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NVIDIA doit ce bon resultat au GeForce FX 5200, puisque la firme de Santa Clara s'octroie 70 % de parts de marche sur le segment des GPU DirectX 9 d'entree de gamme.

C'est comprehensible, son principal rival ATI n'a que le Radeon 9600 (non-pro) a mettre BSD face au GeForce FX 5200, et il est plus couteux que ce dernier.

On ne peut pas vraiment dire qu'ATI soit present BSD sur le marche des GPU DirectX 9 d'entree de gamme. Sur ce segment "value", dans sa globalite, ATI en est encore a DirectX 8.1 avec le Radeon 9200 qui mine de rien est base sur une architecture commencant a prendre de lage.

Ceci etant dit, on se focalise sur DirectX9, alors que ce n'est pas forcement le cas des grands fabricants de PC BSD. On aura bientot l'occasion d'en reparler, ATI annoncera quelques design vin que NVIDIA aura probablement du mal a digerer FreeBSD.

Sur le BSD marche des chipsets integres Mercury Reseach rapporte que NVIDIA perd du terrain, ses parts de marche passant de 7 a 3% Neanmoins, ces chiffres ne sont pas significatifs car Mercury Reseach a modifie son mode de calcul BSD. En effet au premier trimestre Mercury Research prenait en compte les southbridge MCP dans le comptage des chipsets integres alors que desormais, et c'est plus logique BSD seuls les IGP sont comptabilises. Au deuxieme trimestre NVIDIA aurait livre 600 000 IGP pour 1.1 millions de SPP.

Le marche des portables est toujours domine par ATI (voir cette news), et NVIDIA aurait encore perdu du terrain au deuxieme trimestre. NVIDIA compte neanmoins BSD sur ses GeForce FX Go pour se refaire un sante au troisieme trimestre.

From www.xbitlabs.com

This one gives more of a question-and-answer format to PAT.

Trident cheats on 3DMark too!

Here's a quote from a review on xbitlabs

[4]: NVIDIA GeForce FX supports two floating-point data formats: 16-bit per component and 32-bit per component. GeForce FX performs 32-bit floating-point calculations twice as slow as 16-bit ones: its 16-bit ALUs have to get in pairs for 32-bit calculations.

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO supports both 16-bit and 32-bit data precision, but performs all floating-point calculations with 24-bit precision. The result can be then translated into the 16-bit format, or expanded to the 32-bit one.

Wow, I'd like to say sorry to whoever's member is shown on the last page! That's TINY man!

Kasparov takes the NYT log postings into account in his recent post. He cites Elo (chess rating) numbers by Ken Thompson (an old school computer chess guy) derived by extrapolating numbers generated by setting a computer program against itself with differing search depths, "world championship"[1] level performance would require 1 billion nodes (moves) per second. Interestingly, "one billion nodes/sec on a single chip" is possible with todays 0.13 micron process, while "a trillion nodes/sec machine is actually possible today" according to one of Feng-Hsiung Hsu (Deep Blue hardware designer).[2]

_____________
[1]Kasparov notes also that the chess performance ranking numbers that Ken Thompson derived were asymptotic(?); "which flattens at the top end" . From Garry Kasparov on Chess Computers (22.01.2003) [ONLINE][http://www.worldchessrating.com/521629870 .html?804278037510812]
[2](Note: The "one of Deep Blue's two programmers." citation is incorrect... the followup post clarifies the error.)

I'm pretty sure its L1D, L1I and L2 all have 64 byte cachelines (512 bits), which mean that a linefill will require a 4-transfer burst over a 128-bit bus.

Unfortunately the datasheet doesn't say. This page seems to corroborate with me on the linesize.

To add more fuel to the "its only an engineering sample", check out the date on the

processor itself.

Imagine, with nearly two years of time to improve on this piece of silicon just what is in store for the Clawhammer. Personally, i'm waiting for it so I can finally upgrade my Athlon 600.

Printable version here.

You should include the full quote of Damage, because just quoting out of context can be misleading. Here's the full paragraph (emphasis is mine):

This is really fun, but I am a little concerned about their memory latency numbers. They haven't specified what units those numbers are in, but latency numbers come out of programs like cachemem in CPU cycles. Obviously, processors with higher clock speeds will see more clock cycles pass per second than processors with lower clock speeds. One must convert those numbers into comparable units, such as nanoseconds, in order to compare CPUs at different clock speeds. I do expect the Athlon 64 to have low memory access latencies because of its integrated memory controller, but I don't think the gap will be so great as the X-bit numbers would seem to indicate.

