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My big hope is that one day Compaq will become "HP's Desktop Linux brand" so that it can ship Linux PCs without losing Windows OEM licences on the HP side. Its the best shot for any major PC company supporting Linux on the desktop in the near future.

Actually, this drive is a 5 platter design (see here and here), as they are using 100 GB platters. Seagate has announced a 500 GB drive coming in Q3 with 4 platters, which will use (at least) 133 GB platters. (133 GB platters has been used by Seagate for its 7200.8 series of drives. Their 250 GB drive just has two platters!)

Reducing the number of platters have a number of advantages -- including, as you say, reduced heat, reduced power consumption due to a smaller motor, enabling a low-profile instead of a usual 1 inch form factor, and reducing the cramming of platters and heads inside the drive. A disadvantage is naturally that data will be more crammed on to the platters, but all disks with 133 GB platters have worked well for me. Thus, I think I'll wait for the next Seagate drives instead of buying this one.

You people sure it's not an issue with the Raid5 registry flag instead of the 1394? Try this Tomshardware link.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/

Speaking of SCSI features, NCQ is now available on some SATA drives. It's not the full blown SCSI version, from what I gather, but it does bench well. See Tom's article on it.

I have two RAID controllers populated with two drives each in RAID-0. One has two of Western Digital's Raptors (74GB 10,000 RPM). The other with two of Maxtor's DiamondMax HDDs(250GB 7200 RPM). The latter has NCQ and benches significantly better. Some of the difference may be related to one RAID controller being better than the other (I didn't benchmark both controllers with the same drives), but I suspect the bigger difference is due to the NCQ features of the DiamonMax HDD.

The project is based on a partnership of several companies. Volkswagen provides the vehicle, a diesel-based Touareg R5 TDI with an automatic transmission, and the automotive know-how. Intel is supplying the Pentium-M chips (Dothan core) as well as the platform consisting of several 855GM-based mini-ATX boards. Then there is MDV (Mohr Davidow), a company that invests in start-up firms. Android, Honeywell, Tyzx and Coverity are among the other sponsors. Tyzx has specialized in image recognition software, which is especially important for AI (artificial intelligence) systems.

It goes without saying that the power hungry P4 processors and the corresponding platform would have made a bad choice. After all, the power dissipation loss of these seven systems would easily have exceeded 1200 Watts! This would have required special modifications to be made to the alternator and several other components. Instead, Intel has supplied the project with its tried and tested Pentium M notebook processors. These use the Dothan core with its 2MB of cache, are clocked at 1.6GHz and run on an 855GM platform. As a result, the overall power requirements of all seven systems together are only 280 Watts. The individual nodes are linked using a Gigabit Ethernet network.

Right here.

Too bad the submitter didn't Link the Article itself.

Japan already has Blu-Ray recorders and readers, and Sony is about to come out with their second gen or them. Over there, Blu-Ray seems to be catching on.

"These days, the 4.7 Gigabyte DVD disc is on the high-end of our optical storage capacity, as we are still waiting for Blu-Ray to reach our shores. The Japanese don't have this problem as they have been able to purchase Blu-Ray recorders/players for a while. In fact, Sony is already selling their second generation of recorders. The single-side cartridge media holds 23 GB, with plenty of room for future improvement." Toms Hardware Guide : http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050715_1350 22.html

Tom's Hardware has the skinny on these types of $20 plans, telling how/if they work, and how you can do it yourself (without paying).

Or look at the free article over on Toms Hardware (http://www17.tomshardware.com/howto/20041113/inde x.html). It just seems a bit unnecessary to plug a pay site when he just wants basic info.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20041113/index.h tml + Video

The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip

Are you reading the right stories? Please, read:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-0 4.html

Please slashdot, clarify this if I've left anything out:
The Opteron has it's own memory controller. That means it is not sharing the single memory bus in multiprocessor systems like Intel does. The more CPUs you add to an Opteron, the better it scales. Somebody is likely better at explaining this than I can.

As for the "Apple switching to Intel Debate", slashdotters might find this of interest:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p =1

Integrates itself right in. Basically everything works the same, except Intel handles the compiling and linking and gives you faster code as a result. Now perhaps things have changed, but a couple years ago the ICC produced faster code for BOTH platofrms than the MS compiler, though it was even faster for Intel chips than AMD.

Tom's Hardware did a test of various processors using FlaskMPEG (a program that decodes MPEG-2 and reencodes it to MPEG-4) back when the P4 was fairly new. The P4 did pathetic, worse than the P3 and Tom just panned it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001122/p4-03.htm l

Well Intel felt something had to be screwed up, this was just the kind of thing that the P4 was supposed to rock at. So they grabbed the source and recompiled it with the ICC pugged into VC++ (the program is a VC++ program) and sent it to Tom.

http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001125/p4-06.ht ml

Now as you can see, just the recompile (not using SSE2 optimizations) not only resulted in massive P4 speed increases, but almost doubled the speed of the Athlon. So while it certianly didn't optimize the Athlon to the same level as teh P4 (didn't do any 3dnow stuff) it certianly doesn't seem to give bad performance, at least in comparison to the MS copiler.

