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According to at least one tester. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...

RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.

The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.

Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.

Wireless? (Cough!)...

On balance, all this hype over a chipset translates into Intel shouting "Pay no attention to our inferior CPUs!"...

According to at least one tester. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...

RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.

The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.

Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.

Wireless? (Cough!)...

On balance, all this hype over a chipset translates into Intel shouting "Pay no attention to our inferior CPUs!"...

There's not much useful information on the page, unless you own one and need a ROM upgrade. But it should let in the O2's own browser, right? Here is a review of the thing that tells you more than the site does.

I recall some recent reports stating that the majority of commercial spam in the US is domestic in origin, not international.

You probably mean this one.

I wasn't too far off the mark. But it looks like Andy Glew thought of it first.

I think you're talking about the POWER5 multi-chip module (MCM); it actually has four processor chips, each with two cores. It also has four cache chips. Check out a picture.

This discussion is perhaps more suited to ArsTechnica, as the issue at hand is whether or not x86 is the best instruction set for a low power budget chip maker to pursue. I hope you don't hold that Alpha would be a more suitable instruction set for that -- I don't even want to think of what packages aren't available for Alpha, let alone ask a vendor for a program ported to my "Alpha-Compatible". Academically speaking, however, I will reply to your PowerPC attacks. Regretfully, all my college textbooks are 300 miles away, and I have not looked through my senior textbooks in 5 years, so my rebuttal cannot cite specific Alpha shortfalls beyond anecdotal recollection.

PPC is nicer than X86 but it's hardly a "lovely architecture." In fact, it's one of the uglier RISC designs.

4 precise detractors against the PPC ommitted, I concede that these are 4 of very many

As far as RISC architectures go, Alpha was probably the best by far, and the actual implementation was great starting with the EV6.

The Alpha processor team spent years learning that many of the architecturally correct ideals they had held needed to be thrown out when it came to the real world. According to Torvalds, "And all the RISC stuff that tried to avoid it was just a BIG WASTE OF TIME. Because the _only_ thing the RISC approach ended up showing was that eventually you have to do the hard stuff anyway, so you might as well design for doing it in the first place."

Make no mistake, I make no claims about the Alpha deserving the fate that we all foresaw when DEC made the deal with the Devil. Alpha had its share of problems (remember the quick race to 500MHz, then the hard stop for a long time while they straightened out their unbuffered cross chip clock signal?). The RISC/CISC debate ended long ago when Intel effectively merged them. Since then, the two different schools have borrowed from each other so much that we expect chips to have some cruft to reflect their original intents. For this reason, we'll see all Itanium derivatives reflecting that they were made for pre-defined behavior where a compiler can make predictions of the instruction ordering, and likely this will continue to be in intensely predictable math operations. At this time, anyone who insists that modern PPC, x86, Alpha or Sparc chips are exclusively RISC or CISC hasn't taken the time to realize that there is a very blurry line between the RISC and CISC lately. Many have argued that this line is effectively erased and that the definitions have only had meaning in college courses for the past decade.

The Alpha may be your ultimately pure holy processor, but I will continue to find PPC to be a great balance between theory and real world needs and heritage. If nothing else, x86 has taught us that we can have incredibly high performance architectures based on 1970s vintage processors like the 4004.

This is what Apple should have put in their G5 PowerMac's instead of a "crippled" PowerPC.

The conclusion I came to was that there just isn't a fair way to split the credit for large collaborative projects. If you think the linux kernel is hard, what about a nifty embedded gadget or something which relies on the kernel for 90% of its functionality, but was made by completely independent developers?

The situation is a bit better if you offer payments in advance for specific features, as per the Wall Street Performer Protocol or IBM's patent.

I wrote about this a month or two ago in my net.wars column

I was at the Berkeley conference with the FTC to discuss this, and what was notable is that a lot of Silicon Valley's biggest companies really hate the way the system is now: they file for the patents, yes, but it's one of those paranoia-fed vicious circles where everybody does because if they don't everyone else will. A lot of them are really unhappy about the fact that the patent system is now held in such disregard by the engineers and inventors and want it reformed so that a patent really means something.

wg

Published on May 17th SecuriTeam portal apparently many if of the linksys routers, non wifi and wifi are vulnerable. read here. no comment or firmware update has been offered from linksys.

The "analog hole" isn't unprotected. Macrovision, implemented on VCRs and DVD players for years prevents making an analog copy of signals piped through "analog holes".

and check it for porn at the same time

I have a big problem with suns that drives me nuts. If they are turned off wrong you can break them.