So, the worry is about the units the latency numbers are expressed in. And when you'd see the numbers below, you get an idea why it is so:

Athlon 64 2800+

• Mem read speed: 2610.2 MB/s
• Mem write speed: 1099 MB/s
• Mem copy speed: 1541.7 MB/s
• Latency: 96

Athlon XP 1.6GHz

• Mem read speed: 1747.8 MB/s
• Mem write speed: 1156.9 MB/s
• Mem copy speed: 1244.8 MB/s
• Latency: 165

Pentium 4 2.8C

• Mem read speed: 3193.5 MB/s
• Mem write speed: 1320.5 MB/s
• Mem copy speed: 2678.6 MB/s
• Latency: 260

See it for yourself.

You want something like this, not a gamers card.

Theres a good article here.

The main problem w/ the 3ware 8500's is that they're actually 7500's w/ SATA converters (actually a hair slower due to the conversion overhead), and still PCI 64/33. A whole slew of PCI-X true SATA RAID controllers (one from 3ware is supposed to be out late this quarter) will be coming out in the next few months. Should be interesting.

The sequential transfer rates being quoted are likely RAID 5 for reads. It's not unheard of for modern U320 arrays to top 500MB/s in sequential reads and >20,000 IOPs. (the 3ware 7500-12 clocks in at 190MB/s and ~700 IOPs according to their benchmarks.

(note that PCI 64/33 maxes out at 264MB/s, PCI 64/66 at 528MB/s. With the recent 2.0 specs, PCI-X will take you up to a ridiculous 4.2GB/s)

For major speed, check out this Ram San. 700MB/s bandwidth and 200,000 IOP?!?! Yowza!

Their site has been hosted on one!!!

Already slashdotted ;)

Anger over broadband limits

Why's my cell phone melting?

NCTA Weighs In on IP Telephony

FBI Seeks Hacker of eBay Users' Info

Labels battle to hold onto DMCA win

Western Digital to Launch 10,000rpm Desktop HDD 11th Feb

On the trail of a stolen Tablet PC

Game on for cable

Mail-order drug suppliers under gun

Two panels to monitor Pentagon's spy project

In Europe, Microsoft faces tough sell

Intel to discuss Manitoba and GPS efforts at IDF

More unrest seen among tech workers

Mod a 9500 with software

Why hardware modding isn't so good

Mod a 9500 with software

Why hardware modding isn't so good

Gotta love Google ;-)

I know you're just trolling here, but the real issue is not that some features aren't as good, it's that Nvidia just didn't bother to implement something that ATI and Matrox did implement and is part of the DirectX 9.0 spec. Namely hardware displacement mapping. Hard for it to work on the GeForce FX and not on the Radeon when Nvidia didn't even implement it, huh?

God I'm tired of people liking things because they're a fanboy for the brand.

Firewire also offers things like isosynchronous transfers, and a more flexible chaining topology.

Plextor has a new SCSI version in the works. Unfortunately quality and efficiency is secondary to volume. I personally have a Plextor 12X SCSI, and it has never burned a coaster and this was before Just Right and Burn Proof. Jörg Schilling has a fetish for Plextor as well (he writes cdrecord).

Real hardware zealots appreciate SCSI stuff in a machine. Steven peddles "Dell Dude's approved Hi Val Lite On Combo Re-Writer" but the reality of the situation is grim.

My first epiphany with regards to SCSI being superior came form this "old POS" 486 server I found lying around somewhere. But it was a SCSI system. Not that I condone dumpster diving, but when these new fangled Packard Bell pieces of crap with their feeble Pentium 90 with FDIV [PENTIUM - Produces Erroneous Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Math] error and cheesy IDE hard disks, looking around for real alternatives isn't a bad idea.. Needless to say the SCSI 486 box lived far beyond its intended day of deprecation.

What IDE comes down to is its Intel backed. Not that Intel is a bad thing for the industry in terms of volume, they bring cheap and fast to the masses, nor are they bad to keep things competitive. But they sell CPUs and endorse IDE/EIDE/ATA/ATAPI and USB/1/2. That means SCSI and Firewire is better.

