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Sony later re-bought those foundries, actually.

Sony to Buy Back Semiconductor Fab from Toshiba

That doesn't mean those foundries will be used to produce Cell chips, but then the initial sale of those foundries didn't mean that Sony was going to stop using Cell either.

I read through the article and found it very informative. One thing I didn't realize was that Microsoft will not do Windows 7 mobile on ARM.

That was a surprising statement. I googled on it and found this:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20090603123741_Microsoft_Windows_7_Will_Not_Support_ARM_Microprocessors.html

This article says "Micrsoft does not believe ARM can deliver the performance needed." To that I wonder "why is everyone else able to make amazing performance happen with ARM???"

Every time I hear another Microsoft shill claim "but this is not Windows, it is entirely new from the ground up" I have to chuckle a little. If that were true, then they wouldn't have any problem getting performance out of low-power hardware if they designed their OS with that in mind "from the ground up." The truth of the matter is that Microsoft simply can't get away from its legacy code and rebuild from scratch. I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling. Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS and while the transition was painful for users and developers, it was the right choice. I have been saying for nearly a decade that Microsoft should do the same... others have too... but they simply choose not to at every opportunity.

This whole scenario gives me a better understanding of why Windows Mobile isn't catching on even with hard core MS fans. The "desktop experience" doesn't fit in your hand and they simply don't know how to do it any other way.... (Or maybe they are afraid to since MS Bob...)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20091115090149_AMD_Bobcat_Sub_1W_Chip_with_90_of_Today_s_Performance.html

Here it is, on AMD's slide.

Nah, the Voodoo5 was still good at running a lot of applications - the support just dried up and blew away when 3dfx did. Want the ultimate failure of video card design? Shove in a Volari V8 Duo Ultra.

There is a couple of SERIOUS PROBLEMS with your comparison. One, you are talking about CPUs that were custom designed for gaming compared to an off the shelf in order Atom, and Two, You are talking about devices that had custom ultra low resource gaming OSes VS running Windows 7 plain Jane.

I'm sorry, but that is some pretty big fucking differences there tepples. That is like saying "A Cesna and an F16 are just alike, since their both planes" but if you put one against the other I don't think anybody here would want to be in the La Bamba plane, do you? And the reason those here say "Atom plays streaming video great!" is because it is often paired with something like this and allow me to QFT a piece from that article "Otherwise, Atom is a useless chip in HTPCs"

So I stand by my statement. Every single benchmark we have seen of Atom CPUs have shown us two things, One it was made to be REALLY cheap, and Two it was made to be REALLY low power. Now does anyone here actually associate really cheap and really low power with WINDOWS GAMING? Anyone? Beuller? Windows gaming never has been and never will be really cheap and really low power, not unless you consider Windows gaming to be Farmville.

There are patents going back a decade pertaining to using microfluidic ducts as a heat transfer mechanism. Every few months now, there's another article on slashdot about one of the chip giants testing out such manufacturing techniques. Just a few links from a quick googling...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/coolers/display/20031008155430.html
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/2002/11/electroosmotic-microchannel-cooling-system-for-microprocessors/
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2424&page=11
http://www.w7forums.com/nanotechnology-delivers-revolutionary-pumpless-water-cooling-t6658.html

Wii was actually one of the only consoles to NOT be sold at a loss.

2006 Article

Not quite:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-9.html

Yes it does show that 4 short stroked SAS 15K RPM drives are beating out a single SSD by getting 2500 IOPs in the DB test. But those are older SSDs. Compare to newer SSDs in similar/same benchmark:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/corsair-ssd-roundup_6.html#sect0

You will see they are bottoming out @ 4K IOPS in worst case scenarios.

Also contrary to what was suggested earlier, short stroking does not make HDD seek time negligible:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-5.html

3.8ms for HDD vs 0.1ms for SSD. That's still a big difference.