Sun is much more of an ally to Microsoft's cause than many realize. Personally, I don't blame Microsoft for treating Linux like a competitor (although I don't care for many of their tactics in combating the threat Linux poses), but Sun's stance feels like betrayal. Of course, it only feels that way because of a small shred of naive "UNIXes should stick together!" sentiment. There is no rational reason to expect Sun to not view Linux as a threat, but its pretty dirty of them to barely hide that they are allied with Microsoft.

PCI Express IS NOT PCI-X.

This has been said 100 times on here at least in the past.

PCI-X is classic old PCI running very fast and 64-bits, etc. As used on server motherboards.

PCIe is the new specification with the tiny connectors for general I/O, and longer connectors for graphics.

There is no limitation on PCIe connectors unlike AGP, apart from the chipset. Each slot is point-to-point, so you need a controller for each one.

Here is a motherboard with two PCIe slots (x4 and x16), a standard PCI slot, and 3 PCI-X slots.

So are we gonna have Windows running on the PowerPC, or will the Xbox 2 be running Mac OS X?

XBox 2 SDK released on PowerMac G5s

XBox 2 to sport 3 64-bit IBM Chips

Microsoft leaks details about XBox Next

XBox 2 innards laid bare on web

Just think of the implications of Microsoft producing a PowerPC based PC...

I guess he will have lost of quiet reading time next few years.

That this article was on the front page of Google News in the Sci/Tech section? Perhaps it'll still be there.

And that if its troops screw up and start oppressing those under they control, the US will ADMIT it, INVESTIGATE it, REMOVE them from their posts and TRY them for crimes.

United States, 56.74%

Canada, 6.80%

China (including Hong Kong), 6.24%

But this "thespamweblog" article from November 2003 shows:

UNCTAD estimates that the majority of spam victims are in the USA but it also says that in March 2003 the USA was the source of 58.4% of spam, followed at a great distance by China (5.6%), the United Kingdom (5.2%), Brazil (4.9%) and Canada (4.1%).

The same source report (along with sources of digital attacks was mentioned in theInquirer. I'm sure if I kept tracking links in google, I'd find other reports and other percentages.

Maybe recent US lawsuits have, within a few months, forced most spammers off shore or perhaps it's just part of the offshoring of US [SPAMMER] jobs.
;-/

In regards to my sig, a bit of dark thoughts: imagine if China became a strict Moslem nation. If stealing incurs the lost of a hand, I could see the penalty for sending spam to be the loss of one finger for each separate mailing. Of course the worker would be fined and their boss. Eventually that might make a dent in spam. >:=}>

-l

Apparently, HP (of all people) had the nicest idea with this - make the cpu+(local) memory on add-on cards; this way, the 4-way system has 64G (see here for comments and links to the spec benchmarks w/ system description). The tyan mobos only go up to 16G, as they have 2 memory slots per cpu.

"Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work."

You are forgetting a key deficiency of the P4 "netburst" architecture. Its incredibly long pipeline which makes it very susceptable to cache misses. Therefore the larger the L2 cache the less of a performance hit the processor will take if it misses an instruction or two.

It is possible that adding a bigger cache is 'cheap' but if that were the case we'd see a dramatic reduction in the price of P4EEs as they are getting schooled by AMDs. L2 Cache is not cheap to implement. And significantly adds to the manufacturing cost of the processor.

Additionally the lack of a FSB upgrade on the Xeons is troubling, but that apparantly is coming later this year, and this may reduce the advantage of the Opteron's to SOME degree. However, in the current architecture the Xeon's FSB bandwidth will always be shared - while the Opteron's get dedicated bandwidth for every processor. This is really the most remarkable advantage of 'Hammer' family of AMD CPUs over the Netburst generation of P4s/Xeons.

"I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings."

Intel put a lot of money and R&D into a product line (P4 NetBurst) and honestly - even with AMD making inroads - they still do not have that large a share of the CPU market. Intel has however observed their lead eroding and have canned Tejas - successor to the Prescott. So Intel is able to step up and make the big changes even when it has sacrificed large amounts of R&D money.

Intel to formally confirm Tejas canned
Intel may have canned Tejas...

"Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work."

You are forgetting a key deficiency of the P4 "netburst" architecture. Its incredibly long pipeline which makes it very susceptable to cache misses. Therefore the larger the L2 cache the less of a performance hit the processor will take if it misses an instruction or two.

