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....how about this link, fuckhead?

Everything about IBM's Power4 processor is amazing. Amazing technology, amazing size (680 million transistors), amazing power requirements, amazing performance. And it's amazing that anything so complex can work at all. This beast has 5,200 pins on the package and consumes 500 watts (that's right, half a kilowatt) of power. Actually, Power4 is more than a processor, it's an entire neighborhood of processors. It's sold as a module comprising two processor cores per die, and four die per module, making eight 64-bit processors and 680 million transistors in one unit. Each individual die contains 174 millions transistors and measures a sun-blocking 400 mm2 in IBM's 0.18-micron 7-layer copper process.

8 CPUs stuck together, 1.33 times faster then a p4. And with only 12.36 times as many transistors! (And just 10 times as many interface pins, and power use!)

If IBM's 'scalling down' is more then by more then 25%, it'll be slower then intel. If it's by less then 95%, it'll be more expensive :P

That's not too hard to imagine. seeing that a Power4 processor MODULE consists of eight processors, and eats a half a kilowatt of power My reference. What amazes me is that the Itanium2 and the Alpha have it beat, although I always liked the Alpha architecture.

Can you give us an example of any car that is faster then a car with an engine where the peak RPM is more then 2.2 times as high?

Do I win a prize by point out that you can get ZipZaps with 23,500 RPM motors at Radio Shack? (Note: 38,000 RPM motors are also available.)

And this time, as a link to the article on register mapping...

Honestly. It's easy to add links in /. Please figure out how to do it when you have an appropriate reference.

Does anyone know if the encryption for Bluetooth is as braindamaged as some of the others out there at the moment, or if it's actually something halfway decent?

Yes. It's decent. They've written a white paper about it. And while I'm on the subject, Extremetech did a very good Bluetooth overview some time ago. Read it.

--Bud

Imagine if Deep Fritz ran on a beowolf cluster of Hyperthreaded machines!

-dk

I'd suggest the topic of a previous slashdot thread to explain the differences and strengths/weaknesses of FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. everything else ExtremeTech Article but for my 2 cents, i love FreeBSD...I tried Linux and after using BSD in my old job I realized it's a much smarter, well thought out OS

Li-ion isn't the safest technology, When Lithium Ion batteries were first released 4 years ago(Sic!) they were actually banned from transportation on aircraft. Unsolved problems with batteries exploding violently resulted in the ban. [transair.com] Let's hope that some lessons has been learned and this won't happen this time around. Though, Li-ion batteries are still used today because of better safety regulations [nec-tokin.net] and even built in microprocessors to protect from overcharging. Lithium will still explode or overheat if charged at a too high voltage and if it catches fire, don't try to put it out with water!

The advantages of Li-ion obviously outweight the hazards and since fuel-cells don't seem any worse they will probably get accepted too. Apart from
better performance they might find a niche already because of normal batteries abysmal heat specifications. My laptop battery is not to be operated at temperatures higher than 35 degrees celcius, which really is impossible to achieve if you are using the computer standing on a desk. Not considering people in hotter countries or scientists at the southpole...

Correction, it does have legacy support, it's supposedly awkward and unnatural. Anyone have heads up on how this compares to the Opteron?

The ZD sites also have more on this story. Some more details of interdiction and spoofing are discussed, along with comments from the representatives who actually asked the questions. Zoe Lofgren (representing Silicon Valley) actually seemed to know what she was talking about.

Unfortuanely biometric scanning (including iris scanning) is much better at invading the privacy of the law-abiding then it is at confirming the identity of those who seek to defeat it. Here is a VERY EASY way to fool an iris scanner.

