Gigabyte shared its upcoming Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition motherboard with the media at NVISION '08. The board will be a future home for the consumer-friendly Bloomfield Nehalem processors in 2009.

Image courtesy of TGDaily

The prototype board runs off the Intel X58 chipset and features four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, two PCIe 2.0 x4 slots, and support for up to 24 GB of DDR3-1333. Separate power supplies exist for different systems; 12-phase for the CPU, 2-phase for the RAM, and 2-phase for the PCIe lanes.

It's still a prototype, but consider it a portent of (expensive) things to come.

This one is an absolute doozy certainly worthy of sodium chloride worship. Reviewage out of sunny England reports that the 45nm successor to the existing Phenom, code-named Deneb, may launch at speeds up to 4.4GHz.

The lone screenshot of CPU-Z tells of a 4000MHz "Phenom FX-80" chip running at 200x20 with a 45nm fabrication. The site also notes that an FX-82 is in the pipeline that boasts a 4.4GHz clock-speed. Both chips are said to be capable of beating a Kentsfield with a 600MHz clock deficit.

Cue mass skepticism.

Google employee Dan Morill of the Android Developer Blog has revealed that the first version of the Android platform to hit the market with a phone will not have OBEX or GAP Bluetooth profiles.

The omissions, preventing Bluetooth file transfers and Bluetooth device connection, are expected to come in a later version. Google was quick to allay accusations that the omissions were one of negligence, rather than for the sake of getting it right.

"Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it. We absolutely intend to support a Bluetooth API in a future release, although we don't know exactly when that will be," Morill said.

Planned features for the eventual inclusion of a Bluetooth API include:

• Bindings to GAP and SDP functionality.
• Access to RFCOMM and SCO sockets.
• Potentially, L2CAP socket support from Java. (This one is under consideration.)
• An API to our headset and hands-free profiles.

It has been a long and arduous courtship between the rival satellite radio firms Sirius and XM. While the merger was announced more than a year prior, legal oppositions from the National Association of Broadcasters has protracted the process and prompted the FCC to delay its blessings for quite some time.

First signs that the merger was coming to resolution bubbled to the surface in late July when the WSJ broke news that the FCC was close to approving the motion. This represented the first significant movement in the case since the U.S. Department of Justice satisfactorily completed their anti-trust review in March.

The FCC voted to approve the merger on July 25 with a tie-breaking vote by Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate (R-TN). While XM-Sirius breathes a sigh of relief, their matrimony does not come without restrictions. Chiefly, XM-Sirius must agree to cap prices for three years following the merger, reduce the total price of channel packages, and allow consumers to select their desired channels a la carte.

Amidst the July 25 approval, the FCC retained the rights to impose additional terms on the happy couple. Amongst those being considered is the mandate that all future Sirius XM Radio devices come equipped with an HD Radio tuner as well.

Advocates of the term include Ibiquity, developer of the HD Radio standard, Clearchannel, three US senators and a modicum of radio stations. Meanwhile, GM and Toyota stand in opposition by noting that forcing multiple tuners in Sirius XM radios would be "an unprecedented requirement regulating the choice of entertainment technologies in an automotive environment."

Both GM and Toyota automobiles now come equipped with Sirius or XM support in virtually every make and model. Because today's in-car audio devices are purchased on third-party contract, a mandated increase in the sophistication of the radios directly equates to increased cost for the large auto-makers.

In relief, the supporters of the HD Radio inclusion fails to surprise. Its backers, a cadre of parties with a vested interest, stand to financially or politically profit from the maneuver.

While the merger once again returns to limbo while the FCC considers submitted stipulations, it remains to be seen how the FCC will decide in this matter.

NVIDIA skeptical of Larrabee

As Intel beavers away on bringing their discrete GPU to market, NVIDIA has chalked the Larrabee up to wishful thinking. John Mottram, chief architect for GT200-series core admitted that Intel is "not a stupid company" but remains skeptical of the performance of the final product.

"They've put a lot of people behind this, so clearly they believe it's viable. But the products on our roadmap are competitive to this thing as they've painted it. And the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they've painted it. As [blogger and CPU architect] Peter Glaskowsky said, the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Mottram also went on to admit that NVIDIA had to work to catch up with the technology of ATi's famed 4000-series Radeons. While NVIDIA has held the single-GPU speed crown until the recent release of the Radeon 4870 X2, the stunningly-high prices of the 200-series have kept them from gaining a foothold with consumers.

Blackberry Bold launched in Canada

Our friendly igloo-dwellers to the north are the first in the world to get their hands on the retail version of the long-awaited Blackberry Bold. Canadian mobile carrier Rogers released the beauty this weekend. Engadget has delivered a snazzy unboxing video while Americans await the September release from AT&T.

RAMBUS debuts terabyte-speed ICs

Last year RAMBUS announced that it would be pursuing an initiative to deliver terabyte-level bandwidth for memory. Dubbed the Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative (TBI), RAMBUS hoped it could develop new memory technologies that would crush the 100GBps bandwidths we can achieve today in idealized applications like GDDR.

