Slashdot Mirror

When his initial e-mails to the Microsoft blog asking it to remove links to his photo didn't immediately work, Kennedy replaced the image with one of a man engaging in an activity best described as "extreme mooning." Visitors to the Microsoft blog who clicked on the innocent-looking link were guided to the new photo. Says Kennedy, "They pulled down the link within 15 minutes."

Six years ago the TechReport web site had a review stolen by a different site (a site that primarily sold hardware). Not only did they lift the text, but they linked directly to the pics on the TechReport server. Techreport swapped in new pictures to replace the existing graphs and pics. Tastefully, they put in photos of a child with power tools captioned to reflect that the kid was actually a tech at the infringing company. Priceless.

When his initial e-mails to the Microsoft blog asking it to remove links to his photo didn't immediately work, Kennedy replaced the image with one of a man engaging in an activity best described as "extreme mooning." Visitors to the Microsoft blog who clicked on the innocent-looking link were guided to the new photo. Says Kennedy, "They pulled down the link within 15 minutes."

Six years ago the TechReport web site had a review stolen by a different site (a site that primarily sold hardware). Not only did they lift the text, but they linked directly to the pics on the TechReport server. Techreport swapped in new pictures to replace the existing graphs and pics. Tastefully, they put in photos of a child with power tools captioned to reflect that the kid was actually a tech at the infringing company. Priceless.

If these are anything like the drives I priced from BitMicro about a year ago (you have to e-mail for price) then they are probably many (many) thousands of dollars. AFAIK, BitMicro has catered more to the industrial (hard drives for aerospace) realm.

I'm not sure that any drives they may be making now aren't in the same class, a [price] class that would make consumers shit a purple Twinkie, considering in 2005 their U320 155gb drive was supposed to cost north of $75,000 US.

And, what about this? Why are we dancing around this drive when they already make a 1.6 TB model?

*sigh*

http://techreport.com/articles.x/7927/2 -- read the brief part about Dynamic Clock Gating. It's also briefly mentioned here.

There's one method in which turning off _portions_ of a processor has been used in modern processors. I think all modern processors use such features, but I'm not entirely sure about that.

Also, one thing you seem completely unaware of is that transistors only use current while _switching_. (Except for maybe a small leak current.) The significance here is that if you're not _actively_ flipping bits back and forth, you're _not_ using as much power. Also, I know that the Windows idle thread (and I know there's an equivelent in Linux, but I never get to see it) instructs the processor to do something that will pause certain computer functions for a short time -- this may relate to the clock gating; I'm not sure. Still, NT machines do use less power than 9x machines, which is when the idler was introduced.

It's times like this when there was a -1, Wrong mod -- it'd be much better than "Overrated". I'm sure everyone will say "post a comment correcting things!" but when there are already 10 such comments.. the _incorrect_ comment just needs to be removed from the system.

Like one of these?

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12623

// Besides a 32bit kernel offers backwards compatibility with existing drivers.

What existing drivers? When the first x86 macs came out, there were no existing x86 osx drivers for it to be compatible with. A 32bit x86 kernel will not offer compatibility with 32bit PPC drivers. Thus, drivers will already need to be ported from PPC to x86, taking into account any endian issues that might occur. And any drivers written for PPC64 will already be 64bit clean anyway.

Mobile AMD chips (that is the Turions) may have a slightly higher TDP, but your comparing only the 2 chips, and not the motherboard chipset. Intel use a seperate memory controller on the chipset, AMD have it built in to the CPU so merely the presence of that would account for some of the difference. And tests of actual Turion systems vs Pentium M systems shows them fairly competitive from a power usage perspective (i couldnt find newer reviews for the respective dual core variants), see:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/pentiumm-vs-turion64/index.x?pg=12

While i agree that the netburst pentiums were horrendous marketting-driven chips, the fact remains that they still available.

