Computers-Plus

Intel’s “Sandy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5 server chip launch extravaganza is not just about servers. It also includes some chippery for their forebears: old-fashioned, heavy-duty, desktop machines that are still called workstations.

Intel usually has a variant of its single-socket server processors – in years gone by, the Xeon SP and then the Xeon 3000 and now the Xeon E3-1200 – geared up for double-duty as processors for single-socket workstations. Last April, when the Sandy Bridge family of chips were first making their way into single-socket laptops, desktops, and servers with the four-core Xeon E3-1200s, all models of the chips could be used in single-socket workstations, particularly the slightly more expensive variants of the Xeon E3s that had Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPUs built in.

That extra GPU pushes the watts on the E3s up to 95 watts, compared to 80 watts without it. The

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I’ve just watched the new trailer to The Avengers, and holy crap it is amazing. The first trailer was good, but this had the hairs on the back of my neck well and truly standing. The trailer shows off some insane action, and the scope and scale of the movie is shown much better in this trailer. I’m loving that they have crammed so many characters into one movie, something that could’ve only been dreamt of 20 years ago. There are tonnes of tracking shots in the movie, one-liners should be rampant, too. I just love Robert Downey Jr playing Tony Stark. Chris Evans plays Captain America amazingly, too. It’s also good to see the soon-to-be new Bourne playing Hawkeye, too. Read more…

A new English movie channel is making its way to Starhub cable tv. The channel, supposedly should be a Standard 4:3 and a high definition of the same channel is allocated on channels 613 and ch 667. Ch 613 is the standard 4:3 CinemaWorld while Ch 667 is CinemaWorld HD. Both channels goes for S$8/mth.

VIA Technologies today announced the world’s first quad core Mini-ITX boards featuring the latest VIA QuadCore E-Series processor. The VIA EPIA-M900 and VIA EPIA-M910 are the first two Mini-ITX boards to feature the 1.2GHz VIA QuadCore E-Series processor, offering enhanced multi-tasking and superb multimedia performance on the lowest quad core power budget for next generation embedded products.

The first board is the VIA EPIA-M900 and it uses either a 1.2GHz VIA QuadCore E-Series processor or a 1.6GHz dual core VIA Nano X2 E-Series processor. I Read more…