Reg Hardware

20th March 2006 Archive

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  • AMD grew sales 50 per cent year on year

    Letters Spansion factor 'hides' expansion between 2004 and 2005

    Last week, AMD appeared to have slipped in the world chip rankings, according to numbers provided by market watcher iSuppli. Not so, said AMD. With the inclusion of figures from the spun-out Flash memory division Spansion - absent, we should say, through an error of ours, not iSuppli's - the chip maker's ranking would have been …

    PCs 20 Mar 2006, 10:13

  • Acer 'readying' HD DVD notebook

    Following Toshiba's lead?

    Acer is to join Toshiba next month and offer a high-end notebook with an integrated HD DVD drive. So claims Chinese-language newspaper the Commercial Times today, according to a DigiTimes report. Alas there are no other details: will the machine be offered in the US, Europe or both, for example? But it doesn't come entirely …

    PCs 20 Mar 2006, 10:30

  • Bus driver sacked for playing PSP

    Grand Theft Auto, naturally

    A bus driver has been sacked after passengers complained he was driving the bus while playing a portable games machine. Steve Allcock was playing Grand Theft Auto on his PSP. Passengers could clearly hear the sound effects from the game while he drove the bus from Accrington to Blackburn in Lancashire. When the bus company …

    Consoles 20 Mar 2006, 10:46

  • Net video confirms Xbox 360 hack

    Coder pledges not to release modified firmware

    A video has been posted on the web that appears to confirm claims that the Xbox 360's anti-hack security system has been... er... hacked. The video shows a console with its lid off playing a copy of a game. Claiming they're more interested in hacking than piracy, the collaborative effort led by an individual known only by the …

    Consoles 20 Mar 2006, 10:55

  • More PS3 details emerge

    Games Digest Free multi-player gaming on the cards

    Sony Computer Entertainment's president, Ken Kutaragi, announced a raft of new details about the PS3, PSP and PNP at a press conference in Tokyo last week. The big announcement, that the PS3 will launch in mid-November in Japan, the US and Europe simultaneously, has already been covered by Reg Hardware. But more interesting is …

    Consoles 20 Mar 2006, 11:02

  • PSP 'base pack' to ship Wednesday for £149.99

    £12 cheaper on the Continent

    Sony has revealed it will demand punters pay a penny under £150 for the basic PlayStation Portable package when it launches here on 22 March. Announced last week, the box contains just a PSP and a mains adaptor, unlike the bundle-heavy Value Pack that launched in September 2005. A Sony Computer Entertainment Europe spokesman …

    Consoles 20 Mar 2006, 11:35

  • Philips to fix 12,000 plasma TVs

    House calls planned

    Philips said last week it needs to fix 12,000 46in and 50in plasma TVs in the US to prevent them from potentially overheating, though it claimed the faulty screens do not pose a fire risk to owners and their homes. The consumer electronics giant would not say how much it will cost to carry out repairs to all those PDPs, each …

    HD 20 Mar 2006, 12:27

  • Nvidia pitches physics-on-GPU code

    Games to get more real?

    Nvidia will this week show in-game physics code calculations being run on a graphics processor, the first time this has been done in public, the company claimed today. When the technique is implemented in future games, the benefit for players will be more realistic virtual worlds, Nvidia said. The process uses code from …

    Bits 'n' Chips 20 Mar 2006, 13:20

  • ATI unwraps first 1GB graphics card

    FireGL family updated

    ATI today unwrapped its latest pair of workstation-oriented graphics chips - including what it claims is the first ever board to support one gigabyte of graphics memory. The FireGL parts are also the first products of their class from ATI to support Shader Model 3.0. The 1GB FireGL V7350 is accompanied by the V7300, a 512MB …

    Bits 'n' Chips 20 Mar 2006, 14:17

  • Euro trade body launches 'official' HDTV logo

    Mismatch with 'HD Ready'?

    The European Information and Communications Technology Association (EICTA) today announced yet another logo that it hopes will help clear confusion from the minds of consumers as they migrate from traditional television into the HDTV era. However, the move may well have the opposite effect. EICTA's HDTV logo joins the HD …

    HD 20 Mar 2006, 16:54