As for 64bit performance... Having used Windows and Linux in both 32 and 64bit incarnations, i have found the 64bit versions to be faster in virtually everything, especially when you have lots of memory (PAE causes quite a performance hit on 32bit). The only downside is the lack of support for older hardware in 64bit windows (x86_64 osx would be in the same boat as x86 osx here), a problem linux doesn't really suffer from since most drivers can be recompiled.

And yes, the memory consumption for 64bit is slightly higher, but not massively so. Pointers are twice the size, but most other data remains the same. Memory is ridiculously cheap these days, and adding memory over 3gb (increasingly common because it costs what, $100 these days) to a 64bit system doesn't require performance-sapping segmentation hacks like PAE...

It's not just about mutiple-threads, it's about coordination between those threads in a real-time manner.

As you know, multiple threads in a program do not actually execute concurrently - processing is still serial, it's just so fast that threads can appear to execute simultaneously - and it's not just about queuing execution either.

With multiple cores we have the ability to multiply the processing potential, but there is still a coordination issue - what good is it to process x amount of data if you must still wait for the Y data to finish processing before you can use it?

Here's an interesting article about Valve software's difficulties as they begin to experiment with the multi-core architecture paradigm. Some of their solutions are most interesting, including this little tidbit which has stuck with me: "In additional to failing to scale well, coarse threading also introduced an element of latency. Valve had to enable the networking component of the engine to keep the client and server systems synchronized, even with the single-player game."

It's interesting that they already had a 'solution' in place, but that this solution was created for a different reason yet with a useful outcome.

OK html time: HERE

Apparently contradicting prior AMD statements on the matter, Saucier flatly denied any relationship between the TLB erratum and chip clock frequencies. He also said there's no relationship between clock speeds and the performance degradation caused by the BIOS-based fix for the erratum.

Assuming the [Green Power] also shares such a seek time, that leaves us with 15 ms [measured access time] minus 9.5 ms [assumed seek time] which equals 5.5 ms, almost exactly the rotational latency associated with a 5400 RPM spindle speed.

[I]t's easy to convert [WD's values for average rotational latency] to revolutions per minute, or RPM. 5.6 milliseconds of rotational latency works out to about 5,400 RPM, which just happens to be the low end of the GreenPower's spindle speed range. Western Digital says that's by design; the latency spec it lists in the GreenPower's data sheets is merely an estimate based on the spindle speed range of the drive.

From what I remember from the reviews, the disc spins between 5400 and 7200rpm depending on load. Benchmarks showed it's not as fast as equivalent 7200rpm drives of the same capacity, but the performance disparity is in the region on 5-10% at worst. For people worried about power usage and/or noise though, it looks like a superb drive - perfect for an HTPC.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13379

Truth is, I couldn't be bothered to look further than the datasheet of that last generation drive. I don't have one in my possession, so I couldn't speak from experience. I see now one test here http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13440 showing a 105 MB/s sustained data rate on a Barracuda 7200.11 .

So performance is still not the big winner with SSD, and as you kindly point out, neither is price per GB. I still believe that power consumption is the bigger win here - and I'm looking at it from the business user's point of view. Given, for instance, one intercontinental flight and the choice between lugging a laptop with a SSD and an extra battery or a normal laptop and 5 spares, which one would you choose? :)

That's also what I want to know.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13434

WD's got one in their series named for german scheisse-pr0n: Caviar GP. 4W idle, capacities up to 1TB.

The linked article is slow so spread the love

Hard drives are a good example of your point, but I would consider them a special market. What can you possibly think of as a way to improve them? The latest "innovation" is perpendicular recording, which was thought up back in the 1970s. Manufacturers are competing not in an "innovation" sense - simply because the product can't be improved unless everybody does it at the same time. Native Command Queuing and Serial ATA wouldn't have taken off if everybody hadn't done them. NCQ doesn't even lead to major performance increases, it just makes storing more data on the same platter cost less. The next step is flash-based drives, which all the major players are working on making cheaply at the moment, but this is just a different way of storing data. In fact, that's all a hard drive will ever do - store data.

