated versions. In my case, the Tab Mix Plus add-on was not compatible with Firefox 3.0.1 at the time of this writing.

It’s summer time and PCs are working in warmer environments than they’re used to. With our PSU buyer’s guide for the summer season we want to focus on some of the quality power supplies we’ve tested (or are in the process of testing). It’s important to pay attention to heat, particularly if you’re in a home without AC, as increasing environmental temperatures can create problems. Users may not want to get the absolute quietest power supply available if it’s going to be in a relatively hot environment, as these may create instabilities due to a lack of sufficient cooling. Of course, if you do have AC or live in a colder region, we’ll have some silent and near-silent recommendations.

In terms of recommendations and budgets, we need to clarify a few things before we begin. We pretty much won’t even touch power supplies that cost less than $50; it’s possible to get an okay power supply for a truly budget price, but you will get a lower efficiency model and you’re taking something of a risk. We don’t feel the risk is excessive, so for truly entry-level systems you can go ahead and look at the ultra-cheap options out there (i.e. cases that come with a PSU). However, keep in mind that lower efficiency means your initial savings will almost certainly disappear with higher power requirements over the coming months and years.

As an example, consider a budget system that requires 80 W of power in order to function. Using an 80% efficiency power supply means that you will draw 100 W from the wall; a 70% efficiency power supply will require around 115 W. If you leave the system on all the time, you will be looking at somewhere near $15 per year spent on power due to PSU inefficiencies. An 80 W system is also pretty low end; if you’re running a midrange system that uses more like 160 W, your yearly power costs will obviously double. Likewise, it’s possible to get an 85% efficiency power supply and cheap options might only be 65% efficient, again resulting in a doubling of savings.

Having set the stage with that example, our budget power supply offerings will start at $50 and ranged up to around $85. $85 on a “budget” power supply may seem unreasonable, but we are more interested in quality than strict dollar amounts, and so our categories will be based on how much power the various PSUs are able to deliver more than cost. Once you begin to focus on quality power supplies, a corollary to the above is that higher output options will cost more money, so our recommendations may have some overlap.

Randy Allen, who was in charge of the AMD’s server and workstation business and previously oversaw microprocessor engineering for the company, has been promoted to the role of “senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group”. He will be responsible for “broad and growing portfolio of consumer and commercial microprocessor solutions and platforms”, something that sounds like the job description of an almost-chief technology officer to us.

However, it is not quite a complete CTO-like role, as there is a newly formed “Central Engineering” organization that is co-led by Chekib Akrout, who is joining AMD from Freescale, and Jeff VerHeul, corporate vice president of design engineering at AMD. The Central Engineering leadership team is described to “direct the development and execution of AMD’s technology and product roadmaps in partnership with AMD’s business units.” Akrout, VerHeul and Allen will report to president Dirk Meyer.

And even if AMD did not name a new chief technology officer, the company still got a new CTO, short for “chief talent officer”: The company promoted Allen Sockwell to senior vice president, human resources and CTO to develop “AMD’s leadership assets and employee talent”.

Mario Rivas, formerly executive vice president of the Computing Solutions Group and Michel Cadieux, formerly senior vice president and chief talent officer, have left AMD.

From the bloodlines of the WD Raptor, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drive is enclosed in the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink — a customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.

Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:

• 10,000 RPM, SATA 3 Gb/s interface, 16 MB cache.
• 1.4 million hours MTBF.
• The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink.
• Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) - Optimizes performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
• SecurePark - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface.

WD VelociRaptor (model WD3000GLFS) hard drives will be available on Alienware’s high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. At launch, Alienware will offer two 300 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 configuration on www.alienware.com. WD VelociRaptor hard drives will be shipping exclusively through Alienware this month and will be available through the company’s online store and at select distributors and resellers mid-May. Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 300 GB is $299.99 USD.

New AMD Product : AMD Phenom X3 8000 Series..
AMD today announced the availability of three new AMD Phenom X3 triple-core processors that, when combined with the AMD 780 series chipset, can give consumers a full HD experience and visually stunning gaming and digital performance. As the world’s only triple-core x86 processor, AMD Phenom X3 processors bring multi-core technology to a broader audience in search of desktop processors that easily handle today’s multi-threaded digital entertainment workloads.

The proliferation of digital media devices and entertainment changes the way consumers use PCs and creates stronger demand on the processing and graphics capabilities. Two of the biggest determinants of the user experience when purchasing a PC are graphics and processors, with consumers weighing trade-offs. AMD solution-based PCs can free consumers from this dilemma with balanced platforms that enable the Ultimate Visual Experience complete with scalability and great value.

We’ve got the lineup below:

Note that all three of the triple-core parts are 50-series CPUs, meaning they are based on the B3 stepping and do not suffer from the TLB erratum that plagued the early Phenom processors. AMD continues to ship B2 stepping CPUs, but most of them are to OEMs that aren’t as concerned with the performance hit associated with the software TLB fix.

Pricing is also pretty interesting, as the top end Phenom X3 8750 is only $20 cheaper than the quad-core Phenom X4 9750 despite running at the same clock speed. The X3 8650 and 8450 are far more interesting as both of them are priced closer to $150.

There’s now some overlap between AMD’s triple-core Phenom and dual-core Athlon X2 offerings in terms of price, have a look:

The Athlon X2s still hold a tremendous clock speed advantage, but Phenom can do more work per clock. It will be interesting to see if three Phenom cores at 2.1GHz are a better buy than two Athlon X2 cores at 2.8GHz.

“The company has extended its ecosystem into digital televisions with over 80 models certified from major brands such as LG and HP that allow consumers to easily play back their content via USB storage devices that plug directly into the televisions. Various models also enable content to be streamed directly from Internet services,” a statement by the company explains.

