It's not just the processor choice, it's the overall impression the "review" gives. I wouldn't say they're Intel shills. They've just spun everything positively for the platform they reviewed. They listed off all the nForce's features without testing them. If it had been a more thorough review, we might have learned whether the performance issues with the hardware firewall acceleration had been ironed out, or how well that nTune app tunes. Or disk performance, USB/Firewire, CPU utilization, sound quality, etc.
The next thing the jaded hardware review reader looks for is lots of synthetic benchmarks. Check.
The other thing is benching games at a single resolution. What if there's a bottleneck, or curious behavior?
As for the CPU choice, I have to agree with matching up the speeds in that manner. However, the reviewer should convey the relative prices of the hardware used in the comparison, and that should be a major factor in the final opinion. I would have used more pedestrian processors, in the 3.0 / 3000+ neighborhood. It would reflect the userbase more realistically, and the prices would be closer.
To test the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, NVIDIA shipped us a reference motherboard with features that should be indicative of retail-ready products. We should note that the motherboard we tested does not support Intel's new dual-core processors, even though the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition was designed for both single and dual-core processors from the start. NVIDIA has informed us that support for dual-core processors is board dependent, and that top-tier manufacturers will have dual-core supporting nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition boards available shortly.
Whoa, chill. I'm sorry if you interpreted my post as vindictive. I just found it curious that design would start with the number of pins. In general you would start with a purpose for the chip, which would determine the minimum number of pins.
Actually, if you would tell me more about the course, I have a feeling it has a completely different focus from the one I'm comparing it to.
And true, with my GPA, you probably don't want me dragging down your school's reputation.
Picking the size and how many pins? That might be true, but most fab classes would focus on modern semiconductor technology, meaning MOSFETs, and MEMs. At least that's the case at my school.
Schmidt said although eGrades is accessible through the Internet, there are security precautions that protect it from unauthorized usage.
"You have to use an encrypted web browser connection, so if you know that as the geeky https, you have to use an https connection, so that provides the real protection to it," Schmidt said.
So that's why Amazon.com uses https - they want to protect their ordering system from unauthorized non-geeks.
Seriously though, there was not very much "technical savvy" in this "hacking" incident.
My roommate is Indian, and his bag was searched when he flew back to school this week. However, instead of stealing things, the TSA seems to have folded his clothes for him.
I think everybody I know has built a steadycam by now. There was a guy using one on campus the other day. So it's getting kind of ho-hum. There's always a Video of Steadiness published, and this article is no exception.
There's a distinction between the stations and the artists. The stations still have to pay ASCAP fees, etc. But their operation is not for profit. No commercials. Artists, of course, still need to make a living. The point is you can get quality programming for free over the airwaves.
I'm going to school at Berkeley too, and there's a massive Christian presence. You walk through Sproul plaza at lunch and everybody's handing you stuff and asking you to hang out with them at their fun events (fellowship).
I've lived in the Bay Area all my life, and have both Christian and atheist friends. (Heck, most of my friends are hardcore Christian, and a few went to Biola.) Everyone gets along, as far as I can tell. Diversity breeds tolerance.
The Central Valley is another matter...that's still California, but from the election results it's basically another red state. Yet your comments seem to suggest otherwise. Where exactly do you live?
It really depends on the multiprocessing topology. Apple/IBM haven't been as loud as AMD or Intel with their dual-core design. Heck, this is the first I've heard of it. I tried to google for more info, but I can't find anything concrete. All I know is it's a point-to-point bus for singlecores.
... it would be nice to get some info on what exactly is being used in the circuit, but it seems pretty simple to me. You can see a vreg chip behind the alligator clips. My guess is the venerable 7805. The generator therefore has to supply upwards of 6V for dropout headroom. You'd probably want to add a couple of filter caps before and after the vreg too.
Criterion's catalog is so large and of such variety that they probably have a whole battery of techniques. They also probably don't do it all themselves. For example, the Criterion release of Jean Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête" notes that the restoration was done for an anniversary of Cocteau's work. They used a wet projection process and digital scrubbing.
While you're right, there's some subleties to point out. AMD has to clock a dualcore down from flagship speeds to fit the existing power envelope. They've waited for the 90nm die shrink to introduce dual cores, taking advantage of the power/size scaling. Also there've been power optimizations made on the low level. Without these tweaks, yeah, dual core = dual heat.
