Slashdot Mirror

I suspect the reason the VII was released is, AMD got a good price on HBM2 from Hynix. Well below the price touted int recent Fudzilla article which is the same as the price they quoted in May 2017. There is no way that HBM2 prices didn't come down in the intervening 20 months.

I suspect the reason the VII was released is, AMD got a good price on HBM2 from Hynix. Well below the price touted int recent Fudzilla article which is the same as the price they quoted in May 2017. There is no way that HBM2 prices didn't come down in the intervening 20 months.

I had a interview with 3DFX in 1997. The interview with the QA manager went as expected, but fell apart when I got interviewed by the PR manager. If you ever read the Dilbert comics, a hardware company run by the marketing department was doomed to fail. I declined the job. A few years later, they decided to compete with their own customers by manufacturing their own video cards. Not surprisingly, they filed for bankruptcy in the dot com bust.

I also had an interview with Nvidia in 1997. That lasted four hours as a dozen engineers interviewed me. I didn't get the job. Not surprisingly, they're still around.

And of course Nvidia ended up hiring about 100 of the engineers from 3DFX after the company went bust...

http://fudzilla.com/news/graph...

That included Gary Tarolli (one of the 3dfx founders), Emmett Kilgariff (head of Rampage), and Brian Kelleher (Vp Engineering) ...

Last I heard there were no plans for a new FX chip.

It's a little unclear if it'll be part of the FX lineup, but apparently AMD will be releasing a new line of CPUs next year under the codename Zen. The core count will go up to 16, so it sounds like it'll definitely be a spiritual successor to the FX line, even if it's not part of it. (That is, it could actually be competitive against an i7.)

Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/p...

Nearly all AMD CPU/APU's support ECC memory, you just need the right Mother Board... ASUS bios's have consistently supported AMD/ECC memory combinations for many years.

Not long ago, I configured a number of Phenom II X6 1045t and FX-8320 systems with 8-16GB of ECC memory on ASUS M4A88T-M and M5A78L-M motherboards. This link indicates the Zen series will support 4 channel ECC/DDR4.

TSMC has already produced test wafers on 10nm and plan to enter volume production in 2016
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/p...

No, they are talking about MediaTek's new 8 core SoC: http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32068-mediatek-unveils-first-real-eight-core-soc
It's not big.LITTLE. It's eight ARM Cortex A7s.
Qualcomm is right. 8 core is stupid. In fact, 4 core is also stupid, for the same reasons. The only reason 4 core exists is marketing.

The server market, usually Linux-based, appears to be AMD's most stable market.

Servers are a market that AMD has been losing for years now.

AMD stole over 20% market share from Intel while they were fucking around with the Pentium 4 disaster, and they've been losing it ever since the release of Conroe. Nehalem with high-scaling QPI interconnect was the last nail in the coffin - AMD's server share has been in free-fall since then.

2010: 7% server market share!

This year: 5.5% server market share

Like the first linked article stated, AMD bet the farm on Bulldozer, and it's killing them. There's no way in hell AMD can reverse this trend with their existing silicon - that's already been made clear. So they're cutting to stay afloat, while they slowly rot from lack of innovation.

It'll be HP all over again, and that makes me sad.

For all the lack of "hype" (I'd agree with you in North America, at least) they still seem to have sold out, and according to Fudzilla Nintendo will be hard pressed to keep up with demand. So ... how much advertising and marketing do you throw out there when you can't even keep up, as is? Kind of like throwing money away. That being said I've seen a lot about Zombi U, Nintendo Land, and some Nintendo Mario game? The major attribute that Nintendo has going for it (outside of the current large Wii audience looking for an upgrade) is that they bring about change (this time the tablet) that they put into ALL units, so there is hardware consistency. Sorry Sony, but a PS3 and PS Vita combination aren't the same; developers can't count on that hardware combination being available in all cases.

Tegra 2 was obsolete due to its lack of NEON instructions for its entire lifetime, it just wasn't always as obvious as this.

I am not an expert on mobile hardware, but the fact that this VLC version requires NEON seems to strengthen what a guy i know( who basically is a gadget freak, and owns around a dozen android devices) has been saying all along:

That Tegra and Tegra2 were just scams pulled by nVidia and tablet/phone manufacturers (who loved it because of its dirt-cheap cost ). That this lack of SIMD NEON support was the reason why even high-end android devices using Tegra like Asus Transformer struggled to play 720p and 1080p video; whereas non-Tegra devices like Samsung SII and even the oldest iPads -which supported NEON- had no problem doing so.

