Sad state of Dell service centers, but loving my new SSD

I had received my new Intel 320 Series SSD nearly 2 weeks back, but have been struggling to find a way to fit it in my Dell Studio 1749 laptop. Struggling because the SSD didn’t ship with a laptop connector/caddy and Dell’s extremely bad service centers in Mumbai.

Even before I had my SSD, I looked through all the documentation on how to fit it in. I wanted to add the SSD to the second drive slot that is part of my laptop, but needed a caddy and L-shaped SATA connector. I had enquired the Dell customer care and they responded, they didn’t sell the stuff but should be available at the service centers in Mumbai. So as soon as the SSD arrived, I landed at the service center. But what stupidity on my part, to expect the dell service center engineers to know what I was going to talk about. One of the engineers bet with me that laptop’s can’t have two hard disks, another said I have to “burn some plastic” to fit it in. No one, out of the 7-odd engineers at the Dell service centers in Andheri or Mumbai Central had heard the word “caddy” in their lives!! (!!Damn Golf!!)

Nevertheless, after a couple of hours of trying to explain to these people, I had full faith on our lamington road fellows to have imported something from China. Sadly, it was just the regular “atta-chawal” (off-the-shelf stuff) that you can get at every computer shop around the city. Why would people come so far to lamington road, if they didn’t keep “not-so-common” parts?? Not that Dell has any small market in India… so the lamington road shopkeepers should have atleast heard or seen such a possibility… Nevermind, I realized from earlier that an eSATA cable for Seagate GoFlex Agent HDD (STAE103) is impossible to find in this market, forget my caddy!! After visiting over 30 shops and 5 laptop repair guys, I was convinced (… and even they were) that such a thing was impossible to find in India

So, I ordered online with priority shipping from the nice guys at newmodeUS. I say nice because I called them after ordering to clarify about the eSATA cable that I also purchased (already cut to work with Seagate GoFlex ) along with my caddy and they answered nicely. I couldn’t find anywhere in Norway that had these either!! . It reached me in 2 days and I was happy again!!

 

Boot times from 35 sec to 19 sec; Shutdown from 15 sec to 6 sec. Netbeans starts in less than 7 sec compared to 25 sec. Overall amazing performance upgrade!!! The laptop even earlier was a performance beast with 8GB RAM, 500HDD, 4-thread, 3+Ghz i7 processor… but this speed boost is awesome!!

Intel Larrabee to Support Both DirectX and OpenGL

Intel has been showing presentations on Larrabee for sometime now, but hasn’t openly talked about what instructions it will understand, clock speeds or even a hard launch date. For people who do not know, Larrabee is Intel’s attempt to integrate GPU with CPU and create GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) or computing through the use of graphics processing units. Intel today made it clear at Siggraph 2008 that Larrabee will support both DirectX and OpenGL for graphics processing.

Intel already has the highest market share in the GPU world, thanks to integrated graphics processors (IGP) in its chipset's sold with motherboards. But due to the dismal performance over the years of these IGP chipsets, no one ever considers these capable enough for mainstream gaming. Benchmarks have shown time and again that even the most basic discrete graphic cards can perform better than IGPs. With Larrabee, Intel has intentions to bring more computing/graphics power with lesser power requirements.

Larry Seiler, senior engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group said that, Larrabee's consists of cores derived from Pentium processors and have added multithreading and 64-bit instructions. Each core consists of 256kb L2 cache and the first release of Larrabee will have 8 to 48 cores depending on the market segment. Larrabee also has advanced multi-core capabilities and uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network for fast, low latency communication between the cores.

The programming paradigm doesn’t change with Larrabee because it uses the same x86 instructions used by Intel’s current generation microprocessors. Also with DirectX and OpenGL support inside Larrabee it confirms that current generation games will also work fine. But without any mention of the performance improvement in graphics capabilities over current generation IGPs, I still have doubts whether Intel is actually competing with its own processors or with the GPU vendors like ATI (now AMD) and  NVidia. Larrabee does look solid on paper, but as we know papers do create a lot more hype than they can perform and Intel marketing does know how to play that game.

AMD also has been working on Fusion processor which will integrate AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs into one chip. NVidia on the other hand has create a new programming paradigm with CuDA, which tries to enable normal computer processing to NVidia’s GPU. Whichever company wins this GPGPU battle, we would like to see all of them fight on the same grounds and support existing standards. Today’s Larrabee announcement confirms that both the DirectX and OpenGL standards are followed and will allow current breed of games to run on the Larrabee.

