Slashdot Mirror

I am afraid that the numbers you are looking at are old. Intel is not winning. If you wish to take a snapshot today, AMD has won the desktop war, they easily outsell Intel in the Desktop market, regardless of the Dell's that will only sell Intel. The server market still belongs to Intel, but if you look at the trends, it's difficult to say they are winning when the competition is closing the gap at what should be considered an alarming rate. It the rate AMD is picking up market share in that arena, they will surpass Intel there by the middle of next summer. With re-occuring news that their 64 bit architecture outperforms Intels nearly 2 to 1, it could be even sooner. The number is no where near the 10 to 1 that you claim. To support that arguement, even Microsoft has written their new, soon to be released OSes around the AMD core, not the Intel cores. Sure the Intel cores will be fully supported, but they were not the primary concern for MS.

I would also like to point out that you have made an error in profits by the two companies, Intels margins have fallen over the last 12 months while AMD's have risen.

With all of those facts put together, Intel is losing. They may be ahead right now in the markets that matter the most, servers, but it is quickly fading as far as real numbers are concerned. I would hardly call that winning.

AMD is also winning in the sales game. They have successfully changed the public's perception of clock speeds. That is a war I thought they couldn't win myself. Intel had entrenched it into the public's mind. Those days are over. If AMD can overcome a hurdle like that, I don't question for a second they can overcome any branding issues that may arise.

When it was announced, there was some commentary that, without putting in more memory controllers, they had to daisy-chain the second 256MB from the first, in a system that is analogous to the slave drive on a Parallel ATA connection. It's not great for performance. The "no increase in memory bandwidth" supports this line and there isn't a guarantee of more speed with this configuration.

The article I had read where this card is introduced is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050305/ati_512m b_video_card-01.html

A rather neat article (granted it's from 2001) from Tom's Hardware about CPU heat: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010917/index.ht ml

And a video to go along with it: http://www.tomshardware.com/cgi-bin/downloads.m?id =1

A rather neat article (granted it's from 2001) from Tom's Hardware about CPU heat: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010917/index.ht ml

And a video to go along with it: http://www.tomshardware.com/cgi-bin/downloads.m?id =1

but the article said if you ever get bored with water cooling

What could me more fun than proven technology - LN2 cooling, that has been used for supercomputers for decades.

The beast : http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031230/

Also from WinHEC, samsung is not the only player. The disk will be manufactured initially by Samsung, Hitachi and Seagate, and other manufacturers will be announced later.

More details on Samsung's OneNAND hybrid technology:

OneNAND Flash memory has been incorporated into the design of Microsoft Corp.'s prototype Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), the first fully functional disk drive to combine NAND-based Flash with rotating storage media.

The hybrid hard drive prototype uses 1 Gigabit OneNAND(TM) Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer. In the hybrid write mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for the majority of the time, while data is written to the Flash write buffer. When the write buffer is filled, the rotating drive spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive.

The hybrid drive saves power by keeping the spindle motor in idle mode almost all the time, while the operating system writes to the OneNAND write buffer. Moreover, by using OneNAND Flash with hard disk drive technology, disk drive performance is not compromised relative to conventional disk drives. This is due, in large part, to OneNAND's ultra-fast read speeds, which can be fully leveraged during the flushing of the contents of OneNAND's write buffer to the rotating drive. In addition, since the Samsung hybrid disk drive operates at a lower temperature than traditional rotating media, it greatly reduces the possibility of shock and impact damage, improving the overall reliability of the disk subsystem.

While the cost of hybrid disk drives may slightly increase with the addition of OneNAND, any increase will be mitigated by several factors, including lower maintenance costs, 95 percent power savings when the disk is not spinning, faster boot time and substantially increased reliability. All of these changes are crucial to the ever increasing needs of today's mobile customer, making it likely that hybrid hard drive technology will enjoy rapid market adoption.

Japanese retailers have apparently already started selling Windows XP Pro x64 and the article says: "Pricing is on par with the regular professional version of Windows XP."

The photos from the article show the OEM version of XP Pro x64 edition (no fancy box or printed manual). The OEM version of XP Pro costs about $140 at newegg.com.

One reason I never tried out the pre-release version of x64 is that it seemed to require an XP Pro key, which I didn't have.

