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Games did not provide support for the glasses. I remember using my Asus TNT2 Ultra http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=964 on final reality and tomb raider 2. I thought this would not work on an LCD monitor though since most of them work only at 60hz. Kudos to greenzilla for playing on the fact that these monitors have a ridiculously high resolution and halving it to maintain the performance while losing sharpness. I don't think this will work for twitch gamers. but for casual gamers, if they can throw in head tracking, this can be a really fun way to play tetris.

It is possible, and Samsung has being doing it for its desktop panels. I am saying having wide gamut on TN beats the purpose - simply because large part of colors are emulated, so it becomes only marketing gimmick.

Now, Anand (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=8) claims that MacBook Pro actually has an IPS panel.
Since Andand is usually correct, so it is to expect that newest Macbook Pro has IPS panel as well.

How does the fact that it is not removeable affect its shape by 40%?

Well for one, the battery compartment takes space. External shielding takes up space. Most of all, the battery has to be a certain shape to fit into and out of a laptop .

Take a look at any laptop battery. They can't be the footprint of the entire laptop because there would be no way to install it. They have to be brick shaped. By making the battery non-removable, the battery can be optimizied to take as much space internally as it needs. If you at the MacBook Air, you'd see that 2/3s of the internal space of the machine is battery. You can't do that with a removable battery.

Yeah, I remember there was somewhat of a flap when it was realized that OSX was a pretty slow server OS. I wonder if this has been remedied?

I'm finding it hard to see how the drivers are garbage. Both OpenSuSE & Ubuntu have the work done for you.

Hardware-wise, AMD uses crossfire to hit the high-end, and aims for mainstream. See Anandtech's article on the RV770 for more info.

I wouldn't spend the money for something made by Intel or nVidia unless I knew it was a good value. The trophy for making the fastest creates quite the money pit.

I took an ancient, generic 286 computer, and upgraded it through 386SX, 486 DX/2, Cx 6x86, and AMD Athlon motherboards before finally switching to ATX. It was a cheezy, god-only-knows-who-made it power supply that came from a 'not-quite-aluminum-foil' AT case.

I call shenanigans. As I recall, and from what I read on this old Anantech Athlon motherboard review, Athlon motherboards were never produced in an AT form factor, partially due to the fact that AT PSUs were not expected to be able to handle the draw from power hungry athlons.

I also recall #4 having been debunked. Letting the moving parts run 24/7 causes more wear overall than power-up/power-down cycling. You may notice failures more often during a reboot but there's no causal relationship there. In fact, periodic restarts are a good practice to test startup and shutdown routines. 300-day uptimes are wonderful and all but good luck figuring out which of the last 78 changes broke the startup script.

Not all of them. Intel and Samsung both make controllers that do not have the buggy performance problems that the JMicron controllers have.

Mobility and battery life are what matter.

Then I think you're reading the wrong review. You probably meant this one: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3478&p=1

Nvidia never lost the performance crown. AMD did not even bothered to compete with Nvidia for performance at the high end.
Read this excellent article.

What AMD did with the RV770 series was to totally pwn everything below the super high end.
When the 4870 was released at $299, it was generally worse than GTX280, but it easily beat the GTX260 which was priced at $399.
When the 4850 was released at $199, it easily matched the 9800GTX which was priced at $249

A while back, AMDTi said that they were not competing at the high-end anymore: "There were also very specific admissions that AMD/ ATI isnâ(TM)t competing at the high end with Nvidia, nor do they intend to match up to the GTX 280 with a release of their own uber-chip." source. So to say "ATI had to combine two cards to be on top!" kind of completely misses the point. (emphasis added.)

For the interested, there's a great article at anandtech talking about how the R770 came to be pretty awesome... Really, though, it's not a super-high-end part.

I can't believe in this day and age people would still recommend raid0.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

Just do RAID1 please. RAID0 really isn't worth it. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

Ion.simian.c you are a class A idiot. I found good reviews on the Gigabyte IRAM online such as this one http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=12 . The AC apk made statements to which you are left with no good reply at this point such as your asking him what makes hardware access possible and he answered it from a Windows perspective (the os that the gigabyte iram works on, where it does not in linux, and apparently because the SATA interface in Linux is weak in regards to SSD's) and yet you asked him why he brought that up? Get meds for your alzheimers. Do you know how stupid you look at this point? Yet you seem to get off on trying to harass him, and it only makes you look stupider still ion.simian.c

Except those same drives don't exactly compare due to a poor implementation of the hardware or the write/cleaning algorithm in the JMicron controller many (all?) of those are using. The capacity and price are tempting, but the write latency especially during random accesses is beyond awful. Unless of course they were able to update the firmware on those chips to address the issue since this article was published: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=7

According to Anandtech's review, it's highly competitive for database servers. http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3456

It is not the "PC's" fault that you purchased bottom-barrel crap components. Know what Apple uses for motherboards? Slightly modified Intel parts (again, going from what I've seen in some newer machines that went to surplus at my place of work because of how expensive they'd have been to repair). I've never purchased motherboards (even some bottom-barrel priced boards), memory sticks from various companies (though I've settled on G.Skill lately), or other parts that were "buggy". Yes, I've had an occasional DOA part, but that's what warranties are for. Just going by your own words, I'd say you are one of those "Yea, I can be a PC-Tech here for (insert company), because I built my own machine at home!" people I see all over the place. The kind of person that knows *just* enough to assemble a machine, but not enough to make sure all the parts your ordering/spec'ing for a machine will actually work together. This isn't the fault of the aftermarket parts producers -- it's yours.

In my experience, the truth is halfway between your and GP's views:

If you pick somewhat reputable vendors, outright defects are rare. In particular, the Kingston modules GP complains about have always worked fine for me. But having to update BIOSes and drivers to work around bugs is not unusual.
Finally, there are cases where components are out of spec by design and you need to know about it. Consider overclocker DDR3 memory (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=7) for instance. If you use these components as advertised, you may end up with a fried CPU. In that case, I do think it is fault of the aftermarket parts producers unless they include a big fat warning about known problems (in this case, Intel CPUs that may not survive the higher memory voltage).

http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3448

http://anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3413

Even though the article is about power supplies, it has quite a bit of information about how much power various components draw.

What I would really like is if someone would make up an IDE interface to RAM modules and build a large amount of such RAM into the form factor of a hard disk drive. Then, you could populate this RAM-based "hard drive" with the necessary data during startup, and use it for swap and for all of your system's various "temp" folders.

you mean something like this? (note the article date)

I agree, mine was 320$ last year nov-dec when there was a rush for them (Anandtech article: 8800 GT, "The only card that matters") they were always out of stock so i had to rush with a PNY OC edition + state taxes :(

For 100$-120$ its a steal. I play most games at 1600x1200 and they go fine.

Not the eee netbook, the eee box. According to AnandTech it'll just about handle 720p video; they complain about the lack of HDMI, which is a problem if you either wanted digital audio or wanted to watch DRM restricted HD content.

those of us who remember the old days, when slashdot was really nerdy, are kind of disheartened by people who recommend for instance, Dell, HP, or Microsoft products, who really don't know what coding in ASM is like or what it's like fixing compiler options when trying to get an open source app to compile on an unsupported os... (btw: i hate coding)

slashdrones for instance modded an anti vista joke i made recently down to +2, because they couldn't see the humor in vista being called 'slow'

Vista is Slow! it makes gnome look like it were actually compiled with optimizations. gnome runs fine on a single core 3ghz with 768 MB or ram or more, which is a lot higher than XP's decent performance on 256 MB ram with a single core 2 ghz or better (more ram, maybe a little faster cpu for heavy firefox usage) but vista is slow on a 7200 rpm drive with 2 GB of ram and a dual core 2.2 ghz cpu!

give me a break, one slashdrone says vista has great support for slower hard drives (a feature which isn't even enabled by default and takes a removable flash drive, and about 7 reboots to enable, BTW) and i get modded down to +2, on a frigging joke!

I'm gonna cite that thing about the memory http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3009 bottom of page 1 and start of page 2 explain why they couldn't get turbo memory to work (on their first review of it) because they literally had to reboot vista 7 times to enable a built-in feature of vista. nice.

You are assuming a VERY naive wear leveling algorithm that can only move data within the spare area. If the wear leveling algorithm were only slightly less naive, and considered all unused areas to be "spare" for the purpose of wear leveling,(80GB hard drive with only 70GB used for example) then the story improves dramatically. We can infer that Intel is doing something like this, based on the following quote from AnandTech:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4
"One interesting sidenote, you can actually increase the amount of reserved space on your drive to increase its lifespan. First secure erase the drive and using the ATA SetMaxAddress commend just shrink the user capacity, giving you more spare area."
      --AnandTech

You are right to be wary. SSD vendors should report their write amplification numbers, along with some background on how the number was calculated. Intel has at least reported some numbers, has any other SSD vendor gone even that far?

The whole AnandTech review is very informative, and contains generic information on SSD architecture:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

You are assuming a VERY naive wear leveling algorithm that can only move data within the spare area. If the wear leveling algorithm were only slightly less naive, and considered all unused areas to be "spare" for the purpose of wear leveling,(80GB hard drive with only 70GB used for example) then the story improves dramatically. We can infer that Intel is doing something like this, based on the following quote from AnandTech:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4
"One interesting sidenote, you can actually increase the amount of reserved space on your drive to increase its lifespan. First secure erase the drive and using the ATA SetMaxAddress commend just shrink the user capacity, giving you more spare area."
      --AnandTech

You are right to be wary. SSD vendors should report their write amplification numbers, along with some background on how the number was calculated. Intel has at least reported some numbers, has any other SSD vendor gone even that far?

The whole AnandTech review is very informative, and contains generic information on SSD architecture:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

I usually buy most of my parts from Trading Forums, such as Anandtech.com or Hardforum.com.

The prices offered are almost always below what a store offers. Plus, if you decide to go with people selling used instead of new (both are available), you can get it at only a fraction of the cost.

I've been dealing with people from those forums for a couple years now, and they've saved me hundreds of dollars.

Security is the only real issue, since people can rip each other off... but as long as you trade with people that have a good (high) reputation, then you're normally safe. Moreover, a lot of products are sold with transferable manufacturers warranties on them, so you can buy safely, knowing that you're covered for a bit. I have yet to be ripped off after quite a number of full computer builds.

- John

My Atari-400 still works 25 years later

I want my next computer to have no disk drives and no fans, because my last computer like that is still working 25+ years later.

If the Atom platform is good enough (it currently performs like a 1.2GHz Pentium M), then we're almost there. Dell's new Inspiron Mini netbook is fanless, although Dell designed a large heatsink to cool the mobile 945GM graphics. The upcoming Poulsbo chipset, which is designed for Atom, should make it easier to go fanless (and adds full HD video acceleration).

The Atom CPU doesn't need a fan and dual-core versions are supposedly coming this month. Unfortunately, Poulsbo won't be ready.

My Atari-400 still works 25 years later

I want my next computer to have no disk drives and no fans, because my last computer like that is still working 25+ years later.

If the Atom platform is good enough (it currently performs like a 1.2GHz Pentium M), then we're almost there. Dell's new Inspiron Mini netbook is fanless, although Dell designed a large heatsink to cool the mobile 945GM graphics. The upcoming Poulsbo chipset, which is designed for Atom, should make it easier to go fanless (and adds full HD video acceleration).

The Atom CPU doesn't need a fan and dual-core versions are supposedly coming this month. Unfortunately, Poulsbo won't be ready.

That would have been the Gigabyte I-Ram

Nvidia are getting very scared now that ATi are beating them senseless.

Nvidia is really feeling the pinch with ATi taking up the higher end of the market (pro-gear/high end HD) and intel suring up the lower end (GMA, etc). Nvidia pretty much are stuck with consumers buying their middle of the line gear (8600/9600).

When you aim high you tend to hurt real when you fall from grace, the whole 8800 to 9800 leap was abysmal at best unlike their main competitor who really pulled their finger out to release the 3xxx & 4xxx series.

I guess you're referring to AMD/ATI's successful HD 4000 launch about a month ago, but you also seem to be omitting NVIDIA's GTX 200 series. At the high end (non-workstation), the GTX 280 outperforms the HD 4870. The $550 HD 4870 X2 (released about two weeks ago) outperforms the $450 GTX 280, but consumes a heck of a lot more power.

Also, NVIDIA seems to have been beating AMD/ATI senseless for years. According to Jon Peddie Research, for total graphics chips, NVIDIA had 31.4% market share in Q2 2008 vs. AMD's 18.1%. In Q2 2007, NVIDIA had 32.5% and AMD had 19.5%.

For notebook GPUs, NVIDIA led AMD 23.6% to 17.9% in Q2 2008, and 27.0% to 17.4% in Q1 2008. For "graphics add-in boards", NVIDIA led AMD 65% to 35% in Q1 2008.

The "leap" from NVIDIA 8000 series to 9000 series (which was hardly "abysmal") is more appropriately compared to ATI's leap from HD 2000 series to HD 3000 series. NVIDIA's 8000 series was better than ATI's HD 2000 series. ATI responded with the slightly improved (but well-priced) HD 3000 series, and NVIDIA countered with their 9000 series and price cuts to 8800GT/GTS, which drove down the prices of ATI's best-performing cards even more.

Until AMD released the HD 4000 series a month ago, AMD couldn't produce cards that could compete with NVIDIA's $400+ cards. After the successful HD 4000 launch, NVIDIA was forced to slash prices, but this is a very recent develpment. Personally, I'd choose an ATI card over NVIDIA now, but AMD/ATI has been getting whipped by NVIDIA for years.

Given how closely Apple has worked with Intel before and after the processor switch from PowerPC, I wonder how much more Hyper-Threading aware OS X 10.6 (AKA Snow Leopard) will be? After all, it's supposed to be a "tuning" release focused on full 64 bit performance across the OS, so it wouldn't surprise me to see OS X 10.6 to see much greater speed gains from HT than Vista on Nehalem, especially given Anandtech's description of how Vista screws up Turbo mode on Penryn-based systems. (And of course, MS won't go back and put hyperthreading awareness in XP at all...)

The article seems to be down, here's Anandtech's analysis.

I agree with parent 100% on the DS-263N.
I was using exclusively CRTs up until July of this year, when my last good (professional quality) one died. I was reluctant to switch away, because most LCDs I have seen looked like crap. I was proven wrong with the DS-263N.

I am a visual effects and game dev artist, so color accuracy and display uniformity is a must for me. I also do a lot of gaming, so input lag and scaling options (for 4:3 only games) is also a big factor.

Before I purchased, I did a lot of reading and searching for the right monitor. I stumbled upon the LCD thread at the AnandTech forums. It had everything I needed to know about choosing the right monitor. In the "Displays du Jour" section of the post, the DS-263N was listed as being an excellent 8-bit IPS TFT with less than a frame of input lag. I read a numerous consumer reviews on the monitor, and they were also consistently favorable.

I finally made the jump to the DS-263N, and I was not disappointed.
It's BRIGHT, much brighter than my CRT.
The viewing angle is amazing, and the gamma does not change when you shift your view. It only dims just a bit at extreme angles, but the dimming is uniform.
The monitor has 1:1, aspect, and stretch scaling options. So I can happily Quake away at 1600x1200 with no pixel interpolation and only bars to the each side.

The only two issues I have with it are:
1) A single dead green subpixel in the corner (However, I rarely notice it. It's almost impossible to see when gaming or watching a movie)
2) You can adjust the side bar color for viewing non-native resolutions, but it's impossible to get it completely black.

Aside from those issues, it is one of the best monitors I have ever used.

Unfortunately, they were discontinued from production earlier this year and the DS-265W is supposed to take its place.
Hopefully, it will be just as good or better than the DS-263N when it's released.

AnandTech gave the PS3 a 9 out of 10!? What the heck? We have never reviewed the Playstation 3. Here's what we've written on the PS3:

An article when Sony introduced the PS3
An article discussing the internal technology of the PS3 (and 360)
And an article covering it (and the Wii) at E3 2006

We have never reviewed the PS3, in fact we don't even use point scores. I'm not sure if you have us confused with someone else or are trying to attach our name to the PS3, but in either case I'd like to make it clear that we have never reviewed the PS3 as you have described.

AnandTech gave the PS3 a 9 out of 10!? What the heck? We have never reviewed the Playstation 3. Here's what we've written on the PS3:

An article when Sony introduced the PS3
An article discussing the internal technology of the PS3 (and 360)
And an article covering it (and the Wii) at E3 2006

We have never reviewed the PS3, in fact we don't even use point scores. I'm not sure if you have us confused with someone else or are trying to attach our name to the PS3, but in either case I'd like to make it clear that we have never reviewed the PS3 as you have described.

AnandTech gave the PS3 a 9 out of 10!? What the heck? We have never reviewed the Playstation 3. Here's what we've written on the PS3:

An article when Sony introduced the PS3
An article discussing the internal technology of the PS3 (and 360)
And an article covering it (and the Wii) at E3 2006

We have never reviewed the PS3, in fact we don't even use point scores. I'm not sure if you have us confused with someone else or are trying to attach our name to the PS3, but in either case I'd like to make it clear that we have never reviewed the PS3 as you have described.

Thanks, you just made me have a look at Almasi and Gottlieb (1994) again, where else would I need it than on slashdot. Chapter 10 Section 3 and following is good to have a look at.

Your last statement leaves me puzzled. It seems that you must have something to connect caches and memory with so we could be content with a simple bus which A&G describes as existing in Sequents cost effective machines.

When you read further you come across the KSR1 which uses a hierarchical ring architecture, sporting large cashes which connect straight to disk through a second level cache. So there is no memory in our sense. Well I mean a ring is better than a bus, it gives the end nodes the same connectivity as all the other ones.

Notice also that in Larrabie according to an Annandtech article, somebody mentioned here, the L2 is a per node L2. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3367&p=3

The Networking chapter in A&G mentions other networks with much stronger connectedness than a ring but never mind CELL proves it right it seems also from their performance prediction shown on their wiki page.

Anyway, I think that the difference between CELL and Larrabie is that Intel is pandering heavily to the slowest element in the computing environment - the programmer/user. Same old instruction set, simpler memory architecture (I'm not sure about your DMA only comment), lots of vague information about a product which is at least two years out while trying to keep up with the other guys, sounds like Intel. Funny enough they have 45nm now, and also with IA64 they tried to offer something with entertainment value to assembly programmers, so I can't even be angry.

I must get some sleep now. Wake me up when something surprisingly new in CS comes up.

That is much more detailed than the one linked in the article summary. It can be found here.

I was never happy that nVidia got into the chipset business in the first place. If any company has a talent to specialize and do one thing really really well (in a competitive environment), then that is what they should continue to concetrate on.

The problem nv has in the chipset market, as I see it, is that they entered a very crowded market with a dominant player (Intel), which didn't really need another player, and they put themselves in direct competition with Intel, something they weren't when they only made GPUs. It got more complicated when AMD bought ATI, since that also put them in direct competition with AMD.

I freakin' celebrated (not literally) when NVIDIA entered the chipset business way back in 2001. The way I remember it, AMD finally had a very nice CPU (the original Athlon) but, unlike Intel, AMD refused to get into the consumer chipset business and left that part to the three Taiwanese "cheapset" makers: VIA, ALi, and SiS.

I know Intel made a few blunders with their chipsets (think RAMBUS-to-SDRAM translater), but I trusted Intel's reliability way more than VIA, ALi, and SiS. NVIDIA, using their experience with the Xbox, brought much more credibility (IMO) to the AMD platform with their reputation and great chipset features like a dual-channel DDR memory controller, integrated GeForce2 MX based graphics, and a HyperTransport link between the north bridge and loaded south bridge.

I agree that NVIDIA may not be needed anymore after AMD bought ATI's GPU/chipset business. However, way back in 2001, I thought NVIDIA's entry into the chipset business was just what the AMD platform needed to be competitive with Intel.

Of course, when I looked into it, it turned out that the latest ATI offerings beat the pants off of nVidia's

I barely missed dual-NICs, the thing that got me most, was the lack of RAID5 support on the SATA chips...

I don't have personal anecdotal experience with recent NVIDIA and AMD/ATI chipsets, but I enjoy reading chipset reviews at sites like Tech Report, Ars Technica, and Anandtech. From the reviews, I've noticed that AMD/ATI might have significantly inferior "south bridge" performance (hard disk, USB, ethernet, etc) compared to NVIDIA.

AMD's most glaring problem might be flakey AHCI (SATA, NCQ, hot-swap) support. The Tech Report thinks it's so bad, AMD chipset SATA ports should be run in legacy IDE mode. They recently made this recommendation in a July 21 review:

• "We've had numerous problems getting the 790FX chipset's SB600 south bridge component working correctly in AHCI mode. Not only do you need an auxiliary storage controller (or a slipstreamed SP1 disc) to install Vista, but we've found that you also have to choose between drivers that offer strong performance with poor CPU utilization or those that exhibit low CPU utilization with weak performance. Given these issues, you're better off running the SB600 in native IDE mode, which we did for our testing. The nForce chipsets have no problem running in AHCI mode, which is what we used for those platforms."

That same review showed AMD's 790FX chipset being significantly outperformed by NVIDIA's nForce 780a and 750a in multiple read/write performance and general write performance due to the lack of NCQ support when running in IDE mode.

Unrelated to the AHCI issue, AMD's 790FX is also significantly outperformed by nForce 780a/750a in USB performance according to that review.

Note that AMD's 790FX has used the older SB600 south bridge, but AMD's newer SB700 south bridge (used in AMD's newer 780G chipset with integrated graphics) also has similar problems with AHCI reliability, the resulting SATA performance, and USB performance.

Also, AMD is supposed to launch a new south bridge, the SB750, this week. It looks like it's initially going to be paired with the 790FX north bridge. Maybe the AHCI and USB issues will be solved with this new chipset.

I would hope that this AHCI problem can be fixed with a BIOS update, but the 790FX/SB600 chipset combo was released in November, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

I went back and checked the source for that number, and it was AMD's CTO estimating the transistor count for the K8 core, which had between 70 to 230 million transistors, depending on the size of the caches. The Conroe core has approx. 290 million transistors (4MB L2), while the Yorkfield XE has 820 million transistors on two dies (6MB L2 per die). I don't know the transistor counts for the POWER7, but according to Wikipedia the POWER6 has about 790 million transistors, likely due to the per-core 4MB L2 caches.

So the actual CPU logic part of the core is dwarfed by the monster caches in modern processors, and the instruction decoder part is a small part of that.

Well, take a look at this:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2685&p=11

G5s were faster in several tasks when the 1st intel macs arrived

I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

In general, what eats battery power is writing and erasing flash. If you don't have enough RAM and end up paging to flash, that's going to cost lots of battery life (and SSD lifespan as well). There's also a wide range of power management among flash controllers from those that do little or no power management at all to those that only power up an individual flash part when needed. There's also the problem of computer filesystems being horrible in terms of minimizing writes to the flash. When you have to rewrite an entire 128kB flash block for a 4kB cluster write, you can see why this is inefficient.

More significantly, this means that even small improvements to write caching in the OS can make a huge difference in battery life. I would not be at all surprised if somebody turned around and did the same benchmark on a different OS and finds that the same SSD performs better than the hard drive instead of worse. Indeed, AnandTech did just that on Mac OS X and got very, very different results that showed the SSD providing a significant improvement in battery life.

This is, of course, comparing to drives at the 1.8" size, however. Those same tests with 2.5" drives showed the SSD being slightly worse than the latest hard drives, though still favorable compared to drives from a couple of years ago, and only on the order of 5% worse than the latest drives on average---nowhere near the difference seen in the Tom's Hardware test, and pretty clearly proving wrong what Tom's hardware said about 1.8" SSDs versus 1.8" drives ("As a result, the flash based SSD will lose the power consumption battle against 1.8" mechanical hard drives.").

Thus, the question of SSD power consumption becomes mostly one of how much of the wildly different results is due to better write caching, better hot files clustering, etc. in Mac OS X, and how much of it is due to differences in the workload between the two benchmarks used. Discuss.

I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

In general, what eats battery power is writing and erasing flash. If you don't have enough RAM and end up paging to flash, that's going to cost lots of battery life (and SSD lifespan as well). There's also a wide range of power management among flash controllers from those that do little or no power management at all to those that only power up an individual flash part when needed. There's also the problem of computer filesystems being horrible in terms of minimizing writes to the flash. When you have to rewrite an entire 128kB flash block for a 4kB cluster write, you can see why this is inefficient.

More significantly, this means that even small improvements to write caching in the OS can make a huge difference in battery life. I would not be at all surprised if somebody turned around and did the same benchmark on a different OS and finds that the same SSD performs better than the hard drive instead of worse. Indeed, AnandTech did just that on Mac OS X and got very, very different results that showed the SSD providing a significant improvement in battery life.

This is, of course, comparing to drives at the 1.8" size, however. Those same tests with 2.5" drives showed the SSD being slightly worse than the latest hard drives, though still favorable compared to drives from a couple of years ago, and only on the order of 5% worse than the latest drives on average---nowhere near the difference seen in the Tom's Hardware test, and pretty clearly proving wrong what Tom's hardware said about 1.8" SSDs versus 1.8" drives ("As a result, the flash based SSD will lose the power consumption battle against 1.8" mechanical hard drives.").

Thus, the question of SSD power consumption becomes mostly one of how much of the wildly different results is due to better write caching, better hot files clustering, etc. in Mac OS X, and how much of it is due to differences in the workload between the two benchmarks used. Discuss.

you'd think that, maybe, but copying and improving the improvements to linux to the os x kernel is no trivial task, take a look at the exec proc bench on this http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8

mac os x took on average a bit over four times as long to create new processes, if os x were always ahead of linux shouldn't they be at least equal, if not slightly more efficient?

as much resources as apple has, there is no way they'd have collectively as much resources going into kernel development as the linux kernel would have in total, and the quality is reflected in that.

However, the TDP for the dual core is 8 watts, so there is no advantage in power consumption efficiency relative to the single core version.

TDP doesn't tell you anything about either efficiency or how much power the CPU uses in real life. It is solely a number that the CPU maker says the cooling system needs to be able to handle in order to use the processor. It doesn't even mean the theoretical maximum wattage of a processor - it may draw more or (more likely, now that Prescotts are gone) much less power at the maximum load/voltage. Consider that the Intel "QX" family as a whole has a TDP of 130W, then look at this chart.

Power Consumption : 80GB 4200RPM | HDD 64GB SSD
Read/Write : 0.9W | 0.24W/0.36W
Idle : 0.30W | 0.035W
Standby : 0.07W | 0.035W
Sleep : N/A | 0.015W

The power savings are dramatic [for the macbook air]; idle power is reduced by nearly a factor of 10, standby power is cut in half and read/write power is at worst a third of the mechanical drive. The 10x idle power reduction is important since that's where your drive should be spending most of its time, and if the average power savings is somewhere in the 0.25 - 0.5W range you're looking at improving battery life on the order of tens of minutes.

Source.

You fail.

Tom's hardware is crap. Try a decent review site: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341

Most graphics card reviews these days test total system power consumption during idle and load. A sign of changing times I guess. Here's an example from Anandtech's review of the Radeon 4870. Pages 2-10 also have some very technical information about the architecture on ATI's new line of cards, for anyone who's interested.

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

0x000000 Security. Very snarky and somewhat crazy security blogger. Usually interesting.
Phoronix. Linux + hardware + games = Nothing not to love unless you are lame.
Anandtech. Hardware. Glorious hardware. Make sure to put on the adult diapers before visting.
HowtoForge. How to do stuff. Usually in Linux.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. More fun than a barrel of iMacs.
Signal to Noise. The official 37signals blog. They are pompus, they can be pricks at times, but they usually have interesting things to say.
Scobleizer. Robert Scoble. His job is talking to people using social networking tools who own companies that make social networking tools. At some point there will be a business plan. Just not today.