They have problems delivering 28nm right now so take the 20nm predictions with a pinch of salt. "However, the transition to 28nm does not appear to be going smoothly. ARM heavyweight Qualcomm was the first to introduce a 28nm design, the stunning Snapdragon S4 based on its Krait core. But the outfit is now struggling to meet demand for S4 chips and it is basically becoming a victim of its own success. Other ARM players, such as TI, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple, have yet to introduce a single 28nm part." -- http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/27414-arm-hopes-to-see-20nm-processors-next-year

Apple doesn't play too lose with marketing statistics?

Apple plays loose with everything else, why should they not play loose with benchmarks?

And indeed, I find Apple's claim that their two core ARM outperforms nVidia's 4 core ARM with Apple's chip running at a lower clock on a cruder process, difficult to swallow. Impossible even. But much in keeping with Apple's general attitude towards honesty these days.

OK Apple astroturfer shills, have at.

Looks like you Apple Astroturfers are right on top of things.

Apple Astroturfers still out and about. Apple descends further into moral decrepitude

Apple doesn't play too lose with marketing statistics?

Apple plays loose with everything else, why should they not play loose with benchmarks?

And indeed, I find Apple's claim that their two core ARM outperforms nVidia's 4 core ARM with Apple's chip running at a lower clock on a cruder process, difficult to swallow. Impossible even. But much in keeping with Apple's general attitude towards honesty these days.

OK Apple astroturfer shills, have at.

Looks like you Apple Astroturfers are right on top of things.

Apple doesn't play too lose with marketing statistics?

Apple plays loose with everything else, why should they not play loose with benchmarks?

And indeed, I find Apple's claim that their two core ARM outperforms nVidia's 4 core ARM with Apple's chip running at a lower clock on a cruder process, difficult to swallow. Impossible even. But much in keeping with Apple's general attitude towards honesty these days.

OK Apple astroturfer shills, have at.

In amongst the ITC court papers in the recent HTC versus Apple spat is an argument which claims that Andy Rubin got inspiration for Android framework while working at Apple, hence infringing an Apple API patent.

This means that Android started at Apple, just by virtue of the fact that one of its former employees happened to have invented it. If this logic was applied, it would mean that it did not matter where an employee worked in their life all their inventions would be legally owned by the first company they worked for.

Any chance Apple could use that for the next versions of Mac mini and MacBooks? Or is a Core 2 Duo with nVidia 320M still better than Fusion?

... according to Fudzilla.com

http://www.fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/20888-amd-apple-deal-is-28nm-notebooks

"Fusion goes Apple 28 / 32nm It all started here, when AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Sales Officer Emilio Ghilardi was brave enough to show an image of several Apple products in a Fusion presentation. After we wrote our part AMD was quick to deny it, perhaps a bit too quick, which gave us a reason to dig some more, only to find that we were on the right track.

We asked around and some sources close to Intel / Nvidia have denied the rumour saying that they know nothing about it. However, just a day later we managed to confirm that the leak is real and that Apple will indeed use Fusion, here.

Our industry sources have indicated that the deal will be announced in at some point 2011, that it will involve 28nm and 32nm Fusion parts particularly Krishna and that Apple plans to launch notebooks based on AMD chips. Apple is also not cold hearted on Trinity 32nm Fusion parts.

The announcement can be as far as a year away, as 28nm parts won't materialise until the second half of 2011 and since AMD doesn’t have a tablet chip, it won’t happen in iPad segment. At this point Apple doesn’t plan to use any AMD chips in desktop or server parts, but in case Bulldozer impresses us all, maybe Steve might change his mind.

So if you like Apple and love AMD, start saving money as roughly a year from now you should be able to buy Apple notebook with Fusion Krishna / Trinity class APU."

And if you want Fusion benchmarks, check the usual suspects: http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked

Invest that savings into AMD Stock and when the additions happen enjoy the ride. Apple will never use Intel or AMD in their embedded devices [iPhone, iPod, iPads] as their A# ARM based CPU/GPU combo they can control and develop with incredibly high ROI.

Any chance Apple could use that for the next versions of Mac mini and MacBooks? Or is a Core 2 Duo with nVidia 320M still better than Fusion?

... according to Fudzilla.com

http://www.fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/20888-amd-apple-deal-is-28nm-notebooks

"Fusion goes Apple 28 / 32nm
It all started here, when AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Sales Officer Emilio Ghilardi was brave enough to show an image of several Apple products in a Fusion presentation. After we wrote our part AMD was quick to deny it, perhaps a bit too quick, which gave us a reason to dig some more, only to find that we were on the right track.

