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No, most reports out there talk about looking at bars and seeing them drop dramatically. NOT about actually having dropped calls.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

Did you read

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

Evidently so, but you missed the part about it getting BETTER reception and reception in areas that previous iPhones could not.

Read:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

And learn something.

Anandtech just popped out a fantastic writeup on this issue in their iPhone 4 review. Check it out, its very informative for those who don't have basic antenna design knowledge from EE in college. To paraphrase, it reduces signal by up to 27 dbm, which is almost 50% of normal signal range. (50 to 113 dbm). This will not effect you or show on your bars if you get a better signal than ~75 dbm on a normal basis.

Pretty much anyone who has had an introductory course in EE should have forseen this after the keynote...including their employees. It is a case of gross engineering negligence. Yes, interference does happen with all phones, but the effect is much more pronounced with the iPhone 4 due to an exposed antenna and lack of spending to fix / spot the issue.

In short, your anecdote doesn't address the problem because you are in a good coverage area, and the signal degredation doesn't ruin your reception.

Showing again why Anand runs the best tech site on the internet. Mod the parent up and everyone go read http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2 before posting saying that the antenna problem makes the phone unusable or posting that is has no effect.

So, you might want to read first this article, by a guy who actually does this for a living, to get a feel for the actual issues. Then you might want to read this section of Anandtech's review in which they take several phones -- among them the iPhone 4 -- and do science to them.

The things you'll learn might surprise you: yes, there's loss of signal, but it's not unique to the iPhone 4 (though it does appear to be worse with the iPhone 4). And that's far from the whole story (hint: the iPhone 4's antenna, it turns out, may be better at coping with low signal strength than previous models).

Except they're not misleading people. Don't take it from me as I've been accused of being a fanboi (I'm not), here's someone who's actually gone out and measured signal strenghts and the impact of holding the phone in multiple ways. You know, what geeks are supposed to do instead of bitch and moan. Conclusion: while moving the antenna to the outside of the device has caused problems "The antenna is improved [...] the iPhone 4 performs much better than the 3GS in situations where signal is very low."

The article confirms pretty much everything Apple says in your quote.

+5 Interesting, really?

Here, read this actually interesting article on the subject:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

Now, based on the conclusions of overall improved reception and signal quality, in spite of the flaws, can you seriously say that "at no time was an actual engineer in this area consulted"? You really believe that the marketing department designed an RF antenna that worked well and improved signal quality under most circumstances without any consultation with actual engineers?

More likely, like any other engineering endeavor designed for used in the real world, trade-offs had to be considered. And like many other first-generation designs, flaws related to these trade-offs surfaced after implementation.

I would say that hte most likely scenario was that after the Gawker incident, Apple's preferred time-line for release was compromised, and they were forced to release earlier than intended; possibly limiting their real-world testing capabilities.

          -dZ.

"With my bumper case on, I made it further into dead zones than ever before, and into marginal areas that would always drop calls without any problems at all. It's amazing really to experience the difference in sensitivity the iPhone 4 brings compared to the 3GS, and issues from holding the phone aside, reception is absolutely definitely improved. I felt like I was going places no iPhone had ever gone before. There's no doubt in my mind this iPhone gets the best cellular reception yet, even though measured signal is lower than the 3GS."

AMD is the most advantaged on this front...

Intel and nVidia are stuck in the mode of realistically needing one another and simultaneously downplaying the other's contribution.

Exactly, and this manifested in Intel's new Pinetrail platform to the consumer's detriment. Intel refused to grant NVidia the license to connect their ION chipset via DMI, and so people planning on using Pinetrail in HTPC's were saddled with Intel's own chipset with crappy graphics performance (No Native Hardware H.264 Decoding: Long Live Ion).

It can't do multitasking in the background? Better tell that to Pandora. I despise Apple products and prefer my Nexus One greatly, but even I don't lie about what Apple can do.

