We reported about a possible acquisition of Sun by IBM, but Sun's board rejected the offer from the industry giant close to two weeks ago. Well, as it turns out, instead Oracle tied the knot with them yesterday and bought Sun for $7.4 Billion, although Sun brings $1.8 billion of net cash to the deal, making the net cost to Oracle as low as $5.6 billion.

"We're thrilled to be acquired by Oracle and have our technologies, innovations and communities as part of the Oracle vision," Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman, said.

The acquisition will allow Oracle to combine enterprise hardware and software into a total solution, it said. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system -- applications to disk -- where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves," Ellison said. "Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

A couple of weeks ago NVIDIA made some small modification to it's mid-range line-up, in specific their GeForce 9800 GTX+ product. These design changes are related to PCB board design, power efficiency and bringing the overall cost of the product down. As a result the GeForce 9800 GTX+ had what you can call an extreme makeover. Same features, same performance .. yet less power consumption and NVIDIA was able to shave off roughly 25%~35% of the sales price, bringing the GeForce 9800 GTX+ from just over 200 USD, towards sub 150 USD with 1024MB of videocard memory. All that is now labeled under the new product name, GeForce GTS 250.

Today the turn goes to the folks at ECS. Ever since the last year or two, they have been trying hard to get a grip in the e-tail and retail channel, and as a brand they are certainly growing. With a creative product design and marketing team they present us some fairly special designs and concepts.

You can read this Guru3D review right here.

MSI has reelased two GeForce GTX 260 video cards today. The first one being the MSI N260GTX Lightning, and the second one a N260GTX Lightning Black Edition.

Both products where already showcased at CeBit this year. The trick is that these probably are the most feature rich products you can find on the web. First iff, MSI N260GTX Lightning has twice the standard GeForce GTX 260 GDDR3 memory - 1792 MB and then utilizes a Twin Frozr cooling with heatpipes, dual slot heatsink and two big fans.

Apparantly the card design is Phase PWM, with 8 phases are reserved for the GPU and 2 phases for the memory. Furthermore, this graphics card has important overclocking features like V-Check points to measure the voltage.

Though you spot two versions, pretty much both are similar. The Lightning Black Edition is paired with the company's AirForce Panel, an external touch panel that can change the card's voltages and clock speeds on the fly. It is not included in the Lightning edition.

1. Digital Sensors
2. Flying OC Panel
3. 8-way Heatpipes 
4. Exclusive 2-slot+ 
5. 10-phase Power Supply 
6. Digital Sensors
   

Western Digital Corp. today expanded its enterprise family of hard drives to include the next-generation 2 TB capacity, the largest and only 2 TB enterprise-class hard drive shipping today. Combining industry-leading 64 MB cache, dual processors, and increased areal density, WD RE4-GP hard drives yield twice the processing power resulting in as much as 25 percent performance improvement over the previous generation.

WD's GreenPower technology platform is the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. These drives reduce average drive power consumption by up to 50 percent over currently available competitors' drives and are ultra-cool and quiet, all while delivering solid performance.

The new WD RE4-GP 2 TB hard drive provides enterprise-class reliability for storage-hungry applications, such as cloud-computing infrastructure, large-scale data centers, data archive and tape replacement systems, commercial video surveillance and digital video editing houses, with an energy- and money-saving solution that combats the challenges facing the enterprise IT sector -- limited available drive slots, maximum capacity required, and limited power and budget. Addressing the growing high-capacity enterprise market, WD RE4-GP 2 TB drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time before failure) in high duty cycle environments.

Exclusive Intelligent Drive Technology
WD RE4-GP hard drives with GreenPower technology deliver exceptional power conservation, run ultra-cool and quiet, while providing solid performance. Following are several technologies responsible for the performance enhancements:

• Faster - 64 MB cache, dual processors, and increased areal density yield twice the processing power resulting in as much as a 25 percent performance improvement over the previous generation.
• Greener - Improvements in our power-conserving technologies -- IntelliSeek, IntelliPark, and IntelliPower - deliver up to an average 25 percent reduction in power consumption over our previous generation of WD RE-GP drive.
• Improved Rotary Vibration Tolerance - Advanced mechanical and servo control optimization along with system characterization and validation enable rock solid performance under extreme vibration conditions, with negligible impact to performance, substantially more robust than the previous generation, making this drive ideal for the most industrial IT applications
• Active Power Management - WD drives with GreenPower technology monitor work load and automatically invoke idle mode whenever possible to further reduce unnecessary power consumption by up to an additional 40 percent. Drive recovery time from idle mode is less than one second, providing seamless power management between the drive and the host controller.
• StableTrac - Secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.
• RAID-specific Time-limited Error Recovery (TLER) - Pioneered by WD, this feature prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.
• Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) - This second generation WD RE-GP model increased rotational frequencies up to 1500 Hz, therefore optimizing operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone multi-drive systems such as rack mounted servers or in systems deployed at industrial type locations.

Availability and Pricing The WD RE4-GP 2 TB hard drive (model WD2002FYPS) is available from select e-tailers and distributors. MSRP is $329.00 (U.S.). The WD RE4-GP 2 TB will also be shown by WD partners AMCC (booth number SL13007) and Promise (booth number SL12008) at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, NV.

There's a lot of activity among graphics chipset designers for sure lately. Nvidia sets GPU outsourcing to TSMC and UMC for 2Q09, says paper.

Nvidia recently set its outsourcing schedule with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) for the second quarter, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

In addition to expanding its 55nm GT200b GPU outsourcing, the company will also start mass production of the 40nm entry-level GT218, high-end mobile GT215 and mainstream GT214 and GT216 GPUs in mid to late second quarter, according to the paper.

I think Intel is feeling the heat of some new processors being released by AMD this week, and as such decided to lower it's prices a little on their more popular quad-core processors, and introing two new ones.

The Core 2 Quad Q8400 and Q8400S are both made on 45nm technology, have a frequency of 2.66 GHz, a 1333 MHz FSB and 4MB of L2 cache. The 95W TDP Q8400 and 65W Q8400S cost $183 and $245 respectively.

Now when we look at the price cuts, the desktop Q9300, Q9550S, Q9400S and Q8200S would be prices like this: $213, $320, $277 and $213 respectively. Competition is good, love it.

We already reported that ATI is going to ship DirectX 11 capable graphic cards this year, but German magazine heise revealed today that according to some well-informed internal sources ATI is planning to ship their first cards supporting DirectX 11 as early as late July or early August.

Should this rumor be true, it would put Nvidia under quite some pressure, as they are planning to ship their first GPUs with DirectX 11 support not before October. More than just likely, ATI's new chips are going to feature 40 nanometer manufacturing which will further reduce heat dissipation, while increasing performance at the same time.

Currently, it is still unclear though whether these new cards will be based on the RV870 chipset, but if so, this would put ATI in a very good position to steal the performance crown from Nvidia - at least until Nvidia's GT300 series hit the market.

Just a few days ago, we got a sneak peak of the second installment of Assassin's Creed. Today, Ubisoft Montreal unveiled a second trailer for Assassin's Creed 2, revealing a winter 2009 release date for Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3.

Cooler Master intros a new mid tower chassis, Gladiator 600 (RC-600), which seems to be a mix inbetween CM 690 and Centurion 5. The Gladiator 600 is the successor of the popular centurion 5 and will become available for about 70 Euros. The PSU is placed on the bottom of the Gladiator 600, drives are positioned as usually.

The Gladiator 600 is shipped with a blue LED 120 mm fan in the front (LEDs can be switched off) and one 140 mm fan in the lid. More fans can be installed rear and the door of the case.

Superior Airflow Performance
The chassis has a fully meshed front panel with a 120mm blue LED fan for excellent airflow. The body is constructed with top and side ventilation holes to adapt to various fan set-ups; five 120 mm fans or four 140 fans plus one 120 mm fan.

Cable Management System
The motherboard tray includes cable access openings which secure the cables to the structure when routing cables in and out from the chassis and also prevents damage for to the cables/ components.

User Friendly Design
Establishing a user-friendly environment has always been the key for the Cooler Master engineering team. Gladiator 600 provides tool-free 5.25

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has recently brought the high definition format to China. In order to accomplish this, they had to not only provide the technology to create Blu-ray Discs and players to Chinese manufacturers, but also create a licensing format which would lower costs and streamline the production process. One of the advantages to the rest of the Blu-ray buying world, commented Mark Leathan, Marketing Director at Samsung, was that we will soon see the "entry of the Chinese manufacturers into the Blu ray market that we will have a $99 Blu ray player."

