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By choosing Intel, Apple gets access to the highly-anticipated chip code-named Yonah, a low-power chip with a dual core processor ... AMD does not have a direct Yonah competitor

AMD .. is currently developing a low-power, dual-core chip for thin and light notebooks, company spokesman Damon Muzny says.

Dual-core chips, which both AMD and Intel are emphasizing ... are currently throwing a lot of heat, so both CPUs cannot operate at their maximum clock speeds.

That's not what makes his life worse. It's the multi-CPU aspect. Same as with the new Sony Cell chips making things diffucult.

Check out his other interview on the same topic

Oh, in case you think he's still just upset about your company 'rendering Steam somewhat irrelevent', check out what John Carmack of Id (DOOM 3) and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games (Unreal Tournament) have to say about the topic. Those two don't have any Steam to worry about, but agree with Gabe.

A Sony employee dismissing criticism of Sony. Who'd believe it...

When the makers of the big 3 FPS games all agree on it, I think there may just be a real issue.

Given the fact that they applied for the "Carmack Reverse" patent years before he even thought of it means that they probably had some talented guys working on it.

Can you provide documentation for that? I had read that the technique was actually invented by an NVIDIA employee who presented it a few months before the patent was filed... at Creative Labs' developer forum. So Creative stole the idea, patented it, and used it to blackmail id into adding special support for Creative's has-been EAX technology.

The fact that someone can patent an idea in the first place is an indication of how broken the US patent system has become. And the Patent "Reform" Act of 2005 is set to change to a first-to-file system, so someone can legally patent your invention and then force you to stop selling it. The "Progress of Science and the Useful Arts" would be best served by abolishing patents altogether.

Remember Creative is the company that sued their competition into oblivion and then purchased their assest from the bankruptcy court. OBTW, they LOST the suit but still managed to bankrupt Aureal. Granted, Apple has a hell of a lot more money, but good luck going after one of the darlings of Singapore.

When you said Prescott EE, I figured you meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You should be more specific.

I figured the exact model number counted as specific enough... ;)
I do see the ambiguity now, though, and apologize. Didn't even cross my mind that "Extreme Edition" would abbreviate to EE.



Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the thing for a while.

Tell it that... :)

I do realize, though, that if I kept it pegged at 100% for a while, it would overheat. But as I said, it doesn't do much (just a file server). As my point in that particular factoid, I meant to point out the low-end consumption of both chips - An idle Prescott draws enough to cook it.

For some hard data (I didn't post my own numbers because no one believes me that a non-crippled modern machine can draw a mere 60W at the wall), try: This comparison... A heavily loaded 90nm Athlon 64 draws just about the same as an idle Prescott. FWIW, I've seen a better full-family comparison on Tom's Hardware, but can't seem to find it at the moment. Same basic trend, though... All along the two chip families, roughly paired by performance, the AMD's max draw matches the idle P4's.



I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's new processors on "normal" power usage when you don't even have any info on it.

I agree, and didn't mean to do that... In fact, I'll go so far as to say that, if they can pull off the power they claim, and if AMD hasn't beaten them even more by then, and if they don't force Pentium-M style pricing (ie, out of my range for a personal machine) on us - Then my next upgrade may well use one of Intel's next gen chips.

A lot of "if"s in that, though...

An FSB exists in all processors. On an AMD64, the FSB is the DDR memory bus directly, not an intermediate bus from processor to memory controller.

LOCK is an outdated instruction. It is used for indivisible memory accesses. This idea went out in 1990. Processors use MESI (or MERSI or MOESI) protocol now, because bus locking is not efficient (nor always even possible) in multi-processor systems.

See link:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/i ndex.x?pg=2

MERSI works by having the two processors watch each other's memory accesses so they can keep their caches coherent, instead of locking.

