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What the hell?; The inquirer posted an article about how MSI is going to bundle MSI to bundle Intel Robson cards with motherboards: http://theinquirer.org/default.aspx?article=40178. Who to believe? Bit-tech.net or TheInquirer.org..... I'm personally going with the inquirer...

Oh man, that brings back some memories! Late nights cranking out code on my Bunyan 2500 - that puppy went through three cords of oak a week, and it kept the place warm to boot.

My modern Dell laptop can do that too, and it doesn't even need wood! Technology!

http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=32550

According to an article I saw on the Inquirer, a PC to PC sync feature has been removed from Vista. Is this feature just the same as rsync, or am I missing something?

At the present moment, the current estimated cost per wafer is $9000-$10,000, with about 65 good chips per wafer. So, the current estimated cost per chip is $150 and $175 on the board. Now, don't get me wrong, Sony is pretty wealthy. But how can they afford that? $175 and no drive, GPU or anything. Sony will obviously go into the red in order to be competitively priced. Sony: A) Wants to sell it in the red to be competitively priced. While standalone Blu-Ray players will be an estimated $1,000 , you can get a killer game console AND blu-ray player for less! B) Lock consumers into the system with some good launch games and better specs. C) Once there is enough of a base, Blu-ray will be the obvious choice for movie producers and consumers as a storage format. I'm in doubt of this. Between the rootkit and Betamax, the memory stick, etc., the players/burners will be overpriced and Sony will keep it to themselves. The format will probably be designed with Sony and "movie producer rights" in mind vs. the consumer. I am in doubt that the console alone will be able to make Blu-Ray a success.

http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=27770

Suggests that the lowest power ones are initially dual core (presumably the single core ones are failed duals and the yields are coming out ok or something).

So more likely to be dual.

I can understand how it seems that the Open Source community is alway attacking anybody who says anything against it. There usually is vehement opposition to anybody saying that Linux/Open Source is weak in a particular area.

But, has anybody ever really looked at why this is the case?

Take a look at all of the FUD that has been constantly flung at Linux/Open Source for the past few years; most people coming against Linux have used the most desperate arguments to persuade people that it's not good (such as Linux is a cancer, and un-American). It seems as if Linux/Open Source hunting is the latest popular sport.

Getting the facts is hard. Microsoft's Website should be renamed "GetSomeOfTheFacts.com". We need FULL facts, not just a bunch of facts tailored together in such that makes one side look good.

Take this for example:

You have two cats, one gets twice as much food as the other. Which cat would you say was better off? The cat that gets twice as much food? Well, what if we later discover that the cat eating twice as much has such a bad case of worms that it's digesting less than the other cat?

Full facts are necessary, without them you can easily present a false report.

Analysts are being widely disrespected because of situations such as this :

According to a new report, written by none other than DiDio herself, Yankee appears to have changed its mind and now there is very little difference between the cost of maintaining a Windows versus a Linux-based corporate computing environment. Can this be the same DiDio who last year told us that the total cost of Linux was three to four times higher than that of Windows. We wonder what has changed in the past few months to change her mind?

The word of an analyst certainly doesn't seem trustworthy. How can they get any respect?

While you're right, there's some subleties to point out. AMD has to clock a dualcore down from flagship speeds to fit the existing power envelope. They've waited for the 90nm die shrink to introduce dual cores, taking advantage of the power/size scaling. Also there've been power optimizations made on the low level. Without these tweaks, yeah, dual core = dual heat.

Informationweek is really a terrible resource when it comes to technical info. There's better and more timely info out there, like at the Inq.

Same socket, same power envelope.

Read.

Just that TFA is not very informed, and rather sketchy. AMD has already said before that their dual-cores will use the same cooling solutions as existing processors.

See this article at the Inquirer.

Sure, but Prescott can cause a meltdown...

L'Inq

27 Dec 2003
Athlon 64 and Opteron dual-core explained

29 Apr 2004
AMD boss says dual core Opteron will plug into existing boards

27 Dec 2003
Athlon 64 and Opteron dual-core explained

29 Apr 2004
AMD boss says dual core Opteron will plug into existing boards

Can't wait to see the heat sink that goes with it!

Sure it can't be any worse than this Prescott heatsink/jet engine!

8-way multi-core cpu

Our Fuhrer, Dubya falls off of a Segway!

Not quite right. Opterons are for workstations and servers. Opterons have up to two memory controllers, can have larger cache, and support SMP. Athlon64 will be single-CPU only (this wasn't the original plan, BTW).

I expect Opteron workstations running Linux64 and Win32 will be available sooner rather than later.

Check the bottom of this article for info on a BRCM chipset supporting AGP 8x (among other goodies).

Sweet!

Quoting: ATI will call the extended set of DX9 features the DX9++, although we suppose it could add just as many ++++++ as it wanted to. ... ... Nvidia should perhaps call its own DX9 extensions DX9## or DX9.NET.

the sad thing is, though - I would not be surprised if Nvidia did release a DX9# or something stupid like that. I mean, look at Athlons naming themselves AthlonXP. ack

This is a Serial ATA drive, which the article even mentions (second paragraph: "...Enterprise Serial advanced technology attachment..."), but then proceeds to call it an ATA drive (instead of SATA) for the rest of the article.

Here's a somewhat less misleading article.

Lest this happen to you.

The RegUS will be the US version of theregister.co.uk, vendors have been notified, and a letter from The Pabster says that will give Tom's Hardware "its own technology news site", allowing The Pabster to have "more flexibility in terms of such announcements".

I saw a peice from uThe inquirer about a little hack which winxp/2k users can use to enable them toZapp the unwanted bits of XP.... like Microsoft Instant Messaging. Useful stuff.

I saw a peice from uThe inquirer about a little hack which winxp/2k users can use to enable them toZapp the unwanted bits of XP.... like Microsoft Instant Messaging. Useful stuff.

Now that you mention AMD. It has been roumoured last week all over the net that intel has a backup plan, an P4 with 64bit extenstions

os.opinion article
news.com

by the way, the amd hammer is expected to 105 mmm^2 on 130 nanometer (.13).

the current amd MP (palomino) has a die size of 129mm on .18.

the original P4 has a die size of 217mm and is now at 150 mm^2.(with a bigger cache)

Note that the original article does mention the 424 size is on .18 and the next generation is on .13. note that this can make a differce of a factor 2 (13^2/18^2= 0.52)