You are correct about the low level nature of flash memory, but there are many ways to mitigate this. SSD controllers use multiple channels to read/write banks of flash memory. They have large internal buffers & they also have "waste space", meaning they have extra flash memory that the device can read/write to so as to not hold up the drive. SandForce controllers also use compression and other methods to enhance performance. With proper trim support you do not need to run garbage collection, thus it's really not much different in operation than how a HDD will act, just faster. No modern SSD will make you wait one second while it erases a block of data, they just don't work that way now.

Even worst case random write speeds outpace standard HDDs. Yes if you short stroke your 15k RPM and buy 6 of them then yipee maybe you can exceed the performance of a single SSD, but then any arguments about saving money buying 6x $400 drives + controller so you can use 5% of their capacity go out the window.

Which kind of leaves me wondering what the point is; the primary market is people who want to play games but not enough to actually buy a graphics card which can do so. Maybe it would be beneficial in the laptop market where many systems can't really play any games at all.

Naaaaah, that's not it.

Just kidding, of course that's it. It's like I'm trying to say: Where is having performance around maybe a low-end discreet card, or at least that feature set, but with the economics and power usage of an integrated solution, actually a good tradeoff?

Where low power usage isn't just nice but a requirement, and where that level of performance and feature set is actually pretty good -- for laptops, that's a good trade-off. There's a reason it's 20-60W and adjusts frequency and power usage dynamically.

In desktops, it's pretty easy to beat the performance of a chip that doesn't have dedicated high-bandwidth DRAM. And it doesn't cost much to have another model with an add-on card. In that space, they'll probably try to play it like they did dual-core CPUS and price them close enough to integrated graphics solutions that the OEM's cost advantage of having one fewer chipset let's AMD have a little margin on the parts, and try to make that level of graphics the default. If a decent and compatible GPU can be assumed in a significant percentage of cases, then people will write more apps for them, which increases demand for the chips. While Intel and others are moving in that direction, AMD is more out on their own here, so it remains to be seen how successful they'll be. And how the real chip's advantages stack up. But the strategy seems sound, and beneficial if it pans out.

I searched a bit and found this:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20100826225852_Desktop_Bulldozer_Processors_Will_Require_New_Platforms_AMD.html

Advanced Micro Devices said that its next-generation desktop processors code-named Zambezi will use socket AM3+ platforms, which will be backwards compatible with the firm's existing AM3 products.

It's from a month ago, do you have the link to the newer info?

We lowered the wavelength of the laser instead of go to 56x CDs.

How long did it take us to go from a red laser to a blue laser? And speaking of CDs, how much faster are CD-ROM drives now then they were 10 years ago? I still have one of those 72x TrueX Kenwood CD-ROM drives with multiple lasers reading the disc in parallel. Can you point to a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM or BD-ROM drive that can read my CD-ROMs faster than 72x? How many years has it been since CPUs hit 3 Ghz? The first Core Duo was released almost 4 years ago. How much faster are CPUs now? Technology doesn't always advance smoothly and steadily. Sometimes it stagnates for a while before it can move forward again.

1 million iPads isn't even 1/100th of one percent of the computer market.
ftfy.

Your claim implies worldwide PC sales are 120 billion! Doh!

Worldwide PC sales for 2009 were 305.9 million.
That's 25 million per month.

iPad sales were 1 million in a month.

So iPad sales were 4% of the PC market. You're so way off it's laughable.

And wait - that month of iPad sales was for the US only. And we're comparing with the worldwide sales of PCs. It'll be interesting when we get a few months worldwide sales data for the iPad.

blah blah blah, get with the times old folks with small UIDs. A hefty majority of the build-your-own-pc crowd overclocks.

We test with a multitude of stress testing programs that test all parts and instructions of the architecture. We find the maximum frequency we can run at acceptable voltage and heat. There's a linear region of overclocking and an exponential region. Most people find the divergence point and sit there. Those with water cooling can go a little further.

It pretty much is guaranteed, because 90% of us have figured it out and run our rigs overclocked. Head over to anandtech forums and look at the rigs people have listed in their signatures at the end of posts. 4Ghz core i7's all over the place, 3.8ghz Ph2's all over the place...

it's much saner for me to simply buy a faster CPU, rather than trying to overclock it myself.