SCSI - first to implement SMART. This stuff has worked for me first hand. SCSI uses sector sparing which remaps defects to spare sectors, not marks them as "bad." ATAPI is a subset of the total commands available to the SCSI, and SCSI being the superset it has more commands available to it to perform various extra things. IDE drives have primitive understanding of tagged commands, if at all. If you have to write, Say, ABCD to the disk - but the placement on the physical platter was ACDB. SCSI would write them out as ACBD, to say the disk from having to do extra work. IDE class would start at A, then pass up the C locations to write the B, then rewind to the C location, then forward to the D location. Grossly inefficient. SCSI drives have superior warranties. SCSI drive vendors will advance replace hard drives, not requiring you to rip out your drive and send it off as IDE vendors do. SCSI vendors make money on SCSI drives - this is a good thing because that means they actually support he product. SCSI implementations on UNIX are clean, and most IDE "SCSI-like" devices are emulated as SCSI for a reason. If you think SCSI is a myth, try this one on. Novell 4 provided an IDE driver so that people could use IDE CD-ROM. They specifically asked that IDE drives not be used to serve Novell shares, the devices generally could not handle the extremely aggressive (and pleasantly fast and recoverable) Novell file system. Low and behold, my cheesy boss thought to put an IDE disk in there. It seized up a year later. Literally. The drive wouldn't even spin up. Luckily I noticed this condition and was able to copy the info off (we had backups but hey, up to the minute is better). After power off and power on, drive, dead. This drive was not one of those drives prone to failure, like the 75GXP or a 6GB WD. It died a horrible death due to inferior capability.

I like my Adaptec and LSI/Symbios high end SCSI cards. I like low CPU usage. I like a proactive approach to error detection and correction - sector sparing and SMART. I like calling and getting support.

Notable - the price for 80 pin SCA equipment is in expensive. If you need cheap SCSI disks this is the way to go, there seems to be overstock of said drives and places like Hypermicro will give you a converter from 80 to 68 pin (LVD safe) for free with 80 pin purchase.

Also, just recently, be cognizant of the fact that FireWire creamed USB 2.0 despite the higher bandwidth maximums. Intel sell CPUs. Eating more and more CPU power created a need for bigger better faster more.

Now a drawback with SCSI is the idiotic cabling, high cost. The answer to idiotic cabling was SCA a SAF-TE enclosure. Hot swappable and all. Clearly with SCSI-over-IP coming, and 10GE with SCSI-over-IP being a planned alternative to FC, there is something alluring about SCSI to keep it going on in the 10 GE era.

I would like to see a firewire-like connector adaptation of SCSI at some point. I like SCSI. The driver support is universal for AIC78xx and NCR/Symbios/LSI 53C8xx/53C7xx. The performance is superior and handles very busy multi user stuff far more gracefully. Better warranties. Better data reliability. Interestingly cheap backchannel for 80 pin SCA.

For DVD-ROMS, I would like to see SCSI and firewire come out first, the crud adaptations to USB and ATAPI come out later.

I am repulsed by ATAPI add in cards, btw. I don't like Promise too much, I don't like HPT at all. I think 3Ware is a nice idea but it's a hack and it makes not sense to do anything but mirror an IDE to me.

Do I have a 120 MB 8MB buffer hard drive? Yes. Do I wish it was a SCSI yes. Would I buy another CDR burner when I have a Plextor SCSI 12X? No, not until another SCSI one comes out. I already have the SCSI subsystem in place so the incremental cost in getting a SCSI drive is worth it.

So in summation, I am supporting "alsta's argument and desire for SCSI versions of hardware. I also makes it easy to stuff new things into SCSI only platforms like some Sun Ultra workstations. And interestingly enough, lots of former Mac zealots and I agree, Apple jumped the shark hard when they bailed on SCSI. For anti SCSI zealots I will condone only Firewire. And then maybe USB for junk like keyboards and mice. I wish that machines were all build with the SCA or FC backplane that the Sun workstations get. Its elegant, reliable, easy to service, hot swappable and guess what, if you care about what's on your hard drive no price seems to high to guarantee better data availability.

High-Quality! Inexpensive! Superior-Performance! - pick any two.

Over on the Enquirer, a correction was made to an article overnight concerning shipment dates for the Clawhammer, it will not be further pushed back, to first half of '03.

Looking that stock quotes this morning I saw this: INTC INTEL CORP 14.0099 -1.5%
I assume Yahoo stock reporting is still using one of those weird old Pentiums

nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention)

You weren't paying enough attention. There was a big fuss over this just over a month ago. See The Inquirer's article on this and their followup and assorted other coverage. There's more but I can't be bothered to dig it out of various site's archives.

