Crave

Really loud doesn't hurt your ears when the system is up to snuff

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I recently returned to the $6 million Kipnis Studio Standard for an afternoon of listening. Mostly to music and a bit of home theater fun, but the uber system's effortless power is what really blew me away. I was listening to the 11,315 watt system turned up nice and loud, but I had no idea how loud. Luckily, Jeremy Kipnis had a sound pressure level meter handy, so I took a reading, 105 decibels. Whoa, that's really loud, but the sound was so clean it didn't hurt. Bear in mind I'm no fan of loud movie theaters or concerts--in fact I always wear hearing protection when I hear music or movies in public. But here with the KSS loud wasn't a problem. I turned up the volume louder and louder, just to see how it would feel, and the sound just got better and better. If the goal of "good sound" is to reproduce music at the same volume as it would be in real life, you need a lot of power.

How many watts do you need?

Intel has hit a milestone of 10 million quad-core processors shipped. But this time Advanced Micro Devices--with the worst apparently behind it--appears ready to respond. The No. 2 processor manufacturer is about to add Sun Microsystems and IBM to its quad-core customer list.

Intel quad-core 7300 series processor

(Credit: Intel)

Intel has shipped more than 10 million quad-core processors to date, including more than 3.5 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2008, according to market researcher Mercury Research. "Intel's 10 million unit milestone reflects the benefits (of) the rapid move to 45nm (manufacturing), allowing quad-core processors to become much more prevalent in the company's high performance product mix," said Dean McCarron, founder and principal analyst of Mercury Research in a statement.

But the days of Intel having large quad-core market segments virtually to itself are over. Hewlett-Packard and Dell now offer servers with AMD's "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processor.

And server giants Sun Microsystems and IBM are next. Both companies said they are getting set to ship Barcelona-based servers, according to company spokespeople. Sun Microsystems said it will ship systems in May and IBM said systems will appear "this summer."

AMD has long claimed that its quad-core chip has advantages over Intel because of a built-in memory controller--for better memory sharing across many processors--and strong floating point performance. These are the very reasons the Texas Advanced Computing Center selected AMD's quad-core Barcelona processors for its supercomputer that will house more than 60,000 processors when it's completed.

That said, AMD has a lot of catching up to do. Though the company said in its first-quarter 2008 earnings conference call that it shipped more than half a million quad-core processors in that quarter (about 100,000 more than the fourth quarter of 2007), eight months have past since Barcelona was introduced (September, 2007). And until recently the only takers of quad-core Barcelona chips had been select high-performance computing (HPC) customers such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Mainstream server vendors had put off Barcelona deployment because of the now-infamous "TLB" processor bug, among other issues. Phenom quad-core processors, on the other hand, have been shipping to system builders for a few months.

The problem is that Intel has pulled way ahead of AMD in the interim. "Intel is a full (manufacturing) process generation ahead," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at CRT Capital Group. A growing percentage of Intel processors shipped to customers are built on the 45-nanometer (nm) processor while AMD is shipping 65nm chips. AMD is slated to shift to 45nm at the end of this year.

(Credit: Crave UK)

Good news for fans of Creative--and big numbers--as the company has announced that it has shipped 25 million portable music players. In recent times Creative has given us such gems as the Zen Stone, which impressively challenged the iPod shuffle in both price and sound quality. The Zen Stone Plus, built on it by adding a tiny screen and various other perks.

Its most recent player, the Zen, impressed us with its awesome sound quality, SDHC support, a 16GB capacity option and superb video playback.

To put the announcement in perspective however, Apple, the portable music player market leader announced earlier this year it had sold over 100 million iPods.

Sim Wong Hoo, Creative chairman and CEO, said in a statement, "We believe that we now have our strongest line-up of MP3 and portable media players ever," and that "shipment of 25 million MP3 players marks a major milestone."

But what's next for the company? How can it close the 75 million gap on Apple?

Well, Apple has the hugely capacious iPod classic, which boasts 160GB of storage. We'd love to see a hard-disk version of the Zen, though we doubt this will surface. Creative's inclusion of SDHC support is certainly its answer to higher capacity demands, and with 16GB SDHC cards on the horizon, we understand the reasoning.

Apple acknowledged with the iPod touch that people want big ol' screens on their portable devices, and wireless connectivity too. Will Creative's next 25 million players include touch-sensitive, wireless-enabled Zens? We sure hope so.

(Source: Crave UK)

(Credit: Newell Coach)

If you haven't watched MTV in awhile, your idea of luxury RVs may be a little outdated. And even if you have, there's a good chance that a lot of rock stars don't have it this good.