Cool. Scroll down to the graph.
At the time I made the purchase the Core 2 Extreme x6800 cost $999. My e2180 cost $108. It hit 3.4ghz on the nose with 1.48v no sweat, never locked up in anything.
Feel free to blow $900. For me it was a cheap, fun hobby while I was in school.

You are correct, Nintendo is profiting from console sales with the Wii, as they have since at least 2006. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20061215092033.html But that's a bonus to them and only a very small portion of their corporate sales, and that bonus only comes from decades of understanding the industry.

"Just a bonus" to them, eh? That's why they are the only ones making money this generation, while PS3 and 360, which follow your philosophy of making little or no money on the hardware, are inflicting multi-million dollar losses on their parent companies. Show me some evidence that hardware sales on the Wii and DS are "just a bonus." I'll be eagerly waiting.

The OED says I may do so, as it defines subscription as "A contribution of money for a specified object."

You must have subscribed to some really good weed if you think that tortured definition of "subscription" would be recognized by a native English speaker, no matter what the hoary old OED says. I'm going to go get a subscription for groceries and I'll be waiting, if I don't decide to go down to the bar and renew my subscription to beer.

Lower power consumption is not a feature because you don't care about it?

Did I say it wasn't a feature because I didn't care about it? Go back and read my comment carefully before accusing me of not thinking, and referring to it as "dreck." No, wait, I'll save you the effort. I stated, "lower power consumption...means Sony is using fewer/smaller/cheaper components..." such as when they removed the emotion engine. Their goal wasn't to reduce power consumption, but to reduce manufacturing costs as Sony believes their in business to profit off of game consoles. And perhaps it was egocentric (not solipsistic) of me to think that because I don't view lower power consumption as a "feature", nobody else will either. Though in spite of you exposing my myopia on this matter, I somehow still doubt that's going to cause the slim to fly off the shelves. While I'm being egocentric, let me draw your attention to the selfish subject of this comment thread, which entitles me to be egocentric, "Not buying a PS3 now..."

http://playstation.joystiq.com/2007/02/08/playstation-3-manufacturing-costs-to-go-down-way-down/

Utter garbage. Nintendo is the only console manufacturer that insists on profiting on the hardware from day one. That is one of the reasons why their stuff is so underpowered compared to their competitors. "Content subscriptions"...on a Nintendo console? No, you must be thinking of World of Warcraft. If you're thinking at all, which I kinda doubt after reading your dreck.

You are correct, Nintendo is profiting from console sales with the Wii, as they have since at least 2006. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20061215092033.html But that's a bonus to them and only a very small portion of their corporate sales, and that bonus only comes from decades of understanding the industry. But once again you entirely missed my point, being that profit in the console gaming industry is not in the console itself, it's in the sales of software and subscription content. You don't think Nintendo profits from subscription content? That's their bread and butter! They sell "Wii Points" which are as much legal tender as Monopoly money, then convince their customer base to exchange their "Wii Points" for intangibles such as downloaded channels, classic games, videos and new games without physical media. But I'm the one that's "not thinking." I suppose now you're going to try to correct the use of the term subscription in reference to Wii Channels, Wii Ware and Virtual Console content, seeing as these content purchases remain on the Nintendo console indefinitely without the need to make regular payments to maintain them. However, I used the term content subscription in a more general sense, so as to refer to each of the 3 major next-generation console systems ability to deliver content via a network connection. The OED says I may do so, as it defines subscription as "A contribution of money for a specified object." Additionally, apparently console hardware specs aren't what sell consoles. The Sony PS3 has been in production for longer than the Nintendo Wii, yet Nintendo has already sold 67 million consoles worldwide while Sony has sold just half that.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/28/ds-sells-125-million-worldwide-wii-up-to-67-million/ http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps3_sale_e.html

Sorry, two corrections:

"Actually, that's wrong." ---> "Actually, that's wrong, the Xbox360 may turn a profit: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20061120132150.html"

And

"Again, there are no always right and always wrong decisions, it's cost analysis."

