We all love South Park for its humor, satire, the vulgar words and the creative ways of saying the word "s**t" as often as possible in a single episode. Did you know that every new South Park episode is delivered right on the day it airs? Other than the sheer creative talent of the South Park production crew, the show credits its hectic production to Apple computers.

JJ Franzen, technical director at South Park Studios says, "We have very complex stuff that needs to be done very fast and we need to know that we can trust the machines to handle whatever we throw at them without crumbling. ThatÂ?s why we use Macs."

It used to be that the Studio used construction paper cutouts to play as Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny and the other characters. Such a method became too time-consuming, however; the Studio then decided to mimic the original look and feel of construction paper puppets using SGI workstations.

The animation crew uses Adobe Photoshop and Maya. They scan the original paper cutouts and backgrounds, and use these as textures in Maya. Using computers in producing episodes cut down the process from 3 months to 6 days. Recently, a new special-effects technique in producing the cartoon has been introduced: Motion, a graphics software from Apple, which allows snow to appear more naturally in South Park, Colorado.

After animation and audio, the editorial department cuts the episode for broadcast using Macs running on Avid. The team has custom-built the studio to include a 120 processor render farm, more than 30 Mac workstations, and almost 10 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage space.

Prior to using Apple, Maya was rendered on Windows workstations. But Maya would crash often, requiring the entire system to be rebooted. When Maya was released for the Mac, the team made the switch, and now, whenever the application crashes, only the application has to be rebooted - not the entire system.

South Park Studio says that their Mac workstations are fast and reliable. They're coupled with a 120-processor (AMD Athlon) Linux render farm, effectively doubling the amount of shots that the team could do. Macs could definitely keep up with the South Park crew's insane production schedule.

Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says that Apple's quick-to-master style is very useful. "Apple is known in the industry as being very user friendly and when youÂ?re making a big switchover, that factors in ... With Apple and Mac OS X, in-house production could make the transition easily."

So we told you before how the possible release of the Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard this Spring could be delayed. It turns out that this rumor holds no truth. Apple has responded to these reports, saying that Leopard will be released this Spring as scheduled and not on October, as previously thought.

We all know how risky believing in rumors is, but sometimes it's nice to dream. We guess the worth of the rumor must always depend on the worth of the sources. There were a lot of clues that eventually pointed out a Spring release for the Leopard. Besides, it's always safe to stick with the official announcements from the Apple people themselves.

Motherboard manufacturers in Taiwan have an aggressive increase in orders for high-capacitance multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) used in the manufacturing of CPUs allegedly for the use in an AMD-based Apple notebook. With Intel getting in on the Apple action, there's no reason why the other major CPU manufacturer in the world shouldn't get a piece of the warm Apple pie. AMD Taiwan have refused to comment on this.

Although some are saying that an AMD Apple notebook is in the works, other motherboard manufacturers have claimed that there are no AMD/Apple notebooks around, firstly due to Intel having processor superiority over AMD with its latest Core Duo 2 line-up, and that AMD has insufficient capacity to manufacture chips for Apple notebooks.

This is a nice area to look at, and with the success of Boot Camp and the integration Intel processors, and if AMD processor integration goes ahead, Apple computers may steal a lot more of the notebook market, taking even more people away from their Windows laptop loyalties.

If we were all filthy rich and had magic bottomless wallets, we'd all be buying PC with the priciest, most ridiculously high-end CPUs. Such is not the case for most of us though. Performance must always be weighed against budgetary constraints. Also, the CPU isn't the only variable in the equation. We have to consider graphics cards, memory, storage... It's almost enough to drive people insane.

To help prevent an outbreak of foaming-at-the-mouth madness, ExtremeTech's David Case decided to take a look at the CPU side of the equation. Case compared 5 Intel Core 2 Duo processors (E6300, E6400, E6600, E6700, and Core 2 Extreme X6800) and 5 AMD X2 AM2 processors (3800+, 4200+, 4600+, 5000+, and FX-62) based on each processor's performance in 5 different tests, including media content creation and PC gaming. In the tests, the processors vary but everything else stays the same.