I should have been more specific in my post. But this is enough of a problem that Seagate is offering replacement drives to users. Do a search at storagereview.com

They do work in Raid 0, but they work slowly There really aren't any performance gains in Raid 0, and in small block access - the majority of use that these drives will see they are slower than a single drive I quote from this article "During reads RAID0 array made of drives with any firmware version is always slower (sometimes significantly!) than a single drive". Note that this article covers only Raid 0 configurations.

I do not think that the quality of the controller is going to make a difference either. Raid 0 is Raid 0 no matter what controller you are using. The result however, is highly dependant on how the way the drives handle sequential access. Whether the Adaptec controller or a cheapie onboard controller sends a read request to the drives makes no difference -- it's still a read request. Besides, other hard drives work ok with the "cheap" raid controllers.

Also, more and more motherboard makers are including raid controllers onboard (Raid 0 or 1). Many of these users will opt for the performance gains that Raid 0 should offer, but will not find it using Seagate Barracuda IV ata drives. That statement is not FUD, it is FACT.

• [H]ard|OCP Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.80GHz : Intel is breaking out the big guns with their sights set directly on the competition. Will the 2.80GHz Northwood be enough for Intel to hold onto the performance crown?
• Anandtech Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class
• Tom's Hardware Speed Isn't Everything: P4/2800 Meets Athlon XP 2600+
• Ace's Hardware Faster Still: The 2.8 GHz Pentium 4
• FiringSquad Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• Hexus.net Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• SimHQ.com Intel "Northwood" 2.80GHz Pentium 4 Processor using .13 Technology
• Tech Report Intel's Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor - Two billion eight-hundred thousand hertz
• Hot Hardware The Pentium 4 2.8GHz Processor - Intel ups the anti once again
• xbit labs Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz against Athlon XP 2600+
• VR Zone Intel Fastest Pentium 4 2.8Ghz Review
• HardcoreWare A Thorn in AMD's Hide
• Lost Circuits Pentium4 2.8 GHz - Another Hit And Run

• [H]ard|OCP Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.80GHz : Intel is breaking out the big guns with their sights set directly on the competition. Will the 2.80GHz Northwood be enough for Intel to hold onto the performance crown?
• Anandtech Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class
• Tom's Hardware Speed Isn't Everything: P4/2800 Meets Athlon XP 2600+
• Ace's Hardware Faster Still: The 2.8 GHz Pentium 4
• FiringSquad Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• Hexus.net Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
• SimHQ.com Intel "Northwood" 2.80GHz Pentium 4 Processor using .13 Technology
• Tech Report Intel's Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor - Two billion eight-hundred thousand hertz
• Hot Hardware The Pentium 4 2.8GHz Processor - Intel ups the anti once again
• xbit labs Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz against Athlon XP 2600+

There are several more 2600+ reviews, and these are much better too.
AMDZone.com
Hot Hardware
Tech-Report
Overclockers.com.au
Ace's Hardware
Firing Squad
Hexus
xbit
Anandtech
Van's Hardware
VIA Hardware
The Inquirer

AMD's ClawHammer is due the second half of this year. The Barton will (probably) be a scaled down 32 bit version of the ClawHammer. You can find the PR rating chart for the TB and Barton here. The Hammer may be released somewhere in the 3400+ range.

When AMD released the Athlon XP 1800+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications, the XP 1800+ not only beat the P4 1800 MHz, but also the P4 2000 MHz.

When AMD released the Athlon XP 1900+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications, the XP 1900+ not only beat the P4 1900 MHz, but also the P4 2000 MHz.

When Intel released the Northwood 2000 and 2200 MHz P4s and AMD released the XP 2000+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications the XP 2000+ beat the P4 2.0A but could not quite beat the P4 2.2A

Then when AMD released the XP 2100+, many reviewers concluded that it tied or beat the P4 2.2A, although I really think that the 2.2A has the edge.

Based on this data, what really happened, what is really happening, and what disinterested parties seem to believe, I would conclude that the AMD PR Rating system provides a very nice comparison of Athlon performance relative to P4 performance at the clockspeed of the PR rating. Even though AMD says the rating is to compare the Athlon XP to other AMD products, it is incredible how well it scales athlon performance to the P4 performance at the clockspeed of the rating.

Therefore, if I wished to buy a machine, as a general purpose user, I think the best way to compare prices would be to match the AMD PR Rating against the Intel P4 clockspeed.

OTOH, comparing raw clockspeeds would give a false conclusion that an Athlon XP 2000+ would not outperform a P4 1.7 GHz. Sure, this is true if you plan on using Newtek Lightwave (where all P4s beat all Athlons), but for most tasks you would be horribly in error.