And yes, I know my grammar sucks.

The segmenting of processors and video cards seems to have gone past the point of having any purpose other than to confuse and befuddle the customers so that the manufacturer's never get stuck with an unsellable dud. Once customers cease to purchase on knowledge, they can be manipulated into buying just about anything on price.

Two New Cut-Offs: Core 2 Duo E7300 and Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Processors (page 3) - X-bit labs

Besides, there is one more peculiarity that draws our attention: Pentium Dual Core E5200 doesn't support SSE4.1 instructions. It is not a mistake in the CPU-Z report. Although this processor formally belongs to Wolfdale family, it doesn't support these instructions. Intel simply disabled the corresponding feature in its low-cost dual-core CPUs.

There's not enough hours in the day to read all this fine print. I thought understanding the Wolfdale family was enough, but I was wrong. I've looked at Intel's web site for a complete chart of cripple bits, and not managed to find one.

I think this proliferation was a direct response to site such as Ars giving the end user too much of a clue, before having a clue caught on with the wider buying public and began to interfere with channel stuffing manipulations.

I can't wait for the next generation of search engines where I can simply type "Intel processor cripple bits" and have the search engine prepare me a comprehensive table directly from Intel primary documents.

Doesn't really matter the iPad is an iKaboom, it just wont work. All the sales, marketing and forum hype (could apple trolls be considered maggots) are not gonna get that platform moving.

At consumer electronic shows about 30 tablets are expected. MS showed one by HP. So if tablets fail it's not just Apple that loses. I'd love one myself, but not Apple's current iPad, the screen is too small for me. I've been thinking of getting a Wacom Bamboo for now.

Sticking an i in something doesn't make it more saleable, the tablet has always had the one big problem, drop factor, it is to large to be effectively hand held, a keyboard is the quickest input device and the tablet has always been this only for pose platform.

Almost all portable devices have that problem. Years ago I brought my laptop with me when I went somewhere and after I got out of the car I slipped on ice. When I got in I took my laptop out and though it only dropped about 2 feet the LCD was cracked. Hoping but not expecting it to be covered I called tech support but they said they didn't cover cracked LCDs. The person suggested I call my car insurance and when I asked how much it would cost to repair the person just said between $200 and $1200, nothing more precise. $1200? That's half what I paid for it.

And I only had it 3 months.

For now I guess a Bamboo will have to do.

Falcon

There are technologies that allow you to do polarized 3D from an LCD display such as that used in the iZ3D monitors.

Now that is interesting, I didn't know that...

Just been looking at a description of the technology here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/iz3d.html

The fact remains though that active glasses allow the use of a 'normal' LCD panel as a display though. Will one system win out, or will there remain a variety of technologies? Time will tell.

The numbers don't add up.

About 35 million netbooks are on track to be shipped in 2009.

That's about 20% of all shipments.

If linux is a third of netbook volume, overall linux market share (through netbook sales alone) is about 6%.
Add 2% for Linux on regular desktops and notebooks.

Linux share @ 8% of all new PCs shipped calls for celebration. But I doubt it.

XBox 360 became profitable in 2006. Not sure if they've maintained profitability since then with the price drop... but I'd wager they have.

If I were TSMC I'd be pretty pissed.

I'd be pretty pissed too that I was having material issues with my 40nm process that was affecting my customers in a significant way.

Oh but wait I'm sure it was AMD's executives that somehow made TSMC admit that they have still-unresolved problems even though they really don't.

How about take a good hard look at your company that's losing money out the ass and fire and all the moronic windbags in upper management who are too busy cutting insider trading deals to actually instill some fucking leadership in the company.

I hear ya there! I laughed my ass off when Hector the Sector Wrecker (as Motorola/Freescale folks call him) got fingered in the insider trading scandal. Maybe he'll be cooling his heels and get more comeuppance than he ever could just by being fired with a golden parachute. Oh well he already wasn't the CEO.

