Weekly hardware roundup

This past week was a busy one at TG Daily. We covered a number of hardware-related topics, including the very first OpenOffice joystick mouse, crashing Hackintoshes, AMD Fusion and Nvidia’s Fermi.

Analog joystick mouse

WarMouse and OpenOffice have introduced an alternative multi-button pointing device. The $75 OpenOfficeMouse features 18 buttons, an analog joystick and support for up to 52 key commands.

Atom Hackintosh netbooks crash and burn

Apple has apparently struck a deadly blow against the burgeoning Hackintosh community by disabling support for Intel’s Atom processor in the latest version of Snow Leopard.

AMD: Fusion is the future

AMD chief technology officer Joe Macri: “Fusion is the combination of many decades of computing. It’s the fusion of CPU and GPU compute within one processor, significantly enhances active/resting battery life, and provides high bandwidth IO.”

Nvidia CEO says he is “all” Apple

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has claimed that Apple uses the “best” technology to manufacture its Mac product line.

“Apple says to their customers: if you buy a computer from us you can be sure we have selected the best technology inside for you. That is their promise to consumers,” Jen-Hsun told Shufflegazine.

??NEC glasses translator

??NEC has created a pair of specs that can listen to a foreign language and beam a translation directly into the wearer’s eyes.

Nvidia: Fermi production schedule remains on track

An Nvidia spokesperson told TG Daily that the production schedule for Fermi-based GPUs remains on track.

“Nothing’s changed on this since the (October 2009) GPU Technology Conference,” said the spokesperson. “We’ll be in production in the next couple of months.”

AMD claims television is dead

Jonathan Seckler: “Television is a fad and the end of television can be seen. Entertainment has become much more visual intense. People do things now with all that video. People take entertainment with them and don’t just go home and watch what happens to be streaming through the air at that time. You can see the end of couch potatoes.”


SMIC boss falls on his semiconductor sword

The CEO of Chinese foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) has resigned. According to Digitimes, Richard Wang left immediately, while David NK Wang was appointed as CEO and president of SMIC with immediate effect.

DRAM market slowly recovers

Contract prices of DDR2 memory chips lifted by nearly 14 percent in the first half of this month due to a shortage of the chips.

Best Buy sells Acer notebook for $250

Best Buy is selling an Acer notebook for $250 that comes with a Celeron 900, 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive.