New and Noteworthy: Apple Q1 revenue: .7 billion; Dual-core: Popularized, but not invented by Intel

Apple posts revenue of $5.7 billion On stage at his keynote address this morning, CEO Steve Jobs said Apple's sales for the fiscal first quarter hit $5.7 billion - above the $5.04 billion average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call. MarketWatch reports "The company's shares rose as much as 7% on the news on heavy volume, touching a new high of $81.89 in afternoon trading. The stock has risen more than 130% during the last 12 months. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple sold 14 million iPods and 1.25 million Macintosh computers during the three-month period, helping the company's retail stores record sales of $1 billion, Jobs said." Full fiscal results are due on January 18th. More.

Dual-core: Popularized, but not invented by Intel An ExtremeTech article says that the new marketing mania for multicore is the latest example of the belated recognition for a CPU design methodology that already existed before it was popularized by Intel and AMD. "Many people use the term, multicore, in a way that presumes there is a clear, concise definition of what this means. In fact, if there is any mainstream controversy, it's more related to the question of whether the CPU cores need to physically reside on a single piece of silicon within the CPU package. [...] Far from being the first multicore CPUs, x86 processors are rather late to the party and able to benefit from the industry's experience with embedded processors. [...] In fact, IBM makes the claim that their Power4 microprocessor was the first dual-core CPU and was available in the year 2000." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Reliability of refurbished Macs (#2): Most have no problems; Getting AppleCare; Hidden benefits (extra RAM, etc.)
• Tutorial: Preferences Files: The Complete Story (Part IV)

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