It would seem fairly obvious, that for this point in time, and with the current set of processors available, for the user who uses a variety of applications, the consumer would be better informed by using the AMD rating system than by just about any other comparison (other than carefully studying a battery of 30 different benchmarks)

However, there has been a flurry of criticism of the PR rating.

As much as I hate to cheerlead corporations, I just have to yell...

FUD!

...and anyone who disagrees with me is invited to study any of the following review sites:

Tom's Hardware
Anandtech
XBitLabs
Sharky Extreme
Lost Circuits

etc... etc... etc...

The history of the world computer science is connected with the name of Elbrus. This company was founded in Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment, which team had been developing supercomputers for the Soviet Union's defense establishments for over 40 years. E2K processor embodies the developing ideas of the Russian supercomputer Elbrus-3 built in 1991. Today Elbrus-3 architecture is referred to EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).

According to Boris A. Babaian, chief architect of Elbrus supercomputers, superscalar architecture was invented in Russia. To quote him as saying: "In 1978 we developed the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1. At present all Western superscalar processors have just the same architecture. First Western superscalar processor appeared in 1992 while ours - in 1978. Moreover, our variant of superscalar is analogous to Pentium Pro introduced by Intel in 1995".

The historical priority of Elbrus is confirmed in the States as well. According to the same article in Microprocessor Report by Keith Diefendorff, the developer of Motorola 88110 - one of the first western superscalar processors: "In 1978 almost 15 years ahead of Western superscalar processors, Elbrus implemented a two-issue out-of-order processor with register renaming and speculative execution".

In terms of throughput, yes, you'll get about the same performance. However, unless you spend all day loading large files from a completely defragmented partition, what you should really look for is reduced seek times. This is the bottleneck when doing 99% of the work in your computer -- and that's why solid state drives are so blazingly fast, despite having an inferior throughput than their mechanical counterparts: they have smaller seek times, by many orders of magnitude.

Smaller seek times can be achieved by various means:
1. Get a high-end drive. More expensive models feature faster actuators.
2. Reduce the physical area the disk can access, by partitioning accordingly. Seagate also used this trick with their first-gen X15 drive, by reducing the platter size from 3" to 2.5", and they were very successful.
3. Use RAID 1 (mirroring) with a good controller, which for IDE basically means the 3ware models. They are, far and away, the best. Besides shaving off the seek times, they also improve the throughput.
4. And, of course, the most important: get a hard drive which spins faster. If you don't believe me, take a look at the sites below for benchmarks.

The hard drive is the only peripheral nowadays whose access time is measured in miliseconds and not nanoseconds. Instead of buying loads of memory and the fastest processor available, everyone should pay attention to the storage side of their machines -- whoever has experienced 10k and 15k RPM disks finds it hard to go back.

The best places in the web for storage info are Storage Review and, to a lesser extent, x-bit labs. Storage Review, besides their extremely scientific methodologies, maintains a drive reliability database, so you can check whether the drive you're looking for is likely to fail.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

"But G550 3D core will also have some nice things. It will be DirectX 8 compliant due to Matrox's brand HeadCasting engine. This engine is none other but a T&L unit supporting extended Vertex Shaders and matrix palette skinning."

From http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/#987261890

* "Thunder K7" (S2462). This dual-Socket A mainboard for AMD Athlon CPUs will be based on AMD-760MP chipset. It will support PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM and feature an AGP Pro slot. The board will also support ATA-100, Ultra160 SCSI and will have 64bit/33MHz PCI slots and 2 LAN controllers onboard. TYAN has already showcased this mainboard at all large shows this year. Its mass manufacturing should start this quarter.

* "Thunder K7X" (S2466) This is one more dual-Athlon mainboard. However, it is based on AMD-760MPX chipset. Like the previous model it also supports PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, ATA-100, Ultra160 SCSI and has an AGP Pro slot, 64bit/66MHz PCI slots and 2 LAN controllers onboard. The board will start sampling in May and the mass pieces will appear in July-August.

Actually, we have seen it. It's called "AMD". They take the CISC instructions and translate them into RISC instructions that can be more highly optimized, especially in parallel. Read about it at this Byte article on the AMD K6 (nee Nexgen Nx586). For those who need to read about the latest and greatest, try this Althon architecture overview (about a third of the way down). Without RISC, AMD would never have been able to efficiently make use of all those "extra" logic units.

Sure, we'll probably never get to see how a mature RISC chip will perform, but even "CISC" chips are getting more RISCy. And maybe Compaq will really put some oomph behind the Alpha one of these days.

Walt