New and Noteworthy: Xbox 360 chip to feature three PowerPC cores; Is Google testing an eBay competitor?; more

Xbox 360 chip to feature three PowerPC cores A couple years ago, the words "Apple embraces Intel processors, Microsoft looks to PowerPC" might seem absurd, but lo and behold. PC Magazine reports that Microsoft's Xbox 360 contains three 64-bit PowerPC cores, each running at 3.2GHz, "the highest core speed" ever achieved by this technology, according to Jeff Brown, IBM's chief engineer for the Microsoft CPU Project. Able to support two simultaneous threads, the processor was designed with the key goal of being able to support the high sustained bandwidth required by the game console. Brown said the processor should be able to hit a peak bandwidth of 21.6G bps. More.

Is Google testing an eBay competitor? eWeek reports that search giant Google, Inc. tipped its hand this week to Google Base, it's much-rumored auction service that many people believe is meant to compete against auction sites like eBay or CraigsList. "Screen shots of 'Google Base,' available on several different Web logs, explain that the service-to-be is a database consisting of 'your content that's free to contribute.'" More.

iPod Shuffle sales on the rise PC Pro reports that Sales of the iPod shuffle appear to be on the increase and much better than expected, according to the company that makes music decoder chips for the keyfob MP3 players. "SigmaTel's revenues from shuffle chip manufacture were up 31 per cent during its last financial quarter." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Apple releases Backup 3.0.1
• Office 2004 11.2.1 (#4): Restoring colored dots in Entourage projects; Views not remembered, how to fix
• Tutorial: Maintaining and restoring your PowerBook/iBook battery
• Developers: Mac OS X 10.4.3 pre-release builds do not fix PowerMac G5 single-processor 1.8 GHz issues

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