We asked around and some sources close to Intel / Nvidia have denied the rumour saying that they know nothing about it. However, just a day later we managed to confirm that the leak is real and that Apple will indeed use Fusion, here.

Our industry sources have indicated that the deal will be announced in at some point 2011, that it will involve 28nm and 32nm Fusion parts particularly Krishna and that Apple plans to launch notebooks based on AMD chips. Apple is also not cold hearted on Trinity 32nm Fusion parts.

The announcement can be as far as a year away, as 28nm parts won't materialise until the second half of 2011 and since AMD doesn’t have a tablet chip, it won’t happen in iPad segment. At this point Apple doesn’t plan to use any AMD chips in desktop or server parts, but in case Bulldozer impresses us all, maybe Steve might change his mind.

So if you like Apple and love AMD, start saving money as roughly a year from now you should be able to buy Apple notebook with Fusion Krishna / Trinity class APU."

And if you want Fusion benchmarks, check the usual suspects:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked

AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can move faster than people think

I disagree. It seems CPUs and GPUs are designed and planned well ahead of time. Tapeout occurs many months before products hit the market. Intel's Sandy Bridge apparently taped out in June 2009 and won't be released until 2011. Yonah taped out in October 2004 but wasn't released until January 2006. If it appears that these companies are responding quickly with new, competitive designs, it's because they correctly predicted the market direction and planned accordingly.

The companies can only really move fast in adjusting pricing, marketing, availability, and SKUs.

According to this, the original Toy Story needed about 7 TFLOPS to render in real time, although I've seen higher estimates.

87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor 100-MHz SPARCstation 20s took 46 days to do ~75 minutes, so you need to be 883.2 times as fast to render in realtime. Anyone overclock a quadcore processor to 8 GHz? I suppose setup with 4 quadcore cpus @ 2GHz isn't out of reach.

But then again, the machines might have been IO bound instead of CPU bound, needing to send 7.7 gigabytes per second.

TBH I stopped caring about Javascript benchmarks (and benchmarks in general, really) when I realized you can pick benchmarks that happen to reflect the result you want to "prove".

For example, someone else linked to this benchmark (Futuremark's Peacekeeper) which puts Firefox 3.6 solidly ahead of Chrome.

Honest question: are Sunspider and V8 better than Peacekeeper? What real-world scenarios are reflected by which benchmarks? If I want a benchmark that reflects performance relevant to my normal usage, which benchmark should I rely on? If you don't know, how would I find out? ("Read the benchmark code yourself" is not helpful.)

Honest question: besides Google Docs, what real-world scenario actually needs super-fast Javascript performance? For most use cases I can think of, we're not talking about noticeable delays...

Firefox 3.6 does beat the newest Chrome on some Javascript benchmarks (and Chrome beats Firefox on others). I think it's safe to say they're in the same ballpark. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17199/1/

Grudge or not, at least this time it appears that he got the mockup thing right. Meanwhile, if you feel the need to attack the messenger to discredit the message (are you even able to refute the accusations?) then it says more about you than about the messenger.

The reason he bothered to correct the summary so well was because the summary spent so much time screaming "OMG WOOD SCREWZ!!!"

Also, you are correct: claiming that what was pictured is a working board would be a total lie. As such, the article's author really shouldn't be stating that nvidia claimed that item was a working board, since they had another term for it: "mockup."

In short, the author has an axe to grind with nvidia, and is looking for anything he can to make them look bad. In this case, making shit up. :)

P.S. Stolen from another post in this thread: Fudzilla

It's fake. You can't cut a slice out of a graphics card and expect it to work. Second source confirming it's fake, unless you want to add Fuad Abazovic to the list of people who want to see nVidia fail for no particular reason.

And yet, you still make excuses for them? Any other company would get slaughtered in the press for such an obvious stunt...

Little update found on this article: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15798/34/

Mentioned here as well:

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15240/1/

P57 is gone from the road-maps.

... PS3 Slim won't run PS2 discs

I think this is a more practical thing to be concerned about, at least for some of us. I thought about buying a PS3, even though it's unlikely I'd buy many games at first, because looking forward it seemed to make sense. But heck, my daughter still plays a number of PS2 games on a regular basis - so nope, we're not getting a PS3 for a while.