Integrates itself right in. Basically everything works the same, except Intel handles the compiling and linking and gives you faster code as a result. Now perhaps things have changed, but a couple years ago the ICC produced faster code for BOTH platofrms than the MS compiler, though it was even faster for Intel chips than AMD.

Tom's Hardware did a test of various processors using FlaskMPEG (a program that decodes MPEG-2 and reencodes it to MPEG-4) back when the P4 was fairly new. The P4 did pathetic, worse than the P3 and Tom just panned it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001122/p4-03.htm l

Well Intel felt something had to be screwed up, this was just the kind of thing that the P4 was supposed to rock at. So they grabbed the source and recompiled it with the ICC pugged into VC++ (the program is a VC++ program) and sent it to Tom.

http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001125/p4-06.ht ml

Now as you can see, just the recompile (not using SSE2 optimizations) not only resulted in massive P4 speed increases, but almost doubled the speed of the Athlon. So while it certianly didn't optimize the Athlon to the same level as teh P4 (didn't do any 3dnow stuff) it certianly doesn't seem to give bad performance, at least in comparison to the MS copiler.

This from them reported here and here looks almost completey unlike what you're asking for.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

Nice AMD bias.

On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,

The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).

mpeg2 to divx,...

Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).

...the A64 came out on top.

Hardly.

The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.

>>For example, any Anandtech P4/eMT64 vs. AMD64 comparison
>On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html)

Tom's Hardware took over Anandtech?

Wow. I did not know that.

>>For example, any Anandtech P4/eMT64 vs. AMD64 comparison
>On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html)

Tom's Hardware took over Anandtech?

Wow. I did not know that.

So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?

So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?

MP3s didn't become big until Napster. Napster wasn't even released until Fall 1999. By then, the P3 was up to 650 MHz, a lot faster than 100 MHz. By the end of 2000, the Pentium was over 1 GHz. Napster peaked in February 2001.

Ergo, faster than real-time encoding was common by the Napster era. (I have a 1 GHz Athlon which encodes at 5x. )

MP3s didn't become big until Napster. Napster wasn't even released until Fall 1999. By then, the P3 was up to 650 MHz, a lot faster than 100 MHz. By the end of 2000, the Pentium was over 1 GHz. Napster peaked in February 2001.

Ergo, faster than real-time encoding was common by the Napster era. (I have a 1 GHz Athlon which encodes at 5x. )

Yep, Thermal Design Power. In addition, why run a Pentium M 1.6 at 24 W when you can run it at 15 W?

Why use a 13-16 Watt PowerPC chip when you can use a 27-watt Pentium M?

Stuff made of wood is not somthing I would want to wear. Duct-tape products are the new...hotness.

I don't see anything more (cough) inventive (cough) than speculating on the market demand for duct-tape products as...
You guessed it,
0) duct-tape iPods
1) duct-tape wallets
2) duct-tape jackets
3) duct-tape pants
4) duct-tape shoes
5) duct-tape condoms (just joking there, ladies (-:)
6) duct-tape hats
7) duct-tape gloves
8) ????
9) pro-fit!

The Pentium 4 performs much less work per cycle than other CPUs (such as the various Athlon or older Pentium III architectures) but the original design objective - to sacrifice instructions per clock cycle in order to achieve a greater number of cycles per second (i.e. greater frequency or clockspeed) - has been fulfilled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4

And in case you aren't satisfied with that:

As early as 2000, THG observed that the Pentium 4's performance was clearly inferior to that of its predecessor, the Pentium III, on a clock-for-clock basis. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/

There are a ton of other sources, just try googling...

Really? Looked like it did fine in media encoding as well; it's just the synthetic benchmarks (PCMark04) that it falls behind in.

--grendel drago

Err, not precisely. Intel's Pentium M can create a system that draws 132 watts at maximum CPU load, and runs nearly as fast.

I've been buying AMD for about five years, but I think my next system will be a Pentium M. Just as soon as they're a bit cheaper...

--grendel drago

Err, not precisely. Intel's Pentium M can create a system that draws 132 watts at maximum CPU load, and runs nearly as fast.

I've been buying AMD for about five years, but I think my next system will be a Pentium M. Just as soon as they're a bit cheaper...

--grendel drago

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050509/cual_core _athlon-19.html

60-100W difference between idle and full power consumption. That is not an insignificant amount of power.

Don't you just need to stick a patch like this on the unit?

Well actually Semprons, Athlons, Opterons,

Sempron vs Celeron = http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=61&type=exper t&pid=5

Sempron out performs the Celeron on the Game front, but they are pretty neck and neck on the desktop front.

Athlon vs Pentium 4 =
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001206/p4-11.htm l
ergo, " If you have dedicated areas in which you want your computer to perform particularly well, if those areas should be 3D gaming, video encoding or other bandwidth intensive software and if you should not shy away from high system costs and the missing upgrade path, you should indeed consider Pentium 4. However, if you want a balanced system with excellent performance at a good price I heavily suggest Athlon...."

