John Carmack Gives Thumbs Up for Wii U

Nintendo's upcoming console shows enough promise that even id Software is taking notice.

In a recent interview with IndustryGamers, id Software technical director John Carmack seemingly gave a thumbs up for the Nintendo Wii U console. In fact, he said it should be a "slam dunk" in bringing the id Tech 5 engine to the upcoming platform. But don't get your hopes up just yet – Wii U support isn't exactly an official deal until Carmack gets his hands on an actual unit.

Power Consumption Solved: Magnetic Processors

All right, let's be optimistic here: it's not going to entirely wipe power-hungry processors and memory off the charts anytime soon.

But there is at least an idea how to reduce the power consumption of semiconductor devices by a factor of 1 million.

The basic idea is to simply eliminate the flow of electrons, the ultimate source of power consumption. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley said that magnetic processors could work without the need of electrons and function near the minimum power limit allowed by the second law of thermodynamics (Landauer limit). The project group estimates that a magnetic chip may only consume 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, which is about 1 million times below today's processors.

HP: TouchPad Isn't Trying to Compete with iPad

HP is taking a different approach in its attempt to break the tablet market.

Every tablet that launches is inevitably compared to Apple's iPad and it's definitely not uncommon to hear hotly-anticipated hardware referred to as 'a potential iPad killer'. However, while most companies are trying to compete with the iPad, HP insists the iPad is not part of its game plan when it comes to its newly-available TouchPad.

Microsoft Merging GFW Marketplace and Xbox.com

Will Xbox.com become the central online source for all Microsoft-sanctioned games?

Friday the Games for Windows website officially announced that Microsoft's digital delivery store for PC games, GFW Marketplace, is merging with Xbox.com. Microsoft doesn't offer up any additional details, only stating that "now you can get all of your gaming needs in one place." The reaction to the merge is curiously calm over on the Xbox.com forum, with many commenters hoping that the merge means more cross-platform compatibility in the future.

Flash Virtualization Software Unveiled

FlashSoft announced that it has secured $3 million in financing and used that opportunity to come out of hiding and provide a few details about its flash virtualization software, called FlashSoft SE.

The company uses software to enable SSDs and PCIe flash memory devices as server-tier read-write cache and accelerate the overall performance of databases and other applications on servers.

The software addresses a general cost and performance problem in data centers. While flash processes data much faster than hard drives, the cost is often prohibitive. However, Flash virtualization can cut the amount of necessary Flash memory significantly, while increasing the application performance by a factor of four to ten, FlashSoft claims.