Friday, December 16, 2005

Will Apple Computer Eat Intel’s Marketing Apple? Will Apple Promote “Intel Inside”?

11:56 pm | Anton Shilov

Apple Computer has been popular among its fans and only recently users of Wintel computers started to demand Macintosh machines inspired by the iPod music players. In the coming year Apple will launch new computers that are based on processors from Intel Corp. and will be able to put the “Intel Inside” logotype on its machines, advertise them along with the same trade-mark and get additional marketing funds from Intel Corp. The question is whether Apple is going to do this.

For every Intel chip a computer company buys, it gets some cash back, calculated as a percentage of its ad budget. While it may sound as not a lot, for a company that sells many computers this results in significant sums that may be spent on advertising again, which pushes sales up again resulting in higher sums and even more ads. It was Toshiba executives who made reference to the addictive nature of the subsidies, according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices.

Will Apple Computer, which already spends quite a lot on promotion of its products, become a part of Intel’s marketing machine and also advertise Macintosh computers in conjunction with Intel’s brand? Some think that no.

“I have a hard time envisioning a scenario under which it would. The thought of Apple slapping ‘Intel Inside’ emblems on a Powerbook strikes me as so antithetical to the Steve Jobsian sense of aesthetics that it’s laughable,” suggested Businessweek’s columnist Arik Hesseldahl.

• Will Apple Push “Intel Inside”?

Computer Demystifies Mona Lisa? Mona Lisa’s Smile Decoded

11:54 pm | Anton Shilov

For about half of a thousand years scientists and arts critics were trying to guess the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile as well as to find out who she really was. A computer emotion recognition program analyzed the smile and spit some light on this vagueness.

Apparently, Mona Lisa was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, according to the British weekly New Scientist, reports CNN. Still, scientists will probably never know what made her feel the way she did.

The computer software, developed by Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam and researchers at the University of Illinois, examines key facial features, it is reported.

The portrait was painted in Florence, Italy, between 1503 and 1506. Historians have long debated Mona Lisa’s identity, with theories ranging from being Da Vinci’s mother, a self-portrait or a Florentine prostitute.

• Computer Decodes Mona Lisa’s Smile.

ULi’s Latest and Last Chipset for AMD64 Reviewed. ULi M1697 Chipset Performance Investigated

11:53 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

The competition on the market of chipsets for processors by Advanced Micro Devices was not really fierce recently: NVIDIA has been making the highest-performing core-logic solutions for some time now, whereas ATI Technologies took the market by storm with its quality and inexpensive RADEON XPRESS 200-series. Companies like SiS, VIA Technologies and ULi were presented in only a few computers sold. However, recently VIA unveiled its K8T900 and ULi followed with the M1697. Unfortunately, the latter would hardly become popular, as ULi has been acquired by NVIDIA Corp.

ULi Electronics’ M1697 chip features PCI Express x16 bus for graphics cards that is reprogrammable for dual PCI Express x8 lanes operation for applications that require two slots for graphics cards, such as multi-GPU technologies from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp.

AnandTech web-site has taken a look at a new chipset for AMD64 microprocessors from ULi. Although the reviewed sample of the mainboard is a reference one, the author carried out an in-depth investigation to determine what performance and features can be expected in the future from mainboards built around ULi M1697 chipset.

“The natural question today is: how does the ULi M1697 compare to the excellent performance of the NVIDIA nForce4 and the ATI RD480? Since the real competition is the now mainstream NVIDIA nF4 SLI/Ultra and the ATI Rx480 Grouper/Crossfire, we would have to conclude that the ULi 1697 competes very well indeed. The M1697 gives up nothing in performance to the NVIDIA or ATI chipsets,” concludes AnandTech.

“From a features standpoint, the ULI M1697 compares very well against the current best in the Socket 939 market. It provides both HD Audio and SATA2 - something no other discrete AMD chipset currently provides. The SATA2 and IDE both provide excellent performance, and the USB performance is certainly competitive. Based on the low pricing that we have heard about with this M1697 single-chip solution, the feature set is all the more outstanding. The only failing is that 10/100 Ethernet is the only version supported directly by the chipset. The world has moved to Gigabit Ethernet and ULi will quickly find that this will become an issue unless they address Gigabit LAN support in future chipsets. The limitation of 10/100 direct support for Ethernet also has the unfortunate distinction of labeling the M1697 as a budget chipset. That’s really regrettable, since other performance areas are anything but budget,” adds the author.

• AnandTech: First Look at ULi M1697 for AMD Athlon 64.

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