quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
APRIL 2007 MAXIMUMPC 09
A subscriber with a $17.99 plan, for example, will be eligible for 18 hours of
streamed content per month, in addition to the usual disc delivery service.Netflix Rolls out a Streaming Service
By summer, all subscribers to Netflix will be able to stream additional movie
and TV content to their PCs—at no extra charge!MusicGiants Hires
a Music Giant
Record producer extraordinaire Elliot Mazer joins
online music retailer as ‘Music Czar’H
ow do you compete with an online juggernaut
like Apple’s iTunes Music Store? MusicGiants
does it by selling songs that sound dramatically
better, thanks in part to the prodigious talent of
Elliot Mazer.
Mazer has produced the likes of Neil Young,
Linda Ronstadt, and Janis Joplin during his 40-
year career. His job at MusicGiants is to oversee
the ripping and encoding of commercial CDs
from his New York recording studio. Mazer uses
Microsoft’s WMA Lossless codec to encode the
tracks at 88.2kHz sampling rates with 24-bit reso-
lution to produce very high-defi nition stereo and
surround-sound recordings.
“People have forgotten how good music can
sound,” Mazer told us. “The PC can be a quality
audio product, but only if you feed it quality music
fi les. We’re providing that premium fuel.”Vista Gets
Serious about
Upgrades
We’ve all used Windows
upgrade discs to do a clean
install of Windows. It’s
simple: You start the install,
then at some point during the
process, you have to insert
the old disc and validate
your install. Of course, Vista
“fi xes” this problem.
You see, in order to
install Vista using an upgrade
version of the disc you
need to have a working OS
installed—you can’t just
validate the install using your
old XP CD. The Vista upgrade
process is signifi cantly better
than any we’ve used before,
but it’s still less than perfect.
Luckily, there’s an easy
way to do a clean install.
You just need to install Vista
twice. Install the version of
Vista that you bought, but
do not put in an activation
key when you’re prompted.
When the install is complete,
reinstall your upgrade ver-
sion, using your key, on top
of the first install of Vista.
It’s that easy!MusicGiants’
high-res
music down-
loads sound
fantastic,
but we could
do without
the DRM.I
ntel’s announcement of metal-gate transistors
with high-k gate dielectrics swept the mass media
by storm in late January. Mainstream news outlets
that don’t know a transistor from a resistor scram-
bled to find industry analysts who could explain the
technology in newbie terms. Intel’s accomplishment
was touted as a major breakthrough—the biggest
advance in transistor design in more than 30 years.
Within hours of Intel’s announcement, IBM pushed
its top engineers in front of microphones to assure a
nervous world that they too have developed metal-
gate transistors with high-k gate dielectrics.
What’s amazing about this furor is that Intel’s
“news” is more than three years old. On November
5, 2003, Intel issued a press release announcing
exactly the same thing. (I still have my copy.) The
day after that announcement, Intel presented a
technical paper on the subject at a conference in
Tokyo. Intel’s press release from November 2003
reads almost word-for-word like the news stories
that broke in January 2007. The press release
even said that the new transistors could appear in
Intel processors “as early as 2007, as part of the
company’s 45nm manufacturing process”—an
uncannily accurate prediction.
PR flacks should study this incident. It’s a
good lesson in exploiting the news media’s short
attention span.
Intel’s 2007 announcement did include two
details missing from the 2003 release, although
many news stories omitted those details. One of
the new dielectric materials is hafnium, which
replaces silicon oxide. (The metal-gate material is
still a secret.) And the new transistors will indeed
appear in an Intel processor manufactured in the
company’s 45nm fabrication process this year. (It’s
Penryn, the next Intel Core 2 Duo.)
I don’t minimize Intel’s accomplishments. The
new transistors significantly reduce current leak-
age and switching power, allowing Intel to build
faster, cooler, lower-power processors. But I view
this step as more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Similar advances in recent years include silicon-on-
insulator transistors, strained silicon, and copper
interconnects. Future advances in the same vein
are liquid-immersion lithography and tri-gate tran-
sistors, both coming soon.
Engineers everywhere are busting their butts
to prolong the life of Moore’s Law. Intel’s engineers
deserve a big share of the credit—which, in this
case, was 39 months overdue.Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine
and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.Intel’s Transistor
‘Breakthrough’
FAST FORWARD
TOM
HALFHILL