If you have the cash, buy it. It is around $399 but nothing comes close to the speed of it. It embrasses the GeForece 4. Now all we need is linux driver, OH YEAH. some specs to see the comparison: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,475966, 00.asp

Palladium involves new security components to be built into Windows, but it also depends heavily on hardware makers--including Intel and AMD--building in Palladium functionality to their products.

that C# has upper-case method names that are typically longer?? How useful is that?
Let's review:
C#:
infix operator-style functions, capitalized method names, vendor lock-in

Java:
true cross-platform capability, but you have to write foo.equals(otherfoo) instead of foo==otherfoo, darn!

Jee, I wonder what I should use? Maybe I'll sell my soul to Bill Gates so I can define infix operators and hit 'shift' all day! NOT.

This article is a bit old, in fact, the folks at ExtremeTech probably celebrated its birthday just recently, but nevertheless, it turned out to have a lot of useful information for me when it was just published.
ExtremeTech: Java vs. C#, a Code-for-Code Comparison

Don't think so.

Sparcs are not the best processor in any way. They have that odd register windows, 14-stage pipeline (too damn long for RISC!) and only one load/store unit...

Id bet my $$ on POWER or MIPS archs as the best, but the hammer and itanium look quite promising too.

Here is a good article about 64-bit cpus. Bookmarked the page they start talking about sparcs, but the complete article is worth a read.

Cheers.

Well, considering that nVidia's prospects are now looking unstable, you should look into ATI's new Radeon 9700. The specs on it are impressive, with every benchmark blowing away the latest GeForce4 Ti. Check out ExtremeTech's review of it.

"... On average, enabling 64-bit WEP encryption extracts an approximate 5% performance penalty. Depending on your need for security versus speed, that penalty may be a little or a lot. The same average 5% penalty applies when WEP is enabled in high speed mode."

There's a great article at Extreme Tech that discusses 802.11b insecurity and what you can do to make it secure enough to make it uninteresting to the casual bandwidth thief - particularly if there are enough wide open networks in the vicinity.

In a nutshell:

1. Enable WEP. Yes it can be hacked but it does add a barrier to entry that the casual wardriver won't bother with if there are other wide open networks around.

2. Change the default SSID. Don't change it to your company's name or your street address as it makes it easier to zero in on your location.

3. Disable "broadcast SSID" if your access point allows it. That way the SSID of the client must match the SSID of the access point. Having it enabled allows any SSID to be accepted.

4. Change the default password of your access point. Programs like NetStumbler display your access point MAC address which can then be used to determine what make and model your access point is. Once it's known what you've got, the default password may be easily known.

5. Control access via MAC addresses. Yes, MAC addresses can be spoofed but it requires an extra level of sophistication for the would-be bandwidth thief to get in.

6. Disable DHCP in your wireless router. Allow access via static IP's from your NIC's MAC addresses. Yes, IP addresses can be sniffed out but it's another barrier put up for the casual "drive by".

7. Change your IP subnet. If you're using a wireless router and you've disabled DHCP, change the default subnet addresses as well, otherwise it's easy to guess a valid IP address.

8. Move your access point away from windows. Move it to the center of your building to make the signal to the street that much weaker.

9. Buy access points with flashable firmware. Helps you keep up with changing security protocols rather than being stuck with the ones that came with the access point.

10. Some access point manufacturer's have non-standard security features. Orinoco access points are able to "close" thier networks by not broadcasting thier SSID. They also have additional (not 802.11b standard) authentication features such as RADIUS servers.

11. Use VPN. Virtual Private Networks add a level of encrytion and authentication to your network

Yes, these methods can all be easily circumvented to somebody that really wants to get in. As long as you try to make it a pain in the arse to get in, then the crushing masses of 802.11b networks out there that have zero barriers to entry make your little bubble a waste of time.

i wonder if it is these dual processors that are that hot, or if Apple is just planning for the future speed bumps?

I assume they're to accomodate these.

"There were critical points in the evolution of this stuff," Carmack says, "getting into first person at all, then getting into arbitrary 3-D, and then getting into hardware acceleration....But the critical goals have been met. There's still infinite refinement that we can do on all these different things, but...we can build an arbitrary representational world at some level of fidelity. We can be improving our fidelity and our special effects and all that. But we have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world."