Also note that the only CPU dedicated memory (outside of the register file) in a multi-processor system is the caches for each processor. So each AMD processor does have a dedicated link to its own caches, the bandwidth to that cache is reserved for that processor. But caches are relatively small, and switching tasks on a single core will flush out the cache about as much as moving to the other core anyway.

So I said processors don't talk to each other. I did oversimplify, but here's the gist of my comments. What good is 20GB/sec between processors? You don't need it to send a MERSI flag to other processors for each 32 bytes line accessed. You would need it to copy vast amounts of data between the processors, if you did that. Like I said, there is no instruction to copy data between processors, you must use memory to get between them.

Intel's effeciency is lower when accessing some areas that are highly contested between processors. But most areas of memory are "Shared", not Modified or Reserved by one processor.

AMD's system is better, but it's really easy to overstate the value of it.

We'll see if Intel goes to a system that allows cache line state signalling faster than the FSB. I would imagine their new chips (which can even use the L1 and L2 caches for one processor when the other is shut down) do this, at least when on the same die.

Putting the GPU on the HT bus would be interesting. It would have the negative side effect of causing the GPU to go through the CPU when it needs to access memory. That is because the memory controller is in the CPU on AMD systems. But it would seem that when accessing VRAM, the HT bus speed could be useful.

TR also has additional details on the architecture itself.

TR also has additional details on the architecture itself.

See here. Intel P4's burn a LOT more power than AMD chips. They place a far greater demand on your power supply (and your electric bill).

Never argue technology with a 4-digit /. ID unless you know what you're doing ;-).

The Tech-Report has a similar chart, but theirs is sortable and each card is linked to a review of the card if they did one.

Meanwhile, Intel's desktop dual core chips seem to offer much more aggressive pricing at this time. AMD's lowest price dual core chip, the X2 4200 is almost twice as expensive as Intel's lowest cost dual core processor. However, an interview with three AMD execs on PCPerspective.com claims that "AMD would eventually have lower priced Athlon X2 processors via the waterfall effect in the future".

How smart do you feel after reading this?

Tech report compare power usage.

Cool I got a logical point across on /.

The 100CPU chip is based around comparing a P4 with a 8080 and trying to picture a chip that's that much more complex than the P4.

20 years is not that that long in terms of OS evolution. But, in that time frame we should see chips with GB or TB's of cache on them.

Now Intel can try and stick with a small number of CPU's on that chip but it's going to be a lot easer for them to build a chip like a geforce-7800 (http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/geforce-7800 gtx/index.x?pg=1) that way they can test each component and cut off the pipelines that don't work. The top of the line chip could have say 10gig's of L2 cache and 500megs of L1 cache split among 100cpu's and with a good design they can still use chips that have significant damage in there Celeron brand which could be based around having 1/2 of those CPU's working with 1/2 the cache.

The basic problem is moving from 4 > 8 > 16 > 32 > 64 bit CPU's is useful but there is little value in a 128bit CPU vs. 2 X 64 bit CPUs. The 64bit CPU can address 2 ^ 32 X 4gigs of memory so it's going to be a while before we need 128bit CPU's but Single instruction Multiple data instructions are only so useful. Now we can always increase the on chip cash but it's a lot easer to have 100 64bit CPU's than it is to use that many transistors on 4 X 64 bit CPUs such that you are not just wasting them.

I don't know if we will ever have 10,000 CPU's on a chip but after a while it's hard to fund something useful to do with all those transistors. And it's going to be hard to build chips if we are still throwing away chips with a small number of defects. Hell, at some point I expect to start using pipelines to verify what other pipelines are doing.

But, I am not a chip designer so I am open to suggestions as to how you think this is going to play out over time.

Moderate power for office apps? A Skt 754 Sempron runs circles around an equivilently priced Celeron. This is from a year ago. The margin has only gotten wider since. Next?

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/sempron/index .x?pg=6

July 28, 2004

"Business application performance ...
The Sempron 2800+ scores a key victory over the Celeron D here, especially when you consider that the "with IGP" scores represent the most likely configurations for systems based on these value processors. We could almost stop here and say the Sempron has accomplished the bulk of its mission by outpacing the Celeron D in everyday tasks."

