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Stories and comments across the archive that link to tomshardware.com.

Comments · 3,394

  1. tomshardware reviewed this also by skt · · Score: 4 · on Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed
    tomshardware reviewed the Nomad as well. One of the cool things in their article is that they detail the steps necessary to hack your Nomad. 6GB is never enough right?

    This looks pretty cool, but it's still a bit out of my price range. It isn't a solid-state player either, but I might be able to live with that if I was convinced this thing could endure the shock and abuse associated with a portable music player. Also, the battery life isn't that great (~4 hours?) but it's still much better than all of those 64MB players out there that can't hold a full CD.

  2. Re:Hard drives... by n3bulous · · Score: 1 · on Copy Protection Galore
    "One word: Celeron Its probably the worst processor on the market because it lacks cache, but it sells because you can get a 500Mhz processor for the equivalent in price of a 200Mhz PII (even though the PII will perform better)."

    Not Really

    Tom's Hardware shows that celerons have approximately equal performance and are cheaper.

    As to whether people are stupid or not, most of them are sheep. Slashdotters are probably more intelligent on average than the general populace but they still jump early to conclusions, fall for hoaxes, and buy the latest, greatest toy because someone said it was.
  3. ONE LAST SUPER-IMPORTANT DETAIL by Shukaido · · Score: 2 · on Best Supported Video Card For Linux/XFree86?

    ONE LAST SUPER-IMPORTANT DETAIL!!!

    This isn't mentioned ANYWHERE in NVidia's FAQ (thanks a lot, NVidia). If you're using a Geforce2 on a Via KX133 or KT133 chipset motherboard, you'll need to do one more thing.

    NVidia's driver comes with a kernel module that needs to be loaded. That kernel module depends on the agpgart.o kernel module, and as of yet agpgart.o doesn't have explicit support for those chipsets (although it works fine with them). When you try to load it with insmod or moddep (as the Makefile in the tarball does) it will fail.

    This article at www.tomshardware.com explains the fix for this.

    http://www5.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q4/001002/i ndex.html
  4. Tom's Hardware Address by hobbesx · · Score: 1 · on Best Supported Video Card For Linux/XFree86?

    www.tomshardware.com (!)

  5. Athlon Motherboards... by Doodhwala · · Score: 2 · on Linux Intel Chipset Comparison


    Coincidence ... but I was just hunting for this when the article came up. I am looking to build a new computer with with an AMD athlon chip but all the reviews about motherboards on Toms Hardware and Anandtech seem to have a MS Windows centric view.

    I hope they do come out with a review for linux but that just might take time. SO what have your experiences been under linux ? Anything people like me should be keeping an eye out for ? Or something you would definitely recommend ?

  6. toms hardware used p4t a weeb or so ago! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2 · on ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky

    Gees, old news, that ASUS has already been benching p4t's with TomsHardware motherboard test of the P4. Tom has already said that the p4t whopps the Intel board bug time. As usual, ASUS come through again, and this time it's an overclockers dream!

  7. Why even 1 RIMM? SDRAM is better by angelic_crusader · · Score: 1 · on ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky

    I don't like RDRAM. Even tho it runs at a much faster clock speed than SDRAM, the latency is not very good so it ends up being about equal in performance terms. Plus it costs much more than SDRAM, at least in the UK, anyway :)
    Besides, the Thunderbird with DDR-SDRAM is IMHO superior to the Pentium (although admittedly in gaming tests the Pentium still wins, but that doesn't matter cos I don't play games anymore), so there!
    Check out Tom's Hardware Guide for an article and benchmarks on the first Thunderbird motherboards supporting DDR-SDRAM.
    _____________________________________

  8. OT Question...Advertising for Anandtech? by giberti · · Score: 1 · on Intel Says 10GHz By 2005

    OT Question...Advertising for Anandtech?

    Am I alone in noticing that Slashsdot has been doing _lots_ of articles from Anandtech, and less and less from say Tom's Hardware and the like, almost like a small advertising campaign.

  9. Re:Looks like DSP chips are in by alleria · · Score: 1 · on Specialized MP3 Compression Hardware?

    Well, it really depends on what you use, although I agree what the Fraunhofer at 10x is kinda incredible. Either way, it's a moot point, since Fraunhofer is good for lower bitrates. LAME seems okay for higher end -- certainly far better than most, but I've found Blade to be the best.

    Get a good Blade front-end, and even a decently fast machine, and you can do pretty fast encodes. Doing 320kbps with Blade on my Tbird 900 under Win2k Adv Server goes up to 4.6x, if I'm not running much else, and dips to around 3.95x if I'm using the computer heavily.

    I'm not sure if things like the P4's SSE2 would help, but seeing as how an optimized version rips the Athlon to shreds in Flask MPEG4, (see Tom's perhaps MP3 audio is similar enough that it could also take advantage of SSE2 to great benefit...

  10. Re:Athlon vs. P4 test by Fervent · · Score: 2 · on Pentium 4 Re-evaluated, Again (Again)

    My apologies. Here's the link.

  11. Athlon vs. P4 test by Fervent · · Score: 3 · on Pentium 4 Re-evaluated, Again (Again)
    I found the Athlon vs. P4 test, using the recompiled ap, to be quite interesting. The cost performance ratio isn't nearly as great as I thought it would be. True, the P4 1.5 ghz performs better, but not a whole lot better than the Athlon 1.2 ghz. See the picture.

    I'm not trying to knock Intel perse. My main machine is a P3 (Dell laptop, runs like a dream). But you have to wonder if the cost warrants, in this case, the extra 3 fps in compression.

