integration

Live from Hot Chips 19: Keynote 2, AMD

This is the eighth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The second keynote here comes from Phil Hester, the chief technical officer at AMD. It's titled "Multicore and Beyond: Evolving the x86 Architecture."

He began by describing the… Read more

Intel ships long-awaited graphics drivers

Owners of PCs with Intel's 965 chipsets can finally download drivers that will immediately improve the performance of games running on those systems.

The 965 chipsets were supposed to be a dramatic step forward for integrated graphics performance. Most PCs come with graphics technology built right onto the chipset that connects the processor to memory and the rest of a PC. Serious gamers opt for discrete graphics made by Nvidia or AMD's ATI division, but most people save a little money and get the basic graphics.

Intel wanted to make an integrated graphics chipset with more powerful graphics … Read more

Another reason to throw stuff out of a perfectly good airplane

The old way is to shove a pallet of beans and bullets tied to a few parachutes out the back of a C-130 Hercules and hope it lands in one piece. The new way is to release the CQ-10A SnowGoose from 18,000 feet and allow the 110-horsepower Rotax 914-driven prop and laptop-programmable navigation system to land the payload within 50 meters of a customer up to 500 miles away.

Manufactured by Canadian company Mist Mobility Integrated Systems Technology, the SnowGoose represents the latest in a class of guided parafoil systems that are blurring the line between unmanned aerial vehicles (… Read more

Mog sheds beta status, launches Mog TV

Mog, the music recommendation tool and social network left beta this morning and launched a new video channel called Mog TV. The video service scans your music library and offers YouTube music videos that it thinks you'll like. There's also a kitschy feature called "The Magic Button" that can randomly bring up content related to your musical tastes. The button has been placed site-wide, and can be found on user profiles, Mog TV, and artist pages. The only bummer here is the need to install the Mog-o-matic software on your machine for access to personalized recommendations, … Read more

Yahoo opens Yahoo Mail APIs, invites mash-ups

Yahoo on Wednesday plans to open up the APIs to Yahoo Mail, inviting outside Web developers to build mash-up applications with its mail service.

One application that Yahoo will make available creates a link between Flickr and Yahoo Mail. The service looks at the subject line of an e-mail and searches Flickr for photos related to that word, such as "party."

The company envisions a whole list of applications that can be built using mail.

For example, people can find ways to access e-mail from different mobile clients or to combine social networking features and multimedia with mail, … Read more

Big Brother one step closer to floating eye in the sky

The U.S. government wants to build and deploy a huge stratospheric airship, three times the size of the Goodyear blimp, that is capable of spying on an entire city.

The idea is that the blimp, dubbed the "Integrated Sensor is Structure" (ISIS), would hover above the jet stream at 70,000 feet and use its giant, flexible radar antennae to acquire a "dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy." And we thought surveillance satellites were sitting ducks.

One of the challenges has been to come up … Read more