Want to know what's up with this site and read about important new developments in computing? Good, keep reading...

2004.04.29

P4 Prescott

I saw a report on a new chipset for the P4-prescott CPU's. It looks like, with some tuning at that level, the performance drop from the older Northwood core to the newer Prescott core can me mitigated. It was compared using 2.8GHz CPU - the speed for which prescott does the worst on current solutions and it "made all the difference".

2004.04.27

Burning hot

It looks like the cost of DVD burners has gotton to the point that there is no excuse anymore not to have one. You can equip a systems with a 4x or even 8x DVD+/-R/RW drive for about the same as a DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive.
What's next? Dual-layer DVD-R9 (don't tell the MPAA, maybe they won't notice). Expect those by summer for under $200.

2004.02.17

Intel x86-64

There have been some rumors that Intel was going to release a 64bit x86 based server processor (a successor to the Xeon). Well, they did. More importantly this CPU, the Narcona, is based on the Prescott (see below). This means that specualtion that the Prescott was built for 64-bit operation is correct - and it will be compatible with AMD64.

When? Well, the server chip will be out shortly, and a desktop version (a socket LGA775, no doubt) will likely be out when WinXPx86-64 is ready. Performance? For that we will have to wait-and-see.

2004.02.02

The chips are in...

First: For those looking for overclocked systems based on Prescott CPU's, we will be offering 4GHz+CPU/1GHz+FSB systems in March.

...We have Prescott! And it seems the measures Intel has taken to ensure it will scale to the 4-5GHz range have thankfully only detracted slightly from it's performance today. The Prescott 2.8E is a little slower than the Northwood-based 2.8C and the 3.2GHz parts are about the same performance. All of the P4's are cheaper than they were a few hours ago ;-) and the new Prescotts will be priced the same as Northwoods once they penetrate into the normal distribution channels (and there will likely be good deals on Northwoods).

What does this mean? Well, it means more of the same. Until we can get new Intel P4 chipsets (with PCI Express and socket LGA775) from Intel et. al. we will not truly be in the 'next-generation'. Similarly, until things happen on the AMD64 end (like PCI Express and Socket 939) systems will not feature technology that is forward compatible into the 2nd half of 2004 (but that's not unusual). Oh, and a 64-bit OS and applications to run on it might help too ^_^,,

So for a given 'speed grade' and price, Athlon64 systems have the lead in Office/Web, Code Development, and Gaming. P4-HT processors are ahead for Audio/Video, encoding/rendering, and 3D workstation tasks.
Economy systems are currently best served by the Athlon XP (the Duron is not much cheaper, and the current Celerons are a joke - a bad one).

2004.01.12

February 2, 2004.
That's when the new Intel P4 Prescott CPU will be officially announced. It will coincide with price drops of as much as 35% across the P4 product line, and reductions in prices from AMD on the Athlon64 and FX. We are currently evaluating what we can get our hands on, and getting final information on Intel's 900 series chipsets.

We will be building no new computers until after this date (3 weeks).

2003.12.19

AMD 64bit CPU's
More and more motherboard's are available and the performance from the processor continues to be very promising. There have been some tests (in Linux) comparing x86 and x86-64 operation on the processor which have shown improvements in performance in many areas.
When the prices come down and the next generastion boards come out, choosing them for high-end systems may be a no brainer.

The Opteron has shown it is very competitive with Intel's Xeon too - excellent performance in 2-way and 4-way tests, even when only running 32-bit code. There's a push to try and compare it with 4/8way Intel Itanium 2 systems running AMD64 vs. IA64. That should be interesting.

2003.12.05

Panther
MacOS X 10.3 is out. If you are running a previous version (esp. pre 10.2), go and buy this right now! It includes a great selecton of new and improved included apps and will give you an incredible performance boost.
'Jagwyre' boxes were prettier though ;-)

2003.11.29

LCD's
Well, there's a lot of new LCD's (ones that don't suck) available now or in the next few weeks. This includes full 24-bit capable displays in the 16ms and 12ms response range (20" and 17").
There is a big push for large LCD's for the HDTV market too. 30" and 37" models are available, and they are expensive, but I think they perform better than the plasma displays. Plasma is basically as good as it will ever be - LCD's are moving into their 7th generation, with higher resolution, better color, and lower power consumption. Most of them are perfectly happy to attach to a computer too, and that is a good thing™

CES is coming up in January. That's where we should see the 'good stuff'.

