The quad-core chips that have sat at the top of the microprocessor heap for two years are about to begin to be replaced by their bigger, burlier older brother - the 6-core processor.

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corp.’s Digital Enterprise Group, this afternoon announced that the company is set to release its 6-core Xeon processor for expandable servers in September. Dubbed Dunnington, the Xeon processor X7460 will be built with Intel’s new 45-nanometer Penryn technology, the company said.

“The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance,” Gelsinger said previously. “We’re quite excited about it.”

Moving beyond quad-core processors, which to date have been the high-water mark in the semiconductor industry, is a major step - one that keeps Intel well ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., according to Dan Olds, principal analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group.

“This is a big deal,” said Olds. “It looks like, at least from the benchmarks we’re seeing, that six-core chips offer more performance than quad-cores. So, yes, customers are going to want them. What we don’t know is how much power the chips consume and how much heat they will dissipate, and those are key concerns. But, all in all, this is a pretty big advance in the state-of-the-art and all the major vendors are on board.”

AMD, which has been getting its feet under itself after a rocky 2007, has shipped a lot of new products this year, including triple-core Phenom processors, along with quad-core Phenoms, graphics chips and chipsets.

But AMD hasn’t yet launched its 45nm processor and it’s not slated to release its upcoming 6-core Istanbul server processor until the second half of 2009 - about a year after Intel version ships.

“This will put a bunch of pressure on AMD,” said Olds. “These chips outperform anything AMD has and probably win on price/performance too. This could cut AMD’s share of the server market considerably.”

And with Intel ahead of AMD in terms of market share, nanometer manufacturing and core-size, it’s pressure that AMD could do without right now.

“Intel doesn’t have to crank up chip performance right now to thwart AMD,” added Olds. “Their current products handily outperform AMD on server products. From my own research, I can tell you that x86 server customers have moved away from AMD and towards Intel. So Intel didn’t need to release this stuff now to catch up to AMD or to top them, but they’re doing it anyway — just to keep the pressure up on AMD and on themselves.”

While it may be a shot at AMD, are customers eagerly waiting to buy 6-core machines? Maybe not, according to Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat.

“If software can’t take advantage of it, what does it buy you,” said McGregor, noting that a lot of software today still isn’t designed to take advantage of quad-core processing. “You still have software partitioning issues and when you put more cores on a chip, you have to run it slower or increase the power consumption budget or thermal limitations.”

He added that if he had a choice, he would bypass the new 6-cores and hold out to buy 8-core machines. Intel’s Nehalem, which is expected to go into production in the fourth quarter of this year, is designed to scale from two cores to eight cores.

Olds, however, said more server software than desktop applications are designed to take advantage of multi-cores.

Intel hasn’t announced when it might release 6-core chips for the desktop and laptops.

Newly live Web site provides users with 20GB of free storage, making it easy to create and share amazing 3D walkthroughs of your favorite places.

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

What Is Photosynth?

Developed by Live Labs–Microsoft’s applied research arm–Photosynth automatically stitches together digital photographs to create a somewhat abstract but high-resolution three-dimensional re-creation (dubbed a synth) for the world to explore. And though ready-made examples have been previewable for several months now, Photosynth.net has finally thrown its doors open for everyone to upload up to 20GB of photos.

The 3D photo reconstructions suggest an improbable three-way love child of a David Hockney collage, Apple’s QuickTime VR, and Microsoft Research’s excellent WorldWide Telescope. But as PC World’s former editor in chief Harry McCracken said when Photosynth technology was displayed in preview at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2006, it’s one of the more mind-blowing things to appear since Google Earth.

Video: Interview with Photosynth.net co-creator, Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

TOKYO: A 61-year-old Japanese woman gave birth to her own grandchild, using an egg donated by her daughter, a clinic said Thursday. The surrogate mother was believed to be oldest woman to have given birth in Japan.

The surrogate mother used an egg donated by her daughter

Surrogate births are extremely rare in Japan, and the Suwa Maternity Clinic in Nagano, northwest of Tokyo, refused to provide information such as the date of the birth or gender of the baby. News reports said the baby was born last year.
“Both surrogate mother and baby were fine,” said Chihiro Netsu, a spokeswoman for the clinic. Netsu said the woman was believed to be the oldest surrogate mother in Japan, and news reports said she was the oldest woman to have given birth overall.
The Japanese Health Ministry does not release precise statistics on mothers’ ages, saying only that there were two births to women aged 55 or older in 2006, the latest year that figures were available for.
The surrogate mother used a fertilized egg donated by her daughter, who has no uterus, Netsu said.
Mainichi newspaper reported that the previous oldest mothers in Japan were two 60-year-old women implanted with their own fertilized eggs in the United States.
Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a powerful body with over 15,000 members, has banned such procedures, but they are not illegal and individual clinics are free to perform them though few actually do.
At Suwa Maternity Clinic, eight surrogate mothers have given birth. Of them, four women have delivered babies using fertilized eggs from their daughters.
The clinic will report the latest case at a conference of the Japan Society of Fertilization and Implantation later this month. It was the first time the fertilization conference had taken up the subject of surrogate births, Netsu said.