Tech Report got it to 3GHz unstable (without FSB adjustments, the next step from 2.8 is 3.0, IIRC) on a Thermaltake cooler - they suggested trying it with a different cooler, though...

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlon64-fx57 /index.x?pg=14

This baby did't need some silly demand to die. Plus, it featured the "click of death" (TM).

Ah well, they just don't make 'm like they used to!

Two major transitions for Mac: 68K to PowerPC. Next Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Now time for third transition. Transition to Intel-based Macs. Developers Now. Next year for users. "Because we want to make the best computers for our customers." No G5 PowerBook yet. Future products can't be build on IBM of PowerPC. Intel has performance and better performance per watt. Intel delivers much better performance per watt. Starting next year the first Macs with Intel processors. Shipping by next WWDC. Mostly complete by 2007 WWDC. Complete by the end of 2007.

Here's a similar comparision/benchmark. And Tech Report posts a summary/commentary of the tests:

PC World has posted some benchmark results suggesting that Apple's Power Mac G5 isn't the world's fastest desktop PC after all. The PC World tests compare dual G5 systems to a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, Athlon 64 3200+, Athlon 64 FX-51, and Opteron 246, and the results make Apple's claim to the desktop performance crown look rather foolish. The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 can't even manage a win in Photoshop, where the dual Opteron system turns in the fastest performance.

I suggest you check out the benchmark results.

Meanwhile, Intel's desktop dual core chips seem to offer much more aggressive pricing at this time. AMD's lowest price dual core chip, the X2 4200 is almost twice as expensive as Intel's lowest cost dual core processor. However, an interview with three AMD execs on PCPerspective.com claims that "AMD would eventually have lower priced Athlon X2 processors via the waterfall effect in the future".

You might also have noticed the content of all the sites is nearly identical. Just a rewrite of the ati press kit is suppose. They all miss benchmarks (the whole purpose of sli is speed).

Here is a list of some more sites:
beyond3d
techreport
tweakers.net (dutch, but the content is identical to other sites
the faq from ati

Next in line: these same sites (i left anand tech and tomshardware out) will bring the benchmarks all the same day the nda on the benchmarks expires

Plus if Windows won't run (and thus the games/office/etc.) because the system lacks this wonder feature then most people will not only buy it, but actually insist on this new magic chip features that stops viruses, beats OBL and cures Yaws.

Well, guess what, the speed gain from having two processors is zero for current (single threaded) games and negligible under light load (office) (benchmark)) Where dual processing is useful is 3d rendering (3ds max) and small servers. But these guys will never buy any of the "arguments" you enlisted.

Intel is just trying its luck with this series - if they will manage to get away with it they will try to push it harder, if not Microsoft can never blame them for not trying.

• They are expensive.
• They are much slower than the AMD conterparts (benchmark).
• They come with two "features" that not even the stupidest ape would want in its processor:
  1. the "ability" to NOT be able to run the programs you want
  2.the "ability" to get r00ted even without an operating system.
  Is this really that "Trusted Computing" means?

I think that Intel just shot itself in the foot but didn't notice because they are so high.

...except that the GF4MX is not really more powerful for most games than my trusty Geforce2 GTS... From an old article at http://techreport.com/reviews/2002q4/gf4-8x/index. x?pg=1: "The GeForce4 MX 440 is more like a GeForce2 hopped up on a cocktail of steroids, Xanax, caffeine, Metabolife, and some sort of fish paralyzer."

How about this?

It'd be silly for it not to be. It would just increase the latencies for graphics reading, and you wouldn't be able to use the full system bandwidth.

Of course it doesn't need the frame in eDRAM to work on it, but the fact that you basically can't store the frame in eDRAM should tell you that it's quite small. It's not a texture cache. At least, not for next-generation textures.