Informationweek is really a terrible resource when it comes to technical info. There's better and more timely info out there, like at the Inq.
... and the problem is that since it's the same rings, there's no variety in the noise made, which is a necessity in a wind chime. You can use the platters too, but then things tend to get tangled, if you hang from the spindle.
... Slashdot is dying. Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered nerd community today when recently Slashdot itself confirmed that original stories account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all postings.
Just that TFA is not very informed, and rather sketchy. AMD has already said before that their dual-cores will use the same cooling solutions as existing processors.
They've been talking about the dual-cores in existing n-way systems thing ever since dual-cores were announced. It would be highly disappointing if this didn't turn out to be supported. There's no real reason why it shouldn't be. The processors just need, as you say, sufficient HyperTransport linkages, because the memory controllers are on-die.
Sorry, your assumption is flawed. If you look at a picture of a dual-core Opteron die, you'll see that's it's essentially two Opterons sharing the same memory controller -- which is a very small slice of shared chip space. Simply "running the clock" still involves the WHOLE processor, not just a mysterious clock generator. It means refreshing all the cache, letting the execution units run stall instructions, etc. Every gate on the die is going to have some sort of leakage, refreshed each clock. That's why power scales roughly with frequency*voltage^2.
I've heard it straight from the horse's mouth (Kevin McGrath of AMD): a dual core processor has roughly twice the power output of a single core, if both are running at the same frequency. That's why AMD's dual cores will be released at several speed grades below the flagship line, ensuring that they run within the existing 90W power envelope. (The grandparent poster hasn't heard about this, it seems.) Meeting that target will be helped by the die shrink to 90nm.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the processor choice, it's the overall impression the "review" gives. I wouldn't say they're Intel shills. They've just spun everything positively for the platform they reviewed. They listed off all the nForce's features without testing them. If it had been a more thorough review, we might have learned whether the performance issues with the hardware firewall acceleration had been ironed out, or how well that nTune app tunes. Or disk performance, USB/Firewire, CPU utilization, sound quality, etc.
The next thing the jaded hardware review reader looks for is lots of synthetic benchmarks. Check.
The other thing is benching games at a single resolution. What if there's a bottleneck, or curious behavior?
As for the CPU choice, I have to agree with matching up the speeds in that manner. However, the reviewer should convey the relative prices of the hardware used in the comparison, and that should be a major factor in the final opinion. I would have used more pedestrian processors, in the 3.0 / 3000+ neighborhood. It would reflect the userbase more realistically, and the prices would be closer.
At the bottom of the first page:
To test the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, NVIDIA shipped us a reference motherboard with features that should be indicative of retail-ready products. We should note that the motherboard we tested does not support Intel's new dual-core processors, even though the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition was designed for both single and dual-core processors from the start. NVIDIA has informed us that support for dual-core processors is board dependent, and that top-tier manufacturers will have dual-core supporting nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition boards available shortly.
Whoa, chill. I'm sorry if you interpreted my post as vindictive. I just found it curious that design would start with the number of pins. In general you would start with a purpose for the chip, which would determine the minimum number of pins.
Actually, if you would tell me more about the course, I have a feeling it has a completely different focus from the one I'm comparing it to.
And true, with my GPA, you probably don't want me dragging down your school's reputation.
Agreed, it was totally slick.
(WTF is Miguzi? Haven't watched TV in awhile...)
I can hardly stand watching Naruto in subbed form. I can't imagine it dubbed.
Picking the size and how many pins? That might be true, but most fab classes would focus on modern semiconductor technology, meaning MOSFETs, and MEMs. At least that's the case at my school.
Schmidt said although eGrades is accessible through the Internet, there are security precautions that protect it from unauthorized usage.
"You have to use an encrypted web browser connection, so if you know that as the geeky https, you have to use an https connection, so that provides the real protection to it," Schmidt said.
So that's why Amazon.com uses https - they want to protect their ordering system from unauthorized non-geeks.
Seriously though, there was not very much "technical savvy" in this "hacking" incident.
Sorry to hear that.
My roommate is Indian, and his bag was searched when he flew back to school this week. However, instead of stealing things, the TSA seems to have folded his clothes for him.
