We take a look at the gargantuan ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AXE11000 gaming router, which supports the new 6 GHz frequency, also known as WIFI 6E. However, there is no need to be concerned since it is also compatible with 5G AX/AC and 2.4G lower bands. The GT-AX11000 has an alien appearance, but it is crammed with functions and should deliver excellent wired and wireless performance. ASUS's triple-band Wi-Fi router is also equipped with a quad-core CPU.

Read the review here.

Johnny 5 is alive :)  VIA showcased VIA EPIA Pico-ITX-based entertainment robots at the Taipei International Robot Show, being held at the World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan. At the VIA booth there will be three compact robots provided by PlayRobot, a Taiwan-based robot developer and distributor of educational, scientific and entertainment robots for government, academic and research institutes, as well as robot kits for enthusiasts (www.playrobot.com).

One, the popular Johnny 5 robot, has been fitted for the show with the very latest Pico-ITX board, the VIA EPIA P700 featuring the VIA VX800 unified chipset. With robotics development representing the cutting edge of technological progress, VIA' commitment to extremely compact form factors, robust performance, extensive feature sets and extremely low power consumption means that VIA's off-the-shelf EPIA boards are becoming an essential component for academic, hobbyist and commercial robot developers.

1,2 or 4 doesn't matter anymore. Intel will be releasing it's 6-core Intel processors aka Dunnington in September already.

The 6-core Dunnington based model should be announced on September 14, according to company roadmap. The line-up will include three models: Xeon X7460 with 2.67GHz clock frequency and 130W TDP, Xeon E7450 with 2.4GHz frequency and 90W TDP and low-voltage Xeon L7455 with 65W TDP and 2.13GHz clock speed. All processors will be built with Intel's new 45-nanometer Penryn technology and will support 1066MHz bus speed. Xeon X7460 will be equipped with 16MB L3 cache while Xeon L7455 and Xeon E7450 will have a 12MB L3 cache onboard.

New Xeon X7460 and Xeon L7455 processors will be priced at $2729, and Xeon E7450

NVIDIA formally released the finished version of CUDA 2.0. The second generation of the company's general-purpose programming language for its video chipsets supports 64-bit versions of Mac OS X and Windows Vista and adds support for instructions that can help offload more specific tasks from the main processor to the video card, such as 3D textures and hardware-accelerated interpolation of information.
These advancements are particularly useful for volume reconstruction in medicine or for seismic computing in the oil industry, NVIDIA says.

The Santa Clara, California firm also hopes to use CUDA 2.0 as a motivator for creative teams with the inclusion of a reference plugin for Adobe's Photoshop. The blank slate allows developers to create filters and other effects of their own that use CUDA to process images more quickly than would be possible relying on the system CPU alone.

Apps written with CUDA require a card with one of NVIDIA's chipsets built with its unified shader architecture, including all GeForce 8- and 9-series cards as well as newer Quadro FX cards.

Yeah I'm really not joking .. it's really called 'Tee PC', to compete directly with ASUS' Eee PC line. Well you know what, this entire thing might even be just a marketing gimmick to get them some extra attention. But Albatron today is playing on the same theme with its new Tee PC netbook. The Tee PC is based on a 7-inch LCD touchscreen good for 800x480 resolution but, instead of relying on an Intel Atom or Celeron, powers the system with a cellphone-oriented ARM 926 processor running at just 400MHz. The 128MB flash drive is loaded with Windows CE 6 and uses the lower memory footprint to trim down to 128MB of RAM.

Despite the performance, Albatron claims the Tee PC offers more netbook-like media performance with a graphics processor capable of decoding VGA, H.264 and MPEG4 format videos at 30FPS. Other features include an SD card slot, a swivel-mount webcam, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. A pair of USB ports is integrated into the UMPC's docking station, which also sports a large speaker and the power connection.

Neither prices nor ship dates are known at this time.

Oh man, that thing is actually for real. Brando is offering a 6x zoom telescope for the Apple iPhone 3G. The lens is attached to your phone via a plastic case and my gosh does that look retared. But heck, it should do the job.

You can get it over at Brando for $19, there are even pictures to illustrate the zooming capabilities of this cheap lens.

Intel and AMD published detailed, public information about the "DTS" (Digital Thermal Sensor), which provides much higher accuracy and more relevant temperature reading than the standard thermal diode sensors do. (How it works).

