In the world of software, new products of all stripes come out all the time, and rarely is a launch that exciting. But when the launch involves a brand-new operating system, and one that's being developed by none other than Google, people start to pay attention. Yes, I'm of course talking about Chrome OS, an operating system that was only announced this past summer, and hasn't been able to escape daily mention in the news ever since.

Google unveiled the OS for the first time at a low-key press conference yesterday, and it looks almost just as we'd expect. The entire OS is essentially a robust browser, with many tabs found at the top to access various parts of the system, or for various website tabs you might have open. It's important to note that this isn't a desktop OS, and it's absolutely not meant to be, so such a simplified design might prove to be fine for most people running it on a netbook or similar device.

Think that might change? Don't count on it. Apparently, Google is going to have rather tight hardware standards, so it's not going to work without issue on everything. Interestingly, it's not going to support typical HDDs, but rather SSDs. It will support x86 and ARM CPUs, however, which means it will support many mobile devices currently on the market. I wouldn't count on these restrictions as being a bad thing, because Google has released the entire OS as open-source, so there's little doubt that modified versions will come along for use on other platforms.

I'm quite interested to see just where Chrome OS is going to go, because Linux-based OS' for netbooks and the like have been done before, and people always seem to flock back to a Windows-based OS. But given the popularity of Google online applications, this Linux OS in particular might appeal to a much larger crowd of people, and might just put Google on a path to OS super stardom.

Interested in giving the OS a try for yourself? There's actually a torrent available, with a VMware image, and since VMware Player is completely free, as tackled in our news the other day, you have everything you need to see what it's made of. Note that this should be treated as nothing more than a preview, though, because that's what it is. The final version still isn't due until sometime late next year.

As far as going to market, Google's not talking details until the targeted launch at the end of next year, but Chrome OS won't run on just anything -- there'll be specific reference hardware. For example, Chrome OS won't work with standard hard drives, just SSDs, but Google is supporting both x86 and ARM CPUs. That also means you won't be able to just download Chrome OS and go, you'll have to buy a Chrome OS device approved by Google.

Source: Engadget

There was a rather significant release that occurred earlier this week that I ended up forgetting about, but it's worth mentioning now even if I'm a few days late (whoops!). Adobe released its long awaited Flash 10.1 plugin. Before you say, "Who cares?!", realize that this is the version that brings GPU acceleration into things. That's right... the latest version (in beta) will allow you to run version Flash videos accelerated on the GPU rather than the CPU.

Right now, the acceleration is limited to H.264 encoded videos, but that's hardly an issue given just how popular that codec is. The GPU acceleration isn't just for the desktop either, but notebooks, and across all three graphics card producers. Yup, even Intel has added the support via its latest driver. There's a catch though, and it applies to all three graphic card vendors. The card you have must be relatively recent in order for the acceleration to work.

For ATI cards, both the desktop and mobile parts need to be part of the HD 4xxx family, or higher, while on the integrated side, HD 3xxx and higher is supported. NVIDIA supports pretty much every GPU that's been released since the 8000-series, including ION. For Intel, graphics chips part of the 4 series chipset family are supported. If you want to check the full list, or get additional details, you can download the official release notes (100KB PDF).

To make sure that the GPU acceleration works, be sure to download the latest possible driver from either vendor. ATI's latest, and stable, Catalyst 9.11 is fine, but for NVIDIA you'll need to download the beta 195.55 driver. For Intel, version 15.16.2.1986 or later is required. To take a look at some test videos while learning something about the new Flash, you can go here. The image I've posted below can be clicked to go to an H.264 YouTube HD video, in true 720p. Other 720p Flash videos are likely to also work fine.

I haven't had the chance to test out the beta plugin yet, but I'd like to soon. I was hoping my "netbook", the AMD-driven HP dv2 would be supported, but as it was built using an already-outdated GPU when I bought it this past spring, I'm out of luck. As far as I'm concerned, though, netbooks are the largest beneficiary of this feature. It's frustrating to run a YouTube HD video only to have it lag like no tomorrow. I'm very interested to know if the latest drivers and plugin solve this issue, so if you test it out for yourself, be sure to relay your thoughts in our thread!

