John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript

"The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing."

Continue reading the full story at Cult of Mac by Leander Kahney

Intel's 6-Core Gulftown Gets Tested, Wicked Fast!

Six cores. That's how many are in Intel's ridiculous new Core i7-980x. MaximumPC takes us deep inside the world's fastest CPU, with full, mind-searing benchmarks.

Meet the world's fastest CPU. OK, so we just gave away the big reveal to our report before you even flipped one page, and without so much as the common courtesy of a spoiler alert. For that, we do not apologize, because it's not like you couldn't have guessed how this one would end up. After all, Intel's new 3.33GHz Core i7-980X builds on all the goodness of the ass-kicking quad-core 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, but is smaller, cooler, and has an additional two cores under its heat spreader. With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

In fact, Intel's Core i7-980X seems to be one of the most flawless launches we've seen from the company in some time. By flawless, we mean there are no contortionist acts, such as explaining to consumers that a new socket (LGA1156) will have the same CPU branding as an incompatible existing socket. Nor is there the head-scratcher of a very novel, yet very limp, integrated graphics chip in a CPU (Clarkdale), which, by the way, won't work in boards that lack graphics output ports.

With Core i7-980X, you update your BIOS, drop the chip in, and-voilà-you spend hours rocking a six-core high. Put simply, Core i7-980X is 24-ounces of prime-rib red meat for performance enthusiasts who really haven't had much to gnaw on since the original 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition came out two years ago.

So we're done, right? You don't need to read on? Sorry, there's still more to learn. If you want to know if your motherboard works with the new chip, what applications can really exploit the six cores, and how this bad boy performs, you'll have to keep reading.

Read the full story at gizmodo.com

Prepare for ludicrous speed: Ars reviews the 8-core Mac Pro

"After what has seemed to so many of us like an eternity, the wait for the Nehalem Xeon Mac Pros is finally over. When Macworld 2009 passed without any i7 or Nehalem Xeon announcement, I was worried that it would be a while before the dual-socket boards would be released. But Apple finally came through with eight cores, hyper-threading, and a speedy new frontside bus to make us masters of the deadline. It's safe to say that not everyone needs (or can afford) these new eight-core machines, but I've done some serious high-end grind-work to see what sort of user might be able to justify tossing his pocketbook into the juicer for this potential monster."

read more | digg story

Apple refreshes Mac mini lineup with GeForce 9400M graphics

After all that excitement in the run-up, Apple's done just about the bare minimum that was expected in a Mac mini update. The new SKUs both run 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo processors and are backed up by the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics that've done wonders for the MacBook. For $600 you get 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive, $800 nabs 2GB of RAM and more!

read more | digg story

Analyst now says iMacs likely in both dual- and quad-core

A Wall Street analyst who recently reported that Apple was torn between using dual-core processors and quad-core processors in its next-generation iMac line now believes the company will adopt both.

Wu said that Apple was in the "midst of figuring out whether to power the new iMac with Intel quad-core processors or more high-powered dual-core processors with larger caches."

In his note to clients today, Wu now claims to be hearing from his sources "that both types of processors will likely be used," which would "makes sense as this helps Apple create better tiers within the iMac family, utilizing quad-core for the high-end, and dual-core for mid-range and low-end."

read more | digg story

Apple's OpenCL standard near complete in just six months

Apple has reportedly set an industry record by moving its OpenCL parallel computing standard from its beginnings to imminent approval in 6 months, paving the way for inclusion in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.The operating system will use technology to accelerate general-purpose tasks using both individual processor cores, video chipsets inside its system.

For Intel, the prospect of seeing OpenCL already in a shipping operating system for 2009 has been a strong lure. Employees have "divorced [their] families" and worked extreme levels of overtime to complete a draft that many said would be "impossible," according to the chipmaker's Tim Mattson.
read more | digg story