During last year's holiday season, Blu-ray players could be found for as low as $128, though quantities were limited due to the availability of product and the high demand for the high definition players. With sales this year predicted to be at least twice of what they were last year, it is expected that the $99 price point will become the norm for entry-level players, rather than as part of a special sales promotion.

These lower priced entries, however, will likely have little effect on major consumer electronic manufacturers. It is highly unlikely that Sony, Panasonic, and Samung will participate in entry-level game of slim-margins, and will likely leave that to the new Chinese manufactures and new products from Magnavox or Sylvania.

As you can see from the magnitude of the announcements over the past few days, the Blu-ray format is expected to be the hot ticket item this holiday season. The only question is, how many millions of people will wake-up to a new Blu-ray Disc player and Blu-ray copy of 'Lord of the Rings'? [via blu-ray]

An Asian website somehow snugged a photo of the Radeon HD 4770 that HIS is going to release sometime soon. This 40nm RV740 (check our preview) based graphics card features a dual slot cooler, comes with 128-bit gDDR5 memory, two DVI outputs and has support for CrossfireX.

If rumors are correct (and of course they are), then cards like these will match Radeon HD 4850 performance, at  price of under 99 USD.

image was removed at request of HIS

With a huge 64MB dram buffer, the Falcon series represents the best read/write performance stability while avoiding OS stutter. The Falcon series is available in large capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB: the read/write performance of the 128GB and 256GB drives are an industry leading 230/190 MB/Sec, while the 64GB drives are capable of 230/135 MB/Sec. 

" G.Skill is a dedicated provider of the best PC enthusiast computer storage and memory solutions, and the Falcon SSD once again reaffirms this, providing both desktop and laptop users the best choice of data storage device, retaining reliable quality and a highly power efficient nature. G.Skill SSDs are designed to yield an impressive 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) and include an international 2 year warranty as well as ever ready technical back-up."

No pricing is available at this time.

If we can believe Microsoft

It is rumored that NVIDIA's GeForce GT 300 new flagship graphics card won't arrive until October this year, a source leak with one of NVIDIA's partners may have hinted to this . They tell the Inquirer that the first actual production models will be ready October 15th following a tape out, or a first submission for manufacturing, in June.

Whether or not NVIDIA will make its target is nonetheless called into question. The company is likely to have the first revision of fully testable silicon on August 1st but may take as much as 3 months after testing to manufacture enough for the first batch, putting an actual release in mid-November at the soonest. Any need to significantly revise the card would likely push the actual release further.

GT 300's feature set hasn't been leaked, though it makes sense to bring support for DirectX 11, OpenCL and newer OpenGL and will likely use NVIDIA's version of 40 nanometer manufacturing to improve performance and reduce heat versus today's 55nm parts.

Some pretty interesting news comes from xbit-labs, as word is that one of the most important features of DX11 will be avaiable for DX 10 and DX10.1 class graphics cards as well, compute shaders.

General-purpose processing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is gaining popularity slowly, but surely. Unfortunately, at present there is only one standard application programming interface

We are giving away a bucket load of Radeon HD 4890 and 4830 graphics cards for free, join us in our friendly competition and perhaps walk way with a nice prize. Two ATI Radeon graphics cards really stand out. First off the Radeon HD 4830 as you guys have learned about here at Guru3D, is one of these amazing value for money cards. The second one is of course the recently released ATI Radeon HD 4890.

Prizes you could win:

• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Drop by on the contest page to see what you need to do, you can check out all relevant information right here at this url:

http://www.guru3d.com/category/contest-amd-2009/

Good luck dude !

AMD recently  launched a new high-end graphics card. In that spirit we interviewed Dave Baumann. A name that might sound familiar to some of you. Dave Baumann was at the time chief editor for Beyond3D. Back in 2006 he joined ATI (now part of AMD) as technical marketing manager. Dave now is Product manager and both the RV770 and RV790 were his responsibility.

We talk about the Radeon HD 4890, memory design, multi-GPU drivers, DX11 and few more items.