This public prerelease is an opportunity for developers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content. Consumers can try the beta release of Flash Player 10.1 to preview hardware acceleration of video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks. You can also help make Flash Player better by visiting all of your favorite sites, making sure they work the same or better than with the current player. We definitely want your feedback to help improve the final version, expected to ship in the first half of 2010.

Source: Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Pre-Release

Think that NVIDIA's 3D Vision is nothing more than a fad? According to a press conference held earlier this week by the company, that couldn't be further from the truth, and it has a good handful of reasons to back up its claims. Unfortunately, a lot of what was discussed at the conference can't be repeated until a later date, but the most interesting tidbit can be... mobile 3D Vision. That's right, there exists a notebook out there that boasts such support. Is it a surprise that it's from ASUS?

ASUS touts the G51J 3D as being a "3D Gaming Notebook", for a few reasons. The first is that bundled in the box is NVIDIA's 3D Vision kit, which includes both the wireless shutter glasses and receiver. Worried about the fact that 3D Vision requires a 120Hz display, but that's never seen on a notebook? Don't worry, ASUS has taken care of that, and I believe that makes the G51J one of the first, if not the first, consumer notebook to feature a 120Hz display.

The question of just how useful 3D Vision is on a notebook has been debated, and in truth, it is quite hard to sell someone on the technology, especially since very few games natively support it. But at the press conference earlier this week, NVIDIA gave news of upcoming support from various game developers, so the support is indeed growing, and when a company like ASUS vouches support for a technology, especially like this, you know there's real potential.

It's important to note that for a game to look "cool" with 3D Vision, it doesn't have to be natively supported. NVIDIA has recently been demoing Left 4 Dead 2 to show off the technology, for example, and that's one game that doesn't list support. When the first Left 4 Dead came out, I tested it out also with the 3D Vision, and though it took a few minutes to get used to, I did find it to add to the experience overall.

In addition to the 120Hz display and 3D Vision inclusion, the G51J 3D includes NVIDIA's fast GeForce GTX 260M 1GB graphics card, Intel's Core i7-720QM processor (1.6GHz w/Turbo up to 2.8GHz), 4GB of DDR3-1066, up to 1TB (dual drives) of HDD storage, a Blu-ray ODD, a 15.6-inch display (1366x768) and a whole lot more. The suggested retail price is $1,699.99, and we should be able to expect availability on sites like Newegg very shortly.

As the first notebook capable of producing realistic 3D visuals in games and videos, the new ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) G51J 3D is designed to deliver a truly immersive gaming and multimedia experience to gamers everywhere. Equipped with NVIDIA 3D Vision and bundled with specially designed 3D glasses, the ASUS G51J 3D-which sports an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M with 1GB DDR3 video memory - delivers adrenaline-pumping, edge-of-your-seat visuals anytime, anywhere.

Source: ASUS Press Release

Both AMD and NVIDIA shot over some information regarding events that each is holding, one being a contest, the other being an auction. Both are equally as interesting, though. On the AMD front, the company is wrapping up its 40th anniversary celebrations by offering up some game consoles that use its technology, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. The company's giving out 10 of each, and to win, it couldn't be much easier.

You'll first have to go to AMD's official Facebook page and become a fan (original idea, I know), and then you'll have to go to the "Giveaway" tab to complete the online form. It's not a survey, but simply AMD's way of collecting information (which would be needed to award the prize). You will be automatically opted into AMD's marketing list, but the form states that you can unsubscribe at any time.

NVIDIA's event might not be quite as exciting, but it's far more important. It's an eBay auction for a gaming PC valued at over $10,000, with 100% of the profits going to the Silicon Valley chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The PC, is as you'd imagine, jaw-dropping. It features Intel's latest and greatest Core i7-975 Extreme Edition CPU, 12GB of Crucial RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 (four GPUs!), an ASUS Rampage II GENE motherboard, not one, but two Crucial 256GB SSDs, two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives and... *catches breath*.

