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A long time coming, USB 3.0 sees its first product certifed, an xHCI host controller from NEC. Certainly nothing to jump for joy about, but it's a start.

Engadget have spoken to a Jeff Ravencraft whom is the president and chairman of the USB-IF (responsible for overseeing certification procedures) and from what's been said on his part, USB 3.0 based products will start to surface in the market by early 2010, but with this host controller apparently available now in the open market, we may well see some manufacturers speed things up for a shorter time frame.

He also noted that a smattering of companies would be showcasing USB 3.0 gear at upcoming trade shows, with a Buffalo external hard drive, an ExpressCard-to-USB 3.0 adapter and even a full-on laptop with a functioning USB 3.0 port making a stop at IDF later this week. Aside from the aforesaid ExpressCard adapter -- which will let existing lappies enjoy the spoils of SuperSpeed USB -- he also noted that a PCI card would be available for desktop users looking to add a few sockets to their rig. We were also informed that USB 3.0 receptor ports will play nice with USB 2.0 cables and gadgets, albeit at USB 2.0 speed; additionally, USB 3.0 wares will be able to connect via older USB 2.0 sockets, though again at a slower rate. We've got to say, the dual-backwards compatibility is pretty sweet.

Do you remember people giving NVIDIA hell for scheduling an event around the same time as AMD (like the same day)? It was quite interesting to hear people claim that NVIDIA was pulling a low and underhanded tactic to try and take away from AMD's launch of the 5xxx series GPUs.

If that is the case I wonder what people will say about AMD announcing a 6-core consumer CPU the day before Intel's IDF? Yes it is a great announcement and one that has been in the works for some time. It is a move that has been needed. Going back to the A64 days when AMD pulled their desktop CPUs directly from the Opteron line.

But, it is still a little underhanded to do this just before your competitor has an event of their own. It just goes to prove what I always say. No company is above a little dirty pool, there is only how well they spin it afterwards.

The folks over at PC Pro have managed to get hold of an early sample Core i7-820 QM CPU for next-gen performance notebooks with which they put to the test and see if it's worthy of its Core i7 branding in the mobile market segment.

The i7-820 QM is a 1.73GHz clocked processor during light duties but can ramp up to a very serious 3.06GHz (Turbo Boost) when demand calls for it. Intel promises not only noticably superior performance to the pre-gen quad core mobile processors, but improved dynamic overclocking and efficiency for better battery life as well.

As far as PC Pro's findings go, they have some very very positive results to share with us all. Check out the full review of the speedy mobile chip via the link below.

Hmmm, you know that we do not like FUD here. We try our best to qualify rumor from verifiable facts. That having been said we have some interesting news this morning.

It is about the much talked about GT300. You see there is a rumor that nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be heading out to TSMC very soon to talk about yield, pricing and a few other finer points. Now this all on its own is an interesting item, but when you add in the fact that a few of the OEMs I talk to are also saying they have meetings with Huang about the GT300 coming soon, you have a good likelihood that we may see a GT300 very soon.

How soon? Well that is the tricky part. According to a few of my contacts I am hearing that yields are around 40-50%. These are not substantiated as I do not know anyone that works directly for TSMC. However, the idea of a Visit to TSMC by Huang would usually mean a couple of things. Either the yields are below where they need to be for a launch. Or they are there and it is time to finalize price.

Last week we talked about the Zune HD and what needed to happen for it to be a serious competitor against the iPod Touch. One of these things was a need for good marketing, but sadly that just has not happened. Well, at least it has not happened from the MS marketing team.

What did happen was that news and reviews from tech websites have taken the place of the simply awful MS ads. The positive and in many cases glowing reviews of the Zune have caused the new device to sell out just about everywhere. This is marked contrast to the original Zune and is despite MS' best efforts not to promote the Zune.

This demand could lead to more developers taking an interest in the Zune HD and filling out the currently sparse Zune Market. In fact, news that an iPod game was ported to the Zune HD in around 12 hours is great for both potential consumers and developers looking to work both sides of the street. Yes, the game is not over complex, but it does show that it is possible.

Much like Western Digital with its energy-efficient Green series, mainstream Blue series and high-performance/enthusiast oriented Black series desktop HDDs, Seagate now has a three-tier arrangement in place with their latest high-performance XT series of drives shipping to distributors as of today. Seagate also has the existing Barracuda LP series drives for low-power users and of course the standard Barracuda 7200 series for mainstream.

Only one drive is known in the new XT series thus far, this being a 2TB model packed with 500GB platters, spinning at a rate of 7,200RPM. The cache system comprises a whopping 64MB and the drive carries a lengthy 5 year warranty. The best thing about this drive versus Western Digital's Caviar Black 2TB unit is that the XT 2GB from Seagate boasts support for 6Gbps host-to-disk transfer rates, so you'll be next-gen ready if you purchase one of these drives. However, as Tech Report point out, while the interface and amount of cache alone make it possible to use the extra bandwidth, the physical media cannot and Seagate themselves quote a maximum sustained data rate of around 140MB/sec.