I think everybody I know has built a steadycam by now. There was a guy using one on campus the other day. So it's getting kind of ho-hum. There's always a Video of Steadiness published, and this article is no exception.
There's a distinction between the stations and the artists. The stations still have to pay ASCAP fees, etc. But their operation is not for profit. No commercials. Artists, of course, still need to make a living. The point is you can get quality programming for free over the airwaves.
"Not commerical" means not-for-profit.
* NPR
* Jazz
* Classical
Yup, heard it on NPR today too. I was hoping they wouldn't use that Beatles song.
I'm going to school at Berkeley too, and there's a massive Christian presence. You walk through Sproul plaza at lunch and everybody's handing you stuff and asking you to hang out with them at their fun events (fellowship).
I've lived in the Bay Area all my life, and have both Christian and atheist friends. (Heck, most of my friends are hardcore Christian, and a few went to Biola.) Everyone gets along, as far as I can tell. Diversity breeds tolerance.
The Central Valley is another matter...that's still California, but from the election results it's basically another red state. Yet your comments seem to suggest otherwise. Where exactly do you live?
Thanks, finally a diagram. But still no clues as to how the dual core itself is set up.
Looks like they're adopting DDR2. That memory controller has to arbitrate between 4 processors, though.
It really depends on the multiprocessing topology. Apple/IBM haven't been as loud as AMD or Intel with their dual-core design. Heck, this is the first I've heard of it. I tried to google for more info, but I can't find anything concrete. All I know is it's a point-to-point bus for singlecores.
...provided the user has BitTorrent software or software or a protocol equivalent to BitTorrent.
Ah, ZDNet.
... it would be nice to get some info on what exactly is being used in the circuit, but it seems pretty simple to me. You can see a vreg chip behind the alligator clips. My guess is the venerable 7805. The generator therefore has to supply upwards of 6V for dropout headroom. You'd probably want to add a couple of filter caps before and after the vreg too.
Criterion's catalog is so large and of such variety that they probably have a whole battery of techniques. They also probably don't do it all themselves. For example, the Criterion release of Jean Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête" notes that the restoration was done for an anniversary of Cocteau's work. They used a wet projection process and digital scrubbing.
While you're right, there's some subleties to point out. AMD has to clock a dualcore down from flagship speeds to fit the existing power envelope. They've waited for the 90nm die shrink to introduce dual cores, taking advantage of the power/size scaling. Also there've been power optimizations made on the low level. Without these tweaks, yeah, dual core = dual heat.
Informationweek is really a terrible resource when it comes to technical info. There's better and more timely info out there, like at the Inq.
Now that Intel has the hotter chips, this point is largely moot.
... and the problem is that since it's the same rings, there's no variety in the noise made, which is a necessity in a wind chime. You can use the platters too, but then things tend to get tangled, if you hang from the spindle.
... Slashdot is dying. Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered nerd community today when recently Slashdot itself confirmed that original stories account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all postings.
Yeah, okay, that's enough. Time for my nap.
Just that TFA is not very informed, and rather sketchy. AMD has already said before that their dual-cores will use the same cooling solutions as existing processors.
See this article at the Inquirer.
They've been talking about the dual-cores in existing n-way systems thing ever since dual-cores were announced. It would be highly disappointing if this didn't turn out to be supported. There's no real reason why it shouldn't be. The processors just need, as you say, sufficient HyperTransport linkages, because the memory controllers are on-die.
Sorry, your assumption is flawed. If you look at a picture of a dual-core Opteron die, you'll see that's it's essentially two Opterons sharing the same memory controller -- which is a very small slice of shared chip space. Simply "running the clock" still involves the WHOLE processor, not just a mysterious clock generator. It means refreshing all the cache, letting the execution units run stall instructions, etc. Every gate on the die is going to have some sort of leakage, refreshed each clock. That's why power scales roughly with frequency*voltage^2.
I've heard it straight from the horse's mouth (Kevin McGrath of AMD): a dual core processor has roughly twice the power output of a single core, if both are running at the same frequency. That's why AMD's dual cores will be released at several speed grades below the flagship line, ensuring that they run within the existing 90W power envelope. (The grandparent poster hasn't heard about this, it seems.) Meeting that target will be helped by the die shrink to 90nm.