Wimax Missed the Intel Centrino 2 Boat Again

Wimax has been Intel’s big push to wireless broadband for some years now. Intel has promised Wimax as the solution to fast wireless internet time and again, but has constantly failed to deliver real working chips for operation. Today, when Intel launched Centrino 2, it didn’t have much of a mention about the Wimax adapters 5150 and 5350, which was supposedly the main talking point of Centrino 2.

Centrino was probably one of the most talked about technology by Intel when it was first released. It standardized wireless access through Wifi and most people synonymously used Centrino for Wireless-capable laptops. That was back in 2003. After that Intel refreshed the platform with a lot of new processors/platforms, codenamed Yonah, Napa and Santa Rosa. Lots of new motherboards/chipsets came and went and few integrated graphics just changed. Centrino 2 after much delay was launched today and the platform was earlier known by codename Montevina.

The Montevina platform announced today covers new 45nm Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, the GM45 chipset and the WiFi Link 5300 adapter. You can look at all the information about Centrino 2 platform from the wide press coverage its got from all hardware sites. Look here, here and here for examples. But what most of the sites are not complaining about is the lack of Wimax at the launch. I mean what is special about Centrino 2, if its not got a new fast wireless medium, atleast that’s what the original Centrino was all about.

But like I have heard before, the Wimax adapters for laptops 5150 and 5350 are still not ready for release. The adapters have an issue with power consumption and if Intel would have today launched the adapters with Centrino 2 platform, all the promises about improved battery life would have gone down the drains. Intel says we have to wait till the end of the year to get one of those Wimax adapters, but didn’t mention any specific reason for the delay and also didn’t mention that it was due to these (and Atom’s marketing) that Intel has been delaying Centrino 2 for sometime. Lets hope by fall we do see a battery efficient Wimax adapter for my new laptop. For a change, this time the ISPs are not late!!

 

Few presentation slides from Centrino 2 launch:

 

 

The Car came, but Wimax didn’t want a ride!!

Solaris & Xeon Break Million Messages Per Second

Sun Microsystems today announced that it has collaborated with Intel to not only provide the best throughput performance to date by breaking the million-messages-per second barrier, but also the lowest available network latency on a 1Gb Ethernet. This performance output was generated on a new financial services benchmark known as Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS).

The Intel-based Sun Fire™ X4150 with Solaris 10 provided the top-notch results for the benchmark and it indeed is superlative performance to reach million-messages per second. And more importantly its done on standard network topology instead of stacked topology, which can improve scalability but comes at a cost. Doing it with standard 1Gb Ethernet is surely an achievement. The performance by the system is highly dependent on the hardware which Intel has engineered and Sun has built. But Solaris also has contributed to the improved performance. Solaris has the least latency in message passing and network performance on it is excellent.

Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz applauded the new benchmark results and attributed much of it to Solaris. And he sure must be happy!! Sun Microsystems is very focused on Solaris/OpenSolaris these days with a lot of development work towards OpenSolaris. There is also a big PR machine running for openSolaris these days and some ol’ Netbeans guys have been moved to talk and explore the world on openSolaris. Sun Microsystems has got this target to make openSolaris big on the desktop with a distro-plan similar to Linux distros.

Congratulations to Sun on the new benchmark record!! It is definitely one of the strong forte for Sun to perform on the network, but the desktop move is a totally different ball-game. And why didn’t we have one of those largest hardware/microprocessor team from Sun make the system from UltraSPARC to perform that good instead of the Intel hardware ??

Intel Invests in Solar Cells

With the rising fuel costs and the dangers of global warming by the use of carbon fuels, everyone seems to be looking at alternate sources of energy. The last week has been  specially interesting because 3 major tech companies, specializing in semiconductor manufacturing have got into manufacturing solar cells. Intel today announced that its spin-off SpectraWatt will be manufacturing solar cells for panel makers starting in the middle of next year.

Just last week, IBM had made similar announcement of manufacturing solar cells with Japanese semiconductor firm Tokyo Ohka Kogyo. Earlier to that HP said that it has licensed some technology to a solar panel startup called Xtreme Energetics. All these companies are putting their expertise in semiconductor manufacturing to improve solar cell efficiencies and decrease the cost of manufacturing these cells.

