I saw over at Neowin that Apple’s iPad has estimated $54M in sales in just 6 hours. That is quite a large sum of money in such short amount of time, especially with how much hating was going on about the device itself.

According to Mashable, a group of people over at the AAPL Sanity board have done the math and come up with an estimate of the iPad pre-order sales today, based on order numbers (which are listed sequentially). What that means is the numbers are in no way accurate, though the estimates have taken other Apple Store orders into account, and have been made from various sources. Victor Castroll, an analyst with the Valcent Financial Group, backed the estimation, and suggested that there have so far been 90,000 pre-orders in the time that has passed since the iPad was made available, with 50,000 in the first two hours, which doesn’t include reservations made at local Apple Stores as no order numbers are given.

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Consumers have been reporting issues with their brand new Apple i7 iMacs, some with a cracked screen casing, and others are reporting theirs are dead on arrival.

This issue doesn’t appear to be universal, only affecting some of the new iMacs, but is still enough of a problem to raise concern if you plan on purchasing one this Christmas.

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Source: Neowin

Normally, I would frown upon testing beta software against final code that has been updated frequently, but the results this time around are very interesting. Instead of using benchmarking programs, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDNet put together 23 real-world scenarios to see which operating system would be the quickest to complete all of the tasks.

He tested the 32-bit versions of Windows 7 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3. Two separate test machines were used:

An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

Source: One Microsoft Way via MSFN

With 3rd quarter sales, revenue, and earnings posted and evaluated, several surprising facts come into play. iSuppli, a market research firm, has evaluated desktop and laptop sales, and for the first time ever, laptop shipments this quarter have been above desktop shipments.

38.6 million laptops were sold last quarter, only slightly above 38.5 million desktops sold. Notebook PC shipments rose 40 percent over 3rd quarter 2007, while PC shipments fell 1.3 percent over 3rd quarter 2007.

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AMD buys out ATI, Intel and Nvidia seem to form a strategic alliance; in short these are turbulent times in the world of chip manufacturers. If we are to believe the statements made by several manufacturers, then we are on the threshold of some major changes concerning task applications for the various chips in a PC. Though AMD has gotten a head start with Torrenza, Intel won't be far behind in implementing a similar solution.

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Source: Hardware.Info via Flexbeta

It seems that 2007 will be the year of flash-based drives finally starting to nibble into the market share of the only current logical candidates, magnetic platter-based hard disk drives. With all the advances in NAND field, companies have started to introduce flash disk models of usable capacities for the commercial notebook space, not just industrial ones. Adtron Corporation has just introduced some newcomers to its Flashpak family – 2.5-inch flash disk models in capacities of 32GB, 96GB and 160GB.

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Source: The Inquirer via Flexbeta

After the acquisition of ATI Technologies by Advanced Micro Devices the latter started to force out ATI’s brand-name and emphasize AMD brand for graphics cards. However, there are still many fans of ATI, who are very addicted to this name and who would like to get something related to it. Especially for 500 of such people AMD is selling Radeon X1950 XTX Uber Edition bundles signed by Dave Orton, the former chief executive of ATI.

ATI Radeon X1950 XTX Uber Edition is two Radeon X1950 XTX graphics cards (one of which is a master edition version required for multi-GPU CrossFire mode) with clock-speeds of chip/memory increased to 670MHz/2100MHz from 650MHz/2000MHz on default graphics cards. Each of 500 of such bundles is supplied in a special suit-case equipped with a combination lock. Every Radeon X1950 XTX Uber comes with certificate of authenticity signed by ATI’s former chief executive officer David Orton.

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Source: Xbit Labs via Neowin

Motorola’s first Linux handset for the US market, the RIZR Z6, is also likely to be the first in the industry to run an “open” operating system – Linux, Symbian OS or Windows on a single- rather than dual-processor architecture. This shows that Linux is making significant improvements in its suitability to be an operating system for mobile devices, and could give Motorola a significant headstart in the battle to create low power, low cost smartphones.

It is also significant that Motorola said it had worked closely with Microsoft in the creation of the handset. This was primarily to allow it to sync with PCs running Windows Media, but indicates the gradual softening of Microsoft’s attitude to working proactively with non-Windows platforms, as well as its growing closeness to Motorola.

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Source: The Register via Neowin

Intel says the research prototype chip, which will take five to eight years to bring to market, uses less than 100 watts of power and has teraflop performance.

Intel’s researchers have produced an 80-core chip that uses less energy than a quad-core processor and has teraflop performance capabilities.

Researchers have built the prototype to study how best to make that many cores communicate with each other. They’re also studying new designs for cores and new architectural techniques, according to Manny Vara, a technology strategist with Intel’s R&D labs. The chip is just for research purposes and lacks some necessary functionality at this point, but Vara says Intel will be able to produce a chip with 80 cores in five to eight years.

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Source: InformationWeek

GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8300 are the two series of graphics cards which will fill the void beneath NVIDIA’s already launched 8800 series. Based on the G84 core 8600 Ultra and GT will have 64 and 48 shader processors respectively with cores running at 500MHz and 350MHz. With a 256-bit memory bus and memory speeds at 1400MHz and 1200MHz the cards will replace the 7600 series of today. The launch date for these cards is about the same as for when ATI will launch R600, that is, around CeBIT at the start of March.

Except from the 8600 series Bear Eyes has also published specifications for 8300 GT and 8300 GS (via VR-Zone). These cards will replace the 7300 series of today and is based on the G86, an 80nm core. The number of shader processors has been halved to 32 and 24 respectively, while both cores will work at 500MHz. The GT model will have slightly faster memories though, 1200MHz vs. 1000MHz. With a 128-bit bus and up to 256MB the performance will most likely be reflected by the price.

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Source: Nordic Hardware via Neowin