Itanium vs Opteron =
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-2 8.html#conclusion_linux_servers_smile_and_workstat ions_worry
Ergo....A fairly even heated match.

The Point being to say that 1 processor is why AMD has the right or not the right is kind of a rather narrow view. All three of AMDs Procs either match or beat Intel based product.

Antitrust away AMD. Im behind you all the way. Cheaper product that "just works" is far better than monopolistic product that costs too much.

Well actually Semprons, Athlons, Opterons,

Sempron vs Celeron = http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=61&type=exper t&pid=5

Sempron out performs the Celeron on the Game front, but they are pretty neck and neck on the desktop front.

Athlon vs Pentium 4 =
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20001206/p4-11.htm l
ergo, " If you have dedicated areas in which you want your computer to perform particularly well, if those areas should be 3D gaming, video encoding or other bandwidth intensive software and if you should not shy away from high system costs and the missing upgrade path, you should indeed consider Pentium 4. However, if you want a balanced system with excellent performance at a good price I heavily suggest Athlon...."

Itanium vs Opteron =
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-2 8.html#conclusion_linux_servers_smile_and_workstat ions_worry
Ergo....A fairly even heated match.

The Point being to say that 1 processor is why AMD has the right or not the right is kind of a rather narrow view. All three of AMDs Procs either match or beat Intel based product.

Antitrust away AMD. Im behind you all the way. Cheaper product that "just works" is far better than monopolistic product that costs too much.

Regarding AMD's lawsuit, this has really soured my perception of AMD. Companies that start lawsuits instead of competing in the marketplace lose my respect very quickly.

I find it amazing that as soon as a company files a lawsuit against another company claiming unfair competition, everyone immediately and blindly begins backing the plaintiff without considering the fact that the government really should have no place in telling companies or consumers how to run their businesses or which products they are allowed to manufacture or which businesses they are allowed to form partnerships with. If you don't like the deals businesses make with each other, then don't buy their products, period. You can even go as far as creating big groups to boycott their products and use the power of persuasion to change their "evil" ways. But please leave the goddamn government and the courts (and my tax money) out of it.

These lawsuits are spiraling out of control and they destroy huge amounts of investment money and invester confidence, yet the uneducated masses think they are a good thing. I say, grow up and learn how to compete in the free market like an free-thinking adult. If you can't stand the heat of competition, you don't deserve to compete, and you certainly shouldn't be allowed to sue another competitor out of the race because they are ahead of you.

Liberty just doesn't seem to exist in the world anymore, and the saddest part is that most people don't think about it or seem to care.

Your assertions are not correct. Pentium M is a low performance, low power chip, almost exclusively used by the mobile market. It is performs far worse than Athlon64 not to memtion the FX line.

I would recommend reading the article that I linked to above - you'll find that in fact the M DOES clock better in benchmarks performed by Toms Hardware, and I can't think of anyone more reputable - unless you have your own benchmarks?

Actually, most of their bragging rights sit with the Pentium M, built on the PIII architecture. Toms has a great article about it. It beats the Athlon 64 FX and the PIV Extreme Edition. That ain't shabby.

The difference in processor price is only noticable if you are buying OEM components and building your own machine, which you won't be doing since we're talking about buying Macs. Also, some of that price difference is absorbed by the fact that Apple will get bulk discounts on the CPUs. As for the second sentence, you're wrong.

A Pentium M does perform quite nicely, even when compared to desktop processors. Consider http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/.
While the results at Tom's Hardware were achieved with overclocking to 2.5 GHz, that clock speed seems not unreasonable for a 65nm version. Now imagine a dual-core version, and Yonah might indeed be impressingly fast.
That is, if Intel will deliver it on time. If there is a year of delay or so, AMD might cook up something even better in the meantime.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20020531/windows _gaming-06.html

Yes, actually it is about half the speed on Linux. But I still think it will become faster. I also think Wine/CVS may catch up to WineX/Cedega in a year or so. After all, the real goal is to not have to leave Linux for atnything.

San Diego is the newest core, no Venice. It's the same as Venice but with more cache.

CPU chart

Toms Hardware Review

The Belkin Nostromo n52 (http://www.tomshardware.com/game/200403061/) is sort of the same concept, with a bit of a compomise between features and ergonomics. Not all of the buttons are directly beneath a finger tip, but the use of shift states increases the number of configurable buttons to 104. D-pad and scroll wheel are there, too.

I laugh at your pathetic array, try this on for size....
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/raid core32-04.html

4x Broadcom SATARAID PCIX
32x 160GB Maxtor SATA HDD

Otherwise known as 5TB of raid lovin'

From what I've heard, you absolutely lose target firewire and any other OF-related goodies (C for CD, cmd-opt-P-R for PRAM zap, etc). However, that only applies to the final product if they stick with olde-skoole BIOS. There was some talk that they might be looking at an EFI-based board too.

More info on EFI can be found here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20050524/

Right! There's nothing like running Doom to have an idea of how the card performs in Doom. If we look the comparisons on tomshardware, all of them uses different progs and games to see the performance and every card has soooo much performance difference between one and another prog.