Hasta La Gadget!

Five hundred eighty-three calculators, 128 brands and one man who has painstakingly cataloged them all.

Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.

It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15, in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.

“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window,” says Dudek who runs the Vintage Technology site. “The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations.”

Dudek’s online catalog of calculators is an impressive archive of calculators from one decade. Each of the 583 calculators on the site have size, power, case, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. The models also include comments explaining the components used, construction and the logic used.

Ultimately, Dudek hopes to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators he estimates were made in the 1970s.

“What I thought really interesting is that it not just has calculator information but also chip numbers from some of the old ICs used in the device,” says Matt Stack, a calculator enthusiast who recently created a graphing calculator built on open source hardware. ” I like to consider myself an expert in calculators and I learned something.”

Story continues …

ATI, the Canadian graphics-chip company born back in 1985, is dead. After being acquired by AMD in 2006, and spending the intervening four years locked in the Californian chip-maker’s cellar, forced to try on dresses that “make it look purty”, the deed has finally been done: the ATI name has been erased from all products.

The acquisition brought one of the Big Two GPU-makers (the other is NVIDIA) into the AMD’s CPU business, but ATI managed to keep its name on its inventions until today. From now on, there will still be Radeon and FirePro cards, but they’ll be called AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

Why? AMD is moving firmly into combined CPU-GPU systems, which put everything together for energy and space savings. Think of the Intel GMA 950 which was used in MacBooks and Mac Minis, along with PC hardware. These “integrated graphics” systems share the main RAM with the CPU, further saving money but also offering lesser performance. AMD decided that these combined systems would be too confusing with all the different branding, and dropped ATI like the hot girl drops the dork with a car after they arrive together at the school prom.

Best of all, AMD has redesigned the stickers for its chips, and there are actually two sets. One drops all mention of even the AMD name, replacing it with the word “graphics” so when its discrete graphics cards ship in Intel boxes, the names won’t clash. So goes the complex corporate maze that lies behind those ugly stickers found on all PCs.

AMD jettisons ATI brand name, makes Radeon its own [The Tech Report]

See Also:

• ATI
• AMD's ATI Uber Graphics Card, DirectX 10 Delayed
• Intel Pays AMD $1.25 billion To Settle All Disputes
• AMD

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Digital Cowboy announces Xtreamer Pro NAS / media streamer originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This, dear friends, is a sad, sad day. ATI, the name of hope for all PC gamers who were sick and tired of NVIDIA rebadging the same GPU over the past couple of years, is to be no more. The callous souls over at AMD have decided that our little consumer brains aren’t sophisticated enough to handle two awesome brands, so they’re just axing the use of the ATI moniker from here on out. Product line names will be retained, with the Radeon and FirePro branding still intact, but ATI Eyefinity will now be known as AMD Eyefinity. The first graphics cards to, erm, benefit from the new nomenclature will ship “later this year,” and the whole thing is said to have been motivated by AMD’s move to Fusion APUs — hybrid CPU and GPU chips — where it’s considered beneficial to have a unified branding strategy. Great, but did anyone consider the fact that the graphics wars will now be fought between two teams wearing green jerseys?

Continue reading AMD kills ATI brand, you can look forward to blood-stained Radeons

AMD kills ATI brand, you can look forward to blood-stained Radeons originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If 6.0.0 RC1 just wasn’t cutting it for ya, CyanogenMod-6.0 has released what’s being touted as the “first stable release based on Android 2.2” and has hit the target number of supported devices, which by our quick count includes EVO 4G, Slide, Nexus One, Dream / Magic, Aria, and Droid — and we might be missing a few.. You know the drill; if you need a bit of Froyo in your mobile life.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Cyanogen Mod 6 — the one with Froyo — hits target list of devices, first stable release originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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