... aaaand ATI has done the same thing at least a couple of times.

The question is probably more easily answered if asked, "Who *doesn't* cheat?". http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030526040035.html

I'm not defending Intel at all, but...

ATI's done it: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030526040035.html

NVIDIA's done it: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1048824/nvidia-cheats-3dmark-177

They've probably done it several times in the past with other benchmarking software as well.

They're all dishonest. Don't trust anyone!

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/amd785g-intelg45_6.html#sect1

quote
The obtained numbers are pretty interesting. The thing is that although AMD 785G solution is ahead of Intel in 3DMark06, it falls behind the competitor in 3DMark Vantage suite. It is especially strange keeping in mind that Radeon HD 4200 is considerably more powerful than GMA X4500HD according to formally calculated theoretical performance. However, the fact is undeniable: Intel G45 chipset does produce higher 3DMark Vantage score in Windows 7. By the way, this is only true for the upcoming operating system, because Intel graphics accelerator can't repeat its success in Windows Vista. And it means that we can conclude that this sudden success demonstrated by Intel G45 can only be explained by certain driver optimizations and not the GPU architecture.

I'd have mentioned ServerWorks, but they got brought by Broadcom. Oh, in that case: Next up: Broadcom.

Yep, from http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboards/display/20090427213452_AMD_Does_Not_Expect_Broadcom_Nvidia_in_Next_Gen_Servers.html:
“For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time. We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010”
In fact, if you didn't notice, AMD has just launched the SR56x0 chipset series for servers.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news look for the article there. So when The card that was shown by Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia was raised to the public on hand as he declared ... " now i have one here, this Ladys and Gentleman this puppy here is Fermi " I hope they prove to be right and release a card before Jan but lets be honest, as it is it seems Companys will do Anything to get away with things now a days so as to keep making money. At least untill they can not anymore. Lets hope the Demo was Real but in truth we don't know if that was also . Nvidia should have allowed the people to see the Card in the system demo at least then it could have some truth to stand on.

Yes, and Xbit Labs, as is their tradition, got a true power consumption reading direct from the 12v and 5v PCIe supply lines.

It turns out the card has the same power consumption as the 4870 at load (3dmark), not to mention exceptional idle power. Way to go ATI, I could have sworn TSMC's 40nm bulk CMOS (no metal gates) would have raised leakage, but this proves me wrong!

Yes, eInk displays don't flicker. But neither do modern LCDs, not because their refresh rate is fast (which it happens to be), but because the image doesn't fade between refreshes. If you think your LCD flickers, you're imagining things.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/lcd-parameters_3.html

Of course, you may be getting eye strain from your LCD monitor for other reasons, but that has nothing to do with LCD technology.

Here are a few more reviews for today: The Tech Report, Phoronix, AnandTech, X-bit labs, and Benchmark Reviews. It's all enough to make your eyes bleed. There's a list for the Core i7 870 at 0x6877.com

Here's the math

It goes something like this:

2015 Projection

CPU-Alone: 1.2^6 = 3X

CPU+GPU: 50 * 1.????underpants??? = 570X

Intel and AMD release different numbers for their CPU's power consumption. Intel gives an average and AMD gives a maximum. They're not comparible. In real world testing, the X4 965 uses slightly less power at idle and slightly more power at full load than a stock Q9550.

Sadly, that is incorrect.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/phenom-ii-x4-965_4.html#sect0

While idle is comparable (Intel has a slight lead), full load most definitely isn't - 75% extra power consumption (which amounts to over 60W!) for the X4 965 over a Q9550 is far from "slightly more".

Um, Intel's down to 0.18 microns. That's 180 nanometers, which is definitely nanoscale. Better yet, this NAND flash is 34 nanometers.

I'd recommend a Radeon HD3850 - they're cheap at the moment (around $70), support directx 10.1, and only use 13.5W at idle and 63.1W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd3870-hd3850_13.html#sect0). Your current card, (I'm assuming you have the XT, not the Pro), consumes 23W at idle and 55.2W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1650xt_4.html#sect0).

