AMD Game! Goes Live

AMD has just launched a brand new gaming microsite that provides gaming news, reviews, forums, monthly contests and prize giveaways and a handy tool to evaluate your system’s performance. Here are screenshots from the system evaluation tool showing systems passing and failing:

Today AMD has unleashed a new gaming microsite to provide a forum for gamers to communicate, collaborate and stay in tune with the latest developments in PC gaming. Gamers will have the ability to access exclusive game content and contests while customizing aspects of the site to fit every user’s preferences. The site is now available on http://game.amd.com.

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Seagate announces 1TB encrypted hard drive

About a month and a half ago, Seagate officially unveiled its 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 3.5″ hard drive. The drive squeezes a terabyte of capacity onto four platters that spin at 7,200RPM, all complemented by a hefty 32MB buffer. Seagate has now announced a new 1TB Barracuda hard drive, this time featuring the encryption technology it introduced with its Momentus 5400.2 FDE mobile hard drive over a year ago.

According to Seagate, the Barracuda FDE series will be the world’s first 3.5″ hard drive lineup to feature native AES encryption technology. In systems powered by the drive, logging on “requires a pre-boot user password that can be buttressed with other layers of authentication such as smart cards and biometrics.” Barracuda FDE drives will have 7,200-RPM spindle speeds and will launch in 2008 with capacities up to 1TB.

In addition to its terabyte FDE disk, Seagate also intends to roll out new Momentus 5400.4 2.5″ mobile hard drives. Those drives won’t have encryption functionality, but they’ll combine capacities of up to 250GB with 5,400-RPM spindle speed and 300MB/s Serial ATA interfaces.

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Ajax Startup Launches Web Desktop Linked To Gmail

Net entrepreneur Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, is on a crusade to change the software industry again. This time, he’s putting his energy and expertise behind a new startup that uses Ajax as a middleware platform to create a niche in the software as a service (SaaS) marketplace.

The company is Ajax13, the product is ajaxWindows, and the concept is pretty straightforward: The software platform is operating system-agnostic and based on the XML User Interface Language (XUL) to act as a Web-based desktop. Files can be moved around and opened, and applications launch with a mouse click. The interface also includes customizable wallpaper, start-up and shut down sounds, and browser bookmarks. But instead of interacting with the hardware, the user stores all desktop data, documents, and content, free of charge into a Gmail account.

“The concept here is that we didn’t want to determine where our registered users keep their files,” Robertson told InformationWeek. “We are launching the Gmail interface but we will let people have a choice going forward.” Options include other online sites or a local storage device such as a USB thumb drive, Robertson said.

Dell Reveals Barcelona Performance

Dell has no intention of reversing its decision last year to start using AMD processors in its product line. The company wanted to give customers a variety of choices and also because it wanted to guarantee for itself a steady supply of electronic components.

Dell expects AMD to introduce its quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, next week and, comparing it with Intel’s Clovertown quad-core processor, the company would like to offer customers a choice of either product. “If you look at floating point instructions, Barcelona is about 30 percent faster than Clovertown. However, if you look at integer instructions, Clovertown is about 30 percent faster than Barcelona,” Dell said.

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Motorola Begins Selling RAZR 2

While the now $399 Apple iPhone will dominate the news Thursday, Motorola has chimed in to remind everyone that its RAZR 2 is now available through wireless carriers across the United States. But its $299 to $349 price tag won’t likely bring out long lines.

The RAZR 2 V9 is offered by AT&T while the CDMA V9m is sold by Verizon, Sprint and Alltel. T-Mobile will likely sell the RAZR 2 V8, but the phone is not yet listed on the carrier’s Web site. Motorola is hoping to bring back the glory days of the original RAZR by adding features such as Windows Media Player, 2GB of on-board memory and a full-HTML browser. But the company faces stiff competition from LG, Samsung and now Apple.

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HP Announces New Gaming PCs, iPaqs

Hewlett-Packard Co. Wednesday introduced a new line of gaming PCs and iPaq PDAs (personal digital assistants).