This particular patent appears to patent a semiconductor material and is incredibly general. This line makes me laugh at its generality:

...wherein the range of alumina is from 15% to 85% and the range of zirconia is from 15% to 85%.

If you bother reading the whole patent...well, I really can't imagine this claim standing up in court.

Assuming this claim does not stand up in court, then the patent system works. If any of the hard drive companies try to patent a component, four other companies can point to the research they've been doing as prior art. This forces companies to continue researching. Sure, it wastes time and money, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. The alternative, of course, is one company not researching anymore, but simply copying the works of others and selling a cheaper product. OEMs will switch to them (because the majority of them couldn't care less about reliability and they sure as hell don't care about getting the "original" product). Using this advantage, one manufacturer will eventually establish an effective monopoly wherein no innovation will occur.

What about a new company? If they (hypothetically) come out with a truly unique way to do hard drives, then, in a patentless system, all the major players would simply copy that idea. Having the idea first means nothing, as the major players already have the money and the fabrication labs to outproduce you. Your only hope is to be hired by one of the companies that took your idea - but why would they do that? They would have to pay you. Where is the freedom?

I'm all for patent reform, but this is one of many markets where patents actually force innovation, although not in the way that patents were originally intended.

Like this one: http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312
It works wonderfully for Windows swap file! (and better still for Photoshop/Premiere swapfile) It is limited to 4GB (draws power from the PCI bus) and it is driver-less. (works with ANY PC motherboard supported OS)
It connects to the PC using a SATA1 connection (but a continuous 1.5 Gb/s is still better than most HDDs) and it uses 4x 1024MB DDR1 RAM Modules.
There is a future 8GB DDR2 SATA2 3.0 Gb/s model (allegedly) coming out soon that fits in a 5.25" drive bay:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/10116 (please, oh please, don't be vaporware)

Like this one: http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312
It works wonderfully for Windows swap file! (and better still for Photoshop/Premiere swapfile) It is limited to 4GB (draws power from the PCI bus) and it is driver-less. (works with ANY PC motherboard supported OS)
It connects to the PC using a SATA1 connection (but a continuous 1.5 Gb/s is still better than most HDDs) and it uses 4x 1024MB DDR1 RAM Modules.
There is a future 8GB DDR2 SATA2 3.0 Gb/s model (allegedly) coming out soon that fits in a 5.25" drive bay:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/10116 (please, oh please, don't be vaporware)

5. Current performance really sucks.

I'd like to see some performance numbers for the new drive in the Alienware, but after digging around I could only find these numbers.

The short summary is read performance isn't fantastic, and write performance really sucks. Although the final benchmark shows a writespeed of 40MB/s, all of the "real-world" tests shows a sustained write speed of 5-10MB/s.

Basically dreadful, given that performance, prize and size are normally a pick two out of three choice for storage, finding a system that offers pick zero out of three is awful.

I installed Ubuntu Feisty on a Shuttle SN41G2 the other day. It detected the onboard Nvidia graphics card and installed the nv drivers, which limited me to a resolution of 800x600. I installed the proper Nvidia drivers using the package management system, and as part of the installation procedure it told me to run a script from the command line. That script backed up my old xorg.conf, and generated a new one that didn't work. I had to restore from the backup, and then edit the original to call 'nvidia' instead of 'nv'.

I'm willing to accept that my hardware is possibly obscure, and I'm also willing to accept that Windows makes a worse job of auto-detecting my hardware - Ubuntu auto-detects the network card, whereas Windows requires drivers from a disc. But the bottom line is that if I didn't have experience of this happening before, I'd have no idea how to fix it, and I'd be telling my friends not to install Ubuntu.

WE DECIDED to ask Paul Otellini whether Intel would ever contemplate creating three cores on one die.
So he said: "We see a distinctive advantage in having all the cores on one die work."

A much more in-depth review is available at The Tech Report: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13224

Foxconn and MSI showed "hybrid" DDR2/DDR3 boards based on this chipset at June's Computex.