If $70 is too much money, or you'd like less power consumption, the Radeon 4650 might be better for you. It goes for around $60 and uses only 30W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-radeon-hd4650_4.html#sect0). It's not quite as powerful as the 3850 though.

I have a 3850 and have been able to play most games (like Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2) at the "high" performance level (I don't play many high-end shooters like Crysis, however, so YMMV)

I agree that buying last year's games are a good idea - by that time the price has usually dropped $10 - $20, most of the bugs have been patched, and often with games like Morrowind and Oblivion, a great deal of mods have sprung up.

Best of luck with whatever video card you decide on.

I'd recommend a Radeon HD3850 - they're cheap at the moment (around $70), support directx 10.1, and only use 13.5W at idle and 63.1W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd3870-hd3850_13.html#sect0). Your current card, (I'm assuming you have the XT, not the Pro), consumes 23W at idle and 55.2W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1650xt_4.html#sect0).

If $70 is too much money, or you'd like less power consumption, the Radeon 4650 might be better for you. It goes for around $60 and uses only 30W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-radeon-hd4650_4.html#sect0). It's not quite as powerful as the 3850 though.

I have a 3850 and have been able to play most games (like Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2) at the "high" performance level (I don't play many high-end shooters like Crysis, however, so YMMV)

I agree that buying last year's games are a good idea - by that time the price has usually dropped $10 - $20, most of the bugs have been patched, and often with games like Morrowind and Oblivion, a great deal of mods have sprung up.

Best of luck with whatever video card you decide on.

I'd recommend a Radeon HD3850 - they're cheap at the moment (around $70), support directx 10.1, and only use 13.5W at idle and 63.1W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd3870-hd3850_13.html#sect0). Your current card, (I'm assuming you have the XT, not the Pro), consumes 23W at idle and 55.2W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1650xt_4.html#sect0).

If $70 is too much money, or you'd like less power consumption, the Radeon 4650 might be better for you. It goes for around $60 and uses only 30W under load (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-radeon-hd4650_4.html#sect0). It's not quite as powerful as the 3850 though.

I have a 3850 and have been able to play most games (like Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2) at the "high" performance level (I don't play many high-end shooters like Crysis, however, so YMMV)

I agree that buying last year's games are a good idea - by that time the price has usually dropped $10 - $20, most of the bugs have been patched, and often with games like Morrowind and Oblivion, a great deal of mods have sprung up.

Best of luck with whatever video card you decide on.

The 4890 actually DX 10.1, and probably has support for almost all the features in 11. Does the Nvidia card? Didn't think so.

I'm also interested in your "slower than a GTX 285" assertion. I just looked at some benchmarks, and Xbit labs has an overclocked 4890@1GHz beating the tar out of the 285.

The 45nm Core2 processors are even cooler - they have a TDP of 45w, and the average processor uses much less.

Please note: the measurements above are of processor power consumption only, not total system consumption. As you might expect, only the top-end 45nm Core2 procesors consume anywhere near their 45w TDP, just as only the top-end 65nm Core2 processors consume near 65w.

As for the i7, it only performs well in perfectly-multithreaded benchmarks that are completely I/O-limited (like the aggressive multi-pass .h264 encoder), otherwise it performs about as well as a Core2 Quad. And when you consider the starting price for an i7 motherboard is around $200-250, you have to be nuts to consider purchasing such a monstrosity.

Douglas Crockford postulates that companies using IE6 are probably among the less efficient and competent ones, and therefore among the more likely to be weeded out by the invisible hand as times get tough.

I can confirm this. I was at Qimonda, who were still on Win2000/IE6 not for any good business reason, but because they couldn't afford to upgrade to anything newer. Look at what happened to them.

Actually grey-to-grey measurement is correct. It's not to 50%. It's the time a requested shade (not black or white) turns to another requested shade. On TN matrices, changes from pure black to pure white (or reverse) is done very fast compared to changing between 2 shades of grey. So they give the grey-to-grey which represent a "worst-case" timing.
See http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/lcd-guide_2.html#sect0, although it's an old article (2004) it is still good reading material.
Quote: "Measurements suggest that the response time is the smallest when the pixel's state (color) is transitioning from black to white."

Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.

Competitiveness is not a quality of generation number. Still: What statistics have you seen that compare Larrabee and something people use right now (ATI/nVidia)? There is this presentation (PDF) they made at SIGGRAPH, which shows that performance increases as you add more Larrabee cores. Here's a graph which may mean something. The y-axis is "scaled performance" What might that mean?

Graphs show how many 1 GHz Larrabee cores are required to maintain 60 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution in several popular games. Roughly 25 cores are required for Gears of War with no antialiasing, 25 cores for F.E.A.R with 4x antialiasing, and 10 cores for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with 4x antialiasing.

Sounds neat. I guess that's why they're going to promote the 32-core Larrabee. How much will something to run these cost and how much power will it consume? They're still developing this thing, so why do I keep hearing that it will BLOW MY MIND? I have no doubt that Intel has an army of capable engineers that could build something to render graphics great, but if it costs more than the consumer can possibly pay, there's no real point. Intel is gunning for 2 TFLOPs. I'm pretty sure the Radeon HD 4870 passes that mark already (and you can purchase it for less than $500). Sure, it's a cool technology, but I'd like to see some more facts and figures.

What have I heard? Power usage/heat: 300W TDP. That's pretty horrific. Cost: 12-layer PCB. That's twice the typical graphics card and four more than the high-end Radeon and nForce cards. That doesn't directly translate into cost, but generally more complicated equals more expensive.

But back to the PS4 -- Sony's real mistake with the PS3 was expecting the Cell processor to be the most incredible computing device ever. Original plans for the PS3 included 2 Cell processors, but they changed to the RSX when they realized the Cell wasn't capable of rendering graphics like they wanted to (whereas the XBox 360's architecture was designed with the GPU and CPU co-existing from the start). You can't build a bunch of fast parts and stick them together, you have to build a fast system. Perhaps Sony has learned their lesson.

Gordon Moore himself has admitted that his Law was idle speculation projecting an observed general trend, that he's used it to describe various things at various times, and that application to any concrete metric is going to fail. This is not to discount his vision - betting on his company's ability do drive progress at this geometric rate has long been a winning proposition.

And so if you work for his company you had better be looking for ways to fulfill his prophecy. They stay in business by grinding out innovation after invention like clockwork. Tick-tock goes the Intel clock and woe be on their competitors.

Nope, they all had the defective solder.

I would disagree that Intel's power consumption has been "higher." In terms of performance per watt on the desktop, Intel has been impressively competitive.

For example, check out this review of Intel's 45nm Core2 procesors. The true consumption of the processors puts AMD's Athlon 64 X2 far in last. Even if you take into account the power consumed by a memory controller (5w or less, typical), the 45nm Core2 processors have very low power consumption, and the 65nm cores are competitive.

Now, let's read into those results. First of all, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ listed (a typo, it's a 6400+ in the rest of the article) is a 90nm core, so it's not a fair comparison. You can add to the fray the Brisbane 5050e, which has 45w peak power consumption - this is more competitive with the Core 2 power consumption, although it's not amazing.

At the end of the day, the sad fact is this: every AMD dual core on the market will lose in a desktop performance battle with either the E8200 (27w load) or the E6550 (40w load). You need only look at the article I linked above, where an X2 clocked at 3.2 GHz cannot beat either of the above processors. Even ignoring the 45nm E8200, if you just compare 65nm to 65nm, the Intel chip offers similar power consumption (40w peak) with an incredible performance boost to boot.

And this trend isn't limited to dual-core processors. Intel's 65nm quad beats Barcelona in terms of performance per watt. On the desktop, Intel has the performance/watt leadership.

A quick google for PGP whole disk encryption yield PGP's spec page

Which probably means that the scheme is your typical PGP your symmetric key...