  12. I think the server is Slashdoted by Talla · · Score: 1 · on Tom's Hardware Retracts P4 Endorsement

    Try the other one: Server 2

  13. Tom wondered too. by Static · · Score: 1 · on It's All About the Pentium (4)
    Now, I'm not one to play conspiracy theorist, but Tom thinks something rotten in the State of Slashdot. Important P4 update And not forgetting he re-ran an FPU test on the P4 and it came up smelling like... well, it sure wasn't roses!

    Wade.

  14. tomshardware.com by KevinMS · · Score: 1 · on Reasoning Behind The KDE League



    my first offtopic post!

    did anybody see that tomshardware is trashing slashdot?

    here

  15. Doesn't anyone remember... by otter42 · · Score: 3 · on Top Ten Intel Slipups
    Thomas Pabst and his articles exposing the Pentium II as being slower than the Pentium MMX? in 1996, he purchased a Pentium II from a store and benchmarked it, showing that it was slower than the MMX. Intel gave him no end of hell in legal threats and abuses before finally realizing that they had no case against him.

    At the same time, the founder of x86.org had a major problem . He basically reconstructed the secret "Appendix H" technical references for the 586. He simply analyzed the data that Intel published and filled in the blanks. Intel harassed him and sued him for breaching NDA's that he had never agreed to in the first place!

    I attribute much of AMD's success to the incredible uproar over these issues right around the time that AMD was releasing its newest chips. Definitely some of Intel's biggest legal blunders.

  16. Re:real benchmarks! by jonnythan · · Score: 2 · on It's All About the Pentium (4)

    http://tomshardware.com/cpu/0 0q4 /001120/p4-23.html

    Tom has been using this benchmark since a little before the PIII 1.13 GHz I believe. Check out his site for CPU comparisons if you really care about kernel compile times.

  17. Re:real benchmarks! by shyster · · Score: 2 · on It's All About the Pentium (4)

    Here you go.

  18. Tom's Hardware Guide? by Volta · · Score: 3 · on It's All About the Pentium (4)

    I'm surprised to not see Tom's review of the P4 listed in this roundup. See: Intel's New Pentium 4 Processor at Tom's Hardware Guide.

  19. More reviews... by pointwood · · Score: 2 · on C`t Throws Athlons And P4s In The Gladiator Pit

    Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:

    Anandtech
    HardOCP - on HardOCP's frontpage you can find more links to reviews.
    Toms Hardware hasn't got his review up yet, but I bet it will be soon...

    Greetings Joergen

  20. Re:This could be by Fat+Lenny · · Score: 1 · on PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk)
    Ever heard of something called DeCSS? Go to the search page if you haven't. For that matter, substitute DeCSS with Napster, SDMI, or CueCat -- you see the pattern? Yep, they post an article about all three of these things once every fifteen minutes.

    Pay a visit to THG and check out the article about compressed DVD video on a CD-ROM. No special tricks required. , search by topic and see if you can't find an article posted once every 15 minutes. You'll see the same pattern

    --

  21. Re:This could be by Fat+Lenny · · Score: 1 · on PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk)
    Ever heard of something called DeCSS? Go to the search page if you haven't. For that matter, substitute DeCSS with Napster, SDMI, or CueCat -- you see the pattern? Yep, they post an article about all three of these things once every fifteen minutes.

    Pay a visit to THG and check out the article about compressed DVD video on a CD-ROM. No special tricks required. , search by topic and see if you can't find an article posted once every 15 minutes. You'll see the same pattern

    --

  22. Re:The Athlon on Win98 is your entire problem by karma+kameleon · · Score: 1 · on Review of the BSD part of MacOS X Beta
    "Look, mommy; an idiot!"

    "No, son, that's just AFCArchvile. Now stop that, it isn't polite to point and stare."

    Go play in the street, you living defiance of the theory of Darwinism, you.

  23. RMBS is losing it's props by kalinh · · Score: 5 · on Samsung Caves To Rambus Royalties
    This is actually a pretty old story, well old as in at least 12 hours. I've been following the company pretty closely cause I shorted their stock abour 3 months ago. They dropped down as low as $36 a share yesterday as investors finally took their collective heads out of their asses and realized that Rambus has quickly developed one of the worst brands in the industry. Today's great news only resulted in a relatively mild increase (8% or so).

    The point is that the company has been artificially propped up in stature and prominence for a long time and these supports are slowly being removed one by one. But it's taking a long time.

    Intel has gone sour with RMBS and according to the public portions of the contract they signed with them all they have to do to cancel their commitments to promoting RDRAM with their new systems is write a letter terminating the contract. Why hasn't this been done then you ask? There are portions of the contract that are blacked out and the speculation is that RMBS has Intel by the balls on some IP issue that no one is talking about. Though that's just a good theory at this point.

    At any rate, even if RMBS manages to collect royalties on SDRAM and DDR-RAM and it still looks to me like Micron et al have a strong case on the whole RMBS breaking the JEDEC agreement and patenting jointly developed technology.

    Intel put together a group called the Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) to develop a future RAM standard slated for 2003 and they didn't invite RMBS to the table. Regardless of whether RMBS has any claim on the patents that cover SDRAM and DDR, it's obvious that the rest of the industry (regardless of Samsung's licensing deal they are also working on the RMBS free standard) will be working very hard to bypass RMBS royalties as soon as possible.

    Even if RDRAM was viable on the desktop (it's not, as others have pointed out), it's gettign to the point where associating with RMBS is bad public relations. Doesn't it make you feel sick to think that your new PS2 purchase has contributed to the financial health of these leaches?

    There is a great article about this at Tom's Hardware from back in July. It makes some long-range predictions, many of which are now being played out nicely. The whole article and, actually, all of the Rambus coverage on Tom's is excellent. Hey while I was there looking for the link I found this new bit about the Samsung deal which totally jives with what I just wrote and also points out that many analysts beleive RMBS gave Samsung major concessions to stage a well-timed deal and that Samsung is possibly avoiding legal costs while waiting for Micron et al to take RMBS to court. It's also woth noting that Samsung has been one of RMBSs biggest allies for a long time.