Alright, so there's a lot of stuff here, including water-cooling, peripherals, the full-blown Ultimate version of Windows 7, a fleet of new games, a monitor along with NVIDIA's 3D Vision and so much more. What makes the PC all the more interesting, though, is that it's custom all over. It features a Danger Den box chassis that's designed with superb airflow and water-cooling in mind, and it's been lovingly caressed by the folks at Smooth Creations - you won't see this paint job anywhere else.

Since the machine is valued at over $10,000, it wouldn't be surprising to see the auction hit close to that, or even well over. When it comes to auctions like these, they're impossible to predict. If you're looking to go all out on a new PC, though, this looks to be a great way to do it. The best incentive might be the fact that the collective product is 100% tax deductible. Not only would you be supporting an important cause, but you wouldn't have to pay taxes on it. Talk about a win/win!

Last week, Gigabyte held a press conference along with Marvell and Seagate to tout features with each of the respective company's new products. On the Seagate side, there was of course the Barracuda XT, the company's first drive to take advantage of the S-ATA 3.0 (6Gbp/s) spec. From Marvell was its SE9128 on-board chip, which is responsible for enabling S-ATA 3.0 on current Gigabyte motherboards that offer the support.

To coincide with the launch of both S-ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0, Gigabyte has relaunched a couple motherboards as revisions. To know if a board features these two technologies, you can simply look for the "A" addition in the model name. For example, the P55-UD6 becomes the P55A-UD6, and so on. Gigabyte calls the added technology on these boards the "333 Onboard Acceleration", where the "A" in "Acceleration" is the reason for the A in the model name.

The last of the three represents "USB Power 3x", which Gigabyte states is a unique feature at the current time. The 3x figure is literal, as in the slide below, you can see that the power output is indeed triple. The reason the company added this was because it will help negate the requirement of a power adapter for certain peripherals, such as external hard drives. It's really hard at this point to understand just how unique this particular feature is, but once such high-powered USB 3.0 devices hit the market, testing will need to be done. You can be sure that if this is indeed as useful as Gigabyte says it is, then other companies won't take long to follow.


Along with mentions of these technologies, Gigabyte included some light performance data as well, to help us gain a basic understanding of the improvements that can be seen. On the USB 3.0 front, and seen below, a massive 25GB HD movie would take only 70 seconds to transfer onto a perfect USB 3.0 storage device, down from 13.9 minutes on USB 2.0. Note that if this isn't theoretical, it's based on the best possible speeds out there, because 25GB in 70s equals 357MB/s, which current consumer SSDs can't even manage.

Of course, the presentation given wouldn't be complete without some S-ATA 3.0 benchmark results, and those are as we expected, "nice". The differences between S-ATA 2.0 and 3.0 aren't staggering on current-gen devices, but things should improve when even faster SSDs get out here, or HDDs with lower latencies. On a similar drive, a S-ATA 2.0 drive hit a burst speed of 223MB/s, while on S-ATA 3.0, the drive hit 298MB/s. We also see boosts of 9.5% on the average read and 9.7% on the average write. Again, not major, but certainly not worthy of complaint, either.

Motherboard vendor support for both S-ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 has been great so far, so now it's just a matter of waiting for the respective devices to launch so we can take full advantage of what's given to us. It's kind of a weird situation to be in, because both of these technologies are so fast, that the products to take full advantage just don't seem to exist, at least not on the consumer side. Hopefully that means that USB 3.0 will enjoy a full life like USB 2.0 had.

Source: Gigabyte 333 Onboard Acceleration

This past Monday, I made a news post that explained my upcoming plans to install an SSD in my personal PC, to help get a better understanding of the real-world benefits of using one on a day-to-day basis. Simply put, I'm tired of boasting about how great the SSD revolution is without actually using one outside of our benchmarking machines. Once I'm prepared to do the upgrade, the drive to be installed will be Kingston's SSDNow M-series 80GB, based on Intel's X25-M G2.

