Slashdot Mirror

Additional benchmarks in another review over at HotHardware: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-560-Ti-Debut-MSI/

HotHardware Mobile: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i72820QM-Mobile-Sandy-Bridge-Processor-Review/
HH Desktop: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i72600K-and-i52500K-Processors-Debut/

Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i5-2600k-i5-2500k-and-core-i3-2100-tested
Tech Report: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188

Legit Reviews: http://legitreviews.com/article/1506/1/ (mobile)
Legit: http://legitreviews.com/article/1501/1/ (desktop)

HotHardware Mobile: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i72820QM-Mobile-Sandy-Bridge-Processor-Review/
HH Desktop: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i72600K-and-i52500K-Processors-Debut/

Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i5-2600k-i5-2500k-and-core-i3-2100-tested
Tech Report: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188

Legit Reviews: http://legitreviews.com/article/1506/1/ (mobile)
Legit: http://legitreviews.com/article/1501/1/ (desktop)

But how stable will it be when the HD6970 uses both an extra 50w AND a different pin connection than a HD6950. The 6970 uses an 8 pin and a 6, the HD6950 uses a dual 6 connector setup. Can dual PCIe connectors pull the 250w load that the HD6970 requires? This isn't like some Athlon X3 where the only thing you have to do is flip a switch, the other chip pulls more wattage at load and there is no telling if there are other parts besides the connector pin set that they have changed between the cards. Since both cards are over $300 and I'm sure the BIOS flash kills the warranty that is sure a lot of "ifs" there.

I'm three links deep and I've yet to find anything really notable. But fine, I'm an idiot in need of explanation. Tell me what I missed.

Yes, these days it's tons of bullshit until you get to the real thing. Everything above the actual study is going to be full of infantile jokes and idiotic observations, as you've noted (personally it makes me sick to read any modern news articles, or much of anything, due to this). Here's the path I followed to get to the actual study:

Slashdot summary -> Hot Hardware version -> Stanford's news release about study -> Abstract of study -> Study itself (PDF).

In the study, they use the detailed interaction data to try various infection parameters, to see how it spreads. There are many interesting graphs, showing how it spreads in the various scenarios, and where there are sudden changes in how it spreads. They look at different vaccination strategies to see which are most effective.

Actually, if you follow links from TFA, you'll get to that same article. Kind of a waste to mod this up as informative.

HH has a ton of datapoints and additional coverage on the new AMD GPUs: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Radeon-HD-6970--6950-GPU-Reviews-Enter-Cayman/ - Fill rate and memory bandwidth goes to AMD, while Tesselation (for DX11) advantages are strong in NVIDIAs architecture.

Hmm, I'm actually curious now about how insurance premiums might differ based on what browser you're using...
http://hothardware.com/News/At-Capital-One-Different-Browsers--Different-Interest-Rates/

What does your browser's user-agent string say about who you are as a person?

Mozilla : you like to run aftermarket addons. INCREASE PREMIUMS!

Chrome : you like things to be fast. INCREASE PREMIUMS!

IE6 : ah, old and stuck, and you're probably under the thumb of some corporate IT department. With money. INCREASE PREMIUMS!

IE8 : lazy bum. INCREASE PREMIUMS!

Opera : Huh? What's this? Oh well, no one really seems to use this, so whatever.

It's not ergonomic per se, but the Filco Majestouch Tactile Touch Keyboard w/ Cherry MX switches is a great keyboard.

Elite Keyboards is a good place to buy them at.

You can read more about Mechanical Key switch keyboards here: Mechanical Key siwtch keyboards demystified

FPS is over-rated. Cards are so fast now days they have to throw everything at them plus the kitchen sink just to get them down to 30fps.

Here's the 5850 still pulling off 23fps at 1920x1200 4x AA 16x Aniso running the newest game possible (released Feb 2010), Aliens vs Predator. I'm a mild gamer and I'm even sure what the 4x AA and 16x Aniso is, does something with making it look nicer, turn them off and the fps improves significantly. If you're like me and you're stuck playing a game released way back in Nov 2009 then enjoy 58fps

I'm more interested in the ability to run half a dozen monitors. That I'll use every day, that 23 or 58fps, maybe a few hours a week.

FPS is over-rated. Cards are so fast now days they have to throw everything at them plus the kitchen sink just to get them down to 30fps.

