Anyway....
Intel has upped their offerings to the Pentium 4 2.4GHz and the Celeron 1.3GHz, in addition to the Pentium 4 Xeon processor with "Hyper-Threading technology," which effectively turns each processor into two. AMD has officially released the Athlon XP 2100 (still based on the Palomino core) and the Duron 1.3GHz (based on the Morgan core), as well as the Athlon MP 2000 for servers and workstations.
Meanwhile, Via and SiS have upped the memory bus speed for both Athlon XP and Pentium 4 processors. The Via KT333 chipset was the first to increase the memory bus for Athlon XP processors from 266MHz DDR to 333MHz DDR, with a noticeable performance increase.
In other arenas, Cray has released high-speed drives which have a maximum throughput of 80GB/s. This, compared to the 60MB/s for some of the fastest hard drives for PCs. Cray's new drive is a solid-state drive, using high-performance memory modules for a total of 224GB of usable space.
As I posted on the news page a while back, a professor at UConn is reportedly building a time machine, which he hopes will be in operation this fall, when they intend to begin experimentatino with this interesting theoretical technology.
For those of you interested in biology, there is woman 8 months pregnant with a cloned human embryo. There's a lot of controversy surrounding this issue, especially because of the moral implications of this rumor.
Now we go up. WAY up. Scientists identified water on the surface of Mars, indicating it would be possible for life to exist there. Now, scientists are reporting that they have found chlorophyll near the Pathfinder landing site. If you failed biology, chlorophyll is the stuff that makes plants green, and is how plants make sugar and oxygen out of water and carbon dioxide (among other things).
This just in - Infinera has produced a photonic chip. This chip uses gated light beams instead of the gated flow of electrons that traditional transistors have used since the 70's. The speed increase provided by these photonic chips could bring computing to a new, faster level where the Athlon will look the way 8-bit chips look to us now.
Sega is producing games for Palm OS platforms, and they are currently available as demos for the rest of the month. if you want them, grab them now, or they will be GONE.
Sony recently announced that the PS2 Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer have been integrated into one chip using 0.13 micron process technology (similar to the process AMD uses for Athlon XP chips). This will supposedly make it possible to produce 3 times the number of PlayStation 2's from now on.
There is a monitor called the Actual Depth monitor, which provides true 3D effects without 3D glasses or using stereograms. TechTV has a scoop on it. It requires a dual-head video card to drive its dual LCD displays.
Squaresoft and Disney have teamed up to produce Kingdom Hearts, and have already released it in Japan. Check out the Opening Movie. It's well worth the 27MB wait. I want this game. More screenshots are available if you're curious.
OK, OK. Last item: The Sacramento Bee has reported that spray-on solar cells are a reality and may be available soon. This will make home solar energy not only feasible, but CHEAP.
OK, my usual disclaimer:
WARNING: Some of these prices may shock you, leave you breathless, make you sick, get out your wallet, or something else dangerous or drastic in some way. The Junkyard is not responsible for your actions.
Notice: I know the tech update was long, but it's about to get longer. there are a lot more memory types available, and as such, i'm adding them to the list.
| Memory (256MB) | |||
| Type | Price | from last week | Retailer |
| PC-100 | $33 | n/a | 1st Choice Memory |
| PC-133 | $32 | n/a | NeutronUSA |
| PC-150 | $52 | n/a | DV Century |
| PC-1600 | $47 | n/a | Neutron USA |
| PC-2100 | $48 | n/a | DV Century |
| PC-2400 | $63 | n/a | AIB |
| PC-2700 | $62 | n/a | Neutron USA |
| PC-3000 | $83 | n/a | OCSystem |
| PC-3200 | $100 | n/a | OCSystem FASTEST DDR AVAILABLE 400MHz |
| PC-800 RDRAM | $60 | n/a | 11CB |
| CPUs | |||
| AMD Athlon XP 2100 | $235 | n/a | EconoPC (price for phone orders) |
| Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz | $565 | n/a | Aacom |
| AMD Duron 1.3GHz | $67 | n/a | EconoPC (price for phone orders) |
| Intel Celeron 1.3GHz | $78 | n/a | Krex Direct |
WARNING: chances are, these CPU prices are for the OEM package. That is the CPU only, no instructions, no stock fan/heatsink. No cool box either. Sorry. That's what you get for saving 20-50% on everything ^_^
| 40GB 7200RPM EIDE Hard Disk Drives (4 choice manufacturers) | |||
| Maxtor | $66 | n/a | House of Computers |
| Seagate | $65 | n/a | USSA |
| IBM | $66 | n/a | House of Computers |
| Western Digital | $67 | n/a | House of Computers |
