Haibane.info

Category: Geek service

  • Ramadan roundup

    ok so this time I have a good excuse for not posting! the first week of fasting is always the toughest 🙂 The funny thing is that I’ve found myself thinking about adding a food category to the blog (primarily a paean to Chipotle). But food blogging during Ramadan would be just masochistic, so it will have to wait until Eid.

    There has been a lot of stuff going on though. Galactica season 3 starts soon, and there have been online “webisodes” at Scifi.com that have a very interesting prequel storyline to the season that really delves into the resistance fighter mentality – with our own sympathetic and loved characters making decisions that we would normally decry. It’s odd how I am willing to give a fictional character more slack and make excuses for their behavior that I condemn in the real world – like strong weapons in a shrine. Of course the Cylons are Evil Incarnate (or are they?) so the universe of Galactica is more black and white (or is it?).

    Also the Intel Developer Forum is going on and has all sorts of awesome, sharikou-head-exploding stuff like 80-core chips, roadmaps to 45nm processing, and laser FSBs (from Day 1 alone). Anandtech has probably the best coverage. Yesterday during Day 2 they also talked about the Santa Rosa platform, one of my particular interests. One tidbit I’d missed earlier: the FSB clock frequency will also be adjustable, to further improve power management. Right now on the new Centrino platforms running Yonah/Merom, only CPU clock speeds adjust, but the FSB runs at full all the time. And there are even cooler innovations to reduce power that I won’t spoil. The promise of all-day computing gets stronger and stronger.

    Shamus’ “DM of the Rings” comic is awesome. I almost choked with laughter at the whole “Leggo my ass” thing. It reminds me of Summoner Geeks – but better.

    And Sugar is still losing to a demented penguin. Oh, the humanity!

  • smaller is bigger

    Toshiba just announced 1.8″ hard drives with perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), up to 80GB. Apple is already using them in their new 6G iPods announced yesterday.

    Buteven more interesting in storage technology news is Samsung’s announcement of new “phase-change” RAM modules. As DailyTech reports, relative to modern-day flash memory, PRAM will be faster, smaller, and cheaper.

    PRAM, says Samsung, is much faster than the fastest NOR flash memory. Samsung indicated that PRAM achieves its performance by changing the way it writes and reads to memory. Unlike current NOR flash, PRAM does not have to erase data before writing new data. This alone achieves 30 times the performance of current memory technology said Samsung. Durability and endurance are also a key development for PRAM, allowing products to last at least 10 times longer.

    Samsung indicated that PRAM will be a positive forward step for consumer products as well — lowering prices thanks to new manufacturing techniques. Samsung said that PRAM cells are half the size of NOR flash memory and requires 20 percent fewer manufacturing steps to produce.

    I’m not sure if there’s a Moore’s Law equivalent for storage capacity as there is for processor speed, but if not, there ought to be (and they should name it after me). The intriguing thing is that in five years as 100 GB storage in miniscule form factors becomes commonplace, I think we are going to see more innovative usage models than at present. Right now everyone talks about storing your music, photos, videos, and data. But eventually we are going to see full-fledged applications being just as portable. People have already managed to cram an functional (but limited) install of Windows XP onto a USB drive. And there’s also a distro of Linux called Knoppix which is also USB-compatible. And many flash drives sold today come with an application manager called “U3” which lets you selectively install specific applications to your USB stick. But all of this is done within the confines of just a few GB (and of course were not even possible just a couple of years ago).

    But imagine what you could do with a device the size of a pen cap but which held 100 GB? You could literally take your entire computing environment with you. It’s not really clear yet how this capability will change our usage models – can you remember how you survived without a cell phone?

  • 45nm horizon

    Reading this, I muse that were someone from 1900 to take apart a computer from today, they’d find that all the electronics were ultimately centered around a small square piece of silicon, silicon so pure and featureless that even the best microscopes they had couldn’t find any reason for why pure silicon would have such central significance.

  • reality is real-time

    When I read this at Slashdot today, I couldn’t help but reminded of this old post by Shamus.

  • Merom is here

    Ars has the details. Bottom line? The thermal design power (TDP) rating of the Core 2 Duo (ie, Merom) T7600 (2.33 GHz, 4 MB cache) is 34W, just 3W greater than the Core Duo (ie, Yonah) T2700 (2.33 Ghz, 2 MB cache).

    Remember that Merom is pin-compatible with Yonah, so if you buy a Yonah laptop* today you can swap in Merom later. All the recent sturm und drang about Microsoft’s decision to limit HD-video playback to only 64-bit devices is therefore rather overwrought.

    For anyone in the market for a notebook, my updated advice is to go ahead and buy a Yonah-based laptop now rather than wait. As usual I recommend NoteBookReview.com for buying advice, though you are also welcome to leave a comment if you’d like to solicit my opinion on a given machine.

    NBR also has a piece on the Merom launch, which includes a most recent list of available models with Core 2 duo from the major manufacturers. And, because not all laptop manufacturers are shipping Core Duo-based laptops with the correct settings in Windows XP to take full advantage of the dual-core performance, they also have a registry hack that all Yonah/Merom owners need to make sure is in place. I’ve reproduced it below the fold.

    *if the motherboard uses Intel’s 945 Express chipset.

    (more…)

  • Opteron/Solaris

    I’ve ridiculed sharikou a bit here for his doomsday attitude towards Intel, but that’s the desktop. When it comes to servers, sharikou is right on the money: Sun offers far more bang for the buck with it’s SunFire line than anything coming out of the IBM/HP camp. Check out his post for the details. It only confirms with hard numbers what my friends who do IT in the field are saying.