I don't understand why console makers can't grasp that we don't want to keep connecting more and more devices concurrently to our televisions, or having said devices taking up more and more room under/around them...

Are you surprised given that Sony has acknowledged it will sell the PS3 slim at a loss?

So yes, they've changed their strategy to boost sales of the new PS3 by selling at a loss and intending to make up the money on game sales. How many people will buy several of these and never play games on them? Probably not too many, but where do you draw the line?

Stop acting like a kid who can't get what he wants.

... PS3 Slim won't run PS2 discs

Fudzilla claims these 40 watts we're talking about translate into a 60W TDP though.

They could sell the device for $1 with service contract thus guaranteeing internet connectivity.

If you do happen to have a AGP slot in the machine, Gigabyte is selling a HD 4650

Here is what you want: Atom 330 + ION + PCI-E/16

http://www.techpowerup.com/93687/Point_of_View_Releases_its_First_NVIDIA_ION_Mainboards.html

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13577&Itemid=37

139.00 EUR it says.

Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.

Competitiveness is not a quality of generation number. Still: What statistics have you seen that compare Larrabee and something people use right now (ATI/nVidia)? There is this presentation (PDF) they made at SIGGRAPH, which shows that performance increases as you add more Larrabee cores. Here's a graph which may mean something. The y-axis is "scaled performance" What might that mean?

Graphs show how many 1 GHz Larrabee cores are required to maintain 60 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution in several popular games. Roughly 25 cores are required for Gears of War with no antialiasing, 25 cores for F.E.A.R with 4x antialiasing, and 10 cores for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with 4x antialiasing.

Sounds neat. I guess that's why they're going to promote the 32-core Larrabee. How much will something to run these cost and how much power will it consume? They're still developing this thing, so why do I keep hearing that it will BLOW MY MIND? I have no doubt that Intel has an army of capable engineers that could build something to render graphics great, but if it costs more than the consumer can possibly pay, there's no real point. Intel is gunning for 2 TFLOPs. I'm pretty sure the Radeon HD 4870 passes that mark already (and you can purchase it for less than $500). Sure, it's a cool technology, but I'd like to see some more facts and figures.

What have I heard? Power usage/heat: 300W TDP. That's pretty horrific. Cost: 12-layer PCB. That's twice the typical graphics card and four more than the high-end Radeon and nForce cards. That doesn't directly translate into cost, but generally more complicated equals more expensive.

But back to the PS4 -- Sony's real mistake with the PS3 was expecting the Cell processor to be the most incredible computing device ever. Original plans for the PS3 included 2 Cell processors, but they changed to the RSX when they realized the Cell wasn't capable of rendering graphics like they wanted to (whereas the XBox 360's architecture was designed with the GPU and CPU co-existing from the start). You can't build a bunch of fast parts and stick them together, you have to build a fast system. Perhaps Sony has learned their lesson.

Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.

Competitiveness is not a quality of generation number. Still: What statistics have you seen that compare Larrabee and something people use right now (ATI/nVidia)? There is this presentation (PDF) they made at SIGGRAPH, which shows that performance increases as you add more Larrabee cores. Here's a graph which may mean something. The y-axis is "scaled performance" What might that mean?

Graphs show how many 1 GHz Larrabee cores are required to maintain 60 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution in several popular games. Roughly 25 cores are required for Gears of War with no antialiasing, 25 cores for F.E.A.R with 4x antialiasing, and 10 cores for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with 4x antialiasing.

Sounds neat. I guess that's why they're going to promote the 32-core Larrabee. How much will something to run these cost and how much power will it consume? They're still developing this thing, so why do I keep hearing that it will BLOW MY MIND? I have no doubt that Intel has an army of capable engineers that could build something to render graphics great, but if it costs more than the consumer can possibly pay, there's no real point. Intel is gunning for 2 TFLOPs. I'm pretty sure the Radeon HD 4870 passes that mark already (and you can purchase it for less than $500). Sure, it's a cool technology, but I'd like to see some more facts and figures.

What have I heard? Power usage/heat: 300W TDP. That's pretty horrific. Cost: 12-layer PCB. That's twice the typical graphics card and four more than the high-end Radeon and nForce cards. That doesn't directly translate into cost, but generally more complicated equals more expensive.

But back to the PS4 -- Sony's real mistake with the PS3 was expecting the Cell processor to be the most incredible computing device ever. Original plans for the PS3 included 2 Cell processors, but they changed to the RSX when they realized the Cell wasn't capable of rendering graphics like they wanted to (whereas the XBox 360's architecture was designed with the GPU and CPU co-existing from the start). You can't build a bunch of fast parts and stick them together, you have to build a fast system. Perhaps Sony has learned their lesson.