2003.10.16

"Hell freezes over" or "iTunes 4.1 released for OS.X/NT.5"
Today marks the release of iTunes for Win2k/XP. In a few months, with Mac users as their only consumer, Apple managed to sell ~13million songs through it's 99cent download offering. That market was only 3%-5% of all desktop PC's, but accounted for >70% of all paid music over that time period. Now that they have access to a user base many times greater. This will be something to watch...
Oh, and go buy an iPod ;-)

2003.09.27

IDF and Computex
Intel: 'new' P4EE. It's a Xeon MP in a m478 package. 3.2GHz (and later 3.4GHz) with 512kB L2 and a 2MB L3. It works in existing boards without so much as a BIOS update in most cases. Expensive? very. Fast? yes. The advantage held by the new Athlon64/AthlonFX over the P4 in (32bit) games is gone. Hopefully Prescott (which may be delayed to Q1-2k4) will be able to keep up.

AMD: The Athlon64 3200+ (single channel RAM, 2GHz socket754) is pretty fast - much better in all the things AMD CPU's were 'bad' at historically. Cost is similar to existing Barton chips and motherboards are already appearing. AthlonFX-51 (dual channel RAM, 2.2GHz socket940), which is basically an Opteron 148, is as fast as it is expensive. The big issue is that it uses registered RAM (like all Opterons and most other server processors) which is more expensive and less common. There is already a move to push it into the market by Kingston as part of the HyperX line.
We will see a new package (or at least a new socket) for the Athlon64 very soon and the AthlonFX will be revised as well (to allow use of unbuffered memory). So, we will wait to produce them as part of our regular product line, just like the P4-423.

Graphics: new cards are faster, better, and more expensive. As always the top of the line is best only if you are swiming in cash. NVidia looks to be behind and is prepping a big new driver release. They are also releasing prototype versions of their next card for review. Too bad I don't get one -_-,,

2003.09.17

Got Wi-Fi?
We are very excited by the capabilities of the new generation 802.11g wireless networking equipment (the standard is now official, BTW). Some of the 'entry-level' hardware can do amazing things, and be 'convinced' to do even more than the manual may suggest. If you need connectivity locally or site-to-site, this is a good time to find out if you can cut the cable.

2003.09.07

Not too much news lately.
Looks like the ATI Radeon cards have definitively surpassed NVidia in performance and value. We are offering Radeon Pro cards (9600 and up) on new systems. Most of our multi-monitor + TV-out solutions will be low-end NVidia GeForce FX 5200's though.
Initial tests designed to simulate the performance of the upcoming Athlon 64 (using an Opteron w/nForce 3 pro chipset) are almost scary. Even running 32-bit apps in 32-bit WinXPpro shows unbelieveable performance. Multi-CPU Xeon's can still out-encode anything out there when working with video, but that's about it. To be competitive, Intel's next P4 (Prescott) will have to be amazing if current performance numbers are accurate.
Speaking of... Motherboards with Intel's 848P chipset are showing up now. They are an economy chipset with a full set of features, just a little slower than the workstation-level 865/875. Plus they are supposed to be Prescott compatible (whereas the 865/875 may not be).

2003.06.30

Ack.
I'm getting sick of the Apple G5 nonsense. I work with Audio/Video and DTP so they are MacUsers a-plenty and Apple's new propaganda/mis-information - don't even get me started
The details (accurately predicted below, BTW) are actually quite historically humorous. The new CPU for Apple's fastest-yet 64-bit box is made by ... IBM. Who would have guessed that 20 years ago?

So, if you've seen their 'benchmarks' you may think it's killer-fast :: I would read this first.
I thought the XP3200+ was a bit over-sold, but I've been seeing reports all over the place like the one cited there. Those 64-bit AMD CPU's (see below) are going to have fun with G5 comparo's - of course we will have to wait for an x86-64 version of Windows but they can trounce on them with 64-bit Linux for a while.

2003.06.27

Well, the dual channel 865 and 875 Intel chipsets are giving some serious performance gains, especially with the faster P4's (now at 3.2GHz). AMD's XP 3200+ is not doing so well. It has a higher bus speed and the larger L2 cache, but it's typical falling-down point, media encoding, is showing it's true ill: it is slower in some cases than the Intel P4 2.4C (800bus w/HyperThreading). With the exception of general office computing it is slower than the top 3 Intel P4's (3.06, 3.0C, 3.2). It's also quite expensive. The rest of the line is still a good 'economy' choice for mid-range and of course Office PC's. Athlon64's should fare better (based on Opteron performance) - it may be my first AMD CPU in a long time.

