Among them: I-Stat, owned by Abbott Laboratories (nyse: ABT - news - people ), which makes a handheld device for basic chemistry that uses so-called ion-selective membranes, and Cholestech (nasdaq: CTEC - news - people ), which has a lipids testing machine and relies on a glucometerlike optical reflection technology.

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Lab testing had indicated the machine was much more successful than humans at detecting these cues, according to Derrick.

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It takes between six months and three years to book revenue for a new machine because of all the testing required by state-certified labs.

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The machine, reportedly, is for testing purposes.

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Of course, there are significant provisos to get through first -- it's only one machine, running on Apple's drivers, testing mostly Apple applications, and the two systems default to different versions of QuickTime -- but we can still glean some indication of where the two heavyweights are relative to one another.

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Testing the cards on an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700-powered machine with 2GB of RAM, the single R600 card bested the solo 8800 GTX in basically every benchmark they tried, with common applications seeing minimal gains, but games saw between ten-percent (Half-Life 2: Lost Coast) and 42-percent (1701 A.D.) hikes.

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