Intel Capital has put some $50 million into SpectraWatt and Cogentrix Energy, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund and Solon AG are also investing into Intel’s latest spin-off. SpectraWatt is going to manufacture these photo-voltaic cells at a fabrication plant in Oregon. After the Intel’s plant at Oregon is fully-functional it plans to churn out 60 megawatts worth of cells sometime in Q2-2009.

Hopefully all this means that cheaper solar panels can be used in homes and sufficient power can be produced at a good value-for-money. Today the cost of solar panels are way too high and produce too little power to make them practically replace normal power lines.

AMD Working on Intel’s Physics Havok

AMD and Intel are rarely to be found in friendly talk. But this time, AMD is in talks with Intel to integrate “Havok FX” physics in its ATI graphics chips which is meant to improve realism in games and physics calculations in scientific applications. Intel last year acquired physics technology company Havok, and AMD plans to use its API inside GPUs.

AMD, like Intel has plans to have integrated CPU+GPU processors, but plans to use Havok physics in discrete graphics. The main competitor in the physics processing technology is Ageia, which was acquired by Nvidia. With two different technologies for physics, AMD decision to use Havok has important implications for game developers as well as scientific application developers. Nvidia has been pushing Ageia’s Physx technology to game developers and AMD was starting to feel lost. Today’s discussion about AMD using Havok gives AMD an advantage and its called Intel marketing. Intel will be using Havok inside its CPU+GPU Larabee and developers will be magically tilted towards using Havok because of Intel’s large market share.

The official announcement about how much AMD has to give Intel for the technology is still not out, but surely good money will change hand. Physics will definitely play an important role in the future of GPUs, either in games or general purpose computing. Along with ray-tracing, Intel is betting a lot on physics for the future of advanced computing and HPC. AMD has lots of room to maneuver, since it can switch between GPUs and CPUs with good ease. Lets wait and see how everything falls into place!!

Intel to Own Hard-disks in Centrino 2

Intel has been on a war to conquer every PC component. And as the war wages ahead, Intel is going ahead to capture the hard-disks in laptops through the Centrino 2 branding. Intel will be adding SSD drives to the list of requirements to make a laptop have the Centrino 2 logo. Intel has recently uncovered gold in manufacturing and this seems to be a logical steps towards increasing demand for these drives.

Intel's Centrino has been the most successful PC branding and its synonymous with laptops with Wifi. If Intel Inside brought processors to the limelight, Centrino made Wifi and Wireless Internet a necessity inside laptops. Intel has plans to do something similar with SSD (Solid State Drives) in laptops.  Intel High Performance SSD is mainly targeted towards enterprise, mid-range and high-end notebook markets. Intel High Performance SSDs come in 2 variations - Client X25-M (2.5 inch) and Client X18-M (1.8 inch). Both the SSD drives will come in 80Gb sizes and will have the SATA interface. By the end of the year, Intel will be selling 160Gb SSDs and 250GB in 2009.

If you think that Intel SSDs is only good for Intel, then its an incorrect notion. Intel SSDs are the best performing SSD in the market and come at excellent sizes. Intel is also pricing these pretty competitively. The SSDs also require less power compared to normal hard-disk drives and this means that the battery life of such devices are higher. These laptops will also feel lighter and perform equivalently or better in most conditions.

NVidia Wishes It Could Live Like Intel

Nvidia has been kicking quite a lot of mud on Intel. Recently, it started with Nvidia claiming the GPU is more important than the CPU, then it was calling Larabee a powerpoint slide and then claiming that Intel is a monopoly that doesn't want anyone else in the market. But in reality, NVidia dreams to be at Intel's position and its been proved once again with NVidia buying Utah-based ray-tracing company RayScale.

If you've been following the discussion, or you read the above links, then you'll realize how pissed off the Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has got with Intel. The reason for this anger is that Intel has been researching on architectures that are supposed to replace GPU (graphic cards) from computers. If Intel succeeds, it means Nvidia are without a market. Intel calls these next-gen processors that will be able to process graphics along with normal CPU operations as Larabee. AMD is also working on something similar called Fusion. NVidia on the other than doesn't have much to bet on. Although CUDA is starting to make GPUs do the work of CPUs, its way more steeper upgrade curve. Imagine porting all your normal Apps to CUDA vs Optimizing your games for a CPU that can show graphics.

