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• Complaints about the 20" display problems started appearing on the Apple site on August 7, 2007, which was the day the new iMacs were first sold. The most recent complaint is dated November 18, 2007, the day I'm writing this article. There are over 300 posts to the thread, and it has been viewed over 15,000 times. Some 20" iMac owners have claimed in the above thread that their iMacs do not have this problem. They were asked in the thread to post photos of their unaffected iMacs. I have not yet seen a photo of this nature. Another thread was directed at finding a production week with "good" 20" iMacs. Again, a few users claimed to have "good" iMacs, but failed to post photos. This thread took an interesting turn when a faithful Mac owner insisted on seeing photos of a "bad" iMac; I haven't seen a bad iMac display anywhere. The owner of a 20" iMac cheerful obliged him. This user's photos are also interesting because they appear to rule out incorrect gamma settings as a cause of the display issue. The thread ended with a poster deleting his thread for "legal reasons". If he was threatened with legal action, I wonder who made the threat. Apple then locked the thread, ruling out any chance of us finding out if there really was a production week when "good" 20" iMacs were made. A Closer Look At The 24" Display Issue The 24" display issue is surprising similar to the 20" issue, except that the gradient color change appears from left to right and mac photos. The 24" display also appears to suffer from backlight leakage, which apparently can occur from multiple directions. Apple's Handling Of The Issue Of course, the most important thing to both current and prospective 2007 iMac owners is getting this resolved. So far Apple has said nothing about the issues? Many iMac owners have reported being charged a 15% restocking fee when returning their defective iMacs, as some Apple retail managers apparently aren't acknowledging these problems as defects. Many iMac owners are using terms like "class action suit" in discussion forums, but, thus far, none have taken the first step in initiating such proceedings. Many still hope that Apple will take the initiative and issue a recall of affected 20 and 24 inch iMacs. No one outside of Apple knows exactly how many 2007 iMacs are out there, but hundreds of thousands could have been produced. Apple's fiscal year fourth-quarter earnings report shows sales of 817,000 desktops in the quarter ending September 29, 2007, which includes seven weeks of 2007 iMac sales. And, there are about an additional seven weeks (September 30 through the day of this writing) of desktop sales, including early holiday sales, not reflected in the above numbers. That's a lot of iMacs, and potentially a lot of two-way shipping fees and displays to replace. According to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, as of September 29, 2007, Apple had $15.4 billion in cash and no debt. Somehow, assuming the defects are real enough to affect use the of iMacs for the purposes they are purchased, I think they can afford to do the right thing no matter how many displays are affected. Join our discussion on this article!

• Tony Tamasi, NVIDIA's Director of Product Management: Leaked drivers continue to be a major problem for us, and cause for a great deal of pain for everyone involved. We really do not want the drivers to leak, and we continue to try and prevent that from happening. We've gone as far as turning off a huge number of customer accesses to our prerelease drivers, as well as virtually eliminating all developers from access to prerelease drivers - but the leaks persist. Part of this problem is that our business model requires us to enable our manufacturing partners and OEM's continuous access to our updated drivers in order for them to progress with bug closure and GPU/system qualification and WHQL certification. Because we are not vertically integrated, that means that top tier OEM's, the contract equipment manufacturers that build products for those OEM's, and key AIC manufacturers all need early access to prerelease drivers. Typically these drivers are known to be "buggy" in general, but get built to address a specific bug or bugs that a customer reported, and help to keep the QA pipeline flowing (typically QA cycles at OEM's can take as long as 3 months). As we progress, the driver continues to improve in quality, eventually to the point where we have a single driver binary that can pass WHQL for all our OEM customers across our product line. We do our best to only post drivers that meet a high level of quality - at a minimum WHQL certification for our product line. The updated drivers we post will meet that mark. The current drivers posted on our web site (built from the rel6 tree) have been posted for about 4 months, so you're right - we're definitely due for a new release. The new drivers (12.xx) are based on an updated code tree and class interface (they support the NV20 architecture of course), but along the way we also changed versioning schemes. The "single-digit" prefix driver base (6.xx, 7.xx) are based on the NV10 class [GeForce2 type chips - comment of the editor ] architecture, and the two-digit prefix drivers signify the transition to the new class architecture to support NV20 [GeForce3 type chips - comment of the editor ]. We went to more digits primarily to provide more flexibility for versioning for specific customer issues. Thank you, Tony! I used to believe that NVIDIA does not really care much about the leaked driver issue. After all, it ensures that there are thousands of end users deliberately playing beta testers. I also don't know if I would welcome "enforced security measures" against driver leakage, because it would keep the performance hungry and tech-savvy NVIDIA graphics card owners from remaining at the cutting edge. Driver Revision 12.xx - Enhancing Pentium 4 Finally I am getting to 'the beef'. What is so special about revision 12.xx that I am dedicating an article to it? In the last week I was told by numerous sources that NVIDIA's latest leaked driver contains a significant amount of code that is specifically enhanced for Intel's Pentium 4 processor. While this may be a completely normal development, it could have a significant impact on the current situation in the processor market. In other words, this technical issue could easily have political repercussions. So far Intel's Pentium 4 processor is having a difficult stand. Intel's flagship processor is still too expensive for the performance it offers in today's applications, especially since AMD's latest price drop. AMD's