ISLAMABAD: Two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Pakistan army’s main arms factory on Thursday, killing about 45 people and wounding 100 more, security officials said, according to AFP.
The attackers struck almost simultaneously outside two gates of the huge factory in the Wah Cantonment, near the capital Islamabad, local police chief Nasir Durrani said.

‘It’s a massive attack,’ Durrani told AFP. ‘Two men apparently blew themselves up outside the factory during a shift change. The bombers were on foot and they exploded themselves less than a minute apart,’ he said.

A senior security official said that at least 18 people were confirmed killed. Durrani said he had reports of up to 20 dead but they were unconfirmed.

Factory worker Riaz Hussain said most of the victims were labourers who were joining the afternoon shift.

‘I was working in the factory when I heard one blast and then another. They were huge,’ he told AFP.

‘Security people then immediately surrounded the place and we were not allowed to go outside. They allowed us out one by one after clearing the area.’

An official from an ambulance service said that more than 100 injured, along with the bodies of the dead, had been taken to hospital.

‘The blast took place as staff were leaving after finishing their day’s duty and it was very crowded,’ Zaheer Shah, of Edhi Rescue, Pakistan’s largest private charity, told AFP.

‘We have 25 ambulances working and army and factory staff are also engaged in the rescue work,’ Shah said.

The blast comes two days after a suicide bomber blew himself up at a hospital in the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan on Tuesday, killing 30 people.

Pakistani Taliban militants have warned in recent days that they would launch attacks on the military in revenge for an ongoing army operation in the troubled tribal region of Bajaur on the Afghan border.

According to Dawn News, one of the bombers managed to breach the premises, while the other struck the gate of the facility. Witnesses described a scene of carnage with people lying on the ground around the explosion site.

Wah Cantonment is a high security area in Taxila, close to Islamabad, known for its munitions production facilities.

TOKYO: Dozens of policemen with nets took two hours trying to catch a rogue monkey that played an excited game of chase through rush hour crowds in a Tokyo train station this morning.

The animal was first noticed at 9.40am hopping around near the electronic ticket gates in the Shibuya Station in the middle of the Japanese capital.

It darted downstairs towards the entrance to another train line before scaling a pillar and flitting between the ticket machines with officials in hot pursuit.

Bored with the game, it climbed onto an information board and dozed for a couple of hours while commuters and railway staff looked on.

A little later railway staff and police cleared the area to being their attempt to catch the runaway monkey.

Having surrounded the information board with green netting, they hoped to pounce on the animal as soon as it leapt from its perch.

But when it finally jumped down, it slipped through the police cordon, darted into the crowd and disappeared - apparently out of the station.

The Pirate Bay has decided to fight the decision of an Italian judge after it ordered ISPs to block access to the popular tracker. The blocks didn’t prove particularly effective as traffic from Italy only increased but nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is determined to reverse the decision.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay filed an appeal against the decree that forced Italian ISPs to block the BitTorrent tracker. Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi are convinced that they have a strong case. “The decree can be defined as ‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best” they told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay administrators are accused of making copyrighted material available on the Internet for commercial purposes. Giovanni and Francesco told us that this is a strange accusation, considering the nature of the site. “…even the judge who issued the decree states that no infringing material is hosted on The Pirate Bay, which provides just a tracker search engine,” they told us.

“The judge tries to ‘create’ a sort of contributory infringement accusation against The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers explained. It is alleged that the tracker and the search engine are absolutely necessary for the users to “search and locate the content on single computers”. That’s not all, the judge goes even further by stating that the name of the site, ‘The Pirate Bay’, signals intent to infringe copyright.

The lawyers think that because of the lack of jurisdiction, the block should not have been issued in the first place. They also dispute the claim that The Pirate Bay is distributing copyright infringing material. “We will bring all our arguments before the Tribunal, and we are confident of the Tribunal’s decision,” they said.

In previous articles, we suggested that the IFPI, Pirate Bay’s arch rival, might have had a hand in the block. The reverse DNS of the ‘blocked page’ pointed to IFPI’s servers, although they have changed that now. This is suspicious to say the least, and Pirate Bay’s lawyers told us: “It is clear that this decree has been strongly backed up by FIMI (the Italian IFPI),” citing a press release FIMI published where they applauded the Pirate Bay block.

A Tribunal of three judges will now look into the appeal, and a decision is expected in a few weeks. After that, the decision of the Tribunal can be further appealed by both parties before the Higher Court.