For me, Slashdot is still the top link in the Awesome bar, but it is being seriously challenged by:
http://arstechnica.com/ and http://anandtech.com/

Right now there's not any kind of screaming demand for 6 cores on the desktop. There's probably no one making destop motherboards thst support them anyway.

On AMD's side, at least, there are plenty of desktop motherboards supporting the Phenom II X6 line. Intel just doesn't seem to be targetting that market.

I suppose all of this is a mute because the LGA 1156 platform and LGA 1366 platform are being discontinued next year, so if you don't already have a i7 compatible motherboard you'd be buying a board that won't be compatible with any cpus made 7 months from now. I wouldn't buy a i7 cpu unless intel started selling them for $50, while AM3 boards available now are compatible with future 16-core cpus

First off, 3Q11 isn't 7 months away.

And it's all relative. By that time, 1366 will be three years old. I'll have had mine for over 2.5 years. Note that I bought my i7 system because my high-end AMD board, which was 16 months old at the time, was only AM2 and therefore couldn't support the newer AMD CPUs. I had to buy a new board whether I went with AMD or Intel. Even the article you linked states that guaranteeing motherboard support this early in the game is difficult, but AMD is usually good about maintaining socket compatibility. You may be able to slip a Zambezi into your current day Socket-AM3 motherboards. You and your current AM3 board might end up being just as screwed as me and my 1366 board.

Plus you're forgetting that the Phenom II X4 was designed to compete with the C2Q, not the i7. In an old review (can't find the link right now), the i7-920 at stock 2.66GHz still beat out a Phenom II 955BE overclocked to 3.7GHz by 27% on some compression benchmark. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-black-edition/6 shows similar results - in the 7-Zip/Mplayer test, the stock 2.8GHz i7-930 beats the 3.87GHz Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition by over 20%. Yes, the AMD has 50% more cores (not taking into account HyperThreading) and 38% higher clockspeed, but the Intel is still 20% faster.

AMD's CPUs can be a great value, especially for gaming where the GPU is usually the bottleneck. However, Intel's CPUs are simply more powerful for a large number of tasks. Depending on what hardware you currently have, there may or may not be a significant difference in upgrade costs between the two brands. It's pretty safe to say that the Intel will probably cost more, but you'll probably also be getting more performance out of it.

"Surprisingly, even at stock speeds, the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."

-1, Inaccurate

The 2.8ghz i7-930 is $199 vs $342 for a 2.93ghz i7-875K, so almost double the price for 0.13ghz more. How did the author see that and think "better performance per dollar"? The article he linked to even shows the better performance per dollar in a chart, and btw techreport that chart is pretty piss poor, shoving $200 processors on a chart that goes to $1200 just clumps 90% of the processors in the $50 to $400 range. Learn how to make a chart: you should have left off under $50 (no processors under $50) and anything past $1000 (no processors over $1000). Because of your crappy chart the i7-875 is right next to the i7-930 despite the $142 difference.

The i7-930 is locked but it does reach 4ghz on air rather easily.

I suppose all of this is a mute because the LGA 1156 platform and LGA 1366 platform are being discontinued next year, so if you don't already have a i7 compatible motherboard you'd be buying a board that won't be compatible with any cpus made 7 months from now. I wouldn't buy a i7 cpu unless intel started selling them for $50, while AM3 boards available now are compatible with future 16-core cpus

Considering that the 875 is exactly the same as the 870 except for the unlocked multiplier, and the 870 has cost $562 then $342 is a quite significant drop and a better bargain no matter how you look at it but none of them are that great. Also, the title of Anandtech's conclusion is Final Words: Not for enthusiasts. It seems more like what's been happening in graphics cards, that you will be able to get some "pre-overclocked" systems. This is pretty much a competitior to AMDs $299 Phenom II X6 1090T, giving you 4 faster cores instead of 6 slower.

Though yeah, for desktop use I really feel the air is running out. New games are mostly built to be xbox/ps3 compatible and don't strain a modern PC much. Mostly it's server/workstation applications that really put them through their paces these days, but it's not that interesting for the home geek. And when games like Red Dead Redemption are xbox/ps3 with pc edition coming "later, maybe" you know the PC is dying as a game platform not matter how much you stick to your guns. I already have a Wii, I guess PC+Wii will get me through this generation but the next generation I fear it's almost certainly a console as my main gaming station. At least it'll make it easier to run Linux with what's left...

for once, quite accurate by the anon. Reviews about these have been inconsistent, some citing bad overclocking potential and generally being not for enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, others seem to state it's a full sweep and/or basically great .

I'm wondering if this is another scenario of handpicked engineering samples or not.

I'm not at all convinced that this is great, or horrible. Anyone care to weigh in with better comments than kdawson?

Just about any decent hardware will work fine with XBMC. Zotac Ion seems to be a popular choice at the moment. If you want to seriously research out what to buy, visit the XBMC Hardware Discussion forum

One should not forget companies might have "chip lotteries", i.e. use chips that are less robust and cheaper to manufacture without majority of consumers knowing the difference.

They do this in the LCD monitor industry where they have "panel lotteries" that use cheaper parts and are not what is advertised due to consumer ignorance. See Article on Anand here about panel lotteries:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=39226

That's where you're wrong, according to this, the random reads at least on the smaller files are significantly faster than a normal HDD.

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/4.htm

I was going by Anandtech's results:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/3

Of course, if you go in 1MB files, it's going to be faster (assuming the file isn't fragmented).

Yes this kernel feature probably needs to be done first, but for decades people have had to manually save data before restarting X, without the X developers ever fixing that. Some apps have worked around this problem, but if the X bunch use that as an excuse to not fix things it's going to stay crap and this kernel feature will be mostly useless.

It doesn't affect me anymore, I use Linux mainly for servers. So I don't really care who is responsible, I'm just putting on a virtual "Steve Jobs" turtleneck and saying overall it still sucks, the problem is far from fixed yet, and it sure isn't "insanely great".

In comparison here's the state of things for:
OSX: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3709/gfxcardstatus-brings-2010-macbook-pro-gpu-switching

Windows: http://www.osnews.com/story/22850/NVIDIA_Unveils_Optimus_Seamless_GPU_Switching

> Besides, logging out of your desktop and then logging in again is surely better than what you suggest?

Where did I suggest people do that? To me such a kernel feature is useless till the rest of the "Linux Desktop" bunch work together and produce something like this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3709/gfxcardstatus-brings-2010-macbook-pro-gpu-switching

Yes the kernel bunch probably have to do this feature first, but for decades the X server going down has caused X applications to lose unsaved data and basically not work well, and for those decades it still has not been fixed. So far the applications individually workaround such crappiness. Which only makes it a bit less crappy.

• It would be just as buggy and crash-prone as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.
• Because it's on every darn page on the web - for adverts - it'd be running almost constantly as the user uses Safari; so the other down-side comes into play - it's a huge battery hog. Suddenly Apple's quotes of 10 hours battery life on the iPad are reduced to 5 hours (or whatever). Uninformed users (you know, the 99% majority out there) say Apple is lying about it's battery times. Now every manufacturer lies about it's battery times, right ? Oh, wait, no they don't. Apple's battery-life figures stand alone (as far as I can tell) as a reasonable guide to how long you'll get out of your machine. That's worth a lot, to Apple.

I'm not going to pretend there aren't advantages to Apple in requiring people to use Apple's API to code on Apple's hardware (yeah, yeah, I know you bought it, I know it's *yours*, but you know what I mean). Of course there are. That doesn't invalidate the concerns above. I'm sure 'the Steve' sees it as a bonus.

Knowing people who work at Apple, they're a focussed bunch. They care passionately about making things easy to use, and frankly about making the very best (whatever) possible. There's very little of the jaded cynicism I've found in other companies over the years - they're more willing to "++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start." than anywhere else I've ever seen, and I (personally) can easily see the above being sufficient reason to abandon Flash as a platform if they think it's beyond saving.

Simon

Gamers seriously care about 20% faster frame rates, especially at the edge cases. The difference between 28fps and 34fps is sometimes the difference between playable and unplayable.

True. But quite often these benchmarks are done at low quality. Few gamers care about 200fps vs 240fps.

And as soon as you raise the quality, so the GPU is the bottleneck, suddenly the difference drops below 20%. Benchmarks like this suggest 8-16% is more common than 20+%

There are a few games that truly benefit from fewer, faster cores. But it's not like we're comparing 28->34fps. For most, any modern CPU and GPU will manage 60+ fps. Take a look at L4D2 - even Dragon Age is way above 100fps.

Given identical prices, I think a lot of people will go for the extra cores. Whether that's a smart choice is determined by the buyer, because only the buyer knows how he will use it.

Last time around many people picked up Q6600's rather than E6600's, because even though it wasn't as fast in games, more cores meant they'd be set for when games used more cores. The odd time they ran multiple multi-core programs at once, they'd also be set.

I'm guessing many will go for more cores this time around, too.

Anandtech put up a good review of the new chip and included some benchmarks against some i5s and i7s. Here's a link to the review on a single page.

It was outdone by the i7 860 almost universally. The 860 has 4 cores and can be found for $200 if you live near a Microcenter. It also draws less power, generates less heat, and the superior intel turbo boost technology means it runs single-threaded applications faster.

I like AMD too but other than the mid/low range market they really just aren't competitive these days. I think the new chips are a step in the right direction and I'd love to see them get back to their Athlon glory days.

Anandtech managed to get a stable 4.0 GHz overclock with air cooling. It makes an already great deal all that much better in my opinion.

How is a $299 6 core/6 thread chip at 4GHz a better deal than a $199 4 core/8 thread chip that can also be overclocked on air to the same speed, and benchmarks far faster at that point?

Anandtech managed to get a stable 4.0 GHz overclock with air cooling. It makes an already great deal all that much better in my opinion.

If you mean RAM cache at the storage engine level, it makes little to no sense at the desktop PC level. You just add more system RAM and let the OS handle caching. It costs too much to add a bunch of DIMMs to the storage chain. In a SAN or just an immense disk pool, sure, it probably makes sense to have some RAM-based volumes.

Raw GHz is useless, here is fair comparison in terms of processing power http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839/2 and here is one with respect to power consumption http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839/8

From above charts, I would say i5,i7 own Core 2 Quad in terms of both processing power and power consumption.

Raw GHz is useless, here is fair comparison in terms of processing power http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839/2 and here is one with respect to power consumption http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839/8

From above charts, I would say i5,i7 own Core 2 Quad in terms of both processing power and power consumption.

The third core gives a significant performance benefit over two cores, especially since many games were originally designed for consoles and are badly ported to PCs. Unoptimized performance hogs like Grand Theft Auto demand more cores (and can use them). Just today I saw an article on Anandtech describing significant, unexpected benefits from a slower quad core over a newer, faster dual-core in gaming. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3695/the-clarkdale-experiment-mea-culpa

PCI-X video card

It's PCIe - not PCI-X

If you didn't notice an improvement from a quad, then you aren't using your computer fully. That's the same reason lots of people can get away with using netbooks. I personally noticed a big responsiveness improvement when I went from dual-core to quad, and encoding times dropped quite a bit. I suspect your computer usage is somewhere in the middle.

Don't forget to prioritize I/O. A cheap AMD Quad + SSD will give incredible responsiveness compared to a more expensive Quad + regular HDD. Or if you need tons of space, like me, go for multiple HDDs. Those spinning things are still the slowest component that we have to deal with... so speeding them up is more important than a 10% faster CPU or better RAM.

Some games also benefit immensely from faster I/O. Check out the Min and Average FPS for Crysis: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14

SSD is very playable, but HDD isn't really.

Nice list on the Andtech forums http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=609&highlight=free

Why are people hung up on SSD lifespan? Unless you're talking about USB flash thumbdrives any SSD you buy is not going to "wear out" any time soon - 5 years is the absolute worst case scenario assuming you write constantly as much as the drive will take. Tracking against intel's media wearout indicator suggests even heavily used drives will last around 15 years. How much computer equipment do you have around that's even 5 years old?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2972/the-rest-of-clarkdale-intel-s-pentium-g6950-core-i5-650-660-670-reviewed/2

i5-661 (with the fastest on-package graphics) is performance-competitive with AMD's latest integrated graphics. The slower on-package GPU from Intel are behind, but not by much. Nothing Intel can't solve in its next processor (especially as AMD did not increase its IGP performance)

Here's another one: http://it.anandtech.com/show/2739/7

try searching for something like VelociRaptor "raid 5" iometer
velociraptor is a 10,000k drive so it should approximate performance of any high-end 1-2tb desktop drive even if the review is old

I should probably get back to work now :)

I tried typing a more descriptive title but it doesn't allow very many characters.
I figured most people here are interested in high performance rather than best value, and this article shows these new drives have better performance(*) than the Intel and Corsair Nova drives highly rated by the original article...
So when I say it's a better article because it's reviewing things with better performance, maybe I'm not being fair. But I don't think many people would have a chance to read this article if I didn't write some sensationalist headline to go with it. Anyways, we should give the article writer some credit for reviewing these so quickly, he only got the thing in the mail 2 days ago!

(*) usually

Better because it examines the performance of a new controller series from SandForce which beats the performance of these ones by using lossless compression to write less data.

http://www.anandtech.com/print/3656

(printed view has no ads and no margins and is one big long page...)

TRIM doesn't solve the problem, apparently. Why doesn't it just defrag and compact all the files into continous pages on block boundaries? Seems simple enough...

I recommend reading the Anandtech SSD articles as they are clearer, more informative, and less alarmist.

google: why do ssd get slower over time. first answer: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8

no comment

I don't pretend to even an elementary working knowledge of this stuff but the Anandtech articles seem to be the most frequently cited reference starting points. The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ and The SSD Relapse. I've a rudimentary understanding of the problems but have yet to come across anything that speaks to whether a SSD can be "refurbished" at the end of it's relatively short life, or, if a technology could be developed that would be profitable to refurbish SSDs at the end of their life. Just to underscore how little I know about this, I'm not at all sure what I mean when I say "refurbish" a SSD.

Seconded.

Nobody who's actually used an SSD talks about how hard drives will remain relevant. Nobody.

It's not even about the streaming speeds. Going from 60 IOPS (typical SATA disk) to 6000 IOPS(*) is a night & day difference. There's just no comparison. Meanwhile, the latest SATA 6 Gbps drives can reputedly do 60,000 IOPS!

To put that in perspective, 60K IOPS is the same as a 350x 15K RPM drives in a SAN storage array. That's the kind of thing that banks buy for $millions, but it's still not as good as the SSD, because a SAN can only do those IOPS if it's receiving many independent requests on many "threads". The latency of any single request is still a couple of milliseconds. Meanwhile, SSDs can not only pull insane aggregate IOPS, but they can do it for a single thread, because the latencies are way lower.

There's "enterprise" SSDs out already that can do over 200K IOPS over PCI-e. Sooner or later, that's going to trickle down to the consumer market.

Hard drives are the new tape.

*) that's what I get from the somewhat outdated SSD in my laptop.

I don't care whether Google prepares an iPad rival. A whole bunch of new Linux tablets are coming, likewise a whole bunch of "smartbooks" (netbook computers with non-x86 processors).

I'm really excited about the nVidia Tegra 2 chip. Typical power dissipation of about 500 milliWatts, 8 cores: ARM7 "housekeeping" core, dual 1GHz ARM9 processing cores, audio core, graphics accelerator core, video encode core, video decode core, and "image processing" core (which will support a high-resolution camera). nVidia showed off prototype smartbooks with a Tegra 2 playing HD video, and claimed that the chip was dissipating 150 milliWatts; elsewhere I have seen 500 milliWatts as the typical number.

I'm also excited about the Pixel Qi screen. That's the same display technology from the OLPC. A nice-looking display that dissipates 2 Watts when the backlight is on, and about 0.2 Watts with the backlight disabled. If you want to sit outside in the bright sun, you turn the backlight off and you get a nice, readable, sharp display that's very suitable for ebooks and web surfing, but you could watch movies that way too if you wanted.

A typical Atom system dissipates 15 to 20 Watts while operating. That's why netbooks need cooling fans. A Tegra 2/Pixel Qi system ought to have tremendous battery life, especially with the backlight off, and won't need a cooling fan. Win/win.

So, what I want is a tablet and a smartbook with a Tegra 2 and a Pixel Qi screen. I want Linux, but that's no problem, because Windows doesn't even run on a Tegra 2, and I don't think anybody is going to ship a Windows CE tablet. And I insist on a device with USB ports: I want to be able to plug in a keyboard, a mouse, a memory card reader, or USB storage devices.

I imagine that Acer and Asus will both ship products I will want. But the actual announced product I know about is the Notion Ink Adam tablet: Tegra 2 chip, Pixel Qi screen, capacitive multitouch touchscreen, Android OS. It also has an intriguing feature: a trackpad on the back of the device, which allows you to use Flash applications that were designed for use with a mouse (you use a finger on the back to drag the cursor around, and tap on the front with your other hand to click the mouse). It also has a camera that can be flipped around to point at you, away from you, or in between. It was originally announced for June, but recent news casts doubt on that.

By the way, one reason why tablets are the hot new form factor: people who see something that looks like a notebook computer expect it to run Windows, but people who see a tablet device have no expectations. So, there will probably be more tablets than smartbooks.

steveha

The LCD is not sunlight readable, it is another fashion over function device (...)
I will not buy something that only works indoors or should I say, is usable only where the light isn't bright and the glare can be minimized. Sorry, having to change the devices orientation based on lighting sources while even INDOORS is usability bullshit. (...)
Damn, why is it the majority of upcoming computing devices practically require you to be indoors? (...)
Hell I would be afraid to take an iPad outside, less it get wet or too hot, totally disregarding the fact I cannot read it unless I held it above my head to block the sun

Although in this regard the iPad is miles away from an e-ink reader such as the Kindle, it is not nearly as bad as you think it is:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3640/apples-ipad-the-anandtech-review/7
(Go to around 1/3 into the page, right around the photo of the dog.)

Sub-par for the task you want? Definitely. Really worth the huge fuss you are making over it? No, not really.

From a page on that article... with a good hyper link. The 12 core Opteron on Linux absolutely flies! I didn't see another benchmark given there using Linux.

I assume you're referring to this article at Anandtech. The Xeon did in fact beat the Magny Cours on their database benchmarks.

Anandtech has an excellent review of the new chip. The AMD chip is compared against the latest Xeon. In some situations such as OLTP and ERP, the AMD offering lives down to it's name Mangy Cores. In HTP and data-mining, Anandtech gives the nod to AMD.

So choose depending on your needs.

Yep, that's why you would like to cache as much in RAM as possible. AMD can help you there.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3784&p=15 ...
The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2062218 have some info about it... Or rather, a lot of people reporting the same, and nothing from the site admins.

There's also an Anand Tech review which is pretty good and has plenty of different benchmarks. It has the added benefit of testing a 480 SLI configuration which produces some interesting results. It also presents some benchmarks that help to show off nVidia's GPGPU performance as well, which is something that they've been using to hype these new cards.

In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.