This mini-mansion on wheels is built by Newell Coach with the help of Porsche Engineering, a feat made possible by a C15 Caterpillar engine and a 10-speed transmission, according to Luxurylaunches. But it's the interior of the satellite-equipped P2000i that's most impressive, looking more like a seagoing luxury liner than anything that could fit on the road, with an LCD or plasma TV in every portion and compartment of the 45-foot-long vehicle (including the dashboard).

Perhaps most surprising is that as many as 40 of these monsters--which take 10 months each to build--are produced each year, at more than $1 million apiece. Apparently, John Madden has some serious competition.

(Credit: MacDaddy's Fishing Lures)

With the sport of fishing becoming increasingly high-tech, there are new gadgets coming on the market all the time. This isn't one of them. Will that stop us from posting about it? Of course not.

That's because we simply must share this "Million Dollar Lure" just to purge it from our system, in a combination of awe and disgust. It's the ultimate creation of an outfit called MacDaddy's Fishing Lures ("We Put the Bling in Your String!"): The foot-long "lure" comprises 3 pounds of platinum and gold festooned with 4,753 diamonds and rubies, according to Lussorian--that's more than 100 carats of precious rock. It's certainly one way to class up the "Bass Fishing Wii."

It seems like only yesterday that Apple had sold its first 270,000 iPhones--not a bad tally for just a little bit more than the first day on the market.

(Credit: Apple)

Monday morning, a little more than two months after the much-lusted-after gadget went on sale, Apple said in a brief press release that it had sold its 1 millionth iPhone.

"One million iPhones in 74 days," Apple CEO Steve Jobs exulted in a press release. "It took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod."

Last week, Jobs unveiled the new iPod Touch, which mimics the look and behavior of the iPhone. He also ran into a buzzsaw of criticism by cutting the price of the iPhone by $200 so soon after long lines of early adopters plopped down a big chunk of change to be the first on the block with the gadget.

The price cut--the 8GB model now costs $399--is intended to boost sales of the iPhone during the upcoming holiday sales season. Two days after announcing the new pricing, Jobs offered an apology to the first wave of buyers, along with a $100 store credit.

"We can't wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season," Jobs said in Monday's press release.

Just how many hands the iPhone actually is in at this point is a little unclear, Apple's ballyhooing of 1 million sold notwithstanding. If Apple sold 270,000 or so in the waning hours of June, as it claimed, and then 220,000 in July, as market research iSuppli reported last week, that's 490,000 units. Which means the company would have needed a sales surge of more than a half-million iPhones in the six weeks or so since August 1.

Where can you find some primo vintage desert footwear, a discussion of probability algorithms, and a solar-powered robotics operation? Why, it's Crave's slideshow of 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge entrants!

For more on DARPA Challenge teams, click on the image

(Credit: A Bunch of Dropouts)

DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge was a 132-mile Nevada desert race of autonomous vehicles. This year's Challenge is focused on urban operations--navigating a four-way intersection, performing pretty involved street driving moves--all without a human operator. How much time, manpower, equipment, research and programming does it take to teach a car how to drive itself? Read the story.

Seriously though, check out the boots on that dude from the Arizona team. They're hotter than a scorpion on an overclocked processor.

(Credit: HigherFi)

For some time now, we've been playing a little game to see how high speaker prices would go. Most have come in around the level of the "Vivid Audio B1 Loudspeakers" ($13,500 a pair) or the "Karissima" line ($24,400 each), but some have reached as high as the $140,000 or $150,000 (the "Muon" and "La Sphere," respectively).

Chump change.

Meet the "Grand Enigma," a set that tops a list of "the world's most expensive speakers" compiled by HigherFi. The price? A cool $1 million.

Shiny Shiny notes that speakers, made by Netherlands-based Kharma, comprise the only set of its kind ever made, so no need to hunt around for order information. But there's another set from Wisdom Audio that's a steal at $600,000.

The 'official' photo

(Credit: Luxurylaunches)

The plot thickens. Last month, we mentioned a mysterious "$1 million laptop about which precious little was known. That's still the case, but a few more tantalizing (and still unconfirmed) details are slowly emerging.

Luxurylaunches claims to have the first "official" photo of the laptop from Luvaglio, the namesake company of entrepreneur Rohan Sinclair Luvaglio, and describes it thusly: "The laptop combines intelligent gadgetry with state of the art technology, such as solid-state storage, Blu-ray, built-in USB memory stick and MP3 player, integrated screen cleaning and functional jewelry. The laptop will be finished to the owner's choice of precious metals, leathers and real woods."

The handmade computer, which is scheduled for release this summer, is supposedly fully upgradeable. That's good news, because we wouldn't want to shell out another million just for more memory.