As expected, the drive won't be cheap given its capacity and feature-set; an MSRP of around $300 USD, but WD's 2TB Caviar Black carries the same RRP so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. We hope to bring these results to you in the near future once we get hold of a sample.

Although the Intel 32nm, Six-Core Westmere is still a long way away, there have been a few new sightings of the coveted piece of silicon.

The latest is over at PCGames Hardware. Although it is hard to tell exactly what this is, as there are no markings visible on it. It is easy to tell that it is not a Bloomfield by the layout of the underside of the CPU.

Also absent from the sighting are any type of performance testing but we have a feeling that some form of benchmark will be coming out soon. The Gulftown CPU will be the nest evolution of the Nehalem Architecture and will add an extra two cores (4 threads) to the already formidable processing power found in the current Core i7 9xx CPUs.

Graphine and Carbon NanoTubes (CNT) are going to be all the rage in the next 5 years; simply everyone will be wearing them. Well maybe not wearing them but many many people are going to be working with them in the very near future.

The biggest place that Graphine and Nanotubes will be of benefit is in making smaller and more efficient transistors. This will benefit CPUs and other Integrated Circuits that are currently made in silicon. For those that do not know what Graphine is, it is a single layer of carbon molecules in effect it is 2 dimensional. This means smaller and less "leaky" CPU designs can be made in the future.

Intel and AMD are known to be working on them in conjunction with university researchers. Intel estimates that they may have a conventional transistor made from Graphine towards the end of the next decade (about 5-6 years from now).

Intel is planning to show off some USB 3.0 devices at IDF. There will be everything from a Laptop from Fujitsu to a camera that will run off of the high-speed USB port.

USB 3.0 is the next generation of the Universal Serial Bus standard that was first introduced at the end of the Windows 95 era. USB was touted as the best thing since sliced bread despite not having proper drivers for most of the operating systems out. Windows 95 was the big product from MS and it required the installation of an upgrade (to version b) to get USB support.

Of course things are a little different now with the move to the newer standard. The devices that are being built to run off this are faster and more demanding. For example with the new SuperSpeed USB standard we will see (for the first time) a USB Attached SCSI Protocol. This will allow greatly increased throughput on external drives with reduced latency for better and more consistent transfer of data.

Yesterday Apple announced that they were opening up the Grand Central Dispatch code. So, of course today we see the first of the "third-party" applications developed for it.

Interestingly it is a video encoding application that makes use of the OpenCL libraries found in Snow Leopard. The name of the application is called movie gate. It was developed by Christophe Ducommun and shows roughly a 50% performance increase over non-OpenCL performance. When I read this news I started to have flash backs to when NVIDIA released their Cuda API. At the time they called it WhoopAss, a rather goofy name for a bundle of demo applications and a single Video encoding app that was not much faster than CPU encoding (back then).

Despite this flash back I was actually impressed when I read further down in the article. You see although I dislike Apple as a company the one thing that I will always give them for is their Video Editing/ Authoring Applications. I still use FinalCut and DVD Studio for my authoring and NLE Editing. So with this new development I am starting to wonder if it is time to build me a hackintosh complete with some third-party OpenCL plugins.

AMD is working on a six core desktop CPU. This is supposed to be an answer to Intel's Gulftown and, if current CPU marketing is any indication, should also be for future mid-range and low end CPUs.

There is a problem with this new hope for AMD; while the idea of a six core desktop based off of the Istanbul core is nice, AMD is not ready to compete with Intel's just yet.

The first is issue process. Intel will offer Gulftown at 32nm while the new AMD Desktop will be 45nm. As both companies want to stay inside a 130-140 Watt TDP, Intel will have an easier time and be able to clock higher within the same envelope. The advantage here will go to Intel unless AMD can make their CPU more efficient like they did in the Athlon 64 days.

So, Apple released its latest version of the iPhone OS version 3.1 recently. At first glance the new software looks like it has a number of improvements. However, it has come to our attention that many people are very unhappy with this new release and not just the jailbreaking/unlocking crowd.

Reports are popping up that OS 3.1 has a negative impact on battery life, SMS/MMS performance, random shutdowns, mobile Safari crashes and breaks exchange support on older generation iPhone's.

The problem has sparked an increasingly response from iPhone 2G and 3G owners on the Apple support forums. This latest issue flies in the face of the current statements by Apple that OS 3.1 is a major improvement over previous ones.

Back in the days of the X19xx series Radeon GPUs, AMD and ATI were talking about using the GPU to process in game physics. This was in contrast to anything that was being thought about over at NVIDIA and, at the time, was even denounced by NVIDIA as a bad idea.

Unfortunately, AMD and ATI did not put much effort into moving physics onto the GPU and NVIDIA did. NVIDIA even went so far as to buy Agiea, so that they would own the complete PhysX library. This left AMD out in the cold as yet another AMD idea was openly taken and implemented by another company.

