gOt sKillz?!

Speaking with PC Play Magazine, Crytek president, Cevat Yerli revealed that they won’t develop PC exclusives anymore, thanks to the platform’s high piracy rate.

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis”, said Cevat Yerli. “We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable.”

“I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy”, he continued. “To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.”

We respect Mr. Yerli’s experience and reasoning, but we must ask why does Crysis “lead the piracy charts by a large margin”?

We must not forget the game’s steep system requirements. Crysis’s gameplay play also is a hate-it-or-adore-it experience. In our opinion, a lot of potential buyers had the urge to play 2007’s game of the year (second to Call Of Duty 4 on MegaGame’s voting), but feared that their PCs weren’t qualified to handle it. Obviously, piracy was the answer for those gamers’ worries (not that we approve it). So of all those who pirated Crysis, we believe that the majority had PCs that aren’t able to meet its minimum system requirements and some just hated the game. Some of the rest were content with their pirated copy and some decided that they liked the game enough to buy it.

In other words, Crysis’s unreasonable system requirements served only to decrease its sales without affecting the number of pirated copies; and hence, caused that larger than usual piracy to sales ratio.

HP announced that researchers from HP Labs, the company’s central research facility, have proven the existence of what had previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.

This scientific advancement could make it possible to develop computer systems that have “memories that do not forget, do not need to be booted up, consume far less power and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain”.

In a paper published in Nature, four researchers at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams, presented the mathematical model and a physical example of a “memristor” - a blend of “memory resistor” - which has the unique property of retaining a history of the information it has acquired.

Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

Building on their groundbreaking research in nanoelectronics, Williams and team are the first to prove the existence of the memristor.

“To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science,” said Williams. “By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers.”

One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming boot-up process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic hard disk required to run the system.

In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.

Another potential application of memristor technology could be the development of computer systems that remember and associate series of events in a manner similar to the way a human brain recognizes patterns. This could substantially improve today’s facial recognition technology, enable security and privacy features that recognize a complex set of biometric features of an authorized person to access personal information, or enable an appliance to learn from experience.

Williams is the founding director of HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, which is focused on turning fundamental advances in areas of mathematics and physical science into technologies useful for HP. For the past 12 years, Williams and his team have conducted primary scientific research into the fundamental limits of information and computing, which has led to a series of breakthrough discoveries in nanoelectronics and nanophotonics.

There is still little to no information about AMD’s upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4870, but Belgium website, BilgiUstam, managed to get their hands on 3 charts comparing it to Nvidia’s GeForce 9800 GX2.

The charts are available in the screens tab, but be warned: we couldn’t check their authenticity. We asked several hardware reviewers and hardware centered websites but they all failed to confirm the authenticity of those charts.

The charts indicate that ATI Radeon HD 4870, expected to be released within a month, beats Nvidia’s top dog, the 1GB GeForce 9800 GX2, nearly by a 25% margin in 3D Mark 2006 and Crysis.

Alleged test system:
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 @ 3.00GHz
- ASUS P5E3 Deluxe
- 2×1GB OCZ DDR3 1333MHz 9-9-9-26
- Western Digital 250GB 16MB SATA2 7200RPM
- 1GB GeForce 9800 GX2 - 600/1500/2000mhz
- 512MB ATI HD 4870 - 800/3400mhz

Info coming from several sources suggests that Nvidia decided to accelerate the launch of its most powerful G90 graphics chips in order to battle AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 4800.

Leaked info and underground rumors have it that GeForce 9900 GTX and GeForce 9900 GTS might hit retail as soon as July. AMD’s Radeon HD 4800 is expected to be launched in May, though.

There is no solid info about both 9900 cards’ specs, but Nvidia has already said that the architecture behind the flagship will be “extraordinarily complex” with as many as one billion transistors on the GTX. GeForce 9900 GTX is expected to host 1GB video memory with 512 bit interface, while the GeForce 9900 GTS is expected to have 640 or 768 MB video memory with 448 bit interface; but then again, those are not confirmed yet.

Microsoft confirmed that Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been released to manufacturers yesterday and that it should be available for home users through windows update on April 29, 2008.

“We are happy to announce that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has [been] released to manufacturing (RTM). Windows XP SP3 bits are now working their way through our manufacturing channels to be available to OEM and Enterprise customers”, stated Chris Keroack, Release Manager of Windows XP Service Pack 3.

“We are also in the final stages of preparing for release to the web on April 29th, via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Online documentation for Windows XP SP3, such as Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the Microsoft TechNet Windows XP TechCenter, will be updated then. For customers who use Windows XP at home, Windows XP SP3 Automatic Update distribution for users at home will begin in early summer.”

Intel’s latest price update revealed price cuts of up to 50% on select quad core processors.

Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz) saw the greatest price shakedown with a 50% price drop from $530 to $266. The quad-core Xeon X3230 (2.66GHz) also saw a 50% cut: from $530 to $266.

The dual-core Xeon 3085 (3GHz) was reduced 29% from $266 to $188, and the Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz) was reduced by 31% from $266 to $183.

Pentium dual-core E2200 (2.2GHz) and E2180 (2GHz) were cut 12 percent and 14 percent to $74 and $64, respectively.

Celeron chips also saw some price cuts. The Celeron 430 (1.8GHz) was reduced 23 percent from $44 to $34 and the dual-core Celeron E1200 (1.6GHz) fell 19 percent from $53 to $43.

On the same update, Intel also introduced new chips. The Core 2 Duo chips E8300 (6MB cache, 2.83GHz) and the E7200 (3MB cache, 2.53GHz) were announced at $163 and $133, respectively. Intel also announced dual-core Celeron E1400 (2GHz) at a price of $53 and Celeron 570 (2.66GHz) at $134.

Self-Erasing DVDs, dubbed DVD-D have already hit European stores.

DVD-D discs, sold for around one third of the usual DVD-R discs, can be played on any DVD player, but they will self-erase 8 hours after their first spin. Another version with a 48 hours life span is also available for software.

Blank DVD-D discs are also available. They are burned at 8X speed and their life span can be set to anything from 8 to 48 hours. Blank DVD-D disks also have the option to be played once.

DVD-D are currently available in Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

“Windows Vista: A work in progress”, was the opening words of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s speech to the company’s Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle.

After the laughter and applauding cleared off, Ballmer went on to explain that - he believes that - Microsoft “did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on? Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting. We can’t ever let that happen again.”

Ballmer also admitted that, compared to Windows XP, Windows Vista’s performance is disappointing. “We had some things that we can’t just set the dial back, but I think people wish we could. Vista is bigger than XP. It’s going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn’t get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we’re driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve.”

Microsoft CEO concluded his speech by acknowledging the continued demand for Windows XP, but refused to give any indications that Microsoft would forgo its plans to cease its distribution by the end of June 2008.