Chip firm AMD introduced hard details of its Hammer 64-bit family at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose yesterday and early indications are this one's a winner.
The architecture Dirk Meyer and his team has put together will eventually migrate to desktops and notebook platforms. As noted here some weeks ago, Hammer has an integrated North Bridge but it is AMD's plans for migrating the chip which are likely to breach a hole in Intel's own, somewhat controversial, 64-bit strategy. The eighth generation architecture which uses the specification for X86-64 which appears at This site executes 32 and 64-bit code natively, so migration doesn't involve the kind of investment that Intel ISVs will have to make. Like Intel, however, 64-bit applications may be a little slow in coming, with the first ones likely to be database and scientific applications, which more readily take advantage of the additional addressing structure.
News source: The Inquirer
The architecture Dirk Meyer and his team has put together will eventually migrate to desktops and notebook platforms. As noted here some weeks ago, Hammer has an integrated North Bridge but it is AMD's plans for migrating the chip which are likely to breach a hole in Intel's own, somewhat controversial, 64-bit strategy. The eighth generation architecture which uses the specification for X86-64 which appears at This site executes 32 and 64-bit code natively, so migration doesn't involve the kind of investment that Intel ISVs will have to make. Like Intel, however, 64-bit applications may be a little slow in coming, with the first ones likely to be database and scientific applications, which more readily take advantage of the additional addressing structure.
News source: The Inquirer
When a customer buys a prereleased CD, that person is sent an encrypted URL, which links to Speedera's streaming area, Smith said. The buyer can then listen to the music featured on the CD as often as desired. But once the CD is released to the public and presumably delivered to the customer, Speedera will block the Web address.
This also serves to protect the property of the music industry. After Napster, music companies grew hypersensitive to any offering that distributed copyrighted materials to a mass audience. They worried that the technology could be cracked and thereby allow the music to be copied, pirated and spread over the Web.
With Speedera's technology, listeners are kept from copying or recording the streamed music. Smith said there is a secret key embedded into the encryption that prevents anyone but the buyer to access the URL. He declined to offer specifics on how that is done.
"You can't record the music; nor can you e-mail to a friend. And it can't be accessed if someone posts it on a Web site," Smith said.
The technology is easily accessible for other kinds of media, such as video, and through different software, such as Microsoft's Windows Media and RealNetworks' RealMedia.
Sources close to Amazon said that if offering prereleased music over the Web proves successful, the e-tailer will likely extend the feature into other digital content.
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