RAMBUS appears to have done it with the announcement of 1TBps on-chip/off-chip bandwidths. While the products are obviously in testing phases, the company hopes to commercialize their technologies and bring crazy-fast speeds to the masses.

Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed "CloudAV," a next-generation anti-virus technology. CloudAV seeks to improve PC resource utilization and virus detection rates by shifting the burden of virus analysis into the computing "cloud."

Jon Oberheide and Evan Cooke, working under the guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian, tout the cloud's significant advantages over traditional client-side anti-virus:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

The engine currently consists of detection routines and signatures from Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. Analysis reveals (PDF) that the combined signature databases of these varied anti-virus applications yields a 91% detection rate.

While the technology sounds similar to centralized anti-virus, such as Symantec Corporate, it is quite different. Today's corporate anti-virus products centrally manage user policies while leaving the burden of scanning and detection on the client end. Under this model, a significant processor and memory footprint is incurred.

Behavioral analysis is one of the more exciting aspects of this technology, according to the developers. Cooke and Oberheide explained that "behavioral analysis allows us to open a file in an emulated environment and trace the execution of a file through a system." The cloud has enough resources to execute a potentially infected file in a virtual sandbox to determine its impact. This is a significant advance in anti-virus technology that would be impractical to run on a desktop, much less a smartphone.

Other new functionality includes the caching of files in the cloud so that detection isn't a constant resource drain. Once a file signature is cached, it does not need to be reanalyzed. In effect, a single user that may be running Microsoft PowerPoint would submit the signature data for that version of PowerPoint to all PowerPoint users in the cloud. Because a single computer can contribute all the necessary information, deployments that have a swath of similarly-configured computers would benefit from reduced network overhead.

While the technology is being used in a production environment on the University of Michigan campus, there are no plans to commercialize the product. Agents have been developed for Windows, Linux, BSD, Nokia Maemo, and sendmail. Cooke and Oberheide envision implementations of these clients for ISP, campus and corporate deployments.

We were concerned about privacy in the cloud; specifically, we wondered whether or not we would want our ISP to scan sensitive files for us. They envisioned a hybrid system with a lightweight detection engine on the client side for files somehow tagged as private. Meanwhile the CloudAV technology would remain for system files, executables, and other non-sensitive information.

You can find more information on their website, including links to white papers about the technology.

Icrontic is now on Flickr. If you have a Flickr account, and you've got pics of Icrontic events, please feel free to add them to the group pool.

DJ Thrax - a pic from our Flickr group

Please tag your photos with the word "Icrontic" if you do choose to upload them. Also, tagging your photos with important words like "beer" or "chicago" or "LAN" or whatever is going on in the pics is cool too.

Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/icrontic/

(Ed note: Check out these moves while I revolve it.)

In an interesting and unprecedented move, Rock the Vote has partnered with Microsoft to allow XBox 360 owners to register to vote over Xbox Live beginning August 25th. The partnership comes as Rock the Vote tries to register 2 million new young Americans for the election this fall, and with a user base as vast as Xbox Live (12 million members) consisting largely of that demographic, it puts them in a good position to reach that goal.

The initiative extends so far as to allow 360 owners not only the ability to register, but a place to "participate in presidential polls and voice their opinions to the presidential candidates." A dedicated political forum will be available, and Rock the Vote PSAs will become available through Xbox Live.

To provide some scope, Microsoft conveniently pointed out that if all of XBL's user base were of age and voting, they would number sufficiently to be considered the 7th-largest state, controlling around 20 electoral votes.

I'm pretty sure this is the first time we've done this, but since we've entered our 8th year, it's time to put some big boy pants on and take a survey of our members and readers.

We would REALLY appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes out of your busy day to take this completely anonymous survey. You don't have to register. You don't have to log in, you just click the answers and go. There are only 10 questions.

It's very important to us that you take the survey and that you answer honestly.

Thank you thank you thank you!

Yesterday Comcast revealed that it was preparing to engage in select trials of new traffic management techniques to alleviate the burden of high-bandwidth users. Verizon CTO Richard Lynch also expressed a need for network management today at the annual communications summit for The Progress & Freedom Foundation in Aspen, CO. There has "always been a requirement for network management," he said.

While Verizon has enjoyed the luxury of fiber-to-the-home deployments via its popular FIOS service, the telecom firm still feels the pinch of a congested network. Though Verizon spends more than $17 billion each year in infrastructure, Lynch affirms that it would take considerably more to alleviate congestion network-wide. Saying that "customers would be upset," Lynch referred to the tremendous monthly bill that customers would foot to achieve the level of service popularly demanded.

In order to manage the stratospheric rise in internet traffic in recent years, Verizon is testing network-wide Quality of Service (QoS) practices that have long been employed on business networks. A QoS-managed network prioritizes latency-sensitive packets from sources such as VoIP. Protocols and applications of lesser importance could be delivered with an artificial delay of up to 22ms. Lynch asserts that few users would notice such a miniscule delay.

While the details of Verizon's upcoming policies remain scarce, Mr. Lynch assures that it's not for conspiratorial reasons. "We don't have all the answers yet," he said, but promises that full disclosure is "best way to go about it."