$100 laptop trials soon

Widespread field trials of the One Laptop per Child group`s low-cost PC for children in the developing world will start in several countries next month, says Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the group, News.com reports.

Negroponte says reports that trials would be limited to Thailand were inaccurate. He says trials will be conducted in the next two months ahead of the release of the first laptops built on an assembly line in November.

The news comes after the group`s CTO Mary Lou Jepsen said developers had found a way to produce a flexible and cheap display that can be read in direct sunlight. However, the cost of the much-touted $100 laptops is expected to be around $135.

Intel is preparing to release its Tulsa dual-core Xeon processor at the end of the month, although it has already started shipping the processors, reports eWeek.

The high-end processor for servers with four or more chips marks another attempt by Intel to slow-down the momentum of rival Advanced Micro Devices, which introduced its latest generation of Opteron processors earlier this month.

The report says Tulsa is built with Intel`s 65-nanometer manufacturing process and offers up to 16MB of Level 3 cache and will address a sector of the server business in which AMD`s Opteron has done well.

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) say they may have solved the speech recognition conundrum with a new specialised chip that is expected to deliver a thousand times improvement in the performance of speech recognition systems.

The team says this kind of improvement would make it feasible to place sophisticated speech engines in devices such as cellphones or PDAs, reports The Register.

The CMU team has already created a lightweight hardware speech engine based on a Field Programmable Gate Array that solves many of the traditional speech recognition problems. The device can handle only 1 000 words at a modest speed, but the CMU hopes to create a larger capable of dealing with 5 000 words in real-time by the end of the year.

Samsung plans to build a 178cm liquid crystal display (LCD) to challenge plasma and projection televisions, says the Sydney Morning Herald.

The report says the largest LCD screen in production is 165cm and this latest model from Samsung will strike another blow to plasma screens that have traditionally dominated the market for TVs with screens larger than 101cm.

Samsung says its 178cm TV will enter production in the first half of next year. The company also claims the model will set a new benchmark in terms of video image reproduction, viewing angle and image quality.