Here's the 5850 still pulling off 23fps at 1920x1200 4x AA 16x Aniso running the newest game possible (released Feb 2010), Aliens vs Predator. I'm a mild gamer and I'm even sure what the 4x AA and 16x Aniso is, does something with making it look nicer, turn them off and the fps improves significantly. If you're like me and you're stuck playing a game released way back in Nov 2009 then enjoy 58fps

I'm more interested in the ability to run half a dozen monitors. That I'll use every day, that 23 or 58fps, maybe a few hours a week.

There's a bundled HBA to break the 2.19 TB barrier but...

"Product not planned for XP support today" and probably not tomorrow either.

But if you partition it it should be OK on XP I guess?

Block Diagram here.

That "Multi Format HW Decoder" block is probably Imagination Technologies' VXD core.

Considering that they may still be selling it at a loss and hoping to make up for it in game sales may actually net them more money as there were at least a few people who were using them to make clusters.

A single USAF HPC was built from 2,0000 PS3s. Blunderingly, Sony Nukes PS3 Supercomputing Purchases on that scale take product off retail shelves and return nothing to Sony but unbankable good will.

Sony took a brief swing at commercializing PS3 tech for post-production video. Zego When the OtherOS cannabilizes sales of your own HPC product, it is the OtherOS which disappears.

While I agree with your main statement: (Larger, cheaper SSDs would be nice even if we had to live with them being a bit slower), your estimates of hard disk and SSD speeds are pretty far off.

Yes, the SATA 6Gb/s standard supports up to about maybe 600MB/s in practical operation. No, mechanical hard disks do not approach 400MB/s (let alone >400MB/s). The fastest mechanical hard disks on the market right now might get you 170MB/s maximum in a sequential benchmark (read: not a real-world scenario), and only when reading from the fastest part of the disk.
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/WD-VelociRaptor-600GB-Fastest-HD-Ever/?page=6

The fastest SATA SSDs are pushing maybe 300MB/s in these benchmarks, and usually only for read speeds. The reason people are seeing such disproportionate performance improvements with SSDs is access latency. The fastest hard disk might have 6.0ms average latency. SSDs are usually below 0.1ms.

They had to remove those features to make room for new ones.

Heh.

http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1532

is here for you pleasure.

Indeed. This article is painfully embarrassing.

This cheap, easy to use green power source could substantially improve the quality of life of 1.6 billion people

Yep... 1.6 billion people are going to boil potatoes and place them between sheets of copper and zinc in order to light an LED. Who writes this stuff?

The scientists discovered that the simple action of boiling the potato prior to use in electrolysis, increases electric power up to 10 fold over the untreated potato and enables the battery to work for days and even weeks.

Boiled potatoes sitting around for weeks. It's a revolution!

Please name a disk that can keep it up for the whole disk.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Definitive-2TB-Hard-Drive-Roundup/?page=7

You appear to be right. The best write average is about 100MB/s. It's the reads that are near 120.

Asus developed the solution to this, a monitor that was impervious to crossbow bolts thanks to a layer of crystal sapphire: http://hothardware.com/Articles/ASUS-LS201-20-LCD-Monitor/

They are lying, they are trying to justify their lawsuits against third party ink vendors in an attempt to keep ink prices high.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1649866/hp-names-dodgy-ink-vendor

http://news.cnet.com/Inkjet-refiller-lashes-out-at-HP-for-lawsuit/2100-1041_3-5647086.html

There is no need for these cartridges to cost so much, once HP has done the R&D the cartridge design and ink formula need not change when a new printer comes out, and for the most part I bet they don't. No ink is worth $8000 a gallon.

http://hothardware.com/News/8000-Per-Gallon-Printer-Ink--Lawsuit/

FTA: "To put it simply, the most commonly accessed data on the platters get's copied to the much higher performing, SLC Flash memory, which results in a performance boost." Read more: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Seagate-Momentus-XT-Solid-State-Hybrid-Preview/?page=2#ixzz0orEbgttB This makes no sense to me -- that would seem to imply the most likely thing to end up on the SSD is my swap partition, which is the last thing I want on SSD. Yeah, read would be faster, but the wear would be awful. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd probably be happier if it just exposed the 4GB as a different partition...

1600x1200 in 4x3? Meh.

I am sticking with my almost 5 year old Dell Latitude D810 because I have 15.4" 1920X1200 WUXGA screen on it. This 'laptop' is big and heavy, but the screen and the keyboard are great for programming.

What about the Half-slim SSD?

I've been watching the prices of these, waiting for a drop, then hack into my netbook a internal usb compact flash adapter with a microdrive for swap and /home

http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1480

The coverage at HotHardware shows the a closer race between the NVIDIA beast and its competition: http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480-GF100-Has-Landed/

Prevention is not at issue here, other than you would expect them to use a reliable supply chain.