This article highlights how far we have come as game developers. id has been the "poster child" of the game development community, with the majority of other game developers following their lead. Doom III will continue this trend.

The next generation of games is going to be outstanding!

This article gives a great view of where we can be going with new technology. How realistic will games be in 10 years? My guess is that the graphic reality will become nearly indistinguishable from real life, but the greatest innovations will be in game-play. Interfacing with a keyboard/mouse/joystick isn't realistic. Voice control and force-feedback-like technologies are the way of the future, if our computing power can support it.

Kudos to Carmack on 10 years of FPS game design. Here's to the next 10!

We'll take advantage of Linux Losers' programming ability now (We could sure use all the help we can get there). And then we'll turn around and dictate the conditions under which these 'customers' can use their computers and provide a big-brother service to keep the ol' boys in the white house happy. It makes no difference to us that Palladium will destroy Linux and Open Source software. There's more money in it for us if they have to upgrade every 18 months to an ever-more-inefficient Microsoft Piece of Shit.

Magnetic disk storage hasn't gone away because the researchers have consistently beat Moore's Law: magnetic storage has been improving faster than silicon, just killing every proposed competitor. But these guys get no publicity because magnetic disks, for some reason, are seen as boring. In fact, IBM just sold off the lab with the world's leading magnetic disk storage researchers to Hitachi.

Some day we'll run into the superparamagnetic limit and run out of tricks for working around it, but there still appear to be a few more generations worth of gas in magnetic disk storage.

Can't see if this has already been posted, but I found this at Trendetronics. It has that home theatre piece of equipment look that most people desire for HTPCs, but it only accepts MicroATX. (Doh!)

They seemed to have more technical meat about ten years ago; guess I was less educated then.
Extreme Tech actually has some juice. It's certainly less troll-ified than this site... Dvorak is often not pure advertising. Pure whatremains unkown...

A quick web search shows Itanium is x86 compatible.

Admittedly, the Itanium does this using emulation, whereas the Opteron is supposed to handle 32-bit instructions natively, however the statement that 32-bit code will not work on Itanium is quite misleading.

Hmmm.....maybe. But as I recall, somebody had a hacking contest with default installs of Mandrake and SuSE, and nobody rooted the servers. I think that noobs would have to go out of their way a little to make their system insecure.

Contrast that to.....IIRC Extremetech, which set up a Win2k and IIS server, and had it infected with Code Red Twice within like 26 minutes of connecting it to the web and downloading updates from Microsoft.

Anandtech

Tom's Hardware

Tech Report

Extreme Tech

at least id isn't biting. The author calls caramack a "maverick programmer" too :) Funny how id is the only gaming company (that i know of) to actively support linux too....

Extreme Tech also has an article about Cg.

Bjorn3D's Cg Article - Programmer's Perspective

Hot Hardware - nVIDIA's "Cg" Language
(Excellent! Includes interview with David Kirk, Chief Scientist - NVIDIA Corp)

ExtremeTech - New Language Revolutionizes 3D Graphics
(includes interview with graphics guru Kurt Akeley)

3DPGU - NVIDIA Cg High-Level Language Preview
(includes short Q&A With Dan Vivoli - Vice President Of Marketing)

nV News - NVIDIA Cg Toolkit Overview
(makes comparisons using COBOL and FOCUS)

You couldn't be bitching that Intel is trying to ensure no more copyright extensions for media giants like Disney: Intel's Amicus Brief for Eldred vs. Ashcroft

You couldn't possibly bitch that Intel's Andy Grove and Leslie Vadasz have been THE most vocal tech company in the fight to protect our consumer rights against Disney's Michael Eisner pushing the CBDTPA bullshit and and closing the analog hole: Hollywood vs. High-Tech and EFF Applauds Intel's Stand

