Matrox has officially launched the Parhelia 512 site and the product itself.

The revolutionary new Matrox Parhelia-512 high-fidelity GPU delivers a new level of visual quality, excellent performance and a wide range of innovative technologies. Parhelia-512 is an 80 million transistor, 0.15µ, 2D, 3D and DVD/video GPU with a true 256-bit DDR memory interface providing over 20 gigabytes per second (GB/s) of raw memory bandwidth. This AGP device supports unified frame buffers up to 256MB in size and integrates two RAMDACs, a TV encoder and support for dual TMDS transmitters. Designed to surpass the expectations of the most demanding professional users and PC enthusiasts, Parhelia-512 has three major goals: to dramatically increase the quality of all aspects of visualization, to sustain high performance for the most complex and demanding graphics rendering and to deliver a number of innovative and substantive features.

Japanese site Watch Impress has a snapshot of Matrox upcoming Parhelia 512 pic which is to be announced tomorrow. It features a massive heatsink as well as 2 DVI connectors. A special adapter cable seems to be included in the retail package to wire up for TripleHead monitor support. Click on read more for the pics!

On this site you see comparision of the specs from the latest 3D cards against the new Matrox. And some information how the new features work and what they can do. The article covers - as it seems - official Matrox material showing off the GPU flowchart as well as detailed specs. Only one thing... it is in russian, but the pictures on the site say it all. Update: Digit-Life has almost the same review only in full english! (Click on Read More for link).

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I say possible because out of nowhere this week on the Matrox website the specs for a new G1000 chipset were published but quickly removed. Whether this was done as a hacker joke, or a mistake on the company's webmaster's part, you can find the specs here. Now some Matrox websites claim this is a fake but some sites claim it to be true. You be the judge, but dont say I didnt warn you. Watch out Nvidia and ATI, the old school guys are back.

Intel's first Celeron chips based on the Pentium 4 will come out next week in a move that will allow the company to cover the entire PC market with the same chip design. Intel plans to release 1.7HGz and 1.8GHz Celerons for desktop computers next Wednesday, according to sources. Some new PCs containing the chip will appear next week, but most major PC manufacturers will unfurl budget computers containing the chips for the consumer and corporate markets the following week. That's when a chipset with integrated graphics comes out, which will eliminate the need for a separate graphics chip. Source Link: Design Technica
Direct Link: Redesigned Celerons coming to market

Looks like Matrox has already blown the cover of their upcoming Parhelia GPU in China yesterday according to a chinese website. Not much information is available cause all attendees needed to sign a non disclosure agreement. Read on.

Fujitsu has developed revolutionary new read head and media technologies that will enable hard disk drive recording densities of up to 300 gigabits per square inch. The new technologies are expected to lead to the commercial introduction within two to four years of 2.5" hard disk drives with capacities up to six times the recording density available today. Read more...

In early 2001, we were caught by surprise when our server started going ballistic. As more and more users became aware of Neoseeker's existence, our traffic had slowly started to mount up - to the point where we were literally growing too fast for the server to keep up. We had already undergone several painful server transitions, and we were faced with the hard decision of HOW to alleviate the server load. We had been growing steadily without many problems, and then suddenly, a growth spurt caught us unawares and left us scrambling as the server crashed almost hourly. Rancho*: Somehow sounds familiar...

Just saw this @ TheInquirer!

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE between a Pentium 4 Northwood that sits happily in a 533MHz chipset motherboard and a Pentium 4 Northwood that sits happily in a 400MHz chipset motherboard?

That's the question we asked Intel yesterday and the answer is "not a lot", but enough to entangle you in a nightmare if you buy the wrong sort of processor by accident.

For all of you thinking about picking up a KT333 Dragon don't plan on overclocking it TOO far. I haven't seen it really pointed out yet BUT the onboard goodies of the dragon limit your FSB overclock. The worst of which is the USB 2.0 controller which craps out on you when you're around 160Mhz FSB or running that controller on a 40Mhz PCI bus.

Cyber Drive has released an updated Firmware version 120D for their 32x CDRW drives.

The update is dated 7th of May 2002.

"Description: new firmware version 120D for the CD-RW drive CW058D is available now! Improvements among others: Enlarge supported CD-R and CD-RW discs! Better support of Roxio products."

Just got word from Aron that he's got details of Soyo's new P4S-645DX Dragon Ultra mainboard for the Pentium 4.

Soyo's SY-P4S645DX motherboard with SiS 645DX/961 chipset maximizes system and memory performance with 533MHz FSB support, DDR333 memory, USB 2.0; on board RAID and 10/100 Ethernet, and many advanced and easily customized overclocking features. The board delivers the memory bandwidth and optimal performance for Intel's latest 400/533MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors.

VR-Zone has done up a preview on the upcoming Triplex Silver Xabre Pro card based on the Xabre400 GPU. This Xabre Pro card from Triplex is another successful Millennium Silver line of graphics accelerator to be released in the next few weeks and should be priced competitively against GeForce4 MX440.

Today Intel will introduce their new top notch Pentium 4 CPU's running at 2.53Ghz, 2.4Ghz and 2.2Ghz. These new CPU's will take advantage of Intel's revised 850 chipset which offers 533Mhz bus speed and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM. The increased FSB mounts up to a memory bandwidth of 4.26GB/s.

The chipmaker will announce three new Pentium 4 chips for desktop PCs, along with a new version of its 850 chipset. The new chipset offers a faster 533MHz bus and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM, sources said.

Intel's new flagship Pentium 4 will be a 2.53GHz chip. The other new Pentium 4's will run at 2.26GHz and 2.4GHz. All work with the faster bus. The added clock speed, faster bus and new RDRAM could translate into an overall performance boost of roughly 10 percent to 15 percent over current high-end desktop PCs!

3Dlabs, Inc. Ltd. today announced a ground-breaking Visual Processing Architecture that combines the architectural strengths and programmability of general-purpose CPUs with extreme levels of hardware parallelism. This architecture, which has been in development for the past two years and has significant patents pending, enables advanced software rendering techniques to be accelerated in real time to produce interactive imagery with stunning levels of realism. 3Dlabs expects to ship board-level products based on the first Visual Processing Unit (VPU), a chip codenamed the P10, during the third quarter of 2002.

VR-Zone has posted some updated info on the new SiS Xabre graphics cards. Apparently, SiS has assigned some product names to their Xabre series of GPUs. Xabre 80 will be known as Xabre Lite, Xabre 200 will be known as Xabre Real, Xabre 400 becomes PRO and lastly Xabre 600 is known as Xabre Ultra.

Just got word from Beyond3D that they have previewed Nvidia's reference GeForce4 Ti 4200 board! Here's what their saying.

In the preview we check out gaming, Pixel Shader, FSAA and filtering performance. Alongside the higher end P4 we also check out the numbers on a lower end PIII as this budget board may appeal to many on lower end systems still.

A report is running at Independent News uncovering some general information on Sony speeding up development of Playstation 3 specifically targeted for online gaming. Sony has courted alliances with some of the technology industry's biggest hitters in an effort to "soundly beat whatever our rivals produce next''. IBM and Toshiba are jointly designing the central chip that will control the PlayStation 3 at a top-secret technology lab in Austin, Texas. The project, which aims to create the ultimate graphics and sound processor, is believed to cost around $1bn (£650m). Check out the full article via the above link.