This feature is supported on all Intel Core and Core 2 based processors as well as the whole AMD's Athlon64 line of CPUs. For a full list of supported CPUs see the CPU Support List.

Core Temp also has a logging feature, allowing a user to easily record the temperature of his processor(s) over any period of time, then the data can be easily transferred into an excel datasheet for easy graphing.

Core Temp works on Windows 2000, XP and 2003 (both 32bit and 64bit versions). Windows Vista 32bit is fully supported.

Version 0.99.3 - 22th August, 2008

- Add: Correct TjMax values for 45nm Core 2 series, according to this document.

- Fix: When TjMax = 0 (undefined) "Delta to Tjunction" was not added to the temperature string.

Version 0.99.2 - 18th August, 2008

- Fix: Start with Windows option was broken in 0.99.1.
- Fix: Default color for the second system tray icon is invisible with WinXP blue theme.
- Fix: Save screenshot function would create a corrupted BMP in some viewing software.
- Fix: Nehalem does not report VID like earlier CPUs. VID field now disabled for Nehalem.
- Fix: Incorrect 65nm Turion X2 code name detection.
- Fix: Potential bug of improper K10 and up recognition.
- Fix: Enabling distance to Tj.Max with "Highest temp." for system tray would show the largest distance to Tj.Max instead of smallest.
- Fix: Vendor ID and Device ID values were reversed in the register dump file.
- Fix: 3/4 temperatures logged for Phenom X3/X4 instead of 1.

- Add: Support for Core Temp plugins. (Still in beta phase and not in GUI yet).
- Add: Full support for AMD's Puma platform CPUs (in previous version reffered to as Griffin).
- Add: Initial support for 45nm AMD processors.
- Add: Update K8 and K10 recognition code to support all currently known CPUs.
- Add: Default TDP detection for Nehalem.
- Add: On the fly CPU speed detection.
- Add: Close to system tray option.

- Change: Log file is now produced in CSV format - easily import your logs into Excel.
- Change: Logging interval is now in Seconds instead of miliseconds.
- Change: Default logging interval is now 10 seconds.
- Change: Logging is now off by default.

Download - Click Here

At IDF Lucid technology (heavily invested by Intel) demonstrated it's HYDRA technology. The idea is to "build a completely GPU-independent graphics scaling technology" which enables two to four completely different (Radeon / GeForce / models ) to work together in harmony with "little to no software overhead."

More info on this "Bridge' chip was presented at IDF. This might even be a revolution in the high-end gaming segment. Lucid is building a new "real-time distributed processing engine" system on a chip called HYDRA, which can mix and match any GPU from any manufacturer and work with any chipset, and piles it all together for performance scaling that Lucid claims is "near-linear" or even "above-linear."

Next problem that i see ... API calls, but exactly what does Hydra communicate to and with the GPUs? It can't send the hardware itself API calls, as these do not allow that. It must send machine code generated by the graphics driver. So all the difficult analysis of API calls and grouping of tasks and load balancing has to happen in software in the driver. And there where I see an issue. A lot of CPU overhead..

It's the above-linear part that particularly makes no sense though. My second thoughts on this topic is .. i have no idea how this will work out legally with companies as ATI and NVIDIA having patented their multi-GPU technology.

But even more importantly .. would you even like to bridge say two or three GeForce GTX 280 cards over an external solution rather than the original SLI or Crossfire method ?

Not being brainwashed at IDF, Guru3D would like to see some actual working hardware and a decent software implementations before making any real comments. And then do a side by side system performance comparison. As you can see, we here at Guru3D are a little sceptic about the product. As in the end, it'll also add more power consumption to the system and hey, again another level of additional costs, as you need to pay for yet another board in your PC.

In a major coup in the government data loss stakes PA Consulting - which until Monday was one of the Home Office's favourite consulting outfits - has contrived to lose the entire prison population of England and Wales. Personal details of the 84,000 people behind bars, along with those of 10,000 prolific offenders, have vanished on a memory stick, it was revealed last night.

It's by no means the biggest of government data losses, but it shows style. Historically the prison service hasn't found it particularly easy to tally up precisely who they've got and where they are - leading to bizarre cases where we've been told that escaped prisoners might have been recaptured, but they can't be sure - so it's an achievement to get them all in the one place and then mislay them. And as it's actually the Ministry of Justice that runs the prison service these days, it wasn't even the Home Office's data, really. Take that, Jack Straw.