So it seems that an AES acceleration, such as the VIA PadLock, could potentially mitigate the performance issues.
X-bit labs just had a minor blurb recently about how the Via Nano with PadLock trounced the Core 2 Quad...

i thought in a recent /. interview with the VIA open source rep he said that VIA didn't own S3 (not entirely at least):

However, S3 Graphics is an entirely independent company and not a subsidiary of VIA. That basically means that VIA is holding some stock, but that's more or less all. They also promote their products together.

The S3 Graphics discrete GPU's are developed independently from the VIA integrated graphics, and they share no common hardware core or driver.

So since VIA has taken steps to become more supportive of Open Source and particularly Linux and Xorg, we will see improvement for the VIA integrated graphics products. This has no relationship to what S3 does for their products.

personally, i don't know too much about S3 (other than the fact that they were a popular name when i was playing Quake III and Unreal Tournament). but i do have great interest in VIA's product line, especially as they relate to PVR/HTPC applications. perhaps we'll finally see those cheap Chrome 4 + EPIA low-power multimedia platforms we've been promised.

So for the Corsair Dominator RAM to be worth it...you'd need to be running an FSB of 1.0665GHz. Meaning you'd need to have your CPU running at 4.266GHz FSB for it to be better than a slower RAM with better timings. Unless you're lowering your multiplier considerably, I don't see that as hugely attainable. And the loss of performance in timings is just too great.

This is not quite true. If all you're doing is WRITING data to the memory, you will be limited by the processor bus.

But the fact is, there is overhead in memory accesses; unless you're streaming data uninterrupted, your memory bus is going to have a lot of overhead. You can make up for this overhead by clocking the memory higher, or reducing the timing delays.

Further, a number of memory operations are performed via DMA that don't even go to the CPU. For example, anything going between the ram and hard disk / optical drive goes through DMA, and not the processor. Another example: loading triangle data and textures into the video card goes through DMA. Both of the above operations only require the CPU to send a simple message to the DMA controller to copy a block of data.

See this article for a detailed breakdown in how faster memory helps a processor. Please note that the processor in question is on a 1333 MHz FSB, so by your calculations no ram faster than dual-channel DDR-2 667 (the closest thing they have is DDR-3 800) should provide a benefit. But as you can see, most applications show a %5-10 benefit between lowest and highest.

Yes, it's true that the benefit is small, but for people with monster SLI setups, or people who do video work (lots of DMA-driven I/O), fast ram and an overclocked system are not out of the question. But I do agree that these ungodly speeds are taking it to extremes, and I consider their disappearance no loss.

Just go with as many USB Monitors as you need, eh?

I got a Core 64GB. I build large java projects. This is for my workstation, not a laptop. Power and quiet were not the reasons for my experimental purchase.

I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.

I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.

Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.

The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.

So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.

So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.

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Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:

* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

By current units sold market share VIA is small. My understanding is that it's roughly 40% Intel, 30% NVIDIA, 20% AMD and everyone else is crammed into the remainder 10% (that's total shipments of both desktops and platforms, discrete and integrated cards). (Rummages around web) Here's a link to GPU units sold in the second and third quarters of 2007. It looks like VIA sold almost 3 times less than ATI (but they seem to be on an upward progression).

It's the timing that makes this more interesting because Intel have pushed so much work on their open source drivers they are now the easiest "current" GPUs to get going on systems like Linux. Intel have done this by hiring engineers to work on Linux AND releasing specs which is kinda a double whammy. If this turns out to be the only way companies can achieve a similar smooth out of the box operation on FOSS OSes it's not going to cheap for others. It's also interesting that AMD had also taken big steps in specs and drivers direction before this move by VIA. Some would argue VIA's hand has been forced into this if they wish to remain relevant in the FOSS playground. Others point out that this is a process that can only be started by a willing company.

This is a brave play by VIA but there are more challenges to come. The next question is what they do with regard to the OpenChrome and Unichrome drivers and how to integrate the work they've done into the xorg development process. Judging from their Linux kernel integration it looks doable so long as VIA have some help.