current flagship, the Athlon 1333 processor, can easily keep up with Intel's Pentium 1700, even though Pentium 4 has a significant clock speed advantage over its competitor from Austin, TX. In the past Intel could justify its high-price policy with the superior performance of its high-end processors. This is where Pentium 4 has failed so far. The main reason is the lack of software support for Pentium 4's new architecture. Once this situation changes, Intel will have a much easier life bringing Pentium 4 to the masses. If you look at the configuration of OEM systems you will find out that the vast majority is equipped with NVIDIA graphics cards. If those graphics cards would all use drivers that are enhanced for Pentium 4, it could give Pentium 4 a very important performance boost. NVIDIA stated that driver revision 12.xx has indeed Pentium 4 optimized code: As you know, the P4's micro architecture is substantially different from P3, specifically in the areas of cache and front side bus (of course there are other difference as well - SIMD2, etc.). We've rearchitected much of our memory management code to make better utilization of the higher front side bus bandwidth from the P4, host memory, and to the graphics processor. Additionally, we've optimized our code for the increased cache line size, and implemented better prefetching throughout the driver to help compensate for the P4's deeper pipeline. Now you see why we consider it very important to have a closer look at this new NVIDIA driver. It could well have an impact on future Pentium 4 sales! Expectations A graphics card driver is of course only able to influence programs that access the display buffer. NVIDIA's driver 12.10 won't be speeding up disk transfers, but it could obviously improve Pentium 4's scores in 3D-games, professional OpenGL-software and maybe even in 2D (office applications). We compare driver revision 12.10 to driver revision 6.67. The revision 6.67 may sound pretty old, but we should not forget that it used to be pretty up to date until rather recently. The revisions 7.xx never worked properly and as far as I know there weren't any revisions 8.xx - 10.xx. The first semi-official GeForce3 driver revision was 11.01. Each driver will be run on a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz system as well as on an Athlon 1333 MHz DDR system. Test Setup I decided to use a GeForce2 Ultra graphics card in this test, because it is based on the widely used NV10(GeForce2)-type architecture as found on graphics card equipped with GeForce2 GTS, GeForce2 Pro, GeForce2 Ultra, GeForce2 MX or GeForce2Go. Only a very small minority of people owns GeForce3 cards right now, which would make a test with this kind of card rather meaningless to most of you. Pentium 4 System Athlon System Motherboard Asus P4T, Bios 1005 beta 1 MSI MS-6341, pre-release BIOS Memory 256 MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM 256 MB Mircron PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting 8-8-5-2-2-2-2 Hard Drive IBM DTLA 307030, 30 GB, 7200 RPM, ATA100, FAT32 (Win98) / NTFS (Win2k) Network Card NetGear FA310TX Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra Reference Card, Driver 1210 / 667 Power Supply 400 W Operating System Windows 98 SE / Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 1 Desktop Screen Resolution 1024x768x16x85 Quake 3 Arena Retail Version Unreal Tournament 4.28 Evolva Demo Dronez Demo MDK2 Demo Mercedes Benz Truck Racing Demo

• Boy, Don MacDonald, former general manager of consumer electronics efforts and recently promoted to vice president of sales and market and general manager of corporate brands and marketing, will not be happy seeing Viiv appearing on this list (MacDonald gave us an in-depth interview on Viiv in July.) Let's take a step back from all the advertising and marketing blurbs and have a real world look at the entertainment PC platforms of the two processor manufacturers. Intel and AMD promised a whole new approach (two different approaches, actually) to digital TV. Viiv and Live are technologies that are designed to make the computer more useful for entertainment and provide the functionality of what is often described as a digital entertainment hub in our home. About a year ago, we were told Viiv would be key to participate in a movie premiere (at home, on your sofa, whether you like the movie theater or not) and bring a wealth of content to our home. The fact is that this promise has not become a reality yet. Viiv and the competing Live! are marketing names for a combination of hardware components. Both names indicate very little added use for the PC buyer today, but allowed both processor manufacturers to stick yet another label on your new PC. An early Viiv PC In preparation for Vista, I recently bought a new PC for our office and it appears that these days you really don't have much choice in PC operating systems, at least when you want to buy from your local retail store. Windows Media Center Edition is standard in the price range above $500 and more than half of these PCs carry either a Viiv or a Live! logo. So I ended up with a Viiv PC and I was surprised how little Viiv actually offers. Viiv Content, which is often criticized by AMD as closed feature, is virtually non-existent and Intel's ClickStar joint venture with Morgan Freeman currently tells me that I have to wait another week for a movie to be available. I admit that I have very little experience with AMD Live! and I'd have to speculate on available Live! content. But I don't think that it is content why Viiv and Live! are disappointing. The problem really is that both concepts are not transparent enough to make sense for consumers who consider spicing up their living room experience with a PC. Intel wants to be right under the TV and AMD, which launched Live! as sort of an anti-Intel answer, wants the PC to be a PC but stream entertainment content throughout the house (read this article for some more detail on Live!). There has to be an obvious added value of these technologies to make sense. But both, Intel and AMD, are currently not providing a value that goes beyond the Media Center software. Plus, keep in mind, AMD and Intel are high-tech brands that never succeeded in consumer electronics. Viiv and Live! do not have the genes to change that track record. Viiv and Live! are marketing terms that fell well short of expectations this year. An improvement for 2007 is rather unlikely, but we know that Apple is prepping an entertainment device, which means that Intel will be equipping a much more conclusive entertainment platform in the near future - even if it won't carry the "Viiv" label.