You can read the full five page interview right here.

In ther spirit of this interview we are giving away a bucket load of Radeon HD 4890 and 4830 graphics cards for free, join us in our friendly competition and perhaps walk way with a nice prize. Two ATI Radeon graphics cards really stand out. First off the Radeon HD 4830 as you guys have learned about here at Guru3D, is one of these amazing value for money cards. The second one is of course the recently released ATI Radeon HD 4890.

Prizes you could win:

• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Drop by on the contest page to see what you need to do, you can check out all relevant information right here

Up until now, Norwegian file-sharers were pretty safe from prosecution, since Norway's privacy rules prevented copyright holders to get the real identities behind IP addresses. This is more than likely to change now, though, since Norway's Post and Telecommunications Regulator decided that ISPs can be forced by a judge to "hand over the names and addresses of illicit file-sharers to copyright holders. This means that they can now be pursued through the courts, or more likely, through "pay up or else" type threats.

The decision to allow courts to force ISPs to hand over file-sharers' details relates to one particular case brought by Simonsen, a company that is licensed to investigate illegal file-sharing on the web. It's believed that the decision will be applied to future requests of the same nature.

Interestingly, the decision of the telecoms regulator opposes the views of the Norwegian Minister of Education who believes that the music industry should embrace the Internet instead of fighting it. "All previous technology advances have led to fears that the older format would die. But TV did not kill radio, the Web did not kill the book, and the download is not going to kill music." the Minister said earlier."

About one week ago, from the 10th to the 13th of April 2009, world's biggest demoparty, Breakpoint 2009 - "Everything is under control", took place for the 7th time in Bingen am Rhein, Germany. In case you are not familiar with what a demoparty is or why there are any results, check out this little explanation:

"A demoparty is -- on first view -- like a LAN party. Depending on the size, a few or hundreds of visitors may bring their computers and set them up at the location. Unlike a LAN party, Demoparties have an emphasis on creativity. Attendants are encouraged to compete in scheduled competitions (referred to by demosceners as 'compos'.) These 'compos', spread out over the length of the party, are in categories that allow the attendants to showcase their artistic talents with the use of computers.

In short: a demoparty is a multimedia art festival that usually lasts for several days.

The Demoscene considers itself as a loose connection of creative minds with passions of creating digital art. A 'demo' is created by groups of people, or sometimes single individuals, to DEMOnstrate their skills. The traditional skill base of the demoscene is considered to be coding, music, and design."

The competitions at this year's Breakpoint were held in these categories: ASCII/ANSI art, tracked music, animation/video, console/real wild, 96K game, executable 4K graphics, photo, handmade graphics, freestyle graphics, C64 graphics, exe music (newschool), exe music (oldschool), streaming music, C64 demo, Amiga 4K intro, Amiga 64K intro, Amiga demo, PC 4K intro, PC 64K intro, and last but certainly not least PC demo.

Without further ado, here are the official and final top ten results in both the PC 64K intro and PC demo competitions, which are arguably the most prominent:

PC 64K Intro:

01 (580 votes) 060659 - Rebels - download
02 (477 votes) Enigma Sequence - Approximate - download
03 (269 votes) squaredance - loonies - download
04 (267 votes) Diatom - andr00 - download
05 (215 votes) Chelewa - Australian Drug Foundation - download
06 (195 votes) atmta - quite - download
07 (194 votes) D4nce - Hikey^Ministry of 4KB Intros - download
08 (119 votes) Black hole - Hroudtwolf - download

PC Demo: 

01 (639 votes) Crush - Anadune + Floppy - download
02 (453 votes) Roadside Picnic - Brainstorm - download
03 (443 votes) PC-03: "ON/OFF" - GRX / Panda Cube - download
04 (434 votes) Birostris - Matt Current - download
05 (411 votes) fr-065: Euphotic - Farbrausch - download
06 (400 votes) Sonoluminescence - Loopit - download
07 (382 votes) LMSRMX - TOM - download
08 (369 votes) ZINE 14 Headlines - Conspiracy & Brainstorm - download
09 (326 votes) outside - ill - download
10 (308 votes) Delusional Beliefs - Darklite - download

Crush - Anadune's + Floppy's winning PC demo entry: