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"Single threaded gaming performance is, as we mentioned in the first article, no different than the single core Pentium 4 of the same clock speed. And as we know from all of our previous comparisons, the Athlon 64 is the clear choice for single threaded gaming performance." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2389&p=6

It seems like I remember Anand buying himself a Porsche for his 16th or 18th birthday, using the payola from his hardware review site.

While his business acumen is to be commended, I can imagine it would be difficult to remain 100% objective under such circumstances.

http://www.anandtech.com

To complement your nice Tyan motherboard, get one or two (XXX check for physical sizes) of them realizm 800 from 3dlabs. They are the only 16 lanes PCIexpress videocards I know of. Not sure about GPGPU, but at 3840 x 2400, solitaire is bound to look amazing... especially if you can get some nice 9.2Mpixel displays as well: High end videocard without a matching display, what would be the point? Check for instance the IBM T221).

Anandtech reviewed the Realizm 800 here.

Mhhh... If you wanted the machine to be a server of some sorts, then I just wasted 10 minutes typing all this!

you obviously didn't see the anandtech review

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=23 88&p=15

single-core totally nonresponsive, dual-core smooth as silk

"Arrgh... practically every point in the above post is misleading or wrong, and it get's modded to +5"

Ok, the two dies on one chip was true, or believed to be true when they first demoed:

Source: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/200409151 34740.html

I'll concede that point to you - that Intel is now putting 2 cores on a die... however they were never engineered to work that way initially. They only have an 800 MHZ FSB, not 1066 like the newer P4's, so they have even less bandwidth to share. Want a source?? Here:

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2252

As far as my other points go, let's go over them, shall we???

"the new dual core P4s won't be compatible with a majority of Intel boards on the market"

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21793

"The two cores use hyper transport to communicate with various system devices"

Source: http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_11787,00.html

It actually uses a cross-bar to handle the switching as well.

"Now for the best part - anybody with an existing Socket 939 AMD based motherboard will be able to use one. Worst case, you'll have to download a bios update to enable it, but it will work."

Source: http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-x-1583-x-x-x

"AMD designed the K8 core to be dual ready out of the box, so this whole thing about them having an extra year isn't exactly true - they've had much longer than that."

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13344

Still think almost my whole post was wrong? About what you said:

"Re: sharing I/O bandwidth. Intel has to do this because they don't have a built-in MCH. It has *nothing* to do with "selling chips with 2 normal P4 dies on them"."

It has EVERYTHING to do with having 2 P4 cores in a single package - look at that anand article I posted above, here is a quote from it:

"The major issue with Intel's approach to dual core designs is that the dual cores must contest with one another for bandwidth across Intel's 64-bit NetBurst FSB. To make matters worse, the x-series line of dual core CPUs are currently only slated for use with an 800MHz FSB, instead of Intel's soon to be announced 1066MHz FSB. The reduction in bandwidth will hurt performance scalability and we continue to wonder why Intel is reluctant to transition more of their CPUs to the 1066MHz FSB, especially the dual core chips that definitely need it.

With only a 64-bit FSB running at 800MHz, a single x40 processor will only have 6.4GB/s of bandwidth to the rest of the system. Now that 6.4GB/s is fine for a single CPU, but an x40 with two cores the bandwidth requirements go up significantly."

I don't think so - AMD boards don't have a northbridge... the memory controller is on the CPU itself.

http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=200 6

See the last paragraph

Abit: http://techreport.com/etc/2004q2/abit-tour/index.x ?pg=1 ECS/PC-Chips: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1891&p= 1 AOpen & Asus: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mobofactories/ Chaintech: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/cha intech_taiwan/

Firstly, your G4/450 tower isn't over 6 years old, because they were released August 31, 1999.

Actually, they were only announced on August 31, 1999. They didn't ship until October 1999, with the G4/450 being the top model and the G4/500 being delayed until 2000. "Over 6 years old" was one heck of an exaggeration or miscalculation. The fastest Mac six years ago was a G3 without AGP.

FYI, a PC of roughly the same era as your G4 (mid 1999) would be something along the lines of a 600Mhz P3...

In October 1999 (the month the G4 actually shipped), the P3 was available at 733Mhz.

...and would have cost substantially less. Or you could have had a dual ~450Mhz P3 for about the same price as your G4 (~US$2500).

The G4/450 was priced at $2500 when it was announced on August 31, 1999, but the price was raised to $3500 on October 14 when the G4/500 was delayed.

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

Anandtech do some pretty reasonable guides. They assume you've been following industry trends but I'm in the same boat as you - I went from a Celeron 400 to a P4 2.6 overclock - that took quite a bit of homework to research.

They have four main guides that they update every month or so: cheap, medium ( = reasonably high end), gamer-money-no-object (admittedly rather old now, from Nov 04), and overclock-city (very old - Sep 04). The theory is that they periodically review one of their guides and make sure it's up to date. Clearly some guides get reviewed more often than others.

I also used to go to Dans Data but I think he's too busy reviewing toys, moving house and having a girlfriend nowadays.

Hope this helps.

Aegilops

The article is a nice start. For getting the lay of the land, I like the enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and ExtremeTech. Silent PC Review shows some nice components for building silent PCs.

Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series. It's difficult to get the latest ATI A-I-W card from the stock computer builders. If you don't do excessive gaming, you can opt for slightly less CPU and a lower power ATI A-I-W; that will help you build a more silent computer. Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy. Cool cases can be had from places like Ahanix, Lian Li, and Nexus (check out both the iStyle and Breeze cases).

I'm not going to qoute the entire 21 page article from Anandtech, but the conclusion was pretty clear.

Basicly, the summary is that mobile chips are often limited by memory bandwidth etc. The Pentium M is stunning, and an even match for PIV/A64 under those conditions, and with lower power consumption to boot. But when you remove the constraints and move to a desktop, it does not perform as well as the desktop chips. E.g. it has a large cache to deal with a slow memory bus. Give it DDR400 (or soon, DDR2-667) and the big cache is excessive.

The Pentium M was Intels attempt to make AMD fight a two-front war against a superior mobile and superior desktop CPU. They succeeded in mobile chips because they made adaptions specifically for the mobile market, but failed on the desktop. I expect the same choices to hold it back when going for the desktop market.

Kjella

As I also mentioned in elsewhere in this thread several gaming reviews have shown that Athlon 64 and Pentium M performance is close when a high-end desktop video card (GeForce 6800GT or similar) is used.

The Pentium M doesn't fare very well in games vs. the Athlon 64, even when using the same video card.

Anandtech did a test comparing the A64, Pentium M and Pentium 4, and gave them each the same high end graphics card. The Pentium M finished in the lower half of the pack on almost every benchmark.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2342&p=15

In addition, the Pentium M is pretty expensive, so you'll be able to buy a high end Athlon 64 chip with the same money as this below average performing Pentium M chip.

Actually, neither of the parents points are particularly true. http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid =50&threadid=1531887&enterthread=y is a discussion on another board with some good info from PowerEngineer.

Actually, if you look at benchmarks on the fastest Pentium-M chip, they beat the high-end P4 quite consistantly.

I looked at the benchmarks and they definitely *do not* beat the high-end P4's consistently.

The Pentium-M compares to the P4 much the same way that the old Cyrix chips compared to a Pentium- they do well on non-CPU intensive tasks such as Microsoft word and internet explorer, but the weak FPU hinders its raw performance in CPU hungry tasks. The Pentium-M's floating point performance is slightly better than half of the high end P4's.

When you design a chip to be low power, you have to make tradeoffs. Intel designed a pretty efficient chip that delivers good performance for the amount of wattage it consumes, but it shouldn't be confused with more powerful desktop chips. It does well in light applications that aren't really CPU hungry and won't bog the processor.

Anandtech did a pretty thorough review of the Pentium-M and how it compares to desktop chips.

"As a mobile processor, the Pentium M cannot be beat - we've actually seen why, even in this comparison today. With a highly power optimized architecture, the Pentium M continues to deliver performance that is competitive with other mobile CPUs on the market. The problem is that in the transition to the desktop world, its competitors get much more powerful, while the Pentium M is forced to live within its mobile constraints."

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2342&p=21

The Intel is obviously CPU-bound in the gaming benchmarks. Anyone with half an interest in games would see that one, right off the bat.

That is wrong. The Intel system is graphics bound, not CPU bound. In a clock-for-clock comparison Pentium M performs very similar to Athlon 64 in gaming performance when a high end video card is used as Tech Report, Anandtech, Sudhian and others have shown.

The problem with Intel's gaming performance in this review falls squarely on the low performance of Intel's integrated graphics. It is a problem of Intel's making. Intel will not let vendors use the Centrino name unless an Intel chipset is used. Being frozen out of the Centrino notebook market discourages others like ATI from creating better integrated graphics solutions for Pentium M.

One of the biggest problems the Register had with the AMD test setup versus the Intel test setup is that the AMD setup "had a graphics processor from ATI" while the Intel setup had "Intel's integrated graphics processor". It doesn't mention that the ATI video, the Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series, is also an integrated solution.
From the article, "An AMD spokeswoman insisted the company picked 'the most comparable offering from the competitor' that it could find, even though it didn't actually do that."

Well, AMD doesn't make any integrated graphics solutions, and the Radeon Xpress 200 series is one of the only integrated graphics options available. Benchmarks of the Radeon Xpress 200 can be found in this(http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc. aspx?i=2269&p=18) Anandtech review of the chipset the the Xpress 200 integrated graphics debuted on. As expected of integrated graphics, it performs much worse than the lowest tier graphics cards ATI is currently making, the Radeon X300.

AMD rigging benchmarks? Maybe. But the proposition that AMD did not choose the closest video to Intel's offering -- that it had availale -- is false.
The more sensational the report, the more hits the Register will recieve. It is ironic that while chastising AMD for fiddling benchmarks to sell more units, it fiddles with rhetoric to increase popularity.

(I type this at a Pentium M laptop, this is not AMD fanboyism)

yeah but we're not talking about a powersaving feature, we're talking about having 4ghz vs 0.5ghz. That's a huge difference. Now if you're just checking email with both the systems then your wasting, but if you're encoding DivX movies you need the extra mhz.

besides, someone had a good point:
"your desktop power supply does not run at capacity all the time, it needs that to get it through surges in demand"

The only difference between a VIA system and a p4 system is the processor. The hd, video, etc are all sucking the same amount of power, and that p4 isn't going to be sucking maximum power 24/7, when you're just checking email you're not going to be at 90% utilization. Sure it'll use more wattage than a Via, but it's unlikely it'll be 200w vs 90w all the time like in my example, I'd bet the power consumption would be closer to about even given everything being the same except for a Via CPU vs a P4. Does anyone exactly how much more a P4 sucks down at idle vs a Via CPU? I'm betting it's not over 50w, probably not even that dramatic.

check this out: EPIA Power Simulator tells you the power consumption of EPIA boards with different accessories. At idle with a high-end video card, CDROM drive and 3.5" hd a EPIA 5000 got nearly 90w. They also have a p4 you can play with proving larger power consumption, but I found this interesting: over at Anandtech they did a review showing that a AMD64 3500+ 90nm core only sucks down 86w at idle. 86w! That's a full system too. The Tech Report did a similar test and got 113w from a similar cpu. That's still damn good.

So if what these sites are saying is correct these boards really don't save any power when the PCs are idle compared to 3+ ghz AMD64 90nm core processors, and very little compared to P4s. Good to know.

Nope. Core Image basically requires a card that supports pixel shading.
(The VRAM is not the issue, but practically speaking it means 64 MB cards and greater).

Some good info here: AnandTech

A major difference people may not think of in comparing these machines is the processor speed. At face value you would see that the 12" Powerbook is 1.5ghz is only slightly faster, compared to the Pentium M running at 1.1ghz. I don't have an exact benchmark handy, but the 1.5ghz G4 is probably comparable to a 2.5ghz or faster Pentium.

Quite true. But this applies to Pentium 4 desktop processors. Like a G4, the Pentium M gets more 'work' done per clock cycle than a Pentium 4 or an AMD desktop chip. I don't have figures for the 1.1GHz chip, but a Pentium M 725 (1.6GHz) is roughly equivalent to an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or a P4 3.46GHz with business applications. (AnandTech) So, it looks like a Pentium M performs closer to a G4 per clock cycle than a P4. Like a G4, a PM eats up SETI, too.

Not to mention that its always difficult comparing battery life between laptops. Could be that the 6-11 hour claim from Sony is when the cdrom and hard drive are idle, the display is turned off, and wireless internet is turned off, or something crazy like that.

Of course its also possible that Apple's 5-hour claim is possible but impractical, and Sony's 6 hour claim is with everything possible turned on.

Oh, quite true. Apples up to 5 hours is possible with a new Powerbook and doing lightweight stuff (no wireless, more time reading stuff onscreen than doing anything with the processore, dimmed)... same as with the Sony. The up to 11 is possible under the same circumstances... but this is mainly due to the crazy-efficient Penitum M Ultra Low Voltage processor. If IBM came out with a similar CPU and Apple built an ultraportable out of it, I'll bet they'd achieve similar numbers.

That's a good article at techreport. Here's another good article on the 6xx-series P4s from Anandtech. The ZD article was not so well-written.

I also think they're stretching it a bit right now with their current "intel comparable" numbering scheme.

Umm .. its not "Intel comparable", but compared to a Athlon Thunderbird core. ie "We call it 2500+ because if the Thundebird ran at 2500MHz, this is how it would perform".

But you're right.. it dosen't make sense... this does not correctly apply to 64bit cores. For example, the Athlon XP3200 is consistently behind the A64 3200. The Sempron rating is even more confusing...

Can you have more than a person using a Windows computer at the same time with a GUI available?

Yes. The Jetway Magic Twin (review at AnandTech) is a small form factor box running XP that allows you to have two users at once. (It's designed for businesses with users who aren't using nearly as much CPU power as they have, so it can be shared. I think it's some kind of hack on Terminal Service that makes the second monitor a terminal or something.)

Sony makes some nice looking computers. Never owned one, though. And the nicest case for a do-it-yourselfer I've seen is the Lian-Li PC-6070.

Anand just posted and article http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2364 about it.

Neat idea, but I recently read a review stating that the Mini (at least the base version) lacked the processing testicular fortitude to be a full-blown media center. Plus, it does not have the storage to be a server (unless you upgrade the HD) Anandtech Review It still has some potential, but it does not seem to be designed for this role (at least without some serious upgrading)

Apparantly you haven't seen recent benchmarks on SLI: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/ index.html and here for Doom 3, Counterstrike and FarCry benches: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258 &p=4 The store you work probably isn't selling SLI because the new SLI PCI-Express mobos were just released. They're available on Newegg, CDW, etc.

...there is an Anandtech form post.
Linky
For everything else, there's mastercard.

The article seemed to lean twoards, "I love the free SLI stuff that NVIDIA sent me, but don't take my word for it."

Anandtech posted such a nice article on actual retail SLI boards and their qwirks just recently. The boards featured in that review were actually modestly priced as well, contrary to XYZ's thoughts on SLI.

For anyone who is interested, Anandtech has posted a round-up of the four SLI boards on the market (DFI, ASUS, MSI & Gigabyte) which includes some conclusions of their own about usability, value and performance.

#5) No benefit. "From what I heard, more than a few games realize no FPS gains at all from the addition of a second video card". First, this is rumor. Many games realize no benefit at low resolutions (640x480, some at 800x600) because the games are more CPU bound than video card bound. All the games that are SLI compatible definitely realize solid FPS gains. Moreover, those gains can be "converted" into graphics enhancements (i.e. no need to go from 60fps to 95 fps, but now you can turn on 8xAA or up the screen resolution, etc.)

#6) Dual GPU cards. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about here. The Gigabyte dual GPU card is just an SLI solution on a single graphics card. It's (almost) exactly the same as having 2x6600GT cards. It uses the same technology and produces the same results. So what's this viable new technology on the horizon he is talking about?

Equally, you wouldn't use a Prescott if an AMD FX-55 was within your grasp.

It's been proven time and again - Intels are NOT GAMING CPUs. AMD have only one CPU that underperforms an Intel on the 939 line - the 3000+. (I refer you to http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=23 30)
Quote: "Things don't look so good for Intel here, the Pentium 4 570J is the only Intel CPU capable of outperforming the Athlon 64 3000+. Unfortunately for Intel, AMD's Athlon 64 4000+ is about 14% faster at 1280 x 1024.

The Extreme Edition CPUs don't do much for Intel, as Prescott does appear to perform equal or better clock for clock than the older Northwood core."
Given that the 570J is a whole 2GHz faster in clock, that's astonishing. What happened to Intel's product superiority? Out the window(s), that's where.

That would indeed be sound reasoning, if that was reflected by the benchmarks I saw.

Have you even seen the reviews/benchmarks that compare the SMP XEON to SMP Opteron systems?

The ones on Anandtech (find by doing an 'advanced' search for 'opteron xeon' as 'all these words')?

If so, yes, I did. The benchmarks I saw (Sep 13 2004) led me to infer that a 2xXeon 3.2 1MB system would be at most 15% slower than a system with 2xOpteron 2.4s. Further, in order to get prices that were no more than 10% higher than the comparable Xeon system, we'd need to buy from a non-preferred vendor. Sun were far worse due to the need to go with a v40z for >1 133MHz PCI-X slots in one machine and >2 discs in the other, and that was with our discount (admittedly, the v40z is expandable to 4-way). :(

I'd be very interested in seeing better benchmarks for future reference, particularly if they use x86_64 Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, etc as the benchmark platform, rather than Windows.

(-1, Troll)

The first linux drivers ATI released were for their firegl line of workstation cards. You could hack them to work with the normal cards, but for quite a while now ATI has provided drivers that work with all the cards. In fact, you can read anandtech's review of ATI and nVidia cards under Linux here.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2335 &p=4, part of the Anandtech article, compares the Fire to X800s and GeForces. Dumbass Post=Very Yes.

The drivers are more optimized for the tasks that they perform. And yes there are benchmarks, and no they are not better then gaming specific cards. Usually the gaming specific video cards beat the living shit out of the workstation graphics cards.

Here

Intel will likely cut the prices of current single-core CPUs when the dual-core Pentium 4's (Smithfield) are launched in Q2 2005. So it's a little hard to predict what the price premium will be over single core CPUs. However, the pricing for Smithfield seems consistent with Intel's past pricing for mainstream single-core CPUs whenever they introduced a new core.

According to Anandtech's latest Intel roadmap article, the dual-core Pentium 4's will be launched at the following prices:

• Pentium 4 820 (2.80GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $241
• Pentium 4 830 (3.00GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $316
• Pentium 4 840 (3.20GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $530

At those prices, there doesn't seem to be any big price premium for the extra core. At each price point ($241, $316, $530), a Pentium 4 buyer can either choose a slower (per core) dual-core CPU or a faster single-core CPU.

Intel will likely cut the prices of current single-core CPUs when the dual-core Pentium 4's (Smithfield) are launched in Q2 2005. So it's a little hard to predict what the price premium will be over single core CPUs. However, the pricing for Smithfield seems consistent with Intel's past pricing for mainstream single-core CPUs whenever they introduced a new core.

According to Anandtech's latest Intel roadmap article, the dual-core Pentium 4's will be launched at the following prices:

• Pentium 4 820 (2.80GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $241
• Pentium 4 830 (3.00GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $316
• Pentium 4 840 (3.20GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB): $530

At those prices, there doesn't seem to be any big price premium for the extra core. At each price point ($241, $316, $530), a Pentium 4 buyer can either choose a slower (per core) dual-core CPU or a faster single-core CPU.

Well you can run MythTV on OS X. Not sure about the hardware acceleration. Here's a good review .

I'm wondering if Apple really needs Tivo. Why can't they do what they usually do (BSD-Darwin, KHTML-Safari) which is to take some free software (Myth in this case) and make it really easy to use with all the Apple shine. Given that Myth is already such a polished product that would seem like a good idea to me.

"first in a new line of AMD Opteron-based workstations from Sun"

"Up to 16 GB of PC3200 memory (eight DIMM slots, 2GB DIMMs when available)"

Key Applications:

• Defense / Military Intelligence Applications
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE)
• Medical Imaging
• Scientific Research
• Seismic Data Visualization and Interpretation
• Digital Content Creation

How deep are your pockets? 2Gb sticks of ECC are pretty pricey; http://www.memorysuppliers.com/memorysuppliers/kin 2gbpc26re.html/

Here is the system up close at Q Associates; http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm/

Here is a good review of one from AnandTech, they also build a 'white box' they use for comparison and at some $3,000 cheaper than the Sun version which was at over $8,000 at the time of the review; http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55

Sun Java, (n.d.). Sun java w2100z. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from Sun Java W2100z Web site: http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm.

AnandTech, (2004). Sun's w2100z dual opteron workstation. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from http://www.anandtech.com/ Web site: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55.

MemorySuppliers, (n.d.). Infineon 2gb pc2100 266mhz registered ecc ddr sdram. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from MemorySuppliers.com Web site:http://www.memorysuppliers.com/kin2gbpc26re.h tml.

"first in a new line of AMD Opteron-based workstations from Sun"

"Up to 16 GB of PC3200 memory (eight DIMM slots, 2GB DIMMs when available)"

Key Applications:

• Defense / Military Intelligence Applications
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE)
• Medical Imaging
• Scientific Research
• Seismic Data Visualization and Interpretation
• Digital Content Creation

How deep are your pockets? 2Gb sticks of ECC are pretty pricey; http://www.memorysuppliers.com/memorysuppliers/kin 2gbpc26re.html/

Here is the system up close at Q Associates; http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm/

Here is a good review of one from AnandTech, they also build a 'white box' they use for comparison and at some $3,000 cheaper than the Sun version which was at over $8,000 at the time of the review; http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55

Sun Java, (n.d.). Sun java w2100z. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from Sun Java W2100z Web site: http://www.sun.qassociates.co.uk/workstations-sun- java-w2100z.htm.

AnandTech, (2004). Sun's w2100z dual opteron workstation. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from http://www.anandtech.com/ Web site: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55.

MemorySuppliers, (n.d.). Infineon 2gb pc2100 266mhz registered ecc ddr sdram. Retrieved Feb. 24, 2005, from MemorySuppliers.com Web site:http://www.memorysuppliers.com/kin2gbpc26re.h tml.

Better Format

Anand just review a 4-way Opteron system from Sun, as well.

Looks nicer than the ProLiant for a bit less dosh as well. I don't think any of the Big Boys have PCI-e yet, mind you. What on earth do you need it for in a server with PCI-X slots?

While Intel is still a long way away from selling this chipset, the Nvidia nforce4 Pro is already available(although right now its expensive and rare).
Not sure if intels solution also offers a firewall. The firewall dosent work in Linux(yet?). Not sure if the offloading engine will work in Linux.

Can I interest you in an article from someone who knows WTF they are talking about?

AnandTech

I don't know what the Hexus kid was on - but I feel safe trusting my reviews to people who have trouble writing big words!

From Page 2: Being LGA775 CPUs, the new processors all look the same. Being press samples that I get the privilege of testing, they're also unmarked with any meaningful information bar the slightly exciting Intel Confidential. So I draw on them. Not quite the Mona Lisa in miniature, mind you, rather an idea of what it is. Any retail example you purchase will be umblemished with my scriblings.

Anandtech has another article up, but it emphasizes the increase in L2 cache and the effect this has on performance.