The Techreport also has a review up: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/1. Barcelona is similar to Core2, clock for clock. It has better energy efficiency and SMP scaling. But the clock frequencies will need to come up in order to beat Intel's highest clocking chips in absolute performance.

30 watts is a very significant difference, but I'm not sure if it would make up for those power-sucking FB-DIMMs.

Conclusion in the article: Too expensive.

A ramdisk like the i-RAM could help out as well.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram /index.x?pg=1

Currently, Intel's Core-based Clovertown is only available for 2-way motherboards (with two independent FSBs). Intel's 4-way boards still use the Netburst architecture and two FSBs for four CPUs. Tigerton and Clarksboro (the Caneland platform) will update Xeon MP to the Core architecture and four point-to-point buses.

Not only that, but in my experience the fraps hook can have huge impact on your framerate.

I doubt the overhead of FRAPS is all that significant these days. Most games aren't heavily multithreaded to the point that they can stress two cores, so there's plenty of horespower leftover in all these multicore CPUs to power FRAPS.

And even if the FRAPS overhead is significant, you do realize that this will actually hurt the lower-end CPUs more in a comparison like this, right?

If you're worried about variances caused by FRAPS, the FRAPS-captured tests (all two of them!) were the average of five runs, which pretty much removes this issue.

On top of that the motherboards are running different chipsets, simple stuff like drivers for onboard sound cards can have a huge impact on the processing power if they are written poorly.

The motherboards chosen are the best you can get on their respective platforms, and are priced at about the same. You really think using the best motherboards available to both camps is going to negatively affect the results of this review?

The platforms are exactly the same within Intel models and within AMD models. Even the FX-series has the same sound chip and driver as the rest of the Athlon 64s.

Now, they could have gone to the trouble to get matching sound chips, but it ultimately doesn't matter. The benchmarks they published are very close to those I've seen on other websites, making your arguement moot.

There are also only two tests that could be affected by the sound chip used: the two game tests at the start. Ever other test uses ZERO sound.

They really aren't testing anything when they don't have a uniform rig to do so.

Well, I'm still waiting for you to conjure me a motherboard that takes both AMD and Intel processors, all without stupid hacks like entire motherboards on an expansion card. Until you have that, there's obviously NO WAY we can compare these two chip lines in any way.

Note that the Power consumption and efficiency section in the linked article shows CPU power plotted against cost of the CPU, rather than CPU power plotted against the cost of the electricity.

For computers that are on much of the day, the cost of the electricity over the perhaps 4-year life of the system is significant, and more important than relatively small differences in the cost of the CPU.

Although the article has some flaws, it is very useful.

I just hope someone makes a phone using the Mobile-ITX motherboard VIA recently announced - and keeps it open to development.

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/12623

Pictures and more info at TR and specs at VIA

Touchscreen?! I'd prefer a WS in there and do away with the "Dock", and then a PCCARD slot for expansion, but anyhow..

The Tech Report also has coverage, with full application and peripheral performance testing: http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q2/intel-p35/ind ex.x?pg=1

• Several high end image and video processing tools.
• Development tools (parallel compilers, etc.)
• Virtualization.
• Some very popular games.
• Most contemporary operating systems.

The fine folks at the Tech Report did a report on this months ago and found the difference between Aero and non-Aero was only about a watt. They don't disprove that Vista uses more power than XP, but I'd say they prove Aero isn't the culprit if that's the case. Oh and I at least trust the Tech Report guys - ZD Net hasn't inspired a lot of confidence lately. http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10945

If your video card doesn't flinch at Supreme Commander, please share your secret. SupCom is capable of burying even the 8800 Ultra in tests.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/05/02/nvidia _geforce_8800_ultra/5.html
http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q2/geforce-8800u ltra/index.x?pg=4

What this article so nobly doesn't mention is that it's Microsoft who's stirring up all of these lobbyist groups. Snatching a link off of Google (ahem), we find:

DoubleClick: Microsoft Loses, Then Whines - http://www.247wallst.com/2007/04/doubleclick_mic.h tml

Google buys DoubleClick, Microsoft protests - http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/12270

Google rivals urge scrutiny of DoubleClick deal - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18132983/

So, um, don't panic. The community hasn't decided Google is the antichrist; this is all astroturfing, and Yahoo and Microsoft were trying to buy DoubleClick too. ;)

The latest Intel and NVIDIA chipsets (with USB 2.0 built into the chipsets) seem to peform well in Windows XP.