The Xbox was not a good design. It was a poor design that competed solely by brute force. The unified memory architecture was panned greatly when it was announced.

Besides, it's important to remember that the Xbox 360 is a scale up from the Xbox. Latencies that wouldn't hurt the Xbox much will hurt the Xbox 360 much more.

Yah, basically. Guess I'm just demanding.

They're reasonably powerful systems with very low power consumption: the entire system (minus display) usually stays under 20W. Even the Pentium-M consumes much more on the desktop (granted, they're also much faster). The most comparable competition in terms of power consumption are Via Mini-ITX systems, which tend to be much slower.

That's the main memory bandwidth, not the graphics bandwidth. There are a few issues there - that's now split among 6 front ends, that only have 1M of shared L2 cache between all of them. The latency of GDDR3 is good for high-bandwidth, but not wonderful all-around - sharing it between 7 users will really start to lower its effective bandwidth quite heavily, because instead of streaming data, you're doing a whole lot of commanding.

True, and we saw this with RAMBUS on the PC not long ago... of course, we're talking about 3.5 times increase over bus speeds for today's modern processors and the P4 didn't suffer *that* much from high latentcy RAMBUS memory in real world applications. Heck, dual core P4's will be in a worse situation, bandwidth-wise, than the 3 core 360 processor.

Either that, or you're going to have to sacrifice on the amount of parallelization that you put in your code, which is probably more likely. I'd bet a lot that several of those front ends will just sit idling with a thread that, I dunno, checks for controller input or something.

In the first year or two, I'm sure you'll be right. After that? I'm not so sure.

Uh... the shared RAM means that the GPU *does* segragate a chunk of system RAM. That's what a unified memory architecture means. If you're saying that that chunk might not be contiguous, as it is with standard shared systems, yah, sure, but that's not that big a benefit. It's still shared bandwidth.

Maybe you have a differen't definition of segregated than I do. The CPU is in no way limited from writing/reading anywhere in system memory and neither is the GPU. How is that segregated?

Unified memory is strictly worse than separate GPU memory, because you can always get all of the "benefits" of unified memory by having something like an AGP GART on the GPU which allows the GPU to access main memory as well as its own local memory. The onboard memory then becomes a cache for the most often-used textures. Incidentally, you can guess how useful this feature actually is by looking at the number of AGP cards that actually *used* the GART to access main memory - as in, basically none. All graphics objects are heavily used. You want them close to the GPU.

GART sucked. Notice how both ATI and Nvidia are going back to this now that we have PCIe? Of course, main system bandwidth sucks (6.4GB/s), so it isn't all that usefull, yet.

But this also brings up the 10MB of EDRAM in the GPU you keep ignoring. Tech Report http://techreport.com/etc/2005q2/xbox360-gpu/index .x?pg=1 has an interesting article on the internals of the GPU. Not only is the 10MB used as a cache, but the circuitry surrounding the memory itself can do 4x MSAA for "free." In essence, the GPU isn't going to be going to main system RAM nearly as much as a typical PC Video card will. Not only that, there is no bandwidth required from the main system memory to do MSAA.

MS chose unified memory because it's far cheaper, and simpler to design. One bus, rather than two.

I was thinking dual-ported ram, as would be the straight-forward way of doing this. The GPU is also the memory controller, though, so it is a bit cheaper. BTW, you still need two busses, one from the CPU to the GPU and one from the GPU to the Memory, so it's not as huge a savings as you make it sound. You basically save the cost of needing two memory controllers instead of one.

Uh... about 4X more powerful. That's kinda my point. You're stacking the improvements, but a game is the whole of its parts, not the sum of them. If there are more polygons, but the textures still look crappy, it wouldn't necessarily be better.

er... the whole of its parts and the sum of its parts is, well, the same thing... In any case, I know wha

Maybe you missed this news.. the creator of BitTorrent got hired by Valve to help improve their networking/downloading..