I think it will also be required for the "free upgrade" to the x64 edition. Everything I've read about the "free upgrade from 32-bit Windows XP" (like this article) only mentions the Professional edition and excludes the Home edition.

LOL @ sleek Ferrari notebooks on the last page!

For those of you just joining, we like to make fun of Enderle and his Ferrari notebook! Give it a shot, kids. ;D

LOL @ sleek Ferrari notebooks on the last page!

For those of you just joining, we like to make fun of Enderle and his Ferrari notebook! Give it a shot, kids. ;D

Here's a great overview of WinFS at Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030617/
Too bad it will not ship with Longhorn... Not to mention I'm sure the relational database will work like Master File Table of NTFS. or not work like the MFT in NTFS...

Toms Hardware has a pic of it.

here
I think...

The jokes about the heat these puppies will pump out couldn't be more appropriate. An article at Tom's states that the Smithfield core has a thermal design power of 130W making it by far the hottest x86 CPU ever seen.

In contrast, AMD's dual core offering will offer no increase in TDP over their present single core designs.

:D

• http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/w indows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sag_diskconcepts_17.m spx
• http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/index .html

There was a company advertising information destruction services. They had degaussing devices, and an even better option. Tom's Hardware did a story on the RSA conference and took some pictures, which you can see here: http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20050219/rsa_ conference-06.html#sem_destruction_guaranteed. If anything can do what you want, I'm guessing the hard drive shredder that they offer is just the thing.

Intel _makes_ money on it's CPUs while AMD barely, sometimes does.

While you may be correct that Intel's manufacturing is cheaper than AMD's, isn't it the case, however, that Intel can (and does) sell slower, less capable processors at higher prices than AMD? It seems to me I've always been able to look at Pricewatch and see equivalent Intel processors priced higher than AMD processors.

To make my point, I picked a processor at "random," an AMD64 3400+ and looked it up on tomshardware and found this performance comparison. Then I went to pricewatch and found the following prices, AMD64 3400+ = $188, Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz: $200. I looked up AMD processors and the first article I read said:

... the Athlon 64, while not priced as aggressively as AMD's chips in the past, ends up offering better performance than the Pentium 4, for less money. What more could you want?

Obviously some people want it to say Intel at any cost.

Intel _makes_ money on it's CPUs while AMD barely, sometimes does.

While you may be correct that Intel's manufacturing is cheaper than AMD's, isn't it the case, however, that Intel can (and does) sell slower, less capable processors at higher prices than AMD? It seems to me I've always been able to look at Pricewatch and see equivalent Intel processors priced higher than AMD processors.

To make my point, I picked a processor at "random," an AMD64 3400+ and looked it up on tomshardware and found this performance comparison. Then I went to pricewatch and found the following prices, AMD64 3400+ = $188, Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz: $200. I looked up AMD processors and the first article I read said:

... the Athlon 64, while not priced as aggressively as AMD's chips in the past, ends up offering better performance than the Pentium 4, for less money. What more could you want?

Obviously some people want it to say Intel at any cost.

It doesn't really matters how fast are AMD CPUs, people seems to care more about the chipsets, and that's the achiles' heel of AMD, they just make CPUs not chipsets.

No, AMD just doesn't make chipsets.

(Damn, did I just feed a troll?)

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050215/ lcd-01.html

I chose the BenQ FP937s+ as its by far the most impressive at its price. You'll notice no BenQ monitors are mentioned in the roundup, dispite them producing some of the best displays for the price.

Personally, if I'm getting a monitor I want it to be dvi and have a very fast response rate. I think that the majority of people buying monitors have no idea what most specs even mean. Tom's hardware had a good article on this not too long ago http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20040226/ Doubt most of the slashdot crowd would find much new information there, but perhaps some will.

Tom's hit maximum suckage in my book when they posted a review on hard drives and descibed disk space as "memory" three times in the first paragraph. Have not paid any attention to them since.

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

First, to answer your question: yes, Tomshardware recently updated their CPU benchmark test to now include over 100 CPUs from the last ten years. Starts here (graphs come later):

http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041220/index.h tml

Now to explain why you're asking the wrong question: Moore's observation says nothing directly about performance. He merely suggested that the complexity of ICs double every 18 months or so. In general, this has nothing to do with a comparable trend in clock speeds on CPUs, nor performance of CPUs.