Final verdict? Let's hear it from the reviewer himself: "It's clear that Intel's Core 2 Duo lineup offers superior performance across the product line when compared with AMD's Athlon 64 X2. In some applications, even a lower-cost Core 2 Duo can outperform some of the higher-end Athlon 64 X2s."

In other applications though, it's not so clear. For a lot of users, adequate performance is good enough, especially when we factor in the prices. Says Case, "AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+ certainly offers great value, at under $160, and even the 4200+ can be found for under $200. However, the overall "sweet spot" seems to be the two midrange Intel CPUsÂ?the Core 2 Duo E6400 and E6600. The E6600 offers a higher clock rate and larger L2 cache, while the E6400 can be found for well under $250."

As for the the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Case concludes that it "is simply in a class by itself. If you're willing to blow over $800 for a processor, then going a couple hundred bucks more doesn't seem quite so extreme."

Read the full review by clicking on the 'read' link below.

The team behind [H]Enthusiast tried out three core processors particularly for systems heavy on video editing, music encoding music and manipulating images. The contestants were Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, and AMD Athlon 64 FX-32.

The mission: Determine real-world benchmarks for functions an average person would perform on a home PC with similar specs.

The tests:

• Ripping a full-length motion picture from a DVD
• EncodingFrank Zappa's Packard Goose to an iPod native .mp4 / AAC file using iTunes
• Running Adobe Photoshop v8 and Driver Heaven's testing suite
• Importing a 2.3GB avi file imported from a camcorder
• Importing an 800MB MiniDV video clip from a video camera using Windows Movie Maker to encode it to the 2.1Mbps bitrate

The findings: When it comes to editing video, manipulating images, or encoding music, the Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors at 2.66GHz outclassed AMDÂ?s Athlon FX and Athlon 64 line of processors.

It looks like a busy week for Intel. The Godfather of Chips is expected to ship its new Core Duo T2700, a 2.33GHz dual-core 65nm Yonah-based CPU for high end notebooks and desktop replacement (DTR) devices sometime this week. The processor should start showing up in high-end notebooks in the near future.

Intel's new, dual-core Yonah processor has been voted most likely to be the CPU found in the first Intel-based Macs. Early test-drives showed it was a fairly strong candidate to replace the single core Pentium M offering performance equal to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 without an on-die memory controller.

The company will also comically release its Core Duo U2500 ultra-low voltage (ULV) CPU. The U2500 is a 1.2GHz Yonah processor with 2MB L2 cache and a 533MHz FSB consumes only about 0.75 W during normal operation.

On Monday, Intel, the largest chip manufacturer, took the sheets off its new dual-core Xeon Processor 5100 series. The chips, codenamed Woodcrest, are high-volume server and workstation chips which are capable of 135% performance improvement, and 40% power reduction over their previous server products. Power consumption will start at 40 watts for lower models, going up to 65 and 80 watts for the faster processors.

This is very important for Apple's view of things, aside from the obvious inclusion in future products, this would most certainly mean cheaper and lower prices for the current range of processors used in Apple machines.

The new Core micro-architecture is being implemented, which is based on the a power sensitive blueprint design. It is expected that this design will be used in two forthcoming chips for the desktop and notebook called Conroe and Merom. These are expected in July and August, but we all know about delays that can be involved. The 5100, will be shipped at speeds up to 3.0Ghz, with 1333Mhz front side bus and 4 MB of shared L2 cache. The chips are compatible with the current Bensley Platform, which means that they can be dropped in with the current pin format. The platform uses faster and more reliable memory technology, FB-DIMMs, Intel Virtualization Technology, Intel Active Server Manager and Intel I/O Acceleration Technology.

"Simply put, the Core micro-architecture is a technical marvel that is driving a new era of power efficiency without compromising on what can only be described as eye-popping dual-core 64-bit performance," said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of IntelÂ?s Digital Enterprise Group.

Pricing will start at $209 to $851 in 1000 unit quantities, and Intel expect the family of processors to be the fastest-ramping ever. However, they are still loosing ground to the AMD range of processors, and are aiming to rectify things with Woodcrest, Merom and Conroe.