And it's the good type of penny-pinching goodness you'll probably get this early into fall. Word has it in the hardware enthusiast community that Intel has ordained new pricings on the market's most popular processors, including those of Xeons and Celeron. Core 2 Duos and Quads have been seen with much lower tags, meaning there's hope for a visit to the local hardware retail shop this fall. Price changes await at the full story.

You guys might haven't noticed but changes have been made and bugs have been addressed during the last server maintenance of Gravity Interactive's Requiem: Bloodymare. It's definitely something to make your gaming experience better. Find out the details of the update after the jump!

Apple has announced the arrival of a new Xserve which can hold up to two Intel Quad Cores Xeons. Another big thing about this new server is that it comes with an unlimited client license for the Mac OS X Server Leopard.

If you want to know more, be sure to click on the "read more" link below to check out the full article.

So what's better than today's Intel dual core processors? Why a new quad-core processor, that's what. The Xeon 7300 series is twice as fast performance-wise, more than three times the performance per watt over the old dual-core processors, and up to four times the memory capacity.

Intel has unveiled the new series of processors yesterday designed specifically for multi-processor servers running heavy applications with unmatched performance, reliability and scalability. The more energy efficient quad-core processors will enable customers a much more cost efficient ownership of the new machines according to its performance. Intel plans to overhaul their microarchitecture to the new processors within the next 15 months.

Here are just some of the new features that the Xeon 7300 series is sporting:

• Includes frequencies up to 2.93GHz at 130 watts, several 80-watt processors and a 50-watt version optimized for four socket blades and high-density rack form factors with a frequency of 1.86GHz.
• The Intel® 7300 chipset with Data Traffic Optimizations provides a balanced platform design with several new technologies that enhance data movement between the processors, memory and I/O connections.
• HP* delivered a new blade world record** for SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark with a result of 3,500 SD users on a HP ProLiant BL680c G5 blade server with four Quad-core Intel® Xeon® processor model E7340s running at 2.4 GHz.

Tom Kilroy, Intel vice president and co-general manager of Digital Enterprise Group had this to say about the new processor:

Intel Xeon-based multi-processor servers are the backbone of the enterprise. With the Xeon 7300 series, Intel is delivering new levels of performance and performance per watt, and driving the Intel Core microarchitecture into such innovative systems as four-socket, 16-core blades that use less energy than our older models. It's simply amazing.

Those of you tech savvy people may want to take a look at the benchmark performance of the Xeon 7300 series at the Intel website through the via link. The estimated price range of the new processors are somewhere within US$ 856 to US$ 2,301 in quantities of 1,000. Given a little time, we're pretty sure we'll be seeing these new processors go commercial and give us the chance to play our favorite game without any (or at least considerably less) of those annoying lags in between frames.

Everyone's excited about the look and feel of Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and why not? The new OS is looking sleeker than ever and insiders are raving at how easy it is to set up.

   

Wired reports that they ran it on a Quad Core Xeon Mac Pro and Leopard went right on the prowl. These screens show some of what you can expect and it does look sweet.

The preview version doesn't have the final code but most sources say that Leopard has been impressive so far. The animations, the dock and the translucent toolbar are all contributing to giving the package that space-age look and the eye candy just has people's heads turning. DVD burning and Time Machine still haven't been tested, but that just leaves enough to have something to look forward to come launch date.

The Apple community's been waiting for this. It's been rumored that an eight-core Mac Pro is in the works, now it's a rumor no more. The Apple 8-core Mac Pro is finally here.

Back when the 8-core Mac Pro was still a rumor, it was said that it was going to be released later this year, possibly November. It was released earlier than everyone expected. This newly launched Mac Pro is the world's first 3.0 GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. We can't help but get swayed by the tagline on the Apple site: "Consider the bar officially raised."

Mac Pro 8-core boasts advanced performance on workstation graphics, and "unparalleled" expansion in many possible configurations. Simply put, at 3.0 GHz the quad-core Mac Pro runs two times faster than Power Mac G5 Quad. Expansion-wise, it 8-core Mac Pro can accommodate up to four drives and 3TB of storage, eight DIMM slots to fill up with 16 GB of RAM, two Super Drives.

That's a lot of power. We are sure the programmers and software developers are going to be happy with the functions of this one.

   
 

 

Alienware makes developers drool and accountants pat their pockets as the extreme gaming PC brand tout their latest Banzai runners catering to the people attending the 2007 Game Developers Conference. While these puppies were made to roll-over for developers, you can't quite shake off the feeling that the system would be a nasty addition to your computing collection.

Workstations, playstations; with quad-core Intel Xeons, Core 2 Duo Mobile, and AMD Opterons, the MJ-12 8550i, m5790, and MJ-12 8550a (resectively) all pack the multi-core powerhouse needed for creating games and playing them. Graphics are powered by FireGL and Quadro FX cards, with the Radeon X1900 for the laptop. Seeing CryEngine 2 on one of these is bound to be a visual tart. And what about those SAS drives? SATA never had it this good.

Of course, these things cost an arm, a leg and your noggin', so we guess you could always settle for the cheaper options. For more info, click the "Read" link below.

If even the current generation of processors are not fast enough for you, you might be interested to know the next batch could ship bundled with seat-belts.

Leading the pack is the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The first-generation Cell in Sony's PS3 has been clocked at 4GHz. This second-generation chip will zip by at 6GHz. Built for speed, yes, but it will also have a dual power supply for higher memory performance.

Behind the second-gen Cell is IBM's Power6 processor. This speed demon packs 700 million transistors inside a 341 square millimeters and can exceed 5 GHz when running in high-performance mode. Designed for servers, the Power6 consumes less than 100 watts in power-sensitive applications. That puts it in the same neighborhood as the 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

Intel's electronic racehorse is a prototype chip with 80 cores that can perform 1.28 trillion calculations per second. The chip measures 275 square millimeters and will run at 4GHz. It has 100 million transistors and dissipates 98 watts of waste heat.

Sun Microsystems has the Niagara 2 processor. The chip measures 342 square millimeters with 500 million transistors. Its eight-core design can run 64 simultaneous sequences of instructions.

Before the year ends, Intel is expected to introduce two four-core processors that are compatible to its Core 2 and Xeon Line. With these, it is now theoretically possible to have an 8-core Mac Pro (it features two LGA-771 sockets). Single systems can experience a dramatic increase in processing power should this quad-core processors become a reality.

To test the validity of this assumption, the guys over at AnandTech ran a simple experiment. According to them: "We grabbed a pair of 2.4GHz Clovertown samples and tossed them in the system, and to our pleasure, they worked just fine. The most important part of the test is that all 8 cores were detected and functional." The final chip is foreseen to use a 1333MHz FSB.

No crashes with the processors were also encountered after a series of stability test was performed.

The widespread availability of Intel Corp's new desktop processors in the past several weeks is not enough to make Apple introduce new line of iMac computers. We know now why as they confirm previous rumors to sidestep Core 2 Duo and use Merom, the mobile variant of chips, for the MacBook instead.

This month will not be over before they come up with the announcement regarding the next-gen models, including a 23-inch new member of the iMac family. This upgrade will be the third Apple ha made within the last 12 months.

In a related matter, this is not the first time Core 2 Duo was ignored by Apple. The recently unveiled Mac Pro high-end desktops went with Intel's higher-performance Xeon server processor, contrary to earlier reports. Then everybody thought Core 2 Duo will then be going to the iMac line, but here we are, Merom taking the spot.

Merom is said to be capable of up to 2.33GHZ speed, offering a 40 percent increase compared to the previous Core Duo CPU.