  24. RMBS is losing it's props by kalinh · · Score: 5 · on Samsung Caves To Rambus Royalties
    This is actually a pretty old story, well old as in at least 12 hours. I've been following the company pretty closely cause I shorted their stock abour 3 months ago. They dropped down as low as $36 a share yesterday as investors finally took their collective heads out of their asses and realized that Rambus has quickly developed one of the worst brands in the industry. Today's great news only resulted in a relatively mild increase (8% or so).

    The point is that the company has been artificially propped up in stature and prominence for a long time and these supports are slowly being removed one by one. But it's taking a long time.

    Intel has gone sour with RMBS and according to the public portions of the contract they signed with them all they have to do to cancel their commitments to promoting RDRAM with their new systems is write a letter terminating the contract. Why hasn't this been done then you ask? There are portions of the contract that are blacked out and the speculation is that RMBS has Intel by the balls on some IP issue that no one is talking about. Though that's just a good theory at this point.

    At any rate, even if RMBS manages to collect royalties on SDRAM and DDR-RAM and it still looks to me like Micron et al have a strong case on the whole RMBS breaking the JEDEC agreement and patenting jointly developed technology.

    Intel put together a group called the Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) to develop a future RAM standard slated for 2003 and they didn't invite RMBS to the table. Regardless of whether RMBS has any claim on the patents that cover SDRAM and DDR, it's obvious that the rest of the industry (regardless of Samsung's licensing deal they are also working on the RMBS free standard) will be working very hard to bypass RMBS royalties as soon as possible.

    Even if RDRAM was viable on the desktop (it's not, as others have pointed out), it's gettign to the point where associating with RMBS is bad public relations. Doesn't it make you feel sick to think that your new PS2 purchase has contributed to the financial health of these leaches?

    There is a great article about this at Tom's Hardware from back in July. It makes some long-range predictions, many of which are now being played out nicely. The whole article and, actually, all of the Rambus coverage on Tom's is excellent. Hey while I was there looking for the link I found this new bit about the Samsung deal which totally jives with what I just wrote and also points out that many analysts beleive RMBS gave Samsung major concessions to stage a well-timed deal and that Samsung is possibly avoiding legal costs while waiting for Micron et al to take RMBS to court. It's also woth noting that Samsung has been one of RMBSs biggest allies for a long time.

  25. Re:Linux IS supported -- it's a known bug by nyri · · Score: 1 · on AMD's DDR-Capable 760 Chipset Reviewed X3
    Tom's fine site has kernel compilation time benchmark for 760: Here.

    In a nut shell, better memory performance does not affect a bit. So we must wait for better benchmarks.

    Jari Mustonen

  26. Re:Well okay, but... by shyster · · Score: 1 · on Upgrade Your Pentium's Microcode

    Actually this isn't really all that unknown anymore. The PIII 1.13GHz chip REQUIRED a new BIOS and microcode update. Check out Tom's Hardware for their PIII 1.13GHz review (the one that led to the recall, incidentally) for details. But, basically, without the microcode, the processor was very flaky. Tom thinks that it was simply an OC'ed processor, and the microcode was used to disable certain things for stability...that was the impression I got anyway.

  27. Re:Oh, It may be a Betamax by rebelcool · · Score: 1 · on The PS2 - A Betamax In the Making?

    hm, a note on the mpeg thing..mpeg2's quality is a bit higher than mp4 (so are file sizes). Check out this article on tom's hardware. Mpeg4

  28. All-out war will drive prices up by driehuis · · Score: 1 · on Intel Employees Speak Out On Rambus Debacle
    If Intel drops off as Rambus' sole supporter, expect Rambus to abuse their patent position even more. Hitachi (or was it Toshiba? I forget) already gave in and pays a Rambus tax on their RAM technology. Tom Pabsts hardware site has some scathing analysis on this topic. In particular, read this article.

    When Intel really drops out, it is in everyones interest that Rambus gets put out of its misery quick.

  29. All-out war will drive prices up by driehuis · · Score: 1 · on Intel Employees Speak Out On Rambus Debacle
    If Intel drops off as Rambus' sole supporter, expect Rambus to abuse their patent position even more. Hitachi (or was it Toshiba? I forget) already gave in and pays a Rambus tax on their RAM technology. Tom Pabsts hardware site has some scathing analysis on this topic. In particular, read this article.

    When Intel really drops out, it is in everyones interest that Rambus gets put out of its misery quick.

  30. Re:Proof. by AFCArchvile · · Score: 1 · on Intel Employees Speak Out On Rambus Debacle
    Here's one quote from the article itself:

    "The [original Intel 820 chipset] issues were not defects within the MTH. The issues were with the Rambus channel itself and the use of large packages at channel speeds. Technically, the problem has been with microwave-like resonance effects in the component packages, connectors and in the structures formed by these when placed on printed circuit boards."

    Rambus' strict design rules left engineers with little elbowroom to be creative, another industry insider said. "Engineers as a whole don't like being dictated to," he said. "With Rambus' design there's no flexibility."

    Also, here is the Tom's Hardware Guide article: The Rambus Zombie Versus the Wounded Chipzilla. Also, the benchmark ; which shows the lower performance figures under Rambus.

  31. Re:Proof. by AFCArchvile · · Score: 1 · on Intel Employees Speak Out On Rambus Debacle
    Here's one quote from the article itself:

    "The [original Intel 820 chipset] issues were not defects within the MTH. The issues were with the Rambus channel itself and the use of large packages at channel speeds. Technically, the problem has been with microwave-like resonance effects in the component packages, connectors and in the structures formed by these when placed on printed circuit boards."

