News Bits: Ferrari 3400 Announced, Intel 3.8GHz Chip, Microsoft High, 2004 PC Sales Forecast Cut

Acer Ferrari 3400 64-bit Notebook Announced for U.S. Availability

Acer America Corporation,has announced the Ferrari 3400 availability for the U.S. market. The Ferrari 3400is based on the latest Mobile AMD Athlon(TM) 64 processor 3000+ for thin and light notebooks, and harnesses AMD's exclusive AMD64 technology.

"In most markets a high performance exclusive product that is accessible to mainstream consumers is virtually impossible to create," said Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. "Acer, AMD and Ferrari continue to showcase that in the laptop market this unique combination, while far from common, is possible. This is what makes the Ferrari 3400 such a fantastic system and one of my own personal favorite laptop products."

The Ferrari 3400 is another notebook designed by Acer to feature the world's most advanced components in a captivatingly unique design. The 64-bit architecture delivers leading-edge power and provides a taste of the performance gains promised by future 64-bit applications. In addition, the AMD PowerNow!(TM) technology extends system battery life while HyperTransport(TM) technology radically improves overall performance. This newest Ferrari notebook from Acer also features an optional port replicator for increased efficiencies and suitability in corporate environments.

The Ferrari 3400 from Acer is an elegant, slim and lightweight chassis in grey and Ferrari red encases the most advanced technology available for today's mobile users. Acer's newest notebook is a full-featured, thin and light notebook with a brilliant, 200nit 15" SXGA+ (1400 x 1050) TFT display, 512MB of DDR333 SDRAM upgradeable to 2GB system memory and an ATI(R) MOBILITY(TM) RADEON(TM) 9700 graphics card with 128MB DDR video memory. In addition to wireless 802.11g, the Ferrari 3400 offers four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire(R) (IEEE 1394) port, FIR (fast infrared), Giga LAN connection, 56K V.92 modem, S-video output and Bluetooth(TM) support.

Acer Ferrari 3400: http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/fr3400.htm

Intel Hits the Wall with Speed, Pentium 4 3.8GHz Chip Release Marks the End of the Road for Faster Processor Clock Speeds

Thump!

That's the noise generated by Intel's announcement today that their Pentium 4 570 3.8GHz processor is now available. Why a "Thump" you ask? Because Intel axed its plan to release a 4.0GHz Pentium 4 processor, so this is the end of the road in processor clock speed increasesfor now. To improve processor performance in the future, Intel will focus on increasing cache memory and using different techniques such as dual-core processor design as opposed to single core. The 3.8GHz Pentium 4 will be available in the Dell Dimension XPS Desktop and HP Compaq X 5010T Desktop. The P4 3.8GHz will never be seen in a laptop, it simply runs too hot and is too power inefficient to make any sense for use in such a mobile based machine.

So here's to an end of an era and chasing the, seemingly, never elusive faster clockspeed. It was fun while it lasted!

More: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118603,00.asp

Microsoft to Help Build School in Philadelphia and Give all the Kids Laptops

This is kind of an odd story out of the state of Pennsylvania.

Microsoft is helping to fund the building of a $50 million dollar high school in West Philadelphia. Apparently MS will see to it that every student gets a laptop or Tablet PC. The building will be embedded with wireless mobile technology for not only teaching purposes, but also for helping with tasks such as keeping attendance and ordering meals and supplies.

The even stranger thing is that the computers in this school will use Linux and the kids will be taught Java in the introduction to computer science course. Okay, so that's a complete lie on my part(audience laughs).

More: http://www.wnep.com/Global/story.asp?S=2570358

Gartner cuts PC Shipment Forecast for 2004, But Cites Notebooks Selling Better than Desktop Computers

According to Gartner Research, computers are not topping people's wish lists this Christmas. And for this reason they're cutting the growth forecast of total computer sales for the year from 13% to 11.4% increased sales over 2003. However, Gartner does state that much of the growth in the PC market has come from notebook computers, which accounted for much of last quarters growth in shipments of PCs.

more: http://news.com.com/Gartner+cuts+fourth-quarter+PC+forecast/2100-7341_3-5453337.html

Happy Half Life 2 Release Day

Today is 11/16/2004 and that means the much anticipated Half Life 2 PC gameis now available. It only took 6 years for the world to wait for this game since the release of the Original Half Life in 1998. The Half Life of Carbon-14, the element used to estimate fossil ages, is 5,700 years. Let's hope it doesn't take that long for Half Life 3 to be released. But meanwhile let's enjoy what's new now.

Review of Half Life 2 from GameSpot.com: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/halflife2/review.html?q=1?tag=gs_hp_topslot_click

Half Life 2 Price Comparison for Buying: click here for price comparison and where to buy on the web.