New and Noteworthy: 8-core Mac Pro review; Intel to unveil handheld PC plan; Silverlight: Microsoft's Flash competitor; more

8-core Mac Pro review Digit Magazine has a full review of the 8-core Mac Pro. "Apple's latest Mac bears two brand new, faster Xeon processors that aren't available anywhere else. It also ships at a cost much lower than equivalent Windows workstations -- though it's still too pricey for most designers, illustrators and motion graphics artists. [...] In Cinebench 9.5, the benchmarking suite based on Maxon's Cinema 4D 9.5 3D animation application, the new Mac Pro attained a rendering score of 2,318 -- 4.74 times faster than using a single processor core. This is almost 68 per cent faster than the older dual dual-core Mac Pro." More.

Intel to unveil handheld PC plan Reuters reports second-hand that Intel is planning a handheld PC initiative aimed at creating devices that are larger than palmtops but smaller than notebooks. "The initiative is one of several technological advances that the company plans to announce at the Intel Developer Forum in China this week." More.

Silverlight: Microsoft's Flash competitor Ars Technica has an overview of Silverlight, Microsoft's new technology intended to compete with Adobe Flash. "Microsoft is planning on positioning Silverlight as a replacement for other web-based graphics technologies, such as Adobe's Flash. Microsoft is pushing the fact that Silverlight can deliver streaming videos encoded with its own VC-1 codec, which can be delivered in up to 720 lines of resolution. Flash, currently the king of streaming video on the Internet thanks to YouTube, is limited to 576 lines." More.

Adobe launches online video platform Publish reports that Adobe has launched "Media player," a desktop application that uses Flash architecture and "provides content publishers with new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets while also providing viewers with the ability to download and view content offline." More.

Previously on MacFixIt:

• Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop CS3, InDesign CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3, etc.) ships
• Speeding up Safari: Reducing spinning pinwheels, other performance bottlenecks
• Final Cut Studio 2 (with Final Cut Pro 6), Final Cut Server launched

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