On tom's charts, the most recent CPUs are about 50% faster in raw dhry-/whet-stone tests than my CPU which I bought two years ago. Other tests, which rely less on raw CPU performance, show an even smaller difference.

At some point in the past, performance of commodity hardware might have indeed doubled every year and a half. For the past 2-3 years, that's certainly untrue.

The Mother of All CPU Charts Part 1
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041220/index.htm l

I've been calling out sick from work the past week due to not being able to stop reading all I can about this latest Groklaw vs. SCO drama, so I figured I'd provide some good additional reading material to my fellow female Slashdot readers.

This is a great time to mention the new Tom's Hardware article featuring Groklaw's heart and brain, Pamela Jones. She's a sweet girl who's as intelligent as she is attractive and sits down with the guys from THG to share all the dirt about Groklaw and SCO. The URL to the article is http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050322_0430 01.html.

Also, check out http://www.sco.com/scoip/. It's SCO's answer to Groklaw and they claim that it's "The Right Place for SCO Intellectual Property Information" implying that Groklaw is anti-SCO biased. The contents of the site are legal filings from the following:
- SCO v. IBM
- SCO v. Novell
- SCO v. AutoZone
- SCO v. Daimler Chrysler
- Red Hat v. SCO

Enjoy these links and please keep Terry in your thoughts and prayers this Easter weekend.

The article is a nice start. For getting the lay of the land, I like the enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and ExtremeTech. Silent PC Review shows some nice components for building silent PCs.

Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series. It's difficult to get the latest ATI A-I-W card from the stock computer builders. If you don't do excessive gaming, you can opt for slightly less CPU and a lower power ATI A-I-W; that will help you build a more silent computer. Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy. Cool cases can be had from places like Ahanix, Lian Li, and Nexus (check out both the iStyle and Breeze cases).

The Pentium M doesn't fare very well in games vs. the Athlon 64, even when using the same video card.

That Anandtech review was one of three reviews I linked to that showed Athlon 64 and Pentium M would perform about the same. On average the Pentium M system is only about 5% behind that of Athlon 64. But the Athlon 64 desktop systems were using DDR400 while the Pentium M was limited to DDR333 and a 400MHz FSB and 4X AGP.

So what happens when Pentium M moves from 400MHz FSB/single channel DDR333/4X AGP to 533MHz FSB/dual channel DDR2-533/PCIe in gaming? Tom's Hardware seems to be the only site with a somewhat valid comparison. They compare a 2.13GHz/X600 system to that of a 2.1GHz/Radeon 9600 system (and adjusted the video card clocks to match each other). The 2.13GHz system does have a 1.6% frequency advantage so feel free to subtract that off the results.

Notice that the performance increases of 533/DDR2/PCIe would at least offset the A64 performance lead over Pentium M in the Anandtech review? Also notice that the 533/DDR2 system is what AMD used in their Turion benchmarks. Had the Intel integrated graphics not been the limiting factor the Pentium M and Turion would have scored very close in gaming performance. But they didn't score close in gaming because the Pentium M system was bottlenecked by Intel's integrated graphics.

In addition, the Pentium M is pretty expensive, so you'll be able to buy a high end Athlon 64 chip with the same money as this below average performing Pentium M chip.

Price is definitely a large advantage for Turion buyers unless/until Intel lowers their prices to Turion levels.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20040908/ -- Make your own single-disk installer.

The GNAA stories are at least slightly creative. This news story just sucks. It's neither technical, nor interesting. Slashdot needs to start linking back to Tom's Hardware Guide, or something.

Here. I'll contribute.

Tom's Hardware

Tom's Hardware: Painting a New Picture of Pentium 4: Tweaked MPEG4 Encoding

Not to be a Mac apologist, but the Mac Mini is really unbelievably small. Check out this page, which includes a picture of a Shuttle case next to a Mac Mini.

Don't forget physics processing!

"...The Low Power LCD mode lowers the refresh rate to extend battery life. An easy way to understand this may be to think of it this way: when on AC power, the Mobility Radeon 7500 uses higher clock speeds and more voltage for more performance; when the Mobility Radeon 7500 is in DC mode, it lowers the clock speed and voltage for maximum battery life..."

1) The read performance graph gives you the min, avg and max sequential transfer for the disk tested. Min is at the inside, max is at the outside. 2) What do you define as seek time? The access time given on tom's hardware page is the time of positioning the head and waiting for the data to pass. Which is AFAIK the most common measurement used.

Maybe you do not think its fair to compaire notebook disks from dec 2004 with 3.5" disks from feb 2004, how about these from march 2003 3.5 even the Maxtor D740X with 40 GB capacity is faster. Lets try some older models march 2001. Lets see they still have a slight advantage even with only 20 GB the platter. But who compaires disks from march 2001 with disks from december 2004?

1) The read performance graph gives you the min, avg and max sequential transfer for the disk tested. Min is at the inside, max is at the outside. 2) What do you define as seek time? The access time given on tom's hardware page is the time of positioning the head and waiting for the data to pass. Which is AFAIK the most common measurement used.

Maybe you do not think its fair to compaire notebook disks from dec 2004 with 3.5" disks from feb 2004, how about these from march 2003 3.5 even the Maxtor D740X with 40 GB capacity is faster. Lets try some older models march 2001. Lets see they still have a slight advantage even with only 20 GB the platter. But who compaires disks from march 2001 with disks from december 2004?

...you could always try this.

These benchmarks do not support his claims: Notebook
Desktop

These benchmarks do not support his claims: Notebook
Desktop

• Thermal Monitoring 2
  TM2 is overheat protection, controlled by the processor's PROCHOT signal (processor hot). This signal is activated if the CPU's thermal diode detects critical temperature levels. TM2 will dynamically reduce core voltage and clock speed in order to cool down the CPU.
• Enhanced SpeedStep
  SpeedStep does exactly the same as TM2, with the difference that it is initiated by the operating system. Whenever the system load is low, Windows XP SP2 will cause the CPU to lower the clock speed in 200 MHz increments by using ACPI mechanisms. Again, this is performed dynamically, which means that executing a demanding application will cause the system to speed up again.

If forced, I'd refuse to comply. Yes, doing so will park you in jail. Blogs are publications and are often widely syndicated; they're often used as sources for major broadcast and dead tree news stories. ThinkSecret is as legitimate as the Talon; well, bad example on the latter.

Trade secrets are not national security. ThinkSecret and the other folks weren't trafficing in them (selling them to competitors) which would be industrial espionage; they were writing news articles about them.

Is The Register a legitimate news service? Is Tomshardware? Is Slashdot? Is Democracy Now? What about al-Jazeera? Fox News? Who gets to decide what constitutes a "legitimate" and an "illegitmate" news agency?

Two words: Pentium M.

I stopped going to Tom's Hardware after this article:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/athlon_6 4-53.html

How about just benchmarks without the pessimistic commentary? Perhaps I'm reading a little much into "Uncertain Future for AMD", but it doesn't sound pleasant to me.

But, then again, maybe I should see if Tom's Hardware has changed its tune as of late and give it another chance.

Core? I'm not so worried about which core my chip is using... I just want the best performance for the price. I'm not overclocking anything... so as long as it's stable with the default heatsink... I don't care about new advances in power consumption or anything.

Let's look at the current prices for some of these chips at pricewatch:

$624 - Athlon 64 4000
$261 - Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$180 - Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$146 - Athlon 64 3000 939pin

Now just looking at these prices.... where is the jump? On my budget $120 to go from the 3000+ to the 3500+ was a good idea... but to go up another $360 wasn't... so I found my sweet spot.

Now let's look at the performance numbers.

Here are some application benchmarks from a HardOCP review of my mobo... note the fairly small difference between the 3500+ and 4000+
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDU=

And... here are the gaming benchmarks...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDY=

And... fairly small performance difference for the price margin.

So take these two things together and I bought a reasonably priced CPU that was just marginally less capable than the fastest one on the market (without getting into EE's and FX's)... yes I did my research.

As for your comment on SLI not giving almost double performance... it's obvious that SLI gives better results when the graphics hardware is more stressed... like you mention, higher resolutions is one way to do that... and you are correct that 1280x1024 doesn't tax a 6800GT too badly... WITH THE CURRENT CROP OF GAMES.

Note that I didn't buy two of these NOW because I don't need it... NOW. But in the future when the 6800 is starting to look sluggish (yes, it will happen even at 1280x1024) adding another 6800GT will give close to double the performance... even at 1280x1024.

For evidence of this I turn to your same set of benchmarks. Look at the Doom3 benchmark:

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/200 41222/vga_charts-06.html

It is well known that Doom3 is harder on hardware (and yes I realize it favors Nvidia a little as well) than HL2. Now whether that is because HL2 is more awesomly (is that a word?) coded is up for debate. The fact of the matter is that Doom3 is more difficult to run at high frame rates.

Look at the 1024x768 with AA and AF Benchmark. The SLI speedup is around 30 Frames or about 50%. Not bad. Now look at the 1600x1200... the speedup is right around %90 (almost double). Somewhere inbetween that would be 1280x1024.

I submit that this benchmark shows that games in the future (the 1600x1200) that tax the hardware more will give a close to double speedup. At any rate it will be way more than some %15...

As for Dual-core... I said in my original post that I want that for compiling. It will directly speedup (almost double) my parrallel "makes"... which is extremely important to me (I will be in grad school getting a degree in Computational Engineering about that time... so compiling large Finite Element codes will happen frequently).

I'm not worried about what it does for gaming. The SLI is futureproofing my gaming... the 939 dual cores are future-proofing my compiling (and other parallel capable CPU intensive tasks... like video encoding).

So... I'm not sure what you're arguing with about dual-cores... I never claimed they helped out gaming.

It's fairly obvious from the tone of your post that you won't ever see that SLI can be a good thing for upgradeability... so all of this probably fell on deaf ears. But I hope you atleast understand how some of us are not "Asinine" for wanting this type of technology....

Friedmud

Apparantly you haven't seen recent benchmarks on SLI: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/ index.html and here for Doom 3, Counterstrike and FarCry benches: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258 &p=4 The store you work probably isn't selling SLI because the new SLI PCI-Express mobos were just released. They're available on Newegg, CDW, etc.

You are turning this into an ATI v NVIDIA issue.

The reality is that ATI cards work showcase on HL2, whereas NVIDIA cards showcase on Doom3.

#1) Price. $525 for an X850XT PE? I think not...

#2) Same article shows the X850XT PE with HALF the PERFORMANCE of 2 6800GTs in an SLI

Based upon today's numbers, it looks like spending $750 on 2 6800 GT's and getting twice the performance of an available X850XT PE is pretty good. That is, if you base your decision purely upon a single set of benchmarks from a single game...

The reality of the situation is that SLI does work, and works pretty darned well most of the time.

While it is actually a Celeron, note this benchmark of CPUs encoding MP3s.

It's not so much "I don't need it" as the zero or negligible performance gains SLI results in. If it was actually an improvement on a cheaper solution I wouldn't care, but they are literally throwing away money, and rather a lot of it.

The technology has changed. While the Voodoo cards used to simply draw every other line on the screen when they were SLI'ed together, today's cards work very differently.

In a nutshell, one SLI'ed card will (attempt) to draw the top half of the screen while the other card draws the bottom half. Now, there are exceptions to this, and this is the biggest change.

If say, the top half of the screen does not have as high a polycount as the bottom half the underperforming card will pick up some of the slack for the over-worked card drawing the bottom half. This results in the cards working together to acheive an optimal frame rate.

For more detailed information than my bland attempt to sound geeky, click here.

#5) No benefit. "From what I heard, more than a few games realize no FPS gains at all from the addition of a second video card". First, this is rumor. Many games realize no benefit at low resolutions (640x480, some at 800x600) because the games are more CPU bound than video card bound. All the games that are SLI compatible definitely realize solid FPS gains. Moreover, those gains can be "converted" into graphics enhancements (i.e. no need to go from 60fps to 95 fps, but now you can turn on 8xAA or up the screen resolution, etc.)

#6) Dual GPU cards. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about here. The Gigabyte dual GPU card is just an SLI solution on a single graphics card. It's (almost) exactly the same as having 2x6600GT cards. It uses the same technology and produces the same results. So what's this viable new technology on the horizon he is talking about?

And Inferior Performance.

Same article, two pages earlier.

Oh yeah, and the cheapest you can find an X800 XL is $350, not $200/300.