ATI announces new product line

ATI has unveiled the three products that will carry its next generation Radeon graphics processors. The new products comprise the Radeon 8500 aimed at the gaming market, the Radeon 7500 for "mainstream commercial and computer users", and the Fire GL 8800, a "mid-range 3D graphics board for CAD/CAM and the modelling and animation aspects of digital content creation". The 8500 is the most powerful ATI graphics processor yet and incorporates Truform, a rendering technology designed to deliver natural 3D images for games, and Smartshader, designed to enable more complex and realistic texture and lighting effects with support for Pixel Shaders 1. ...more

BT highlights the digital divide

BT has highlighted a new study that considers the extent of the digital divide and how it could affect the UK in 20 years time if current policies remain unchanged. According to the latest figures, 51 per cent of the UK adult population (24.2 million) are digitally excluded in the most basic sense of having no access to a home computer or the Internet. ...more

New p2p system tags data similarities to increase download speed

US researchers have developed a new method for transferring data across the Internet at high-speeds, based on a discovery that many ostensibly different files actually share common or similar chunks of data. The researchers - Dvid Andersen of Carnegie Mellon University, Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research and Himabindu Pucha of Purdue University - found that files that appeared to be different are in fact very similar. MP3 music files for instance, may contain differing header information but the song data that they wrap is almost always the same. ...more

Wanadoo timetables new Net services

Wanadoo's MD of strategy products and services, Marc Overton, outlined his company's roll out of new Internet services as its LLU drive gets underway. Currently the company plans to have 105,000 lines unbundled from 154 exchanges by the end of the year, he said. This means that those customers will be receiving Wanadoo's 8Mbps services. ...more

New Duron for Windows XP

A 1.1GHz Duron is AMD's latest offering for mainstream desktop PCs. With Windows XP due to appear on the shelves, AMD is emphasising the multimedia capabilities of the new chip - as well as hardware-based data pre-fetch, it uses 3DNow! Professional technology. ...more