    Rambus' strict design rules left engineers with little elbowroom to be creative, another industry insider said. "Engineers as a whole don't like being dictated to," he said. "With Rambus' design there's no flexibility."

    Also, here is the Tom's Hardware Guide article: The Rambus Zombie Versus the Wounded Chipzilla. Also, the benchmark ; which shows the lower performance figures under Rambus.

  32. Re:Uhhh drivers? by e_n_d_o · · Score: 1 · on Wine Runs Word 2000 And Excel 2000

    It all depends on the quality of the driver. If you have 100 engineers optimizing the hell out of a driver for Win98, and have 3 who port that work to Linux, what do you expect?

    But hey check out this link http://www .to mshardware.com/graphic/00q3/000811/linux_geforce-1 8.html... here we have Linux beating Windows on a few tests. It's true that in most of the tests tomshardware.com did, Linux lost. But its not because Linux sucks. It's because the drivers aren't as good.

    My home workstation goes down for hardware upgrades, kernel upgrades, and power outages longer than twenty minutes... thats it. In other news, our well-maintained very-lightly-loaded w2k workgroup server ate shit this afternoon, requiring a hard boot. Sure this is anecdotal evidence, but reliability is something that can only be tested in practice.

  33. Re:This isn't a discussion about design philosophy by ToLu+the+Happy+Furby · · Score: 3 · on AMD vs Intel: CPU Design Philosophy
    Ugh. Ignorant crap getting a +4 insightful. Well, let's get this over with...

    Rather, it is a piece of self-promotion by Ace's Hardware, who sent this story in themselves.

    Many websites send notices of their original content to each other, especially when they know that it is excellent content, like this article. ArsTechnica sends notices both to Ace's and to /. Here is an example of exactly the same brand of "self-promotion" from Hannibal, and as regarding a (IMO) far less worthy though still interesting article.

    The article itself doesn't say anything the knowledgeable don't already know.

    This is false. I am a hell of a lot more knowledgeable in matters of MPU architecture than you, and I learned quite a bit. But I suppose you were already an expert on the intricacies of load-store reordering on the P6 vs. the K7, on the precise weaknesses of the K7's branch prediction algorithm (i.e. that it throws an exception and flushes its BTB when presented with more than two branches in a 16-byte aligned code window), on the dependancy scheduling problems of very large instruction reorder buffers and what they imply about the P4's clock-speed ramp. I suppose you'd already seen benchmarks which measured the effects of L2 latency and branch prediction on IPC. (You wouldn't mind posting a link, would you troll?)

    In fact, it reads like a high-school report, and not even a very well-written one. E.g., "First we will try to analyze the most important shortcomings, next we will search for possible solutions." Sounds just like the simplistic expositions of a high school term paper.

    Way to go, asshole. The author's name is Johan De Gelas. He lives in the Netherlands. ENGLISH IS NOT HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE. I'd like to see you post a single sentence in Danish, much less an incredibly insightful article on competing philosophies in next-generation 1.5 GHz+ MPU design.

    Look, I know that there is a lot of mumbo-jumbo laden "technical" architecture discussion going around the web, often quite nonsensical and written by good-old fashioned Americans who just haven't had the benefit of 8th grade grammar (or a solid education in MPU design). The point is, you were horribly wrong to lump this article in with that schlock, and you apparently did so only because it contained terms and explanations which you didn't understand. Furthermore, you made your point, with quite authoritative tone, in a public forum. Of course you have every right to be loud and wrong in /. Indeed, I've been known to be loud and wrong in /. several times before. Still, if you don't know what you're talking about, please please please don't talk.

    I repeat: the article is not a technical piece at all. Hannibal at ArsTechnica writes technical pieces about CPU design. This article at Ace's Hardware says nothing insightful.

    Completely backwards. Now, let me first say that I not only respect Hannibal tremendously, but that his articles (particularly the excellent RISC vs. CISC in the Post-RISC era) were what inspired me, a bit over a year ago, to begin to learn much more about MPU architecture and design. They are written very vividly, with strong prose and excellent, clear analogies. They do a fabulous job of explaining complicated concepts and new trends in MPU design to a lay reader.

    ArsTechnica, like /., is a general-purpose tech site. Ace's Hardware is all about hardware, mainly MPU design and architecture. Indeed, it is perhaps the most respected daily-updated MPU architecture site on the web. Several experts--many very well informed amateurs, many who work in the industry--post in their technical forum. We're talking people like Aaron Spink, MPU designer for Compaq, who works on what is generally acknowledged to be the best MPU design team on the planet (the Alpha). We're also talking people like Paul DeMone, designer for MOSAID, who in his free time writes IMNSHO the best technical series of design articles available for free, including this excellent article which destroyed one of Hannibal's fundamental premises in that Post-RISC article I loved so much. And indeed, Hannibal immediately posted a link to the article and said as much. That's because, as great a service as he provides--and I really, really love Hannibal's articles and they're the first thing I recommend to anyone interested in learning about MPU design--they are *not* technical, they often miss important points which an experienced professional would not (as in this case), and Hannibal is just a student with the benefit of a few architecture classes and a well-worn copy of Hennessy and Patterson.

    So by all means, people--if you're reading this and want to learn about the fascinating world of MPU design, start with Hannibal. But just know that his articles, while very good, are *not* technical; when you want technical, a great place to start is Ace's.

    Now that we're through with that bit of unpleasantness, let's clean up your misstatements, shall we?

    In fact, it misses the point. It dares to call the P4 "innovative" and wonder whether future designs in the x86 world will copy it. Well, of course not! How many times must it be said that the P4 barely keeps up with the Athlon and performs less well than a P!!!? Because, that is a fact. Numerous production samples have leaked, with the test results uniformly and without exception pointing to the fact that even if the platform's performance is improved by release time--which it should, since these are samples not a retail product--it won't outperform a P!!! with equal clockspeed. That's why the P4 is being released at 1.4 and 1.5GHz initially, because if they were released at 1.2GHz they'd be outperformed by the 1GHz P!!! and that wouldn't be good.