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/6278

you ever look at a benchmark for a dual core CPU? They aren't even close to 100% faster.

the XBOX 360 is going to have latency out the @ss due to the shared memory for graphics (ever used onboard PC graphics with shared memory, yeah it sucks

BTW, you keep comparing things against the Revolution... I was just trying to point out that saying you would need an 11Ghz 3 core processor to beat a 733Mhz Celeron was, at best, an exaggeration.

AMDZone.com Tech Report Sudhian Hexus Hot Hardware Anandtech xbit xbit PCWorld Trusted Reviews

It's hardly accurate to judge a CPU's performance based on a "power drawn at the wall" measurement.

> gamers don't need dual core

Right, and when video cards that supported an accelerated transform and lighting (i.e. the GeForce) came out, they didn't need that either since current games didn't support it. You can bet the next core of games will be multi-threaded.

Right and false, in the test DOOM III doesn't seems to benefit from the dual core, but Far Cary and UT seems to benefit from it.

See: Gaming performance

Sorry about our server's inability to keep up right now. We have a mirror here: http://www2.techreport.com/

I'm not sure that UT2004 is a CPU / GPU intensive product, so I'm a little surprised at their benchmarks.. link

No actually, they're going to be launched in June. The fact that this would be lost on the submitter was so obvious, I was able to prepare this message in advance and just paste it in.

These look to be amazing CPUs. After the initial linpack-with-large-matrices benchmark, you have to go thirteen pages into the benchmarks at TechReport to find some of note where the Intel solutions are able to score off a win!

Nice post... too bad it is about 2 years out of date. Ever since the Thoroughbred core came out, AMD has been beating Intel on power usage in the desktop arena. The newest Intel chips are using a ton more power (which turns into heat):

See this graph

Also, instead of using a jet engine cooler, why don't you just use a modern cooler? Those things are so silent and have good enough performance that I'm probably going to ditch my watercooling setup.

People always make jokes about how hot the AMD chips are, but that is based on old products. I pretty much know whether a person is an intelligent consumer based on statements like yours. It only takes a quick minute to research on Google to find that your post is no longer pertinent to the real world.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/64-bits/index .x?pg=1

1) Cost.
Since there need only be half as many sockets, the motherboard can be smaller, less complicated, and therefore less expensive. This is especially true in the case of single-socket motherboards, which are usually 50-60% as expensive as their dual-socket brethren. AMD has sweetened the cost savings even further by arranging it so that most single-socket motherboards already in use with a single-core CPU can accomodate a dual-core CPU after just a BIOS flash.

2) More efficient interconnection between the cores.
This advantage currently applies to AMD's design but not Intel's. As explained here, "As you can see, AMD didn't simply glue a pair of K8 cores together on a single piece of silicon. They've actually done some integration work at a very basic level, so that the two CPU cores can act together more effectively. Each of the K8 cores has its own, independent L2 cache onboard, but the two cores share a common system request queue. They also share a dual-channel DDR memory controller and a set of HyperTransport links to the outside world."

After reading the TechReport article I linked to above, it looks to me like AMD is way ahead in the dual core market in all of the areas that count: better backward-compatibility, better cache coherency, and lower heat.

Their brand of in-depth, hard-hitting coverage is probably why Intel conveniently passed them over for the first round of Dual Core reviews; can't have any bad press at release time.

Read all the reviews. Went out of my way to find new hardware tech sites for more reviews. Was my first computer. Decided to do it right from the beginning. So I read all the reviews, and the glowing reviews on the IBM GXP hard drives were enough to convince me to go with them. Bought two. Used second to backup the first drive.

Disaster strikes, times two. First drive fails with the infamous screech of death. Shut system down, try to figure out what to do, read online, buy third drive, plug in, start up, start to backup data from backup drive, lightening strikes twice. Lost years of work previously migrated from older systems.

My experience with trying to RMA the drives (just a few months old) was so bad that I made it my mission to ensure that no other newbies or small business owners or individuals went through what I did. Or do my best trying. So what did I do?