The issue is having their lawyers send cease and desist orders to those revealing the story without even bothering to check it out first.

http://hothardware.com/News/Newegg-Ships-Fake-Intel-Chips-Supplier-Threatens-Journalists-For-Reporting-It/

And the HD Tach plots here: http://hothardware.com/Articles/WD-SiliconEdge-Blue-256GB-SSD-Review/?page=7 show how far behind Intel is with writes and how strong Micron's drive is looking.

The drive shows pretty decent write performance actually, seen here: http://hothardware.com/Articles/WD-SiliconEdge-Blue-256GB-SSD-Review/?page=6 but it falls down a little bit on small transfer sizes and high queue depths. Still it's pretty much a decent offering for a client PC application so long as WD gets their price down a bit.

I guess when they have dual CPU notebooks with full size keyboards and 21" displays, I might be more interested in them. But I'd also want solid state hard drives and hdmi cables to wire them to the TV...

these guys are close...

http://hothardware.com/News/Eurocom_launches_QuadCore_XEON_Based_Notebook_/

But oddly, I would like to have an SSI EEB desktop case, that lies flat, like old PCs used to...

Well if you read the specs here you will see that it has 12 execution units, which I'm guessing is Intel speak for stream processors, which considering a $30 ATI card has 320, I'm guessing like all Intel GPUs its gonna be of the uber-suck.

About the only ones I saddle piss poor Intel GPUs on anymore is the housewives, who at most are playing a browser game on Facebook. Everyone else gets an Nvidia or ATI onboard so if they decide to do a little light* gaming they can.

* The new ATI onboard GPUs are surprisingly good at gaming. I personally was playing Bioshock and Swat 4 on my 780v until I could get time to order a 4650 discrete. While these games aren't cutting edge, the fact that an onboard could actually game blew my fricking mind! Compared to the horrible chips that Intel calls GPUs it was actually nice, and it had full hardware acceleration for the most popular formats out of the box. I was impressed, and unlike so many horror stories I had heard the ATI drivers were just as solid and stable as could be.

The article had dollar values as well. Netbook sales in 2009, according to the article, were worth $11.4 billion dollars, which is just over 10% of the total for portable PC sales. What's more, because of the low price of netbooks the unit sales numbers are even more impressive. Apparently 33 million netbooks were sold out of 169 million portable PCs. In short, approximately 20% of all portable PCs fit into the netbook category.

Perhaps even more interesting is that while unit sales for all portable PCs were up 5% net revenue was down 12%.

The article doesn't cover demographics (I would doubt that anyone has that information) but apart from that it actually covers most of your questions.

The idea that netbooks are dead, at this point at least, is simply ridiculous.

the article should be tagged FUD, really.

MS doesn't like netbooks because of a lack of margin, so they try to put out press whenever they can against the concept.

In reality, netbook sales are WAY up, which isn't a sign of them going down.

Also, some nice high res images of the Acer panel here: http://hothardware.com/News/NVIDIA-Demos-3D-BluRay-On-3D-Vision/

Intel delivered the first sub-40nm flash memory and has delivered two generations of top-flight solid state drives. Intel has always been strong in flash memory.

If you look at the original submission (which is what I did), you can find the link there. That said, somebody really ought to fix it in the summary.

http://hothardware.com/News/Chrome-Detailing-Previewing-Googles-New-Operating-System/

http://hothardware.com/News/Chrome-Detailing-Previewing-Googles-New-Operating-System/

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/

FWIW, you can get near linear scaling on many MB RAID controllers with SSD drives up to 3 drives. You may get a boost on the 4th drive as well, but it's not as much (some MB RAIDs top out at around 666MB/s and 3 Intel SSD drives will push this limit). As a matter of fact, with less than 4 drives, the difference in speed between built-in MB RAID and dedicated HW RAID is almost indistinguishable.

There are plenty of benchmarks on the net if you look for them that show both a large speedup in transfer rates and in IOPS with MB-based RAID and SSD's.

BTW, your USB drive copying example is flawed... by that logic, you should never buy a drive that does more than about 30MB/s because that's currently where USB tops out. Transfer rate is important for other things such as processing large video files, multimedia creation, loading large datasets (video game levels), etc.

The link in the slashdot is only to page 4 and one datapoint. Here's the main page: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/

If the average speed is 45 mph, and he was stopped at the end (ie speed 0), then at some point he was going above 45. Especially since you can't stop instantaneously. This is like calculus you learn in High School... If the Judge ruled the other way, the future of America would be even in deeper sh*t than it already is.