    Oh really. Just like preproduction benchmarks of the K7 proved it to be "closer to that of a Celeron 366 than any Pentium III." Just like preproduction benchmarks of the PII lead to the following insightful comments from Tom's Hardware (a leader in the "P4 is overhyped, clock-speed isn't everything, blah blah blah" ignorance these days...):

    Well, the beef with the Pentium II is that it seems to suffer from BSE (bovine spongiform encephelephy a.k.a. Mad Cow Disease), although I doubt that any British cattle was involved. Although BSE infected products shouldn't be imported, I'm pretty sure we'll also see the Pentium II here in Europe soon after the 3rd of May when it is finally released. However, since I wouldn't eat BSE infected beef, I wouldn't be interested in risking an infection of my computer with this CPU either.

    ...For former Pentium users there's hardly any attractiveness in the Pentium II either. The Windows 95 performance is hardly any better and in some cases even worse than the cheaper Pentium Pro or Pentium MMX. Windows NT users would be the last ones to be interested in the Pentium II, there is just no reason at all to swap the Pentium Pro for a Pentium II.


    Guess what: preproduction benchmarks are always wrong. Again, preproduction benchmarks are always wrong. And in particular, the benchmarks we've seen on those preproduction P4's are--just like the benchmarks included in the articles above (i.e. the K7 scoring only 60% of a clock-normalized PIII on FPUMark; the PII doing worse on 32-bit code than a P5-MMX)--utter nonsense given what we know about the P4's design . Thus the logical conclusion is that, just like the preproduction MPU's "benchmarked" above (and let me remind you that those were at least close enough to final silicon to be clocked at release-ready clock speeds), the P4's we have seen "benchmarked" on the web so far have been sandbagged.

    Now, the common reaction to these charges goes something like this: "Sandbagged? Impossible! After all, these P4's are at most one stepping from final silicon, maybe even final silicon! Thus they can't be sandbagged!" Which is utterly false. Obviously the sandbagging isn't done in the chip design--that would be idiotic. Rather, it is done in microcode. Every feature of the chip can be turned on and off, tuned and detuned, in microcode. Thus it is trivial to ship a preproduction MPU off for validation with, for example, part of the L2 cache disabled, or the BTB or instruction reorder buffers set to flush when they don't need to, or the way prediction on the two-cycle L1 cache turned off, or tuned wrong, or with certain x86 instructions mapped to unnecessarily slow circuit paths, or any of dozens and dozens of different things set wrong. Indeed, this is the common state of internal preproduction MPUs, because the only way to test corner cases and pathological cases is by disabling one part of the chip and thus placing unrealistic stress on another. In other words, preproduction chips are sort of like beta software--full of DEBUG code which slows everything down, but isn't worth taking out until you're sure everything works.

    "But," you may say, "why would Intel sandbag their preproduction P4's when they know benchmarks will leak out?? Why not build up the hype and all that??" The answer, again, is simple. If you take a look at Intel's history of dealing with prerelease cores, you find that they only hype the projects which are likely to underperform horribly--the i860, the iAPX432, Itanium--and they significantly underplay the ones which are going to kick major booty--eg. the P6 core and now the P4. "But why???" Easy. If Intel has a project which sucks, the best they can hope for is to scare off their potential competitors from the market space until they can get another crack at it. (Remember, there's a 3-or-more year lag-time between the decision to start--or not start--a project and the finished product.) That's exactly what they've done with Itanium, scaring MIPS out of the high-end RISC business, and putting Compaq and HP years behind on their high-end RISC designs, with nothing but a bunch of IA-64 FUD. Meanwhile, if their upcoming core is going to perform incredibly, why waste time hyping and giving your competitors the tip-off?? All that would do is cannibalize the sales of your current MPUs as people wait to get the amazing new chip due out in 6 months. Worse, if Intel hyped the great performance of the upcoming P4, they would need to admit that the average PC user can actually use 1 GHz+ performance...which, of course, would play right into the hands of AMD which is the only player with decent 1GHz+ volume until well into next year. This way, you get to surprise the industry, get great press, and sell off way more of your old, now obsolete chips. Simple, really.

    Now, the P4 barely keeps up with the current-generation Athlon Thunderbirds. This is important to note because people always *blamed* AMD for a processor which still, with the advantages of the P!!! SIMD intruction optimizations used in much software, didn't quite keep pace with Intel's offering in the most common benchmarks. Now, the technically knowledgeable know that the Athlon whomps the P!!! in anything that isn't SIMDified, and that its floating point unit is head-and-shoulders above. But people still moaned about the performance gap in certain common SIMDified benchmarks.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong. The only cases in which the Athlon clearly bests a Coppermine P3 is in scientific (i.e. double-precision) FPU-heavy simulations, ray tracing, etc. On almost every other benchmark, they are within +/-5% at identical clock speeds, with a few standouts at around +/-8% for each architecture. In particular, 3D games tend to show an affinity for the Coppermine. Blaming this on some "SIMD bogeyman" is ridiculous--every 3D game, and especially a standout game like Quake 3, is optimized for 3DNow just as it is for SSE. Now, you can either deny the facts, or you can try to understand them.

    The main culprit, of course, is the difference in L2 latencies. Tbird has a 64-bit bus to L2 at a latency of 11 clock cycles, with 384Kb total cache; Coppermine has a 256-bit bus to L2 at a latency of 7 clock cycles with 256Kb total cache. The Tbird has the bigger cache because the cache design is exclusive; however, it also has much longer latencies for this and other reasons. In the end, there is no comparison as to which is the better design--the Coppermine's cache hierarchy is simply better than the TBird's, no argument about it. And Johan's benchmarks illustrate this rather nicely.

    Well, here's what they didn't realize: the Athlon is a truly seventh-generation core--which beat Intel to the punch by, what, almost a year and a half? As such, it has made trade-offs to be able to scale to higher clockspeeds better--one reason why Intel had to recall, and still hasn't re-issued, the 1.13GHz P!!! yet AMD are easily churning out 1.2GHz Athlon Thunderbirds.

    "The Athlon is truly a seventh-generation core." What does that mean??? If you think it means the K7 core has one single architectural innovation which does not exist on an MPU available before it, then I challenge you to list it now. (Indeed, I can't think of a single innovation in the K7 which isn't in the P6 core--except for the exclusive cache architecture, which is an overall weakness compared to the Coppermine cache--but there may be some.) If you think it means the K7 is a better core than the P6, well, you're right. The K7 is indeed a better core, in that its pipeline stages are more evenly balanced, and thus it can scale to higher clockspeeds on similar process. On the other hand, the K7 is less well balanced from an execution resources standpoint, including such oafish features as a fully 3-wide FPU (as opposed to the P6's 1.5-wide FPU), which offers at best 40% better performance, but generally no better performance than the P6 on FP intensive apps. Yes, the reason for the discrepancy is partly due to code which is compiled with the P6's execution resources in mind--but of course, that will continue to be most things so long as Intel has the majority of market share (AMD currently sells out all the MPUs it can make and thus has no theoretical way of getting majority market share for at least the next 4 years or so), and most apps are precompiled binary. But it's partly due to the fact that there's just not enough need for 3 full FPUs to justify the die space they take. This is just one example, but the end result is that the K7 is a well-balanced core pipeline-wise which is larger and consumes more power than it can justify based on its ability to get instructions from cache and memory. It is still the fastest thing out there, but it uses brute force to make it there. Time-to-market issues are behind some of these design issues, and some of those will be solved with the upcoming Mustang/Palomino/Morgan core tweak. But that still won't make the K7 anything more than a rebalanced tweaked-out brute-force of a P6. And hey--that ain't bad. But it ain't innovation.

    The P4, on the other hand, includes many features never before seen on a commercial MPU. They include: double-pumped ALU, integer decoder and scheduler, and integer retiring (running at up to 4 GHz on a .18 process!!!); trace cache; two-cycle L1 potentially using way-prediction to reach 2.0 GHz on a .18 process; hardware prefetch; and, well, a pipeline deep enough to allow 2.0 GHz on a .18 process. It also includes some impressive resources never before seen on the x86 side of things. They include: 126 op buffer; 3.2 GB/s-4.27 Gb/s FSB; "most accurate branch prediction algorithm ever" (claimed by Intel at MPF a couple weeks ago); 48 GB/s L2->core bandwidth; and SSE2, which will finally let the x86 push double-precision FP code with the big boys, and doesn't resort to a kludgy, die-space-wasting, gas-guzzling halfway-solution like the K7's triple FPU. On the downside there is the branch misprediction penalty of 19 clocks, potentially 27 if the code is not in the trace cache (unlikely). However, even this is mitigated by the fact that while the official branch mispredict penalty of the P6, for example, is a mere 12 clocks IIRC, the actual time to execute new code on a mispredict is more in the neighborhood of 30-50 clocks, because the instructions need to be rescheduled. Meanwhile, the P4 has wider scheduling resources, and thus may not even have a higher branch mispredict penalty in practice at all. It will certainly have many fewer mispredicts, so the overall analysis here is probably a wash.

    It is, all-in-all, a very impressive looking chip, more than worthy of the title "seventh generation", whether it turns out to perform well or poorly. However, meaningless sandbagged benchmarks aside, all indications are that it will perform magnificantly. Taken as a whole, the P4 contains not only the sorts of design changes necessary to *double* clock speed on a given process over the P6 (note:WOW), but also *increase* IPC. But we'll see how this beautiful looking design translates to reality when the first actual P4's are released and benchmarked.

    Blah blah blah, biased statements towards Ace's.

    Ace's is in general a slightly AMD-biased site. "Unfortunately", Johan, Brian, and the rest of the crew there "have to" read the thoughts of actual MPU experts day in and day out in their technical forum, and thus know that the case for the K7--and against the P4--is not what the average hardware site has made it out to be. This is not to take anything away from AMD, which has at the moment by far and away the fastest performing MPUs on the planet, the best binsplits on the planet, and about 1.4x the performance/price of Intel all the way up and down their price lists. However, all appearances are that, once the P4 moves into heavy volume production (note: not until Q3 next year at the earliest, after a process shrink to .13 Cu), Intel will have a very strong and competitive lineup. And that until then, while AMD ought to be the choice of every sane computer buyer around, Intel will have bragging rights for the highest-performing (not just highest-clocking) chip in the x86 space, if not in the world. Furthermore, with the K8 almost certain to be just a derivative of the K7 (probably with 64-bit extensions and 2-way CMP), it looks as if Intel will take back the clock-speed crown and hold it for good. Whether that means it will win the performance crown for good remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn't discount the P4 core if I were you.
  34. Re:Semi-ontopic by stilwebm · · Score: 3 · on AMD vs Intel: CPU Design Philosophy

    Tom's Hardware disects these terms a good bit, and compares the various processors that use these platforms. Be warned that Tom is a little biased as an anti-Intel kind of guy.

  35. Real sites? by Dr+Caleb · · Score: 2 · on Journalistic Integrity in the Digital Age?
    There are lots of sites out there that provide news. The Associated Press has a long rich history of providing "the facts" which they rigorously check. For local news, I check places like Canadian Online Explorer , The National Post or The Globe and Mail. While I admit some of these have some bias, being controlled by large corporations, they still have a long rich tradition. The Globe and Mail for example is over 100 years old.

    For tech news, I check BBC Tech News, Ace's Hardware, Tom's Hardware , or ARS Technicia. ZDNet has become way to sensational and biased. And all the crappy banners! More like The National Enquirer of geekdom.

    For discussions, I check K5 or Rootprompt. And Slashdot. But it's tough to have a discussion here anymore.

    I'm sorry to say, but Slashdot, while I check it regularly, is starting to have too high a signal-to-noise ratio. Not enough "discussion" too much "babooey to natalie portman's beowulf cluster of hot grits and penis bird on toast."

    It's safer to stay off the main page if I want some interesting discussion. As well, I don't tolerate mistakes in my profession. No matter what I do, I like it to be as perfect as humanly possible. While I know mistakes happen, there have been far too many here, adding to the signal-to-noise ratio, and reducing my faith in accurate articles.

    I get my news elsewhere, but I still come back, hoping the old days will return.

  36. Re:information technology in germany... by BadDoggie · · Score: 4 · on MP3 Creator Honored By Germany
    Perhaps I can shed a little light.

    Ever hear of a little company called Siemens? I'll just tell you a few things they did since the war.

    In 1953, they developed the zone refining method for high-purity silicon production.
    1958 saw the first cardiac pacemaker.
    Blah blah first European 64K RAM chips blah blah first workable cell phone system blah blah 1M DRAMs blah blah high-temp fuel cells blah blah blah.
    Last year Siemens developed the Sivit, a computer without a mouse or keyboard. And no I don't know if it runs KDE.

    Perhaps you've heard of CEBIT. It's held in Germany every year. It's the most important technological convention in the world.

    You've heard of Bayer -- they still have the trademark on "Aspirin" in Europe -- and you probably know that pharmaceuticals is a rather important high-tech industry. And it hires more and more computer people. They need Beowulf clusters to do molecule modeling, so now I get modded up for that mention.

    Are you familiar with Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik? Yes you are. They make so many of the things you buy better. BASF. German, since 1901 (or is that going back too far?).

    Germany leads the world in "green" products and their implementation, from washing machines that run on less than 15 litres of water (almost 4 US gal.) to high-efficiency oil heaters to solar cell technology (a new breakthrough in coated copper backing for solar cell panels which drastically increases efficiency is just going into major production).

    We've got technology coming out of our asses (arses, for UK & Oz) here. Dr. Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware. Nobel Prize winners. You name it.

    All that and the Oktoberfest (please stop singing when you get to my street!). And a lot more that I'm too lazy to spell out right now.

    Oh... and I'm not German, I just live here. And I'll probably stay here. You see, I work for a high-tech company whose most important office outside of HQ is here. And who in his right mind would give up good pay (even if it is in Euros), full medical (it's standard here) and 30 days of vacation a year?

    "We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." -- Mark Twain

  37. Slashdotted by eeeuh · · Score: 3 · on Mamba: Athlon And DRAM Get Together

    This is the link to the main server and this wan DOES work #)

  38. Info on upcoming Athlon chipsets by JungleBoy · · Score: 4 · on Dual Athlons Released

    This link to Toms Hardware has some info about the upcoming athlon chipsets. It looks like Via's SMP/DDR chipset (KX266) should be out by then end of the year.

    Of course, I think I'll wait for the second itteration of these chipsets. By then they will have most of the kinks worked out, and the platform optimized. Also, by then the Athlon will be much faster per dollar.
    --
    "You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet
    might be running loose in your pants."

  39. SGI 1600SW or Radius Artica by jo42 · · Score: 1 · on Super Large, Super Hi-Res LCD Screens?

    Troll eBay looking for either an SGI 1600SW or a Radius Artica ($1500-$1900) - both are the same device: 1600x1024 resolution, wide screen, awesome image quality, uber geek. Only two cards that I know of drive it directly; the now defunct Number Nine Revolution IV or the current 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-1600. Looks like Xi Graphics have decent X support for both. Otherwise you can get the SGI multi-link adapter ($495) that will take analog DB-15 or DVP/DVI digital inputs and drive it that way. Though, whatever you do, get 100% digital from video card to display. DVI is the current standard in the PeeCee world with support from Matrox, nVidia, ATI on the video card side and more flat panels are coming out that have a DVI-D connector (i.e. Philips 150P) - see Tom's Hardware for a good write up.

  40. Biggest piece of Crap by NoWhere+Man · · Score: 2 · on Pentium III 1.13: Tops For Speed, 'F' For Price?

    They have already recalled this chip. Tom's hardware Guide has had numerous articles on just how crapped up this chip actually is. He even has another hardware site to back him up; HardOCP. Maybe the Pentium III 1.13 Ghz can go that fast. Its possible...but the damned thing fails to work 20% of the time, do you want to spend the money to take that chance? Assuming you can actually get a hold of one? You'd have better luck getting someone to give you a porshe or something

  41. Re:AMD SMP - "Sledgehammer" is SMP on a chip by jambi23 · · Score: 2 · on What Happened To SMP For AMD processors?
    Actually I heard from Tom's Hardware that "Sledgehammer" (K8) will START with two full cpu's per die - effectively SMP on a chip.

    From there I think it likely that AMD will produce 4, 8, 16, etc chips-per-die instead of plugging them into a motherboard. Although I guess it depends when they run into the bandwidth bottleneck.

    Suppose that's when they'll start pumping that EV6 DDR bus up to 400mhz, etc.

    Drooling profusely here.

  42. Tom's hardware list for socket A SMP support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1 · on What Happened To SMP For AMD processors?

    Go here in order to see the table that points out when (not exact dates) the SMP support chipsets will come out. The bottom line is that sometime in Q4 2000 VIA and AMD will have one.

  43. Re:Multiprocessing by jambi23 · · Score: 1 · on X86-64 Simulator - now available (Linux only)
    AMD have confirmed that 'sledgehammer' (x86-64) will already have two cpu's on the die - so yes, you could definitely say it supports multiprocessing.

    Tomshardware Article

    You'd be tempted to think that multiprocessing versions of the chip will come out which are a single die with 4, 8, 16 etc cpu's on it.

    Quake seven here we come.

  44. Re:Wrong market?... by GauteL · · Score: 2 · on X-Box Limitations (Hemos Is Dumb) (Yes, I am)

    Actually... if you have a NVidia-card, you might as well run it under Linux now.
    Look at this.
    The miniscule performance difference is not really worth the reboot, if you have ok hardware that is.

  45. Re: Glad to see someone else who hates Mesa. by fireant · · Score: 1 · on 3dfx Does OpenGL
    3dfx is staying with a 128-bit 2D accelerator when the world has moved onto 256-bit.

    Oh no... It happened to you too. Check out this article over at Tom's. The Geforce is NOT a 256 bit chip. It's all marketing.

    Here's the quote:

    I could hardly believe my ears when I was finally told what the '256' stands for. NVIDIA adds the 32-bit deep color, the 24-bit deep Z-buffer and the 8-bit stencil buffer of each rendering pipeline and multiplies it with 4, for each pipeline, which indeed adds up to 256.

    It looks like ATI got sucked into doing it as well because it seems this strategy to confuse consumers actually works.

  46. [Potential troll] What DviX is really used for by gfecyk · · Score: 4 · on DivX ;-) Deux Update

    Before you moderate this down as a troll post, please read it.

    a high-quality MPEG4 codec used quite heavily by DVD pirates to recompress movies

    Nice to see the truth come out. Tom's Hardware even knows this.

    This is why the MPAA won the first round. This is what DeCSS.exe (Yes, the Win32 program, not the LiViD player) is being used for. It is certainly possible to transfer enough of a DVD to a 650 MB CD-ROM using this technology.

    Yes I know about making backups, about control over media, etc etc but you have to admit this does make pirating movies easier (much easier than image-copying DVDs with CSS in tact).

    There, now please moderate this down so it doesn't cause a flame war.

  47. Re:Tools for Buggy OS's? by daved321 · · Score: 1 · on Converting DVDs To VCDs Under Unix?

    Check out the link on tom's hardware, /. linked to this a few days (weeks maybe, time is a blurred concept to me lately) the link is HERE

  48. Re:Transmeta is two years behind in performance. by Parity · · Score: 2 · on Transmeta Claims Five Year Lead Over Intel/AMD

    Yes, but, Athlon wins in the only benchmark that matters so who cares that they're (marginally) behind in the 'OfficeBench' and 'SysMark' tests? Besides, there -is- no comparably clocked PIII when weighed against the latest Athlon...
    Anway, the Athlon is faster at the same CPU speed on some benchmarks, not others, but it's a close race either way there. Athlon is -still- (or 'again') the fastest PC processor out there because the 10% lead of 1.1GhZ vs. Intel's 'measly' 1.0GhZ is bigger than the the 2-5% differences in those benchmarks that AMD does lose on.
    (Of course, personally, I'm looking at the price/performance ratios and the Thunderbird-850 for my next upgrade. I'll get a GhZ+ machine when my company agrees to buy one for my desktop at work or when the price comes down from the stratosphere. :))
    An-yway, it's all shameless muscle-flexing, but I just wanted to point out that I don't think AMD was ever 'lying' in their advertising.

    --Parity

  49. show me some figures, then. by operagost · · Score: 1 · on Transmeta Claims Five Year Lead Over Intel/AMD
    Transmeta seems to be succumbing to the same thing AMD succumbs to: marketing arrogance. Remember those claims by AMD that the Athlon was faster? And remember how they were shot down when it was found that a similarly clocked P3 could perform better in high-demand applications? Sure was a wake-up call to AMD's marketing team; they couldn't use faster performance in their ads 'cause it just wasn't true.
    Show me some figures to back that up. Never mind, allow me.

    Or here.

  50. Re:Yay. by sethgecko · · Score: 3 · on Real Review of DDR Mobo
    Let's look at what you said objectively.

    Lets look at this objectively: a 10% increase in speed over SDRAM, which is already way behind what modern processors need in terms of speed/bandwith.

    Actually, it's a 100% increase in speed over SDRAM. It delivers data twice as fast. 100MHz clock speed * twice the data. Or another way, it yields 1600MB/s bandwidth.

    Looking at the leaps and bounds with which processor speed is growing, a 10% increase is a drop in the bucket.

    Yes, it is a drop in the bucket. But you're comparing apples to commodores. It's a 10% system performance increase over systems that use PC100 RAM. That's quite respectable without changing the processor. Wouldn't you like to make your processor run 10% faster without buying a new one?

    Intel and AMD need to stop their Mhz/Ghz race and prod some chip maker into making decent, fast RAM.

    Considering that Intel is pushing RDRAM running at 800 MHz and that still runs worse than DDR RAM, don't you think that this statement is a little off target? I understand that your and my idea of decent RAM is not Rambus. But as far as numbers on paper goes, RDRAM is quite fast.

    Also, I take issue with what you say about modern processors needing more speed/bandwidth in memory. I thought I agreed with you until I took a look at Tom's Hardware. A 533 PIII gets a 126 sysmark rating. A 1 Ghz PIII gets a 194 rating, nearly twice as fast when thechip is nearly twice as fast! If modern processors are really waiting for RAM so much, why is processor speed a linear progression up the performance chart? It would be tailing off, with performance gains of a 1GHz PIII only marginally faster than a 700 or 800Mhz at the top of the chart.

    It looks as if the fast cache on chip is the answer to slow RAM, and at least according to this chart, RAM speed does not make such a difference to fast processors.