HP’s new gaming PC, the Blackbird 002 LCi, is made from aluminum and is liquid-cooled to enhance performance. The Blackbird was created by designers of VoodooPC Inc., which HP acquired last year. The Blackbird 002 Dedication Edition will be released September 15, and come with a pre-set configuration. Users will be able to buy customized Blackbirds from Oct. 1, each of which will be hand-built in HP’s Calgary, Alberta facility. The machines retail for US$2,500 to $7,100.

The company also announced five new iPaq models. The iPaq 900 Series Business Messenger is a 3G (third-generation) phone with a QWERTY keyboard; the iPAQ 600 Series Business Navigator is also a 3G phone and with a built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) and navigation functions; the iPaq 300 Series Travel Companion is a PDA with built-in GPS, with additional graphics and 3-D mapping capability; the iPaq 200 Series Enterprise Handheld is designed for business users; and the iPaq 100 Series Classic Handheld offers Wi-Fi connectivity and easing synching with a PC. HP did not offer suggested pricing for the new iPaq models.

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Intel readies Penryn chips, may release Silverthorne early

Following the launch of Intel’s quad-core Xeon 7300 processor on Wednesday, the company’s efforts are now focused on preparations for the rollout of its first Penryn chips later this year. And there are signs the company is planning an early 2008 release of its Silverthorne chip for ultramobile PCs and handheld devices.

Intel confirmed plans to release a server version of Penryn before the end of this year, but the company is releasing little information about its plans for mobile and desktop versions of the chip. Penryn will offer better performance than Intel’s current processors, and the company is counting on them to hold off any gains rival Advanced Micro Devices makes with the release of its quad-core Barcelona chips next week.

“So far what we’ve said is that we intend to ship a broad family of 45-nanometer processors by the end of the year,” said Nick Jacobs, an Intel spokesman in Singapore, referring to the technology used to produce the Penryn chips.

Unlocking the Iphone

Apple’s iPhone is a marvel of modern technology, but getting it to work in Thailand can be equally impressive

An American business associate who frequents Thailand gave me an Apple iPhone as a gift. I should be pleased to have one of the first iPhones in Thailand, but there is a problem. The iPhone has a built-in dual locking system that prohibits unauthorized activation of its internal programs, while it “locks” the phone to AT&T, a US mobile operator.

Locked in a box

Only AT&T is authorized to activate and unlock iPhones. But since AT&T does not operate in Thailand, I have a very expensive, iconoclastic icon of advanced technology that can only be used as a fancy and lifeless paperweight, a sort of snow globe without the snow.

Solution: I’ll ask Apple Thailand for help. After all, Apple has its money and I have an iPhone. I just need to activate and unlock the phone so I can subscribe to a local phone service, and everyone will be happy. Right? Wrong! Surely, the famed mobile phone hackers at MBK can unlock it. Right? Maybe.

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Google Reader gets Search

That’s right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements.

Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you’re looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone’s shared items, it’ll search those too. This handy feature is brought to you especially by Ben and Chris‘s tireless engineering work and Jenna‘s relentless iteration on user interface concepts.

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

If you’d like to let us know how search is working out for you, or have any other Reader feedback, you can use our shiny new forums to get in touch.

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Movie download service Vudu launches

Silicon Valley startup Vudu will start taking orders tomorrow for its proprietary set-top box, which will allow users to stream or download up to 5,000 movies onto their TV sets over a broadband Internet connection.

The box is priced at $399 through www.vudu.com and Amazon.

Vudu operates similar to a peer-to-peer service. In a P2P network, movies or other large files are downloaded from a number of fellow P2P users with a computer connected to the Internet that already have the file on their computers. This means files can be sent faster than those downloaded from one central server.

On Vudu’s service, files will be transferred across a private network. Vudu will send bits of files of popular movies to different users’ Vudu boxes. When a user clicks to watch a movie, the file is then sent from those other Vudu boxes. Since the files are sent between Vudu boxes only, the company says they can provide better copy protection and ensure a file is sent with the pieces in order so the user can watch right away.