New and Noteworthy: Vendor opens Cube and puts a PC inside; Intel's photonics plan for chip performance; more

Vendor opens Cube and puts a PC inside Australian IT reports that Korean company U-Power has come up with a way to shoehorn a Pentium M processor and Centrino chipset into the PowerMac G4 Cube, allowing users to run Windows XP and all PC-compatible software. "A Pentium-M daughterboard sits on top of the other Mac hardware and communicates with Apple's Open Firmware system, emulating the PC BIOS. An emulation layer allows the Pentium M to run Windows programs using the Mac hardware, albeit with some loss of performance." More.

Intel's photonics plan for chip performance eWeek reports that Intel researchers are shedding some light on a potential new application for chip photonics: upping the performance of multicore processors. "The processor giant's research labs are exploring ways to use silicon photonics-on-chip components that use light to transmit data-to replace electrical interconnects using copper wiring and simultaneously speed up vital connections that move data into and out of processors." More.

Previously on MacFixIt:

• Safari 2.0: Problems logging into secure sites, potential workaround
• Slow printing, high processor usage from HP printers under Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger)

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