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F
iring yet another shot across
the bow of the good ship Intel,
AMD has announced an all-new
processor line designed for handheld
devices and portable video players.
Collectively named Alchemy, these
processors have incredibly low power
requirements as well as video-specific
features for use in PDAs and hand-
held video players (the latter have yet
to catch fire, but most market ana-
lysts view them as a potentially huge
future market).
Alchemy CPUs have already been
named the CPU of choice for Tivo’s
new Tivo-To-Go technology, which
will allow people to transfer recorded
content from their Tivo onto a lap-
top, PC, or handheld video player forviewing on the road or at the gym.
The processors consume so little
energy they don’t even require a
heatsink, with the Alchemy AU 1550
consuming just 0.5 watts at 400MHz
and the AU 1100 sipping 0.25 watts
at the same clock speed. For video
duties, the Alchemy CPUs are power-
ful enough to run Divx, WMV9, and
MPEG. They can also rescale video
on the fly, so there’s no need to
transcode content when shuttling it
between devices.New processors bound for
handhelds and palmtopsAMD Unleashes New
Low-Power CPUs
AMD’s Alchemy-series CPUs
consume less than a watt of juice.I
t seems that every time the feds,
the RIAA, or the MPAA succeeds in
shutting down a P2P file-sharing
service or web site, another one
immediately pops up to take its place.
We’ll soon witness this phenomenon
once again with the arrival of the
all-new P2P file-sharing application
Exeem.
Exeem—which is based on
BitTorrent technology—comes
close on the heels of a massive legal
barrage that shuttered numerous
popular web sites that showed people
where to download “torrent files,”
which typically included Hollywood
movies, copyrighted music, TV
shows, and other illegally copied
content. The biggest of these sites,
Suprnova.org, was shut down in late
December, and its staff is responsible
for the development of Exeem, which
should debut soon.
While BitTorrent is a very efficient
application for sharing data among
many users, its Achilles’ heel has
always been that users must go to a
centralized, public web site to find
downloadable content. Exeem solves
this dilemma by decentralizing thewhole operation, so there are no
public web sites to visit or servers to
shut down. Unlike most BitTorrent
clients, however, Exeem will be
searchable and users will also be able
to add comments to files they’ve
uploaded or downloaded. The only
fly in the ointment is that Exeem
will be ad-based, though an Exeem
spokesman has stated that users
will be able to opt out of some—not
all—of the ads displayed within the
application.BitTorrent’s Successor on the Way
New app will be searchable, decentralized
Bit Torrent is about to go even
deeper underground in an effort
to avoid future litigation.Bloody Hell
+GAME THEORY BY^ THOMAS L. McDONALD
M
y faith is awash in blood. As a Catholic, it’s
at the very heart of my belief system: the
ritual sacrifices by the Jews, the death of Christ,
the transubstantiation of the Mass. “The blood is
the life,” Bela Lugosi says in Dracula (1931), and
it’s as concise an explanation as any. After all,
God was pleased with the blood sacrifice of Abel,
and displeased with Cain’s offering of the “fruit of
the soil.” So, of course, Cain killed Abel. I’m sure
it made sense at the time. In the words of AC/DC:
“If you want blood, you got it.”
The most striking thing about The Passion of
the Christ is how much it absolutely demands
a uniquely Catholic mindset to fully understand
it. Among mainstream critics, only ex-altar-boy
Roger Ebert “got it.” Gibson dramatized a ritual
called the Stations of the Cross: an annual
meditation upon the physical suffering of Christ.
It’s inextricably woven into our faith.
The armchair psychiatrists can decide whether
or not this accounts for my lifelong enjoyment of
horrifying, often violent, entertainment: fiction,
films, and, naturally, games. I’m not morbidly
obsessed with them, but there’s a pure operatic
power of violent entertainment that I have found
nowhere else but in religion. It’s the power to
shock and to disturb, certainly, but also to purge.
I not only think this is fine (for adults), but healthy;
for some, it’s even essential. Violence is wrapped
so tightly around our very being, our nature, our
faith, our concepts of self that we can never pry it
apart. It speaks to us, and while we must master
that aspect of the human condition, we’d be
foolish to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Violent images engage our basest elements.
Religion draws out our most noble aspects.
Together they form the two halves of our humanity,
constantly at war. Frankly, I’d rather exorcise the
darker impulses in the safe confines of a game
than on my neighbor’s skull. Obviously, that’s
a gross oversimplification, but I think it does
strike at a core truth that all faiths share. We are
called upon to master these darker impulses, not
to pretend they don’t exist. That’s what so many
crusaders against violent entertainment seem to
miss: the distinction between thought and deed,
fantasy and reality, sin and sinner. The human
heart is the battleground for the soul of man. Isn’t
it better if some of those skirmishes are dispelled
with harmless imaginary diversions?Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.14 MA XIMUMPC MARCH 2005
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