Really? I've found them to be fairly close in benchmarks I've read, with the Nvidia cards generally holding the edge. (Primarily comparing gtx 260 vs 4870) Can you show me any benchmarks within the last month or so that would possibly change my mind?

Techgage - GTX 260-216 vs 4870
Hexus - GTX 260-216 vs 4870

The GTX 295 looks like it will dominate the 4870x2 once it's released (supposedly in January)

xtreview - GTX 295 vs 4870x2
Fudzilla - GTX 295 vs 4870x2

According to this, All Five of M$'s Divisions Lost Money Last Quarter. FUDZilla says 17% will get the exe. M$ has screwed the pooch. They've been playing Slog games instead of making things people want. This failure would not have happened to a nicer company. Good riddance.

Nice trick doing this to a laptop mobo, but LN2 cooling is hardly novel. Xtreme Systems has had a forum dedicated to LN2 cooling for years, and guys there are doing it everyday.

Interestingly, the site owner did an overclocking demo for Intel. I guess Intel can't say they are anti-overclocking anymore.

That forum will answer all of your questions. Frankly, LN2 suicide runs are fun, but I am more impressed with phase change systems that can run 24/7 like mine. :D

You can't get a Core 2 CPU to run at 5Ghz no matter how hard you try.

Given that the Nehalem is reaching the same speeds or higher on air-cooling, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel could match 6 GHz under liquid nitrogen cooled conditions.

The 4870 will be $350, not $450. And at that price Nvidia is going to have a hard time convincing me to buy a GTX 280, even if it does turn out to be marginally faster.

Lets see how the reviews of the 4800 series pan out.

"While direct performance comparisons are still missing"... you can get the indirect ones for now.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6932&Itemid=1

No, as far as I can see, the article doesn't state what processor the machine will have, the summary is the only thing that says the processor will be dual core. And I'd bet that the summary is wrong, I'm under the impression from other articles that it will include the Atom 230, which is single core. Especially since the dual-core version, the Atom 330, isn't supposed to be out until Q3 2008.
Although the Atom does include HyperThreading to compensate for its lack of out of order execution, thus explaining why some people might think the solo core Atom really has two cores.

Except that the audio takes up very little space compared to the video, and the encoding formats have changed to codecs that are way more efficient (many times smaller for similar quality). Early Blu-ray releases were still in MPEG2, but about 2/3 of the BR discs out there now use H.264 or VC-1, and that number's only going to get larger. Almost none of the HD-DVD discs use MPEG2.

Some sample numbers here.

I posted this as a Reply above, but thought it would be beneficial to those who don't want to dig down on links... This is my alternative for an iPod and even an iPhone :) Enjoy! Before I get on with the Nokia N800, I'll give a little feedback on Apples latest move. Sounds like a Sony Mini Disc/Sony Connect store move to me. If you don't know what I mean by that then here's a quick run down. With Sony's Mini Disc you can only move songs you have ripped or purchased to the one device from the one original computer. You can not move songs from that same computer to another device, or move the songs from that one device to another computer. On top of that, you have to use Sony's software in order to do so. Anything else added to it not using Sony software was used as mass storage and unrecognized by the firmware. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what it sounds like Apple is trying to do per: http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3059&Itemid=1 . While it may not be the exact same (I don't know as I don't own a new iPod. I have an old one, but haven't used it for a bit as I have my PSP and N800 that can do the same and more). In case you are wondering how things turned out for Sony... They will be closing the Sony Connect store by end of this year, or beginning of next year (granted they never got as big as Apple has with the iPod, and the Mini Disk never caught on, but I think it goes to say that people like freedom to do what they want with what they purchased). All of Sony's new players now feature full support for MP3 ;) On to my reply... I considered an iPhone, but then came across the N800. I was sold in a second with the interface, flexibility of what you can do with it, software and hardware, the design, features, etc. It is my all in one now :) I use it for GPS, Music, Movies, Casual Games, Internet, Planning, Organizing, Phone (whenever I'm at a hot spot, which is almost always. Just in case, I leave a Pay as you go phone in the car console.), Chatting, Carman (via Bluetooth I can diagnose my car if a Warning light comes on), and the list goes on. While this is not a dedicated media player, it is a UMPC that is almost the size of an iPod. The casing is made of aluminum and is black on bottom, silver on top. It also includes a built in adjustable stand that forms to the body for watching movies, browsing the internet etc. There is an app. called Canola that has a beautiful and simple interface for your movies, music, and photos. I picked mine up from Dell, but they also sell them in CompUSA (if you're in the U.S., check out Nokia's official website for other countries). Cost = $399.00, if you don't want to spend that, you can pick up the predecessor called the Nokia 770 for $130-150 (Here's a pic of my buddies 770 running the latest version of Maemo on it: http://troseph.homelinux.com/Site/Blog/0FA20D29-A1B4-4E63-9E72-3194689DF333.html) The background and theme that is on there is the default theme, and you can change the theme and background. Specs (curtsey of Wikipedia and the back of the box. Check out the pic. displayed, that's my N800 posted :) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N800 - OS: Slimmed down version of Debian Linux that runs NATIVELY on the system called Maemo (www.maemo.org). - Browser is Opera and there is a Firefox browser available called MicroB. Web pages are viewed at full width without scrolling (for most pages anyways), due to the beautiful resolution. As a note, the screen looks as good as my PSP slim IMO. - The N800 supports Flash 9 and Skype internet calls as of July 6, 2007, which allows users to better browse YouTube videos, and play online flash games, as well as making free internet calls to other Skyp

