Nexus One Running Android 2.2 is 450% Faster

Froyo is out there and it's fast.

Google has a habit of giving future versions really tasty sounding codenames. Be it Cupcake, Éclair or Froyo, they all sound delicious. However, Froyo (that’s Android 2.2) is sounding more and more delicious by the day because when it hits my Nexus One, Android will be 450 percent faster than it is now.

The guys over at Android Police have Froyo running on a Nexus One and boy, is it a bump in speed over Android 2.1. The lads played around with it and ran some tests using Linpack, which tests the performance of Android's Dalvik VM, the brains of Android. According to their results, while a HTC Hero (Android 1.6) scored about 2 MFLOPs and their Nexus One running 2.1 clocked between 6.5 and 7 MFLOPs, Android 2.2, or Froyo, rang in at 37.5. Yowza!

Mozilla Making Firefox 4 to be ''Super-Duper Fast''

Mozilla this week showed off its plans for Firefox 4, detailing some of the features we'll see in the next version of the open source Internet browser.

Erica Jostedt, PR at Mozilla, yesterday blogged about the company's plans for Firefox 4 and said the main priorities for the next version of Firefox are speed, power and empowerment.

Though Erica was quick to label the plans as fluid and subject to change, she said Mozilla wanted to make Firefox "super-duper fast," enable new open, standard Web technologies, and put users in full control of their data and browsing.

You can check out the 45-minute presentation here but if you're looking for the quick and dirty break down of what was announced, we've summarized what we think will be the biggest improvements and listed them below.

EA Sports Making a FIFA Game for Facebook

EA has announced a new FIFA game that will be played through Facebook.
It's not unusual for a company to have a Facebook presence, particularly a company who's target demographic typically spends a lot of time online anyway. What is unusual, is that EA has revealed that the next FIFA game will be for Facebook. EA President Peter Moore today blogged about a partnership with Playfish, a social gaming developer that EA purchased last year. This partnership will result in a title called FIFA Superstars, a game that will be played on Facebook.

Report: New iPhone will be 4G Verizon Device

We're just a few weeks away from Apple's annual WWDC and what everyone is assuming will be the iPhone 4G launch. One of the bigger and more interesting rumors about the device is what network it will be on.

Everyone is referring to the the next iteration of Apple's smartphone as the iPhone 4G, 4G in this instance standing for 'fourth generation'. However, recent reports suggest the iPhone 4G may actually be a 4G LTE device. Engadget reports getting several tips about this year's iPhone launching as Verizon's first 4G smartphone.

" … This is pretty difficult to believe and we don't want to get your hopes up only to have them smashed into a million pieces -- it'll supposedly even be a 4G launch device," writes Chris Ziegler. "We've gotten surprisingly specific details both from Verizon employees and tipsters whose companies are supposedly under NDA with Verizon to test enterprise deployments of the handset later this year, and they're all sending basically this same message."

Engadget goes on to say that this isn't going to be an LTE exclusive (rather LTE is just being included as a publicity stunt) and that because Verizon's LTE coverage is likely to be very patchy at launch there's little doubt that this would be a CDMA/LTE dual-mode deal capable of working anywhere on the carrier's network.

If it's true, it's bad news for AT&T, which up until now has been the exclusive carrier in the U.S. However, Ziegler highlights Apple's habit of only pushing out minor hardware updates each year and suggests that Cupertino could opt for CDMA this year and leave the LTE update until June 2011.

Intel Stuffing More Than 8 Cores Into Westmere-EX

The more cores, the more hardcore.

Intel's octacore server chip, the Xeon 7500 Nehalem-EX, is built on the 45nm process. For the next big evolution of the Xeon line, Intel hopes to be pushing even more cores when it takes it flagship to the 32nm Westmere-EX generation.

While the Westmere 32nm technology is in the Xeon 5600, Intel plans to extend that technology to EX sometime next year.

Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations and enabling at Intel, said during a webcast speech that the upcoming Westmere-EX chips will be targeted at systems with four sockets or more. The good news is that the Westmere-EX chips will be socket compatible for those who have already invested in the latest Xeon servers.

"We are well along in development and we are confident that we have a product that will give us a great performance boost. It will go into the same sockets, so the idea here is the platform is an investment that the OEMs have made," said Smith, according to the IDG.

Although Intel didn't divulge any information on core counts or clock speeds, analysts see that hitting 12 cores (for 24 threads) is a likely possibility given that AMD already has its Magny-Cours product.