Following the announcement of the new iMacs, and their rather surprising specification, the websites are speculating on what is really inside of those new iMacs. While some websites seems to have mixed up plateform code name with CPU generation, the hardware sitting in the new iMac is for sure exotic.

According to several websites, CPUs are a "special" model of the current 45-nm Penryn processor, but not officially available from Intel catalog..... So, either it is indeed 1066 MHz FSB capable CPU on a 800MHz Santa Rosa FSB, or the new iMacs feature a overclocked version of the Santa Rosa to bring support for 1066 MHz FSB.

Following [the new] iMac introduction, speculation has been rampant as to whether Apple got an early shot at Intel's upcoming Core 2 Duo Extreme X9100 chip. The X9100 is meant to usher in the "Montevina" Centrino 2 era, and boasts significant less power consumption than its forebears, in addition to those spiffy new clock speeds. Well, it turns out the new iMacs aren't Montevina....

Look what arrived on our doorstep today! That's right - the shiny, expensive new iMac that's now equipped with that funky custom and / or overclocked 3.06GHz CPU. Take a look at us wildly unboxing and handling the behemoth in the gallery below, and get a load of its fairly impressive Xbench scores...

Solid-state disks (SSD) are probably some of the most talked-about new gadgets of late. They easily distinguish themselves from the mechanical hard drives of the Jurassic period because they have no moving parts. Like USB drives, they use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, but SSDs are wrapped in an enclosure the size of a 2.5-in. mechanical laptop drive and have a SATA interface for an easy connection to the internals of your portable....

So have you ever wondered if it's really worth it to plunk down the extra $1,300 for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air? Or have you been tempted to swap the current mechanical hard drive out of your portable and slide one of these high tech bad boys inside? I did.

And surprisingly.....

None of [the] results, in my opinion, show any clear and present advantage to these SSDs -- at least not on a price/performance ratio.

Last week, Apple made a tiny debit from their enormous cash reserves to buy small semi conductor design firm PA Semi. At approximately $278m, the deal barely shifts the multi billion dollar cash account on the balance sheet; still it has left many analysts, watchers and writers asking questions.

The first and most obvious is "why?" Why did a company that favors buying companies in the early stages of development buy a company with an established customer list? And why, given Apple's focus and success with consumer-focused products, would it choose to invest in the challenging and cyclical semiconductor industry?

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