Weekend tech reading (2.16)

Radeon HD 4000 series specifications surface (rumor/speculation) The ATI Radeon HD 4000 series is slated for late Q2. Information about the high-end RV770 has been leaking onto the web, from here and there, but the exact specifications has remained in the shadows. NordicHardware.

Secret recipe inside Intel's latest competitor By merging asymmetrical cores onto the same piece of silicon, Montalvo can cut power consumption by dishing applications that don't require a lot of computing firepower onto less-powerful, more energy-efficient cores. News.com.

Tech Pay Hit Quarterly High, Then Dropped Off, Says Report After hitting a record high in October, hourly wages for tech workers sputtered in the last months of 2007, according to a new report released on Thursday by IT staffing firm Yoh. Information Week.

S3 intros GPU with DirectX 10.1, Blu-ray support AMD is no longer the only company with graphics processors that support Microsoft's DirectX 10.1 graphics standard. And yet Nvidia still hasn't hopped on the DX 10.1 bandwagon just yet. So who's the other contender? Tech Report.

Is Amazon’s Small Crash a Giant Crash for Cloud Computing? Amazon’s S3 service – which companies can use to rent data storage on Amazon’s tech gear — crashed this morning, knocking many small businesses offline and highlighting one of the model’s drawbacks: You’re putting your operations in somebody else’s hands. WSJ.