"Target" and "Reality" are two different things.

The "Target" of the G965 is to raise performance above anything available today.

The "Reality" of the situation is: the drivers are terrible. Vertex shading is still done in-software, just like the G950. As-of March (six months after release), there are still no updates available, and the rumored "beta" drivers are still just that - a rumor.

The Reality of the situation is the X3000 gets trounced in mnay games by the 2-year old GeForce 6150, and to get respectable (> 20fps) framerates in recent games you have to pair it up with a beefy Core 2 Duo.

How about if some guy just used audio compression for a jukebox on his computer and never had time or inclination to complete, publish or otherwise commercialize his software? In any case he thought the techniques were obvious, they must have been because he did it.

Is that how patents are supposed to work and would Carmack and Dietrich agree?

In the meantime, you can get an AMD X2 3600 (65nm Brisbane core) for around $85 now, and probably in the $60 range well before these new products hit. The high end is one thing, but who actually buys it? Very few. I don't know anyone that bought the latest FX when it came out, or an Opteron 185 when they hit, or even a Core2Duo Extreme. All this does is push the mid- to low-end products down, and a ~$65 dual core that overclocks like crazy (some are getting 3 GHz on stock volts on the 3600) would seem like the best price/performance to me.

Is this. Not this.

HTML is fine, but double check those URLs and HTML tags!

The M-Audio's Revolution 7.1 http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q2/maudio-rev/in dex.x?pg=1 is powered by Via and has better sound quality than a comparibly priced Creative card. Creative is not for audio quality as much as it is for 3D games acceleration. The on-board Via sound you may have heard is the little brother to this chip.

C-Media Oxygen HD sound cards from Auzentech and Sondigo -
Creative gets competition:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q1/oxygen-so und-cards/index.x?pg=1

(p.s. Hi!)

Add to this, everyone involved in the contract, has home computers bogged down with virii and now sees MS as flakey.

On Windows, the sad fact is that Creative's mid-range X-Fi models are pretty much as good as it gets for audio quality. And unlike every other manufacturer's cards EAX actually works if you care about that.

The cards are pretty worthless in Linux, though. Anyone know the driver situation for VIA's Envy24 cards?

Way has no one came out with a pci based ram disk card with out higher cost of battery back up for use as a high speed temp disk?

They have.

Like I said, "sort of." Instead of having separate pixel shaders and vertex shaders, the GeForce 8800 has 128 simple scalar floating-point processors that nVidia calls "stream processors".

XP's driver support was much better than Vista, that's certainly true. This is probably because Vista has a new driver model, and XP was basically Windows 2000 Plus, which meant that the drivers were essentially the same. Therefore drivers for Vista are taking a while to appear in the wild, and upgrading on existing hardware is currently a bit of crapshoot. My recommendation to friends and coworkers is not to upgrade to Vista at all on their existing hardware at all - instead wait for their next hardware refresh when they can be assured (well, more likely at least) to have Vista-compatible hardware.

For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.

Yes, SCSI drives run hotter and use more power than a consumer drive. A typical consumer drive runs at 7200rpm, while a 15k SCSI drive is over double that, at 15000rpm (they are quite a bit louder too).

According to this review, the Savvio 2.5" 15K drive uses less power than older 10K drives. Also, it is twice as quiet as previous 10K models, that's pretty impressive IMO.

These drives aren't cheap either, the 36GB version goes for around $450 while the 73GB version goes for around $840.