2003.04.15

Canterwood (Intel 875P):

Intel's new workstration class chipset is out and shipping (limited quantities so far, with prices dropping daily). The 875P replaces the 850E RDRAM chipset and it seems the E7205 (Granite Bay) as well. It also brings a bunch of 'fun new toys' with it.

The most obvious additions are of course 800MHz bus support for the revised P4 northwood CPU's and more importantly dual-channel DDR400 memory. 800MHz bus won't make much performance difference for CPU's below 3.2GHz or so, but it doesn't hurt either.
The 875P also features what Intel calls PAT (Performance Acceleration Architecture). You see, the (delayed) 865 and 875 are essentially the same chipset - PAT refers to taking the best chips and running them with faster timings to get a few percent performance gain.
The chipset includes the new ICH5 with integrated SATA150 support (and optional RAID). This is important since the PCI bus (where addon SATA adapters resided 'til now) only has 132MB/s of bandwidth - by putting the interface on the ICH it can actually reach full speed without sucking every last bit of communications bandwidth in your system.
Along the same lines is the new CSA (Commumnications Streaming Architecture) bus. It is essentially a dedicated HubLink2 interface for adding onboard Gigabit Ethernet (which can use 2x the bandwidth of the PCI bus all by itself).
This is of course a stopgap measure until the introduction of PCI Express (sort of a serial PCI bus) which will feature a large number of dedicated high speed channels (266MB/s each) vs. the shared configuration of the PCI bus. Also, PCI express (actually 16 channels ganged together) will replace AGP in a year or so.

Intel's Springdale and Springdale-G (865 chipset) have been delayed, but will be around soon - a few weeks. These will be the low cost high-performance chipsets powering mainstream systems for the bulk of this year.

Oh, and 800MHz FSB means new CPU's too. The first is a 3GHz model with HyperThreading (which was pushed back due to a bug). I would expect to see them shipping about the same time that Springdale does.

2003.03.12

Yes, we have no Banias:

We don't make (or rebrand) notebooks, but we do know about them. Intel is releasing their new mobile platform, and it's called Centrino. It is a group of mobile technologies based around low power parts, with integrated video, networking and wireless connectivity and the new Pentium-M processor (Banias). The new CPU is based on the P3, but refined and tuned for mobile applications and incorporating a P4 compatible bus and large 1MB L2 cache.
You should start seeing Centrino ads today from Intel and major OEM's. (Intel's teaser ads were for this technology, BTW)

2003.02.20

Intel Developers Forum:

Of the most immediate importance are the new chipsets. The 865 (springdale) and 875 (canterwood) are bringing three important things. 800MHz FSB for the next generation P4, main-stream dual-channel DDR memory controllers (already in server and workstation class parts, which we sell), and (finally!) native SerialATA support in the southbridge. In addition to 2 conventional parallel ATA connectors, the chipset supports 2 SATA ports (with optional RAID-0 or 1) which increases the number of devices you can attach and gives better performance.
Also, it looks like Intel is big on Dual-displays going mainstream. Most of their concept PC's sported multi-monitor solutions.

2003.02.15

There hasn't been much news this year computing-wise.
At the end of last year Intel introduced the 3.06GHz Hyper-threading P4, based on the Nothwood core. This was a surprise since it was intended to only be available in desktop systems in the next generation Prescott CPU. AMD's announcement that the 64-bit hammer processor would ship soon seems to have jump-started the release of HT. Hopefully this means there will be many HT-aware desktop apps by the time the cost of entry comes down. And AMD's 64-bit CPU? (Athlon-64) not any time soon...

They also confirmed the new chipsets (Springdale and Canterwood) would be capable of 800MHz FSB operation (for the 90nm process Prescott). This was the original target speed for a RDRAM based chipset, which was reduced to 667MHz mid-2k2 when RDRAM was replaced with DDR and dual-channel DDR on Intel's roadmap.
With the proven success of high-speed DDR memory, 800MHz is now a possibility again and future Intel chipsets should support dual-channel DDR400 (PC3200). We should know soon, IDF (Intel Developer Forum) is coming up and there should be some good stuff coming out of that.

Apple? There is still no G5. The revised G4's (the ones that first appeared in the Xserve) will scale through the 1.8GHz range though.
The G5 (possibly the 64-bit PowerPC 970, an IBM chip) is targeted to 2004 (maybe late 2k3).