Processor war heats up

After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core Barcelona chip will become generally available in April, but a newly-announced six-core processor developed by rival Intel will force AMD to play catch-up once again, reports PCWorld.

On Monday, Intel said a six-core processor, code-named Dunnington, will be available in the second half of this year. AMD, meanwhile, will ship Barcelona to partners later this month, making it broadly available from resellers sometime in April, AMD VP of commercial business Kevin Knox told Network World this week.

"Barcelona is a step up, but it's really too late," says Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds. "They needed Barcelona in the second half of last year."

Use of the mobile Internet may be in its infancy, but one group is embracing the technology in a big way, according to figures released yesterday, says InformationWeek.

Eighty-five percent of iPhone owners searched the Web for news and information using their slick phones in January, making the device the most popular for accessing online information while on the go, according to M:Metrics.

"The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype," Mark Donovan, senior analyst for M:Metrics, said while releasing the figures. "Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video."

A Federal Government Bill to force Telstra and other Australian telcos to hand over their network secrets has been introduced to Parliament, reports MySmallBusiness.

The government wants telcos to hand over the information so rival companies can effectively compete for the $4.7 billion in government money to build the planned fibre-to-the-node high-speed broadband network.

Some telcos have agreed to hand over the information voluntarily but others, including Telstra, have expressed reservations.

This is the day that all PC gamers dread. The graphics card they just sank a couple hundred dollars into is no longer the graphical king of the hill. The new heir to the throne: Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2. And it'll only cost you between $600 and $650, says The Washington Post.

So what makes this card such a big deal? The 9800 is a powerhouse. In fact, it physically feels like two 8800 GTXs sandwiched into a single card and the specs justify that notion - it has two 128 processor cores (256 advertised on the box), two times the 512MB GDDR3 memory (512MB per GPU).

With a 600MHz core clock, 1 500MHz shader clock and 1000MHz memory clock, it promises to crush benchmark scores.