Wondering where you got average speed from ?

If you had followed the first link http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/07/18/0318228/GPS-Tracking-Device-Beats-Radar-Gun-in-Court (a bit of effort I know 2 clicks with the mouse) you would have come to the article
http://hothardware.com/News/Speeding_Radar_Gun_vs_GPS/
with the quote :-

..... Rocky Mountain Tracking device was "very" accurate, to within a couple of meters on location and to within 1 mph on speed. Dr. Heppe also pointed out that the GPS device released instantaneous data, and not data averaged over a distance.

I personally think this article ( http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091104/ARTICLES/911049901/1334/NEWS?tc=autorefresh) does not have enough info to make any meaningful decisions from.

Um, you mean this?

http://hothardware.com/News/Asus-Eee-Keyboard-With-BuiltIn-PC-Shipping-Next-Month/

I'd made a typo in the original post - it should have been WRITE speed not READ.

Anyway, if you still disagree with me, have a look at http://hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-34nm-X25M-Gen-2-SSD-Performance-Update/?page=1

Amazing what Intel managed with a firmware update - up to THIRTY PERCENT improvement in write speed.
I'm betting their design still has significant headroom left in the sequential writes department but , as I said before, they're protecting their premium SLC, the X-25E

I ordered a new system based on an Intel CORE i5 750 2.66GHZ CPU running on the Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium w/8 GB DDR3 1333 Mhz ram two days ago, and have been monitoring the net for signs of this mobo to actually hit the shelves. I will be running this with an unremarkable 64 GB Patriot SDD as the boot drive, until the new SATA 6 Gbps SSDs come out - which could take a awhile I imagine. I expect blazing speed from this platform, and can hardly wait for it. The only unknown is when will the mobo arrive. If it drags on and on, at least there is the option of an add on card that will convert one of the other ASUS X58 boards to USB 3 & SATA 6. I just hope I haven't made a mistake with the decision to wait. The P7P55D-E Premium motherboard will retail for $299 while the U3S6 add-on card will be $29.

Here are a host of links I collected on it this morning...

Asus Unveils USB 3.0 Motherboard
Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium
The motherboard, unveiled Wednesday [October 28 2009], is 4.8 inches by 3 inches and is scheduled to be available next month for $299.

October 30th, 2009
USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Performance Preview - ASUS brings the goods
the P55-Express based P7P55D-E Premium is very close to hitting the market.

October 29th, 2009
USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Performance Preview

October 29th, 2009
This Is The First USB 3.0 Motherboard

October 28th, 2009
ASUS debuts USB 3.0 motherboard and add-on card
The P7P55D-E Premium motherboard will retail for $299 while the U3S6 add-on card will be $29. Both will be available November.

October 28th, 2009
ASUS brings the first mobo with SATA 3 and USB 3

October 28th, 2009
ASUS P7P55D-E Motherboard Offers USB 3.0 and SATA-III 6G Performance
North American Availability
The P7P55D-E Premium and U3S6 expansion cards will be available at ASUS authorized retailers early November at $299 and $29 respectively.

Well, its been promised that they'd be bootable in Q4 2009 ( which, I guess, is now ) but if you have
no faith in them delivering, try the OCZ Z-drive ( 256GB for $900 ), which is bootable right now

http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-Announces-ZDrive-Bootable-PCIExpress-SSD-Solution/

Those Kingston items you linked to are quite different from Fusion-io's products.

The Fusion-io devices are PCIe cards that connect directly to the PCIe bus. They don't use SATA. They have breathtaking performance and prices to match.

So this is why ARM and Global Foundries recently made a deal. ARM's Cortex-A5 is going to be built on a 40nm and Global Foundries already has that equipment, with AMD working hard to advance to the next node that frees up a lot of manufacturing power for ARM to use. Officially it was for Cortex-A9 at 28nm but what's to stop other stuff from being done in the shadow of the deal?

Eyefinity is enabled through a combination of hardware and software being developed by AMD. On the hardware front, AMD's upcoming Radeons will sport between 3 and 6 display outputs of various types, DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, etc. And those outputs will be managed by software currently dubbed SLS, or Single Large Surface. Using the SLS tool, users are able to configure a group of monitors to work with Eyefinity and essentially act as a single, large display.

http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Eyefinity-MultiDisplay-Technology-In-Action/

7680 x 3200 - that ought to increase your field of view just a tad!