MSI just opened a new and interesting road in the cooling field, by releasing the first mainboard with a cooler using the Stirling engine theory. Now, is that great or what? It won't help you save energy costs, it won't cool your components much better but, thinking big, it may be yet another interesting step towards a cleaner planet!


The idea is pretty simple - the "Air Power Cooler" from MSI uses the hot air to push the fan to rotate, and so cool the heatsink attached. The small piston that powers the fan is in direct contact with the heat generator (chipset for now, but maybe it could be used for CPUs too, in the future), so when the air expands, it moves the fan, it's just as easy as that!

A live demo of the "Air Power Cooler" concept will be ready for the public at MSI's booth in CeBIT Hall 21 B34, but don't think about the fact this is a prototype. One day, it may become reality, adding a bit more "green" to the idea of "green computing"!

Today may go down in history as the day when Intel has broken the doors to the processors for small devices market, by releasing the previously codenamed "Silvethorne" chip using a new name, Atom. So...what's that special with this new processor, after all?


The Intel Atom chip was designed from scratch using 45nm technology, and its targets are ultra mobile PCs(UMPCs), smart phones, possibly even portable game consoles, and other portable, low-power devices. With a CPU clock speed ranging between 500MHz and 1.8GHz, the single core Atom has only 47 million transistors, and has a maximum TDP of 2.5W, which sounds great, considering the fact that a 1.8GHz Atom is expected to have a similar performance to a first generation Pentium M processor!

Intel's Sean Maloney said "This small wonder is a fundamental new shift in design, small yet powerful enough to enable a big Internet experience on these new devices. We believe it will unleash new innovation across the industry.", and, for now, there's no reason not to believe him. Time shall tell if he was right or not, as it always does...

If you need to grab a brand new server in the near future, here's some good news for you - AMD's Barcelona is finally ready, and system vendors are getting ready to place these processors under the hood of some of their servers that are going to ship in the first half of this year!


According to official sources from AMD, the quad-core Barcelona chips are shipping to large vendors that are going to use them inside their servers, but there's also a darker part of this - we're talking about samples here, and not production versions...

The version sent to Dell, HP or IBM is the B3 revision, which fixes the TLB bug that caused so many delays so far. For example, HP's Eric Krueger said "We expect to start shipping systems in early Q2.", and it's already confirmed that the HP ProLiant DL585 will carry AMD's Barcelona's processor inside.

So far, so good, but there's a pretty long time until early June, considering the speed Intel has in grabbing back market share lost a few years ago to AMD...