    For anyone doing IT in an enterprise environment, there are three things you can do to put yourself ahead of the pack. They are: 1. build your own Opteron box, 2. install Solaris 10 on it, and 3. install Centos (ie, RedHat without the licensing). If you have admin-level proficency on this platform, you’re gold.

  • Turion 64 X2 benchmarks

    Tom’s Hardware does the legwork. They conclude:

    Though AMD has not landed a great coup with the Turion 64 X2, the first 64 bit CPU with two execution units for laptops, the engineers in Dresden and Sunnyvale deserve commendation. They have succeeded in developing a laptop CPU that provides considerably more performance than its single-core predecessor Turion 64, but whose power consumption is the same or only slightly higher.

    However, compared to an Intel platform based on the Core Duo and the company’s own GM 945 chipset, the combination of AMD CPU and ATI chipset is inferior in terms of battery time and multitasking performance. Therefore, under equal conditions, it can only be regarded as the second choice – if it is worth getting at all. The Core Duo 2, Intel’s next generation of laptop processors is already at hand, and first measurements show that the Core Duo 2 is even more powerful while not consuming more power.

    This is not to say that buying a Turion laptop is a mistake; after all, the laptop decision rests on a number of other axes, including price, features, weight, etc. There is a lot of room for innovation and the CPU performance is not the sole metric by which consumers make their choices. The Turion looks to be a decent chip at a reasonable price, and its presence in the market is a positive thing overall. With Dell already selling AMD desktops and soon to follow with its notebook lines, the new Turion simply means more choice.

    Still, it will be fun to see Sharikou‘s reaction to these benchmarks 🙂 He hasn’t posted yet…

  • Tera! Tera! Tera!

    Hitachi promises a 1 TB hard drive by the end of the year. Desktop drive, of course, with PMR. Any wagers on how soon we see a 1TB notebook drive? My best guess is one year, preceded by 500 GB drives at Christmas.

  • waiting for Santa Rosa

    Anandtech has a comparison of the Yonah and Merom processors from Intel – known more popularly as Core Duo and Core Duo 2 – and concludes:

    Overall, Merom may not be as big of an upgrade to Yonah as Conroe was to NetBurst, but the bottom line is that you get equal or better performance in every test without increasing cost or decreasing battery life. Owners of Core Duo laptops really have no reason to worry about upgrading for now, and waiting for the Santa Rosa platform before your next laptop upgrade seems reasonable. Those looking to purchase a new notebook on the other hand have no reason to avoid Core 2 Duo models, assuming pricing is consistent with what Intel is promising. There will be a delay of at least a few more weeks as we await availability, and testing and validation by laptop manufacturers may delay things a bit more, but within the next month or so you should be able to get a Core 2 laptop.

    I bought my T42 Thinkpad with a Dothan chip (ie, Yonah’s predescessor, the Pentium M). I have no regrets; I bought the T42 in December and have used it heavily. As Anand points out, the Santa Rosa platform will really give Merom it’s full potential – primarily the counterintuitive impact that increasing the front-side bus speed will have for lengthening battery life:

    With Santa Rosa, clock speeds will go up slightly but more importantly we’ll get access to a faster FSB. Unfortunately a side-effect of keeping Core 2 Duo fed with a faster FSB is that while performance may go up, battery life may go down. It’ll be interesting to see what Intel can pull off with the new platform; one of the funny things about performance and battery life is that if you can complete a task quickly enough thus returning your CPU to an idle state faster, battery life will grow even though instantaneous power consumption may be higher.

    Note that the other big selling point for Santa Rosa is 802.11n wireless, which promises much improved range and bandwidth. However, the 11n standard got delayed again, so the impact on Santa Rosa’s rollout is unclear. I think we won’t really see Santa Rosa until midyear 2008, which is really fine by me.

    Another reason it’s worth waiting is because of storage technology. A big technological advance is perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which promises higher data density (and thus, more GB for the buck). Seagate has already introduced a 200GB notebook drive using PMR technology, though it only runs at 4200 rpm. Presently, you can find notebook drives up to 160GB running at 7200 rpm, so I imagine that by the start of 2008 we should see PMR drives sized 200GB and above at 7200 rpm as standard.

    But more important than PMR is the new hybrid drive technology. Hybrid drives use a flash-based disk in addition to the rotating platters as a kind of super-cache. This technology is being developed jointly by Samsung and Microsoft, and Windows Vista will be heavily optimized for hybrid drives, for both performance boost and longer battery life.

    Overall, notebooks in 2008 are going to have a lot of these “incremental” seeming changes under the hood. But the net effect should be pretty dramatic gains in usability. The ultimate goal: a laptop that you can take anywhere, all day. We aren’t there yet but we will be a lot closer in 2008.

  • F-150

    So, my ’02 explorer is at the dealer for some overnite maintenance and repair. They oferred me an ’05 F-150 4-door as my rental for the same price as an economy. Wheee!

    This thing is BIG. Not that buying one woudl ever make economic or usability sense for me or my family (we’ll replace the explorer with an Odyssey or a Quest next, most likely) – but I really, really understand the appeal.

    BTW, the reason I am driving in all the way to work today instead of just to the park n’ ride to take the bus is because I might need to leave a bit early to pick up the explorer. Seriously. Plus I’m a bit tired and want to grab some coffee on the way, but not drink it all in one shot, so I’d have to take the cup onto the bus, so it is easier to just drive in. Really.

    Everyone living in Texas should drive a truck, at least once. I consider this my long overdue citizen’s exam. Its been 8 years after all.