It is possible that adding a bigger cache is 'cheap' but if that were the case we'd see a dramatic reduction in the price of P4EEs as they are getting schooled by AMDs. L2 Cache is not cheap to implement. And significantly adds to the manufacturing cost of the processor.

Additionally the lack of a FSB upgrade on the Xeons is troubling, but that apparantly is coming later this year, and this may reduce the advantage of the Opteron's to SOME degree. However, in the current architecture the Xeon's FSB bandwidth will always be shared - while the Opteron's get dedicated bandwidth for every processor. This is really the most remarkable advantage of 'Hammer' family of AMD CPUs over the Netburst generation of P4s/Xeons.

"I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings."

Intel put a lot of money and R&D into a product line (P4 NetBurst) and honestly - even with AMD making inroads - they still do not have that large a share of the CPU market. Intel has however observed their lead eroding and have canned Tejas - successor to the Prescott. So Intel is able to step up and make the big changes even when it has sacrificed large amounts of R&D money.

Intel to formally confirm Tejas canned
Intel may have canned Tejas...

M.
--
Numismatica

oops article here

Would the governor pay tax for software he buys?

I'm not sure about the governor, but I'm sure his staff would.

The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.

Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.

Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.

I read about this a while ago here. I've found it to load in a second or two, as opposed to the 15-30 seconds it used to take, and it no longer leaves anything running and hogging up resources after I close it.

According to this article, Dell won't be shipping AMD because they are committed to buying $5 billion worth of Intel hardware.

If it's true and if it's not some fluke.

Even more so if you could consider that native Windows for [i]AMD-64 won't be available until Q4 according to His Billness at WinHEC.

Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.

Tell you what, Craig, you cut your salary and benefits instead of cutting jobs in the country that made you rich, then we might be more inclined to not call you a traitor.

Go on, say it. Scandalous.Corruption. FUCK THE CARTELS!

as opposed to the catalog of scandalous corruptions that we have to live with today. Computer memory prices go up? Computer device prices should always be going down in comparison to what you get. F*ck the cartels.

No one wants to deploy it ??

brandybuck is bellyaching

Given that PCI Express is coming along, is this not just a ploy to encourage users into buying old stock? NVidia seem to be clearing out their old stock

Apple's designs are fine, but its build quality is poor

As an Apple user, I have to agree with everything said in this article. I've experienced bad build quality from Apple first hand, on more than one occasion -- including the infamous paint-peeling TiBook, multiple bad RAM fiascos (Apple's own RAM installed at purchase time, not aftermarket RAM installed by me), BAD heat problems, and, most recently, the dead-after-3-weeks-iPod Mini.

They even reported "Be a cupid. Shoot your target with the ID Sniper"

By INQUIRER staff : Donnerstag 15 April 2004, 14:03

*A CONFERENCE* chaired by the Federal Trade Commission, the National Academy of Sciences and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology kicks off in California in a few hours time.

The idea is reform the patent system without stopping innovation, but the industry is along there in the shape of giants Intel, Microsoft, Symantec and others, and we're sure they'll try to pursue their own agenda.

There will also be representatives from the European Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Luckily, they are counterbalanced by legal organisations and academics.

The agenda for the workshop is here http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/patentsystem/pate ntsystemagenda.pdf, and there's a very lengthy discussion document about proposed reform on the FTC site, here http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf.

The FTC document proposes a number of changes to the current system including a new admin procedure to challenge a patent's validity without having to go to law, allowing courts to find patents invalid on the preponderance of evidence rather than clear and convincing evidence, and the limiting of awards of "treble" damages.

It's pretty clear that for many large companies, patent actions have become a wing of marketing. Kicking off big patent cases can tie a smaller competitor up for years as the painful battle continues through the courts. Let's hope sanity prevails. But don't hold your breath for that.

