Apple exec Eddy Cue joins Ferrari board of directors, raises hopes for truly high-tech exotic cars

By Jon Fingas posted Nov 7th 2012 4:27PM

Ferrari loves to extol the advances found in its drivetrains, but the unspoken rule is that its interior technology leaves something to be desired; unless you're thinking of a 458's manettino, even a less expensive car like the Tesla Model S is virtually in another league. The automaker may be narrowing that gap by putting Apple online lead Eddy Cue on the Ferrari board of directors. Without giving too much away, Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo points to Cue's experience with the "dynamic, innovative world of the internet" as the motivation -- as good a sign as any that the Maranello team wants to take connected cars seriously. Whenever the Apple Senior VP's experience comes into full effect, we may see one of the few supercar lineups whose cabins are as advanced as the engines. Just don't look for any tight integration with Ferrari-badged Acer gear in the near future.

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AMD unveils Opteron 6300, hopes to put servers in a Piledriver

By Jon Fingas posted Nov 5th 2012 12:01AM

AMD's advantage these days most often rests in datacenters that thrive on the chip designer's love of many-core processors, so it was almost surprising that the company brought its Piledriver architecture to the mainstream before turning to the server room. It's closing that gap now that the Opteron 6300 is here. The sequel to the 6200 fits into the same sockets and consumes the same energy as its ancestor, but speeds ahead through Piledriver's newer layout and instructions -- if you believe AMD, as much as 24 percent faster in one performance test, 40 percent in performance per watt and (naturally) a better deal for the money than Intel's Xeon. Whether that's true or just marketing bluster, there's a wide spread of chips that range from a quad-core, 3.5GHz example to a 16-core, 2.8GHz beast for massively parallel tasks. Cray, Dell, HP and others plan to boost their servers before long, although the surest proof of the 6300's success from our perspective may be that everything in the bacrkoom runs just as smoothly as it did yesterday.

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