It is not a secret that modern TV-sets pack quite a lot of computing power in order to decode high-def TV streams encoded using H.264 codec. However, there are very few TV-sets capable of content playback from the Internet or USB. Two major manufacturers of high-definition TV-sets – HP and LG Electronics – said on Wednesday that certain of their HDTVs are now Divx certified and can playback appropriate content without a player or set-top-box directly from an USB memory stick or the Internet.
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The announcement by Divx is hardly surprising. Earlier this year Advanced Micro Devices and Divx agreed to work together to achieve DivX certification for specific AMD Xilleon processors that power set-top-boxes and HDTVs. Besides, Divx is also working with such chip providers as Chips and Media, Broadcom and Trident in order to enable Divx playback on HDTVs and STBs. Further market penetration of Divx certified devices will considerably popularize not only the codec itself, but also video content downloaded from the Internet, or created using Divx certified camcoders.

At present there are two HDTVs from HP and LG listed at Divx web-site.

The DivX and its brother XviD formats are used to distribute copyright protection-free movies typically by the Internet and usually without content producer approval. Both codecs are based on MPEG 4 ASP and offer balance between video quality and file size.

“The market for televisions is changing rapidly as entertainment is increasingly consumed through digital formats and consumers begin to look for solutions that connect their living room with a high-quality digital experience. Given its steady adoption rate within this market, DivX is well positioned to capitalize on this shift and secure a significant share of the business,” said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates.

In order to benefit from the higher throughput, you’ll need both a motherboard and a graphics card that comply with PCIe 2.0. While ATI has been quick with deploying PCIe 2.0 to its Radeon HD 3000 family, only the latest GeForce 9 graphics cards are PCIe 2.0 compliant.

Performance differences among technically similar platforms have almost disappeared, making feature differences and overclocking capabilities the main differentiators. Unless a motherboard manufacturer really messes up fine-tuning its product, two different motherboards based on the same chipset will perform alike when operated with comparable parameters. While only the latest chipset generation supports PCI Express 2.0 today, there are still many other chipsets available, which provide equal performance and comparable features. However, PCI Express 2.0 offers twice the bandwidth of PCI Express 1.1, by doubling the throughput per lane from 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s. A x16 PCI Express link hence offers the same bandwidth as PCI Express 2.0 at x8.

We took an ATI Radeon HD3850 mainstream card and an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 dual GPU high end board and limited their PCI Express 2.0 interfaces to x8, x4 and x1 link speeds in an effort to find out whether or not PCI Express 2.0 is really necessary to achieve the expected performance. Regardless of the outcome, PCI Express 2.0 does have one major advantage: new PCIe 2.0 graphics cards are compatible with PCIe 1.1 motherboards, meaning that they will run on them using the available bandwidth of PCI Express 1.1.

Features

1. Improved flow circulation by cylindrical fins offers 1-2°C improvement over WB4 series
2. Gold-plated copper base for excellent heat transfer and corrosion prevention
3. Accepts seven different sizes of tubing
4. Compatible with Intel socket 775/478 and AMD socket AM2/754/939/940
5. Strengthened aluminum cover for improved safety over the ZM-WB4 GOLD and ZM-WB4 PLUS

Specifications

Dimensions, mm 63(W) x 63(L) x 40(H)
Weight 160g
Materials Gold-plated pure copper base with anodized aluminum cover
Compatible tube sizes (outer x inner, mm) 14×10, 13×10, 13×9, 12×9, 12×8, 11×8, 10×8

AMD’s next graphics cards are being prepared for launch: During the Q1 earnings call, president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer stated that the company will roll out a significant number of products in May and our sources now confirmed that the introductions will include desktop and mobile (M88) graphics parts.

RV770 will launch as Radeon 4800 and will make its way into the FireStream stream processor and FireGL workstation cards. Both GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory will be supported by the chip, but ATI itself will only be offering GDDR5 cards. The Radeon 4850 version is set to come to market with an 800+ MHz core (the final clock has not been specified yet and will not be available until the final qualification is completed), while the 4870 will be the first mass-production GPU with a clock speed higher than 1 GHz. Prototype RV770 boards were clocked at about 1.05 GHz.

The new graphics card generation is expected to become available to system integrators and OEMs in GDDR3/GDDR5 variants with 256/512/1024 MB buffers. 256 MB GDDR3 cards are exclusively targeted at OEMs (as well as ODMs, Sis) and are unlikely to shop up in retail. Expect to see mainly 512 MB GDDR5 cards in retail for both the 4850 and 4870. Just like the GPU, the memory clock isn’t set in stone either, but we were told that the GDDR5 memory is currently running at a physical clock of 1.8 - 2.2 GHz.

The graphics processor itself will integrate more texture memory units (TMUs), which is the Achilles’ heel of the R6xx generation: 32 TMUs in the RV770 will challenge the 56/64 units of Nvidia’s G92/G92b.

With a 256-bit memory controller, we’re talking about 115 to 141 GB/s of bandwidth. This number equals the memory bandwidth record set by the 2900XT 1GB GDDR4 (512-bit interface with GDDR4 at 1.1 GHz DDR).

While we expect the desktop boards to be announced soon, RV770-based FireGL boards will not be introduced until Siggraph 2008, which will open its doors on August 11.

The GeForce 9600 GSO will be equipped with a G92 chip with 96 Stream Processors enabled, 384MB of GDDR3 memory and of course, the now usual, DirectX 10.0 and SLI support. (BEd: Sarcasm alert.) How exciting!

Editor Say : I’m Waiting in impatiently !!