The Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012) is not exactly news, but we’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to it here because it’s taken so long for it to come out. Also, never mind that nVidia’s Ion solution is, well, pretty damn good. However, for those of you who have a netbook and would like to enjoy HD video on it and don’t have the good fortune of having a Ion chipset, you may be in luck because this $30 mini PCI-e card may breathe a little life back into your netbook.
It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at what Intel is up to these days and counted the Intel Pine Trail updates among those things. So, in honor of it being almost a year since talking about what Intel has been planning for their ever expanding netbook and nettop line, let’s look at what is finally on the verge of coming out in the near future to a netbook or nettop near you.
Once again I find myself in the position where I’m unable to test this for myself, namely because I’ve had problems getting Snow Leopard to install on any of my netbooks, but some people are reporting success with this. Therefore, with the intention of disseminating information and possibly helping some folks out, allow me to redirect you to Insanely Mac where there’s a forum thread with a patch and some translated instructions. (Scroll down to post 7 for short and sweet instructions.)
If it works for you, let others know!
I hesitated to post anything about this when it originally came out in one of the developer seeds that OS X 10.6.2, the latest update to Snow Leopard, had removed (or intentionally sabotaged unofficial) Atom support. It looked like that was certainly the case, and then a few days later another build had Atom support restored. However, 10.6.2 is officially out today and the various sites are reporting that Atom support is in fact gone.
I know that Intel’s Core i3 CPUs aren’t out yet, but that doesn’t stop some sites from getting closed-door previews of what to expect when these processors come out in the fourth quarter of 2009. Keeping in mind that the Intel Clarkdale and Intel Arrrendale CPUs these are dual-core processors (which I understand may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but shouldn’t be when you consider the possible applications for these CPUs) the numbers are looking pretty good.
SFF is something that has been around for ages, but because of technological limitations, it has historically been limited to low-power operations, both in the sense of low wattage and low processing ability. With the advent of the Atom, Intel has brought SFF computing the front and almost single-handedly reinforced the stigma that SFF computing means computing with caveats. So what is a person to do if they want SFF and want a powerful, usable computer? Well, there are choices.
This is one of those situations where this has already been done to death, so I may not take it much past this article. However, I figured I’d throw out a few quick impressions of what you could expect if you were looking at a Mac Mini as a possible solution for an every day computer or for the heart of your home theater system (at least as far as HTPC (HTMac?) is concerned).