MacRumors

Taiwanese site Coolaler previewed an early version of Intel's upcoming Penryn X9000 CPU. A translation of some of the findings was provided by Fudzilla.

The CPU previewed was an engineering build of the unreleased mobile Penryn X9000 CPU clocked at 2.8GHz. Along with the 45-nm die shrink, the upcoming mobile CPUs increase the L2 cache, and boost processor speeds. The 3dmark06 benchmark for the production sample 2.8GHz processor gives a CPU score of 2569, which compares to scores of 2106-2339 for the current top-of-the-line 2.6GHz CPU available as a build-to-order option in MacBook Pros.

Future and current Intel mobile processors are compiled in this table:

Obviously, not too much weight should be given to benchmarks for early engineering sample CPUs, but the release of new mobile processors may trigger an upgrade cycle for Apple's MacBook Pro laptops, which have not seen substantial updates since June.

The new mobile Penryn processors are expected to be released in January 2008.

Pepsi and Amazon are negotiating a deal to give away up to 1 billion songs during a music-giveaway promotion that will launch during the 2008 Superbowl on February 3rd, according to Billboard Magazine. The deal is reminiscent of the early iTunes-Pepsi promotional giveaways that were launched at the 2004 and 2005 Superbowls.

In the upcoming promotion, however, Amazon will replace Apple as the music distributor, providing MP3s from their DRM-free Music Store which launched as an early Beta in September. Amazon's DRM-free store works on Macs and integrates remarkably well with iTunes.

The negotiations also serve as a push for several labels to join the DRM-free movement, since the promotion is sure to attract a large number of customers. Wal-Mart is also forcing the issue by alerting Warner Music Group and Sony BMG that they will pull all of their Windows Media Audio (DRM) format music from Wal-Mart's site by January if the labels have not yet provided their music in MP3 format.

At present, the labels offering DRM-free music are fragmented across stores. EMI was first to announce the launch of DRM-free music in iTunes, while Universal is offering DRM free music to everyone but iTunes.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that the likelihood of an ultra-portable MacBook is about 85% at Macworld San Francisco.

Munster bases this prediction on circulating rumors about the ultraportable MacBook that have been making the rounds amongst Mac rumor sites over the past few months.

"As Macworld approaches, reports of an ultraportable MacBook are following patterns of previously expected products that eventually materialized," analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients. "We believe these reports are legitimate and continue to expect Apple to introduce a MacBook with a significantly smaller form factor."

The new ultraportable MacBooks are rumored to be aluminum clad, 50% lighter and "strikingly slimmer" to the existing 15" MacBook Pros. They are also expected to incorporate NAND Flash memory to improve battery life and boot times.

Macworld San Francisco takes place January 14-18th 2008 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

An interesting observation was noted on the Wine mailing list. As it turns out, new in Leopard is the ability to load and understand Windows Portable Executable (PE) files which is the common format for Windows applications and libaries. Understandably, the author raises a number of questions about the discovery:

So this leads to the question. Whats going on? Is this a hold over from EFI which is PE by default? Why would the OS need to load the EFI files? Maybe just for easy of development and testing? Or is something else going on? Is Apple going to be adding a win32 compatibility layer to OS X? Is having a loader of any use to us?

This, of course, leads some to the most dramatic conclusion: that Apple may be integrating Windows virtualization into Mac OS X itself. Of course, rumors of this possibility had been circulating for the months prior to Leopard's official release.

One developer we had contacted about this finding thought it was very unlikely and felt that this parsing of PE files may simply be the product of Apple's ongoing work with Safari and iTunes for Windows. He also noted that simply parsing PE files is a far step from being able to actually run Windows applications.

Google has released a beta version of Google Gadgets for Mac. Google's Mac Blog provides some details about the release from Mike Pinkerton.

This feature brings hundreds of existing Google Gadgets to Dashboard. You can add fun gadgets (such as bowling, virtual flower pot, or YouTube), useful gadgets (weather maps, driving directions, and news), and others that offer daily wisdom for the ages (Confucius, horoscopes, and even a joke of the day!). These gadgets look and behave just like any other Dashboard widget, so you don't have to learn anything new.

Google's "Gadgets" are mini applications similar to Apple's own Dashboard Widgets. Google's Gadgets for Mac are now integrated and installable into Apple's Dashboard in Mac OS X. This makes them functionally indistinguishable from Dashboard Widgets.

Google Gadgets comes integrated with Google Desktop, a desktop search application also available from Google.

Apple has issued a patent application for an adapter to convert mini CD/DVD-ROMs to standard 12 cm size for use in slot-loading drives found on many of Apple's computer models.

Apple points out that the use of reduced-size media when possible would reduce shipping, manufacturing, and packaging costs. However, such media cannot be played in slot-loading drives that are designed to only accept standard-sized 12 cm media.

As a solution, Apple presents an adapter that would fit around reduced-sized media, making the media work as if it were standard 12 cm media in slot-loading devices.

The patent application, which was first published last Thursday, was filed in May of 2006 and was brought to light today by AppleInsider.

Raw Data: Patent Application #20070271577

Apple will be offering a one day sale (November 30th) in their international online stores similar to the U.S. Black Friday sale last week.

Discounts appear to be comparable to the U.S. Black Friday sale.

AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson confirmed that the 3G version of the iPhone would be made available "next year".

Plans for using the faster 3G data connection in the iPhone have not been secret. Steve Jobs has stated that a 3G iPhone is coming, but that the delay is due to excessive battery life consumption with existing 3G chipsets. The iPhone presently uses the EDGE network for its data connectivity.

Yahoo News reports that Intel has upgraded its software development tools today, introducing support for Mac OS X Leopard as well as their new Penryn processors.

The Intel Software Development Products for Mac OS X includes updated compilers and libraries for development environments like C, C++ and Fortran that optimize applications to take advantage of features in Intel's latest 64-bit multicore processors, said James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel's software development products division.

The new tools can also take advantage of the new SSE4 instruction set that debuted with the Penryn processors.

Intel first announced the 45-nm Penryn processors on November 12th, 2007, with the first batch of Penryn processors focusing on the higher end server-class Xeon processors. Apple has been rumored to be buying up the high end 3.2GHz Penryn Xeon processors which feature a faster 1600MHz bus and 12MB of L2 cache for an upcoming Mac Pro revision. Apple currently uses the previous generation Xeon Woodcrest (Quad core Macs) or Xeon Clovertown (8-core Macs) processors in their Mac Pros.

Mobile versions of the Penryn processor are not expected until January 2008.