Admittedly, we were a bit hesitant when Cisco contacted us with jubilation over a router, but now we can kind of see why. The company has pulled in design experts from its recently-acquired Flip for what it's banking on is a much simpler and friendlier user experience, from the packaging to the set up and maintenance menus, with a new lineup of routers it's calling Valet. The hardware itself is not too shabby -- it'd probably be quite inconspicuous in a Tomorrowland exhibit -- but the internals are nothing mind-blowing. Both the Valet and Valet Plus offer 2.4GHz Wireless N, while the latter model boasts a longer range and a quartet of Gigabit ports (the standard only uses 10/100).

Eschewing the usual CD installation key is what Cisco's calling the USB Easy Setup Key. Similar idea to the other routers, just plug in and install the software. After two clicks of the menu, it auto-located our Valet and connected to a newly-minted, protected wireless service (in this case "BusyFish") with the password saved in our keychain. Adjusting guest access and parental controls are easy enough, and nice part of the USB key is that you can write the settings onto it, letting you simply plug it into another computer and auto-load the settings. Manual controls are still available and should be fine for most readers. Nothing mind-blowing, but for the audience Cisco's targeting, it's definitely a step in the right direction. According to Cisco, availability is "immediately" and prices are $100 for Valet and $150 for Valet Plus. Press release and oodles (yes, oodles) more pictures after the break.

Gallery: Cisco Valet hands-on

Continue reading Cisco's Valet routers take a cue from Flip's design department

Cisco's Valet routers take a cue from Flip's design department originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You thought six cores were nifty? This week, AMD and Intel have begun the multithreaded battle in earnest -- if only on the IT front -- with chips that have up to double that core density. This week, AMD has officially brought us that Opteron 6000 series leaked last week, a set of 8- and 12-core processors aimed at dual- and quad-CPU servers that it claims have both higher performance and lower cost than Intel's recent hex-core offerings. Not to be outdone, Intel has just introduced a 8-core processor series of its own, the Xeon 7500, that it envisions deployed in mammoth 256-processor configurations. In bulk orders of 1,000, a single 12-core Opteron costs nearly $1,200, while the cheapest single 8-core Xeon will set you back a cool $2,461 in the same quantity. We don't doubt they're powerful, and we'd kill for a pair of either in our gaming rig. At those prices though, we'll stick to building our supercomputer out of PS3s -- Oh, wait.

AMD launches 12-core Opteron server chips, Intel counters with the 8-core Xeon 7500 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GameStop listings are about as accurate as a 14th century musket -- especially when it comes to release dates -- but that didn't keep news site GameSpot from capping the above screenshot. As you can no doubt read, the picture suggests that SanDisk will indeed release a specially-branded 8GB USB flash drive alongside the Xbox 360's USB storage update -- but at twice the normal price for a drive of that capacity. Our red hot rage at this injustice is tempered somewhat knowing there's no concrete proof the $40 figure is correct, but knowing SanDisk (and, frankly, Microsoft's own propensity for overpriced storage) we wouldn't be surprised to see several green thumbdrives pulling a premium at retail next week. Once more for the record: as long as it's larger than 1GB, smaller than 16GB and you format it using the Xbox 360 menus, any USB flash drive will do.

GameStop listing shows SanDisk's Xbox 360-branded USB drives at outrageous prices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OH, GOOD GRIEF.

“Mein Fuhrer, set the wayback machine for 1905!”