Since that post, I got in contact with Intel who clarified a few of the points surrounding the issue of using TRIM under Linux. Sure, this is a topic that bores most people, but as a full-time user of the OS, I care about it quite a bit, and I'm sure a lot of others out there are in a similar situation as me. And as frustrating as I've found tracking down the information to be, I'm hoping this investigative sleuthing will affect a lot more than just me.

Intel made a couple of points that cleared up a lot, starting off with the fact that TRIM is indeed alive and well in Linux, and it comes down to having the right software installed to take advantage of it. I was pointed to a PDF that explains how the command can be executed (section 7.10.3.2), and that's all that's needed for a software engineer to implement the feature, whether it be someone in charge of a distro, a piece of software, or a file system.

I was also told that it wasn't only ext4 that currently supported TRIM, but Btrfs, GFS2 and XFS do as well, with more to be added later if the file system developers decide to add it (hopefully, they will). Past the file system, there are two things that need to be in place for TRIM to work: a TRIM-aware Linux kernel or an application capable of passing the command (like hdparm) and of course, also an SSD that supports it.

Intel also stated that it's been working with Red Hat and upstream Linux developers to provide guidance on supporting the feature in their (and other) operating systems for its particular SSD. TRIM in general isn't SSD-specific, however, so if the support is there, then any distro to natively support it should do so with any TRIM-capable drive. Sadly, Intel couldn't state when the fruits of this guidance would be seen, but I'm hoping it won't be too long before something pops up.

There's still just one thing I'm a little confused about. How can we use TRIM now? After all, even Intel said that it's supported, so where is it? Well, there's hdparm (a Linux hard drive benchmarking tool), but when looking at the help file, this message made me a little wary, "For Solid State Drives (SSDs). EXCEPTIONALLY DANGEROUS. DO NOT USE THIS FLAG!!". Can you blame me?

I think a project is in order. In the next week or two, I'd like to install Kingston's SSD not in my personal machine, but in the benchmarking machine as a secondary drive. I'll install Gentoo Linux on the primary SSD or HDD, so as to make it easy to wipe the drive entirely should I need to during testing. Benchmarking the clean SSD, dirtying the heck out of it, and then running a benchmark again should be a good enough method of seeing whether or not TRIM works. I'm hoping that's not going to be easier said than done.

Hot on the heels of ATI's launch of the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970, an NVIDIA employee posted a fun little image on his Facebook that shows off a GF100 card, also known as the first card to use the company's Fermi core. That's not what's important. What is, is that the card is seen running the Unigine DirectX 11 benchmark, with all its tessellation goodness in tact (you can tell tessellation is active by the spikes on the dragon). This is a good sign that the final silicon is right around the corner.

But... no matter how much NVIDIA tries to prove a point, there's always a minor issue that causes the skeptics to question the validity of it all, and to be honest, I can't blame them. The first problem is that this is a picture, not video, so there's no real proof that it's running at all. The second issue is that in the image, there's another motherboard on a riser, with an audio card conspicuously installed, blocking out the view of the graphics card that could be running behind it.

Whether the picture is legit or not is up to you, but despite the things that work against NVIDIA in the photo, I'm going to believe that it is. At this point in time, I just can't see NVIDIA putting out a "faked" photo after the issue with the mock card at Siggraph. Plus, we are at a point where Fermi cards are right around the corner, with a hopeful launch next month, or at the latest, very early 2010.

Aside from the benchmark being run, we can see that the GF100 card requires just two PCI-E 6-pin power connectors, which is nice to see given this is going to be NVIDIA's highest-end offering for a while. ATI's highest-end single-GPU, the Radeon HD 5870, is no different in this regard, but given that Fermi is supposed to be quite the power-hungry beast, seeing that we're going to be able to fore go an 8-pin power connector is nice.

Source: NVIDIA Teaser Shot