It became apparent in the weeks and months that followed that IBM GXP drives were so bad that they were failing by the hundreds at hosting providers, that many others were having such problems that many stories and threads were started on some hardware tech sites, and that even a class action lawsuit was started over them.

So I started contacting hardware tech sites that were still glowing about the GXP drives, and asked them to revise their review or remove the review. Some didn't answer (CNet). One or two less famous sites actually removed a review, or added a disclaimer, maybe because I wrote or because there was simply too much bad press to ignore. Some other sites were using the drives in their computers for testing other hardware. And listing the GXP drives when describing what hardware they used to test. I saw this as an endorsement, so I asked them to stop using the GXP drives, explaining my position and providing links about the stories on the hard drives. Some site owners ignored me *cough* Tom's Hardware *cough* and continued using the drives even after repeated email requests that they don't, one actually emailed back that those were the drives he bought and couldn't afford to replace them, and others soon after stopped using the drives and switched to others as far as I could tell. Some sites (one that I recall, forget the name, haven't heard about it since then) actually featured the GXP drives on the top left of their front page, as a great drive (banner link to a review page), many months after the bad news on the drives came out and after the class action lawsuit announcement made it on slashdot (and after the news on the hosting provider losing hundreds of the drives). That site didn't even bother answering my emails about how wrong it was for them to push the drive in light of all the problems about the drives that everyone was shouting about.

That little episode was enlightening as to who I could trust with advice on purchasing decisions and who to avoid. Now, some 4 years later? Who can really be trusted for accurate reviews? Buyer beware, and spread the risk. Especially on hard drives, use raid, backup to optical media and buy more than one brand of drive and buy drives from more than one source. And then cross your fingers and pray.

Read all the reviews. Went out of my way to find new hardware tech sites for more reviews. Was my first computer. Decided to do it right from the beginning. So I read all the reviews, and the glowing reviews on the IBM GXP hard drives were enough to convince me to go with them. Bought two. Used second to backup the first drive.

Disaster strikes, times two. First drive fails with the infamous screech of death. Shut system down, try to figure out what to do, read online, buy third drive, plug in, start up, start to backup data from backup drive, lightening strikes twice. Lost years of work previously migrated from older systems.

My experience with trying to RMA the drives (just a few months old) was so bad that I made it my mission to ensure that no other newbies or small business owners or individuals went through what I did. Or do my best trying. So what did I do?

It became apparent in the weeks and months that followed that IBM GXP drives were so bad that they were failing by the hundreds at hosting providers, that many others were having such problems that many stories and threads were started on some hardware tech sites, and that even a class action lawsuit was started over them.

So I started contacting hardware tech sites that were still glowing about the GXP drives, and asked them to revise their review or remove the review. Some didn't answer (CNet). One or two less famous sites actually removed a review, or added a disclaimer, maybe because I wrote or because there was simply too much bad press to ignore. Some other sites were using the drives in their computers for testing other hardware. And listing the GXP drives when describing what hardware they used to test. I saw this as an endorsement, so I asked them to stop using the GXP drives, explaining my position and providing links about the stories on the hard drives. Some site owners ignored me *cough* Tom's Hardware *cough* and continued using the drives even after repeated email requests that they don't, one actually emailed back that those were the drives he bought and couldn't afford to replace them, and others soon after stopped using the drives and switched to others as far as I could tell. Some sites (one that I recall, forget the name, haven't heard about it since then) actually featured the GXP drives on the top left of their front page, as a great drive (banner link to a review page), many months after the bad news on the drives came out and after the class action lawsuit announcement made it on slashdot (and after the news on the hosting provider losing hundreds of the drives). That site didn't even bother answering my emails about how wrong it was for them to push the drive in light of all the problems about the drives that everyone was shouting about.