Perhaps you are disturbed that Intel didn't whore itself to Microsoft in true AMD's Jerry Sanders fashion to help alleviate Microsoft's legal woes AMD chief testifies in Microsoft's favor followed by the very coincidental Microsoft support for Hammer Microsoft To Support AMD's Hammer

As far as marketing and time to market go, I can't think of a more formidable opponent than Intel. Hoping Intel will fail in this arena is futile. And hoping they will fail for ethereal political reasons is absurd. And thinking that a quake demo against a 1.6GHz P4 underclocked to 0.8GHz and memory bandwidth equally underclocked is any indication of "suck ass" performance is pathetic.

You know when you have to tie both hands of your opponent behind their back to give him a fair fight, you've got some serious problems of your own.

but LCDs still suck shit for games. That is until this becomes available around 2003.

but LCDs still suck shit for games. That is until this becomes available around 2003.

if you want to learn more about distributed computing there is great article that describes various types of distributed computing and how distributed computing works.

Indeed, but for a while there it looked like they were finally going to admit that it's a dead end. I'm just depressed that it looks like x86 is here to stay for years more.

Also, IA64 does x86 compatibility. Just rather awkwardly.

Couldn't agree more:
- It's anonymous (for Christ sake!)
- Superficial: CPU load at encoding to MPEG ? Support for other video formats ? Bundled software (e.g. DVD player) ? etc, etc...

All in all, don't confuse "luser stories" with "reviews".

Ah, and one last thingie: here you have a proper review of two video cards with Digital VCR, time-shifting, remote control, (etc, etc) capabilities (namely "ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 DV" and "VisionTek Xtasy Everything") . Alternatively, do yourself a favor and look for other reviews for ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 8500 DV card ("tom's hardare" and "tech-report" had two pretty good ones, IIRC)

Oh, yes, I'm looking forward to be modded down to "-1 flamebait" ;)

If you wnat to learn more about 64-bit processors I suggest you read this article:

Extreme Tech article

Some folks at Extreme Tech also said that DIY computers will be dead with more or less the same reasons. Is this a trend or what?

Some folks at Extreme Tech also said that DIY computers will be dead with more or less the same reasons. Is this a trend or what?

The whole thing

Rather than a popup ad per page.

from Voodoo Extreme:

Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU

I wonder if this new Apple display will be the first to incorporate Mitsubishi's Feed Forward Display Technology. Then we'd finally be able to watch full motion video and play QuakeIII on our LCD Displays - and I'd actually consider owning one.

on the insecurity of 802.11b

Try hacking your own gateway with airsnort

Looks like that piece was simply written from a press release. ExtremeTech has a piece at here that talks about the Linux distro used (SuSE) and some of the details of the motherboard.

Sega didn't design the graphics in the Dreamcast. Powervrused their pvr series 2 chip in there with tile based renmdering engine, currently I have a pvr series 3 chip in my computer right now that rocks. I'm waitng for the mysterious kyro 3 to come out soon and whoop some ass for a hundred and change. Anyone that pays upwards of 200 dollars plus for a graphic cars is insane.

Modern CPU's have many different execution units. Depending on the code running, not all of them may have work scheduled. Future work may depend on previous results; obviously you can't do this in parallel. The idea of "HyperThreading" is to run more than one thread of execution at a time with the multiple execution units - so more work gets done per clock cycle.

A quick Google search turned up an article here. At one point I read a really excellent article on single-processor multithreading (discussing a future Alpha processor) but I can't find it anymore. Hopefully AMD will do something like this as well for a future Hammer processor.

According to this article the maximum range of the i-series industrial Segway is 17 miles on a single charge.

Let's first take a look at Intel's Big Chip from Feb. 4th. and look at ExtremeTech's article about 64-bit chips.

As someone who works on making clusters of Itaniums (and soon McKinleys), I must say that I love the performance they offer, but the architecture has a few ideosyncracies (like elilo).