PA held the data as part of a contract to work on JTrack, a project to manage Prolific and Priority Offenders (PPOs). It's a database made up of information contributed by police (details of arrests and charges, the Crown Prosecutions Service (trial outcomes) and the Prison Service. It has 2,500 users, and is intended to allow police forces and the CPS to "co-ordinate their approach to targeting PPOs." The presence of the entire prison population on this database might in that sense seem overkill, given that they're not all PPOs (although in 2004 the Home Office estimated that there were 100,000 of them, more than the total lost this week).

The data was held on PA's computers, in "a secure format" according to the Home Office, but was downloaded onto a memory stick and "for processing purposes." This was then lost. A search of the company's premises has failed to recover the stick, and the transfer of further data to PA has been suspended pending an investigation.

So that's at least one thing Gary Glitter can breath easy about today.

In its capacity as one of the Home Office's favourite consultants, PA was the development partner for the ID card scheme, working on "design, feasibility testing, business case and procurement". The Home Office spent

The Microsoft has called on American comedian Jerry Seinfeld to big up Vista in its next Windows ad campaign.The software giant is keeping quiet on the details, even though world+dog have nicely spun out the firm

According to the source, ACC won't be exclusive to AMD for long. If the slide below is true, NVIDIA's plans regarding MCP72/78 unambiguously indicate the complete support of AMD ACC. The company will just have to use the JTAG interface and introduce certain changes into topology, connecting CPU and MCP72/78. The first motherboards on MCP72/78 with ACC support are expected on September 1.

Note that not all MCP72/78-based motherboards can offer ACC support, since it requires hardware modifications.

In Leipzig the GC 2008 (games convention) just started. Guru3D took a drive over there and shows some of their impressions in a series of small articles. Today the first findings at GC Leipzig 2008. There is loads of stuff going on and though the booths are a little smaller, size-wise this exhibition can definitely match with the E3. Obviously all big names are present. We'll definitely talk you through some of them.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/gc-leipzig-game-conference-day-1/

According to claims from Chinese site Expreview a new-and-improved GTX 260s with more stream processors will quietly hit stores in mid-September. These cards will supposedly feature nine thread processing clusters (TPCs) instead of eight, which should work out to 216 stream processors and 72 texture units (up from 192 SPs and 64 TUs on the current model).

For reference, the top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 280 sports 240 SPs and 80 TUs. Expreview goes on to say the new GTX 260 will retain the same 65nm GT200 GPU, clock speed, memory interface width, and memory capacity as its predecessor. We won't hazard a guess as to exactly how the extra TPC will impact performance, but the move should still narrow the gap between the GTX 260 and the 4870. Right now, the Radeon HD 4870 has a slight performance edge and tends to sit between the GTX 260 and GTX 280 in many benchmarks.

All this is unconfirmed though.

A lot of game trailers today as we are covering the Games Conference in leipzig today. Tom Clancy's EndWar is a real-time tactics game designed by Ubisoft Shanghai for the PS3, Xbox 360, PSP and NDS, to be released on October 15, 2008 in North America and October 14, 2008 in Europe.

A PC version is planned for release at a later date. It is set in 2020 at which time World War III is ongoing. Now Germany's giant game show gives us another look at the war to end all wars. Check out the trailer.

The objective is to take out three antiaircraft guns atop some concrete fortifications. The easiest way to take them out is the bazooka; just stand off at a distance, get a clear shot, and avoid having to take out the mess of infantry between you and it. However, you can blow them with charges if you're short of rockets. Then comes an Japanese counter-attack, so you have to man some machine guns and take up positions on top of the fortifications.

This was a co-op battle, so there was naturally a lot of chatter going on about who should go where and who should shoot what. Apart from that, the campaign is the same whether you're playing solo or playing with three others, though the difficulty does scale in relation to the number of players in the battle. If someone is killed, another player can revive the fallen but if everyone dies at the same time, it's back to the previous checkpoint. That's if you're playing regular campaign co-op. There's a nifty little twist called competitive co-op that basically adds a scoring mode; you get points for kills, extra points for head shots, etc. The winner, of course, is the one with the most points. It's possible to really rack up a high score if you manage to snag score modifiers that multiply your points. The kicker is that in competitive co-op, if you die, you lose points, and if someone revives you, they earn points. That mechanic is designed to reign in players, because if you charge ahead or take a lot of risks or play wildly and get killed, you lose points.