That little episode was enlightening as to who I could trust with advice on purchasing decisions and who to avoid. Now, some 4 years later? Who can really be trusted for accurate reviews? Buyer beware, and spread the risk. Especially on hard drives, use raid, backup to optical media and buy more than one brand of drive and buy drives from more than one source. And then cross your fingers and pray.

Read all the reviews. Went out of my way to find new hardware tech sites for more reviews. Was my first computer. Decided to do it right from the beginning. So I read all the reviews, and the glowing reviews on the IBM GXP hard drives were enough to convince me to go with them. Bought two. Used second to backup the first drive.

Disaster strikes, times two. First drive fails with the infamous screech of death. Shut system down, try to figure out what to do, read online, buy third drive, plug in, start up, start to backup data from backup drive, lightening strikes twice. Lost years of work previously migrated from older systems.

My experience with trying to RMA the drives (just a few months old) was so bad that I made it my mission to ensure that no other newbies or small business owners or individuals went through what I did. Or do my best trying. So what did I do?

It became apparent in the weeks and months that followed that IBM GXP drives were so bad that they were failing by the hundreds at hosting providers, that many others were having such problems that many stories and threads were started on some hardware tech sites, and that even a class action lawsuit was started over them.

So I started contacting hardware tech sites that were still glowing about the GXP drives, and asked them to revise their review or remove the review. Some didn't answer (CNet). One or two less famous sites actually removed a review, or added a disclaimer, maybe because I wrote or because there was simply too much bad press to ignore. Some other sites were using the drives in their computers for testing other hardware. And listing the GXP drives when describing what hardware they used to test. I saw this as an endorsement, so I asked them to stop using the GXP drives, explaining my position and providing links about the stories on the hard drives. Some site owners ignored me *cough* Tom's Hardware *cough* and continued using the drives even after repeated email requests that they don't, one actually emailed back that those were the drives he bought and couldn't afford to replace them, and others soon after stopped using the drives and switched to others as far as I could tell. Some sites (one that I recall, forget the name, haven't heard about it since then) actually featured the GXP drives on the top left of their front page, as a great drive (banner link to a review page), many months after the bad news on the drives came out and after the class action lawsuit announcement made it on slashdot (and after the news on the hosting provider losing hundreds of the drives). That site didn't even bother answering my emails about how wrong it was for them to push the drive in light of all the problems about the drives that everyone was shouting about.

That little episode was enlightening as to who I could trust with advice on purchasing decisions and who to avoid. Now, some 4 years later? Who can really be trusted for accurate reviews? Buyer beware, and spread the risk. Especially on hard drives, use raid, backup to optical media and buy more than one brand of drive and buy drives from more than one source. And then cross your fingers and pray.

I consider Scott Wasson's Tech Report to be one of the best "independent" review sites around.

That is Athlon 64 3000+. This is Opteron:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/opteron-146/i ndex.x?pg=1

See the difference? Hint: there is no such thing as "Opteron 3000+".

Linpack isn't peak Flops, it is real-life flops. There is usually an order of magnitude difference between theoretical peak and LinPack peak.

Here are some recent x86 CPU's and there LinPack results:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/athlon64-fx55 /index.x?pg=3

Athlon64fx55 Linpack peak: 1.3 GFlops
Pentium4 XE 3.4Ghz Linpack peak: 1.3 GFlops

Well, first:
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

Then:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q1/athlon64-3000 /index.x?pg=1

HTH. HAND.

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/

Last year I read an interesting article reporting on a tour of Abit's Motherboard factory. Although this story seems more comprehensive you might want to check it out anyway.

With trusted applications the information could be hidden.

STAR WARS DIFINITIVE EDITION (57 sources) Download (y/n)

If that was all the application gave you, how would you know which sources had the material? The application would know, but IT WON'T TELL YOU.

You wont be able to hack it to get that information. Only approved clients would even be able to connect to the network in the first place.

It's clear you have no idea what "trusted" computing is about. Please read this before commenting any further.

trusted P2P