Apple Mac Pro With a Great New Cylindrical Design: What You Need to Know?

WWDC has seen some quite amazing achievements by Apple, and one of the most eye-candy is the new Mac Pro. Mac Pro is the desktop PC from Apple, running the new Mac OS X ‘Mavericks’ operating system, rival to Microsoft Windows. Let’s see what is new in this new Pro PC, which is, first of all, kind of different in looks. Check it out:

Perched on a cylindrical metal pole inside a glass cylinder as shown here is the new cylindrical Mac Pro. You can see the expansion ports—USB and Apple’s own Thunderbolt ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI, power port, etc.

How Is Mac Pro Different?

In terms of design, this is something that nobody has ever attempted. As Apple is pretty savvy in the design of its products, this Mac Pro also has a unique, industry-leading design. The entire PC is within a cylindrical column of 9.9 inches by 6.6 inches, which means, it is slightly taller than your iPad 4 and not even as wide. Quite a tiny form factor for an extremely powerful desktop computer, isn’t it?

The most important aspects of the new Mac Pro, the technical specifications, are not yet available as the computer will not be hitting the market until the later part of this year. However, we have quite a bit of information to make informed guesses about this product. Let’s go upon them.

Mac Pro has dual graphics cards and Intel Xeon E5 processor with 12 physical cores. As there is no E5 processor with 12 physical cores, we suppose there will be two six-core processors. While we do not know the exact model number of the processor, we know most of them are hyper-threaded, which means Mac Pro will probably have the multi-tasking capabilities of a 24-core processor.

The previous Mac Pro had 12 GB of RAM, but it is not known how much RAM this new one has. The graphics cards used will be AMD’s FirePro W9000, with up to 6 GB of graphics memory. FirePro is a specific AMD brand catering to workstation computers that are used for Computer Aided Design (CAD) and multimedia authoring. In the new Mac Pro, you will get two of these graphics cards having 6 GB of VRAM each, providing maximum amount of power.

The new Mac Pro has its storage based on the PCI Express standard, which is the fastest available standard for flash storage drives. The expansion slots available in Mac Pro include six Thunderbolt 2 ports and four USB 3.0 ports.

Beyond all these, what powers the Mac Pro? Well, it is the latest edition of Mac OS X, codenamed ‘Mavericks’. This is the next big release of Mac OS X after Lion. With the new redesign of Apple OSes, including the iOS, we can quite a bit see a flat design all over Apple.

The Power Distribution

A computer derives its power through three important means, and a cutback on any of these aspects can create a performance bottleneck. These aspects are the processing power, physical memory (known as RAM), and the data transfer rate between various components in the PC.

For instance, you get a PC with an insanely fast processor, but if the RAM is not high enough or fast enough, then your PC will not perform any better than one with the same RAM and an ordinary processor. The same is the case with the bus speed, which is the data rate between various components in the PC—between RAM and processor, processor and hard disk, RAM and hard disk, etc.

How does Mac Pro improve on the power distribution? Well, Apple has upgraded all of these three aspects. Here is the information that the company shares with us:

Cores: 12; gives two times better floating point performance than the previous Mac Pro (speed of the processor).

RAM: Bandwidth is twice as much as the current Mac Pro at 60 GB/s.

Graphics: While the current Mac Pro gives 2.7 teraflops of power, the new one promises 7 teraflops (7x10^12 operations per second).

Storage: PCI express flash storage giving 1.25 GB/s

Expansion interface: Thunderbolt 2 ports giving up to 20 Gb/s (2.5 GB/s) and USB 3.0 ports giving up to 5 Gb/s (600 MB/s) speed.

The Expansion Slots

One of the major features of the Mac Pro is its expansion slots. These slots include six Thunderbolt 2 ports, which is an Apple-Intel technology for data transfer with external devices, such as storage devices, displays, cameras, etc. Thunderbolt 2 ports as mentioned earlier can help transfer data at a rate of 20 Gbps, which is the maximum among all interface technologies today. They can support up to four 4K displays too. If you read our article on 4K TVs, you would know these displays really need extreme bandwidth.

One disadvantage is that there are not many devices supporting Thunderbolt yet, and you have to get an adaptor to get it to work with other devices using USB or FireWire technologies. Those adaptors are expensive too. However, USB 3.0 ports are there on the Mac Pro that you can use. There are four USB 3.0 ports that give up to 5 Gbps bandwidth.

The Design

One of the uniqueness of this Mac Pro is its design, which unlike the previous ones, is cylindrical.

This is the first time that any PC maker has created a unique design for the chassis. Mac Pro’s internal structure is also quite efficient. It has a central unified thermal core that cools down the motherboard and both of the graphics cards. The heat generated in the central column is efficiently radiated upwards through the appropriately designed fan blades.

The motherboard and each of the graphics cards are immovably screwed on the frame around the heat sink. Due to this reason, it becomes quite difficult for customers to replace the graphics cards on this Mac Pro. It should not however be impossible.

All in All

Mac Pro has several other important features as well, such as the 802.11 ac Wireless, Gigabit Ethernet port, etc. Since we don’t know the exact specifications, we cannot make many assumptions. However, since Mac Pro and other Apple products are the only ones that come with such technologies as Thunderbolt, it should be one of the fastest OEM PCs to come to the market. Two major disadvantages that one could point out are the difficulty in upgrading and high prices of Thunderbolt adaptors.

One important thing remains to be seen as well. As soon as Apple comes up with its own unique device designs (thanks to Jony Ive), others follow suit. iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac Mini, MacBook, etc., all gave birth to similar-looking designs from competitors, and so we won’t have to wait long to see cylindrical PCs hitting the market from other companies as well. For the time being, check out these innovative PC case designs:

Read the full article »

Pen Input: Why the Lag In Drawing on Tablets Like Galaxy Note?

With the current technological advances, we have, such things as S-pens, C-pens, Wacom iPhone styli, etc., to help more natural pen input on touch devices. With these technologies, one might expect the way we be creative should change. One might expect to see a lot of mainstream drawings being done on such devices as the Galaxy Note. I mean, we are no longer in the era where styli were used just for navigation as in this PDA:

So, why does that not happen? Why do the people still stick with the old style notepads for note-taking and the old-style canvas or plain paper and brush for painting? (You might say there are drawings made on Note, but the number is still low, and people still don’t find it quite enjoyable to draw on a tablet like Note; you can’t deny that.)

The reason is that it is not a perfect technology quite yet. You can create a drawing on a Note but it takes time and effort, and it is not as natural as Samsung would want you to believe. In short, when you draw on a Note, you have to keep your pen strokes under a specific speed, or the drawing will lag!

So, what causes this lag? If you go deep down into that, you will have to ask a lot of questions. And you will come to the broad conclusion that the technology has never been and will probably never be as real and perfect as the real world itself. I mean, the fastest you can play a game is if you play it outside; no camera in the world can take pictures like your eye itself; other things, such as 3D, color reproduction, sound, etc., are all better outdoors than in any of our technologies.

Within Note, why we are limited to or even tempted to draw only primitive sketches with large brush strokes is because it is easy only for that. If you want to sit down, take a deep breath, and really draw a good picture, you might want a canvas, brushes, and all kinds of oil colors. Drawing with a digital pen just doesn’t seem natural enough.

On the top of that, the lag! What causes the lag? The speed of the device, of course.

Do you know how graphics intensive a good drawing application is? One of the most graphics-intensive of Windows applications is Adobe Photoshop CC, and its minimum required CPU speed is 2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. This means the system might actually need a big CPU of at least 3 GHz and 8 GB of RAM to run the program appreciably. Otherwise, a lag will occur. On Note II, you have a 1.6 GHz Exynos processor and 2 GB RAM, and hence it has its obvious limitations in graphics performance.

This is the reason why it is difficult to paint on Note. Drawing is possible with slow, painstaking brush strokes.

Yesterday in Computex, NVidia showed off its latest processor, Tegra 4, and its graphics performance. In the demo, CEO of NVidia, Jen-Hsun Huang showed us how Tegra 4 chip can improve the pen input performance on an Android tablet. The Verge managed to get this image of him drawing on a tablet with an old world stylus and still managing to get a good drawing out of it.

Well, the calligraphic sketch he is making doesn’t seem to involve much work, but it’s the underlying speed and precision that matters.

Remember we introduced you to the NVidia Tegra 4 chip on its unveiling back in the CES**? That same chip hasn’t yet found its way into any of the devices other than the Project Shield gaming device, also manufactured by NVidia. In Q2, we will see several devices utilizing this chip. If Note family includes a device that has NVidia Tegra 4, we might even see better graphics performance on them.

Another major competitor to Tegra 4 is the Snapdragon 600, 800 processors that have already made way into several devices.

The drawing lag on Note and other such devices is due to the speed of the processor and the graphics unit, and it will be rectified only with a much faster and better system specs.

[Image:Androidtapp; the Verge]

Read the full article »

Here Is a Mouse That Has a Trackpad Built In!

Asus has manufactured a new, eye-candy product. It is a mouse, but the specialty is that it has also got a trackpad on. Named under the Vivo brand of products, it is known as VivoMouse. Engadget managed to build a gallery here of the VivoMouse. Here are a few of the images (click to enlarge):

VivoMouse has a three point multi-touch, circular trackpad on the top, which you can use when the mouse is off the ground. In that way, it can essentially act like a remote control for a PC.

VivoMouse has been created to work hand-in-hand with Asus’s VivoPC, which is a new product the company is launching. It is a box PC with Media Center built in, and it will rival others in the market, such as Apple Mac Mini and Google Chromebox. These announcements came in Taiwan’s top computer technology show, Computex. Here is Asus’s press release announcing the product with further information.

As soon as the third quarter of the year approaches these products should be available in shelves. Here are the specifications pulled from Asus website:

VivoMouse	Asus VivoPC
Optical sensor: 1200 dpi (indicates the sensitivity of the mouse)	Intel Processor (details unknown)
2.4 GHz Wireless Radiofrequency connection	Intel HD graphics
Trackpad with 3 point multi-touch	2 USB 3.0 ports and 4 USB 2.0 ports
Dimensions: 135x78x25.5 mm	190x190x56.2 mm

Most of the important specifications are withheld. We will get to see them in action in the third quarter of the year, and by then we may be able to publish a better review.

[Images: Slashgear, The Verge]

Read the full article »

Motorola Has Some Pretty Unique Technology to Show Off

D11 tech conference of WSJ’s subsidiary All Things Digital (allthingsd.com) has some interesting stuff going on. One of the recent interviews that happened was with Motorola Mobility’s CEO, Dennis Woodside and its Senior Vice President of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan. It was in this interview that you can watch here that Regina introduced us to two important innovations happening in Motorola.



Now, as you well know how Google acquired Motorola and how it intends to develop the smartphone manufacturer into a part of its own, most of the discussion concentrates on how this will be achieved. There are certain important developments happening in Motorola’s research facilities, and they are thinking about solving some issues that plague smartphone users these days, such as authentication.

One of the first things that Regina introduced us to is the electronic tattoo that can authenticate your phone. Remember how you get access to your smartphone’s functions normally. You either put up a password or use that swipe pattern to get access every single time you want to access your phone. It has become quite a difficult thing to do.

Earlier, when I had my first mobile phone (not a smartphone, not even a feature phone) that could only make calls, I had a keypad lock function in which I had to tap ‘*’ to unlock the phone. After about two days of using it, I was so annoyed that I searched inside the phone’s settings to find a way to turn this off. In short, that particular key lock doesn’t achieve any benefit. Today’s passwords and pattern swipes are no different. It won’t protect you from hackers.

It would in fact be beneficial to have your body act as an authentication token that the phone can recognize and work with. This is what motivated this advanced thinking from Motorola. The first, electronic tattoo, in association with a company called MC10, can authenticate the phone as soon as you touch it.

Secondly, there is another method, a pill of authentication, shown here.

This pill, made by Proteus Digital Health, is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Once you swallow the pill, your body’s digestive acids can power it. It will then generate an 18-bit signal that can help authenticate any smartphone.

With these technologies, Motorola will be able to reduce the time it takes to do various things and probably increase security as well. Dennis Woodside did also mention about other major concerns being addressed, such as battery life, but it is not known whether we will get to see any of these or others in action in the upcoming Moto phones. Dennis has confirmed about six or so devices will be launched before the end of this year.

Read the full article »

Facebook Introduces Verified Pages!

Do you remember our earlier post on how to be smart on Facebook? That gives an important lesson. You know, there are many Facebook pages that have been prepared to mimic the official celebrity pages. These pages are prepared solely as a marketing gimmick too. Since they are made under the name of a popular celebrity, they quickly interest the fans of that celebrity and get a fan following pretty easily. Then marketing becomes easy.

This was one of the reasons why Twitter introduced verified pages. You know that simple check mark on Twitter accounts of VVIPs? That is a sign that the Twitter account is a verified one, and it does indeed belong to the person mentioned. Facebook has also gone the same direction by introducing verified pages yesterday. Here is the official PR from FB.

Verified pages on Facebook have a blue check mark on them, next to the name of the page or profile.

Check out this official page of Michelle Obama.

Facebook has the official page of the celebrity as well as the fan pages and marketing pages created by other people for various purposes. Check out how many pages come up for a search for ‘Michelle Obama’ here. Only one of them can be verified.

Here are some other verified celebrity pages.

However, the list of verified pages is not exhaustive as in Twitter. It may take some more days to get all celebrity pages verified. For the time being, please look for a verified badge—the blue check mark—before following a page.

Read the full article »