Hope you all had a great long weekend. It wasn’t a long weekend for me (actually there’s no such thing as a long weekend when you work for yourself), but it was productive nonetheless. We have been apartment hunting for a month, and finally found a place to our liking! There’s a few cool things to report today:
- Microsoft has announced the Zune HD, which will compete against the iPod Touch this fall. There’s not much in the way of detailed specs, but we know it will have a 3.3 inch 480×272 OLED display, a built-in HD Radio receiver, and HD output (via dock). One cool detail is that it will integrate with XBOX Live.. somehow. We’ll have to wait and see.
- Intel has unveiled the latest multi-socket server/workstation CPU – the Nehalem-EX. Think of it as a Core i7 on steroids: 8 cores (with HyperThreading, so 16 threads), 24MB of cache, 4 QPI links, 4 memory channels, and support for up to 16 memory modules per channel. As we said in our Core i7 review, the Nehalem core is extraordinarily versatile due to its modular nature. We’ll see this in action again when the Core i5 is announced (current rumors say that will happen in September).
- Joystiq is reporting that after E3, there will be a new “Special Edition” Playstation 3 SKU available. It will be the same price as the current 80GB PS3, with the same hard drive, but will be bundled with two games. Nobody quite knows what games they will be, but expect them to be related to whatever huge sequels are announced at E3.
- Finally, Kojima Productions’ stupid teaser site is finally showing something interesting: A big picture of Big Boss from the Metal Gear series. As a huge fan of MGS4 (and only MGS4), I’m glad they are sticking with the series – despite Kojima saying before that he wanted nothing to do with the series after MGS4, but maybe he was only referring to Snake? Who knows. Then again, I’m not sure why everyone is assuming it’s Big Boss in the picture. I mean, who’se to say it isn’t Snake himself? How can anyone tell the difference? Aren’t they clones? Or something? I will never figure that story out…
