ATI Redwood and Cedar to be in market in Q1

ATI to unveil two new chips and three new cards by Q1 2010. The Redwood XT which is a 40nm DX11 chip for mainstream market which is expected to rule over 4770 and 4670, while second one will rule over 4650 in the mainstream market called as Redwood or PRO.

The 4550, 4350 as well as 3450 cards will be seen in the Q1 2010, and will be recognized as sub-Cedar part of the value market. There are chances that Cedar might be branded as Radeon HD 55×0 / 53×0, which totally depends upon performance and nonetheless it is ATI’s marketing decision.

Intel relaxes its rules for Netbook displays – Higher resolution (1366×768) now allowed on N-Series Atom netbooks

N-Series Intel Atom processors were allowed to be used in netbooks with display resolutions upto 1024×600. Now, Intel has relaxed the rules a bit and has allowed the netbook manufactures to use up to 1366 x 768, which is the same resolution as sported by the newly released, Sony VAIO W. However, this change does not applies to netbooks more than 10.2-inches. Only the netbooks that have screen size upto 10.2-inches can use the high resolution along with Atom N270 or N280 CPU.

Windows XP Mainstream Support now officially retired

As planned for today, the Microsoft officially retired Windows XP mainstream support. However, extended support will continue till the year 2014. One would wonder, what are the differences between mainstream support and extended support? Well, there are not much. Both offer (free) security updates and phone/web support to the users. However, after today, any new bug-fixes or updates will require extended support contract.

Also, this effects all the versions (excluding Windows XP Embedded). Since, there are not any problems to be solved with the XP (except security holes), we do not need to worry about anything for our netbooks. However, it is encouraged to update to new version of windows (I recommend Windows 7).

Note 1: If Microsoft releases SP4 too, it will retire support for SP3.

Note 2: this deadline is also valid for Office 2003