Before I get on with the Nokia N800, I'll give a little feedback on Apples latest move. Sounds like a Sony Mini Disc/Sony Connect store move to me. If you don't know what I mean by that then here's a quick run down. With Sony's Mini Disc you can only move songs you have ripped or purchased to the one device from the one original computer. You can not move songs from that same computer to another device, or move the songs from that one device to another computer. On top of that, you have to use Sony's software in order to do so. Anything else added to it not using Sony software was used as mass storage and unrecognized by the firmware. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what it sounds like Apple is trying to do per: http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3059&Itemid=1 . While it may not be the exact same (I don't know as I don't own a new iPod. I have an old one, but haven't used it for a bit as I have my PSP and N800 that can do the same and more). In case you are wondering how things turned out for Sony... They will be closing the Sony Connect store by end of this year, or beginning of next year (granted they never got as big as Apple has with the iPod, and the Mini Disk never caught on, but I think it goes to say that people like freedom to do what they want with what they purchased). All of Sony's new players now feature full support for MP3 ;)

On to my reply... I considered an iPhone, but then came across the N800. I was sold in a second with the interface, flexibility of what you can do with it, software and hardware, the design, features, etc. It is my all in one now :) I use it for GPS, Music, Movies, Casual Games, Internet, Planning, Organizing, Phone (whenever I'm at a hot spot, which is almost always. Just in case, I leave a Pay as you go phone in the car console.), Chatting, Carman (via Bluetooth I can diagnose my car if a Warning light comes on), and the list goes on.

While this is not a dedicated media player, it is a UMPC that is almost the size of an iPod. The casing is made of aluminum and is black on bottom, silver on top. It also includes a built in adjustable stand that forms to the body for watching movies, browsing the internet etc. There is an app. called Canola that has a beautiful and simple interface for your movies, music, and photos. I picked mine up from Dell, but they also sell them in CompUSA (if you're in the U.S., check out Nokia's official website for other countries). Cost = $399.00, if you don't want to spend that, you can pick up the predecessor called the Nokia 770 for $130-150 (Here's a pic of my buddies 770 running the latest version of Maemo on it: http://troseph.homelinux.com/Site/Blog/0FA20D29-A1B4-4E63-9E72-3194689DF333.html) The background and theme that is on there is the default theme, and you can change the theme and background. Specs (curtsey of Wikipedia and the back of the box. Check out the pic. displayed, that's my N800 posted :) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N800 -

OS: Slimmed down version of Debian Linux that runs NATIVELY on the system called Maemo (www.maemo.org).
- Browser is Opera and there is a Firefox browser available called MicroB. Web pages are viewed at full width without scrolling (for most pages anyways), due to the beautiful resolution. As a note, the screen looks as good as my PSP slim IMO.
- The N800 supports Flash 9 and Skype internet calls as of July 6, 2007, which allows users to better browse YouTube videos, and
play online flash games, as well as making free internet calls to other Skype-enabled devices.

Input: 4.1 inches (widescreen), 800x480 at 224dpi resolution, touch screen interface

Connectivity: IEEE 802.11 b/

...but who is going to back up AMD? AMD asks for 1.5 billion