Day 1: Thursday, April 15, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
1. 12:00 - 1:00 pm, Press Conference
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
1:30 - 3:00 pm
Overview of the Patent System and FTC Proposal for Reform
- Susan DeSanti: Senior Policy Analyst, FTC
- Prof. Peter Menell: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
Day 2: Friday, April 16, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
8:00 - 8:30 am
Opening Remarks
- Dean Designate Chris Edley: Boalt Hall School of Law
- Robert Merges of BCLT and Boalt Hall School of Law
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
8:30 - 9:40 am, Non-obviousness Panel (Reinvigorating the Non-obviousness Standard)
- Rochelle Dreyfuss: New York University
- Rebecca Eisenberg: University of Michigan
- Ron Laurie: Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC
9:45-11:00 am, Opposition and Post-Grant Review Panel
- Robert Blackburn: Chiron Corporation
- Prof. Joe Farrell: Economics, UC Berkeley (CPC)
- Bronwyn Hall: Economics, UC Berkeley
- Dietmar Harhoff: European Patent Office
- Steve Kunin: Patent and Trademark Office
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Douglas Norman: Eli Lilly
11:00 - 11:15 am, Break
11:15 am - 12:45 pm, Litigation Panel (Including Presumption of Validity)
- Mark Janis: University of Iowa
- Mark Lemley: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Lynn Pasahow: Fenwick & West
- James Pooley: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
- Matthew Powers: Weil Gotshal & Manges
- Arti Rai: Duke University
12:45-2:00 pm., Lunch
2:00 - 3:45 pm, Industry/Institutional Issues Panel
- Carl Shapiro: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (co-moderator)
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC (co-moderator)
- Robert Baechtold: Fitzpatrick Cella Harper and Scinto & AIPLA
- Robert Barr: CISCO
- Bart Eppenauer: Microsoft
- Sean Johnston: Genentech
- Jay Monahan: eBay
- Ron Myrick: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner
- Kulpreet Rana: Google
- Robert Sacoff: Pattishall, McAuliffe & ABA IP Section
- David Simon: Intel Corporation
- Herb Wamsley: Intellectual Property Owners
3:45-4:00 p.m., Concluding Remarks
Commissioner Mozelle Thompson

Well, there always was the AOL spammer who was reprimanded in a relatively high-profile way... I'd like to see more of this in the future, really; I wonder what the guy's sentence was...

One thing is for sure - if Nvidia have another "paper launch" like they did with NV30 (originally promised in August 2002, launched in November and only available in quantity by February 2003) then they can expect to go the way of 3dfx.

Bad news for you, the ATI X800 will require 2 molex connectors too.

ATI needs extra power too

1. The power consumptions of the last generation nvidia and ati cards are indeed very similar. Please don't say ATI's cards consume less power

Comparison 1
Comparison 2

2. The ATI Radeon X800s will require two power rails also. So stop dreaming about a "power efficient" part and buy a new PSU :(
ATI needs extra power too

That said, I'm no fanboy of nVidia or ATI though. The new GF 6800U is still occupying one extra PCI slot and blowing a whole lot of hot air inside the case. Imagine someone put another 100W+ Prescott next to it. I just feel uncomfortable for a GFX card to dissipate so much of heat right next to the CPU. But well... ATI is gonna do that too (except for the two-slot thing)

If there's any reason I'd look forward towards the X800s, I hope they won't require two slots - that is just inelegant. But based on the two molex connectors on the X800s, and the power consumption of their older parts, I won't hold any hope that ATI would "save power".

according to an article on the inquirer, even if we assume WASTE was licenced under the GPL, VIA took out all the copyrights in the code which violates the GPL making it illegal

Aparently he had a broken arm last October (Inqurier article too). Related problem? He's only 51. There's no mention of any other event on his personal homepage.

Man, I love those search engines. You can trust them to bring you the most accurate information ever!

It's even better than TV!!! Really, dude.

Given that the instruction sets are compatible, you don't need to do much investigation to figure out that they have looked at AMD's x86-64.

Apparently, there is still some confusion about whether the instructions sets are compatible or not, and people such as Linus has been critisizing Intel for trying to hide the fact that they are indeed compatible by giving the instruction set another name.

When it comes to licensing of technology, AMD and Intel has had cross-licensing agreements since the seventies, and there has been roumors for a long time that these has included x86-64.

And yet, it stops anti-trust proceedings against companies who kill. This is criminal. Murderers should be tried, whether they are individuals or companies. Politics shouldn't allow them get off scott-free.

Yes Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are responsible for the loss of 7 innocent lives:
Microsoft Powerpoint fingered in space shuttle crash

The following statement leads me to believe that its a hoax:

Demon fire ate my computer
The Committee for the Control of Paranormal Claims has ruled out demons or poltergeists.

"The fact that the phenomenon occurs only when there are people present makes it hard to believe that it is a natural, or even supernatural phenomenon," it said in a statement.

Here's the actual quote from The Inquirer:

"But David Dawes seems a little suspicious: "I have heard privately that some vendors were planning to move to an X.Org release even before this licence issue came up. That probably makes business sense for the vendors given that X.Org is a vendor-oriented organization sponsored by hardware and software companies, while XFree86 is an independent group of volunteer developers. I suspect that the licence issue may have affected the timing, but not the end result", he concluded. "