Well now, a few years later, AMD is getting back to physics on the GPU. They have partnered up with Pixelux and Bullet to bring an Open Physics library to not only the Radeon GPU, but to pretty much any GPU. This move should help to bring a more standardized physics library to developers.

Hot on the heels of the new HP ION based netbook, we see VIA is launching what it is calling a "NetNote". Besides the ridiculous sounding name, this new product category is noteworthy for the fact that it is capable of playing back 1080p HD video.

This is the same high-end resolution that the NVIDIA ION platform is shooting for. Now while this is very impressive, what I did not see in the press release was any indication that the associated netbooks were able to display this on its tiny little 10.1 - 12-inch displays. If they cannot playback 1080p natively in the display, it does reduce the impact of having this feature available in the first place. They might manage 720p in a 10-incher, but I doubt 1080p is going to happen. I would think that if this was the case, we would see it bandied about in the text of the PR. Instead we only see VIA working hard to create a new category in the mobile world exactly where we do not need a new category.

VIA is getting this performance from its VX855 media processor combined with its Chrome9 HCM IGP. The company is also dropping in an HDMI port to turn your NetNote(Book) into a mobile HD media center.

AMD just pushed out a nicely priced quad-core CPU. This is the Athlon II X4 and you can get one of these for just under $100 US. Now this is all great, but there are some things going on behind this new launch that are a cause for concern.

You see, back when Hector Ruiz was planning the financial fiasco that would be the ATI acquisition, AMD and ATI were talking about a CPU with a native GPU built into a single die. This new product had the label of Fusion.

Well, AMD is now onto its third version (the last two were cancelled) while Intel in their typical fashion has its own version of this idea ready to launch by the end of the year. This is the same issue we saw with the first quad-core CPUs. AMD expounded on the virtues of having a "native" quad-core CPU, while Intel simply bolted two dual-cores together.

There is a new nVidia Vs ATi rumor out. It revolves around the latest leaks of ATi/AMD HD 5870 performance. You see those numbers have gotten to people that have seen a demonstration of nVidia's GT300 product.

If their word is to be believed then the new GPU from the Big Green Machine might still out perform AMD's latest offering.

The GT300 has been kept carefully under wraps with surprisingly few leaks about performance, design or even what is going on over at TSMC. Yes there are rumors about bad things happening at nVidia, but from what we have been able to find out those rumors might not be accurate at all.

Since the new Zune HD is out Microsoft wanted to get the software that powers it ready and out for you as well. I took the chance to grab this software and take a quick 15 minute look at it.

The first issue I ran into was in getting it downloaded. As I have been using Windows 7 x64 exclusively for some time and Zune 4.0 is supposed to be optimized for this I opened up IE 8 and started the download process.

I began getting all sorts of errors and ended up with a simple Page Unavailable. Getting a tad annoyed I tried to grab the older version of the Zune software (3.1). This also proved to be a problem when using IE so I had to move to FireFox to get it.

The Zune HD launched today. This has been one of the most anticipated media players since the iPhone 3G S. I know that sounds really odd. But it is absolutely true. You see people are actually looking for someone to compete with Apple. Even current iPod/iPhone owners.

So what does the Zune bring that the iPod does not have? Well for starters it has an nVidia Tegra 600 under the hood. This new SoC has 8 cores that can dynamically adjust power to provide the longest battery life possible. It does this by powering down unused and unneeded cores to almost zero power usage.

But the Tegra also brings Open GL ES 2.0 720P playback and a host of other features. This is combined in the Zune with HD Radio, Wireless Sync (over WiFi) an AV dock that allows connection to an HD_TV through HDMI, native gaming support (this is nVidia we are talking about) and multi-touch.

Have you ever sat back and wondered just what direction computing is going? Over the last few days I have had some time to think about it and to be honest I think we are right on the verge of something big.

Intel just pushed Lynnfield out the door, AMD just kicked out DX11 GPUs and a fully DX11 driver package. nVidia is pushing Tegra while Microsoft, Linux and Apple are working on the move to a fully 64-bit computing world.

We are seeing systems becoming more and more simple instead of complex. Lynnfield brought the PCI-e controller for graphics into the CPU cutting out much unneeded data transfer between the CPU, GPU and Northbridge. The next step in this evolution is right around the corner as Clarkdale and Arrondale get their coming out party at IDF.

I have worked with PoE (Power over Ethernet) and even wrote up both sides of this handy little feature that uses you network to provide power to remote devices. This is a great feature, but has absolutely nothing on what I saw today.

This is HDMI over Ethernet using a standard IP network. The device that makes this possible is called the Projector Connector and can send up to HDMI 1.3 Lossless over any standard IP/Ethernet network. As long as you are running Cat 5/6/7 cable you are set.

The Projector Connector can also handle up to three switches between the source and the display. This gives you up to 1,000 Feet to play with between points.