With all that trouble knocking on Nvidia's doors, obviously you can't blame Jen-Hsun Huang for his anger. But today's buy of RayScale could point to what NVidia could do in the future. Intel has been pursuing a lot of research on Ray-tracing as a replacement for the vector processing that we see on today's graphic cards. Ray-tracing can be done on CPUs or Larabee/Fusion and could render images on screen, with more realistic lighting and shadow effects. Currently it takes a lot of processing, but it isn't too far from becoming mainstream once we have optimized processors. NVidia may be preparing for such a product and RayScale could be its software partner to move in that direction.

Nvidia also does not have the great fabs that Intel owns. Intel's strength is its production and NVidia really can't manufacture its own designs. Thus, if Nvidia even manages to create a killer GPU+CPU, how can it create enough of these for the entire world?? AMD on the other hand with their ATI buy can switch anywhere between a CPU+GPU or GPU+CPU... But haven't you heard: If you've got one leg in one boat and the other leg in another boat, you end up catching your groin!!

Intel HexaCore Dunnington at 2.66Ghz

Intel has taped out its six-core processor running at 2.66Ghz, which it plans to release sometime in Q4 2008. Intel's six-core processor is currently codenamed Dunnington has 3 dual-core processors stuck with each other and run as a single packaged processor. The processor will require a new socket to run. But the good news is that Intel is able to extract good speeds from it.

Dunnington is a reply to AMD's 3-core processors (TriCore), which AMD had initially thought to be value-for-money for the customers. Intel on the other hand has no plans to sell Dunnington's for cheap and will be sold only as server processors, under the Xeon brand. The Dunnington processors have a huge cache of 16MB, which should be very attractive for applications that run a lot of threads. Another news has it that, Dunnington will be running a single thread per core, and does not use HyperThreading (HT) technology.

The last time I met an Intel Design Engineer from Bangalore, I had heard that Intel was much impressed by Sun's designs in Rock or Niagara 2. Lots of concurrent threads on a core are very good on servers. Intel seems to going forward with the core-race at the moment, but I expect a switch to more threads on a core very soon!!

Intel Steals AMD's Supercomputer Shopper

Cray and Intel announced today that they have established an R&D deal for research on next generation supercomputers. Cray Inc is one of the best supercomputer and high-performance computing manufacturer and mainly has been using AMD processors in its machines. Cray and Intel will be researching on the use of Larabee accelerators in supercomputers.

Larabee is Intel's next-generation GPGPU initiative, which is the cunning plan to use graphic cards to do other computing tasks than just showing graphics. GPU are known to have high-floating point processing capabilities and the industry has decided its time to use it for some math. AMD's ATI acquisition was on similar grounds and AMD today manufactures AMD Stream Processors that do the same thing. Nvidia with its CUDA is also doing a same thing.

AMD must be pretty sad that it hasn't been able to pull something similar with its Stream Processors. AMD Opteron has been pretty popular among supercomputer manufacturers due to scalability brought through HyperTransport architecture. Cray shares seem to have risen due to some excitement with AMD's chip availability, but I suspect its more to do with the Intel partnership.

Stream Processing are going to be the future of high-performance computing. Even on desktops, it'll be either be processors doing GPU work or GPU doing processors work sometime in the future.

AMD Launches New Processerr... GoHome'on

AMD has been struggling and much of it is because of bad execution and sitting on the laurels when it was winning in the CPU race. AMD's financial woes featuring huge debt after ATI buy continues and in this hard time they do like corporates always do. But in AMD style of bad names, they released a new processerr called GoHome'on and like 'Athlon and Duron', its not going to be met well by the markets. Its basically a product to ask employees to leave the job and "Go Home!!"

AMD expects revenues for the quarter ending March 29 to drop approximately 15 per cent drop from previous quarter but up 22 per cent over 1Q 2007. Generally Q1 is not the best time for microprocessor business, but this story is longer than that... AMD has been struggling with the performance and Intel has been executing better than ever.

AMD announced that it will layoff about 10% of its current workforce starting mid-April and finish the entire procedure by Q3. This means after the exercise finishes, 1,650 AMD employees will be doing something else. The markets haven't taken the news well and AMD is down by more than 4%. In the meanwhile, Hector is still on the hotseat trying to convince it'll be good someday and his expected successor Dirk Mayer is optimistic.

AMD just a week ago was saying that the layoffs are rumours. And today it confirms that there will be layoffs. The financial results will be out on the 17th of April and probably the layoffs are to promise some expenditure cuts on AMD's part... Hopefully, we aren't loosing some good chip designer who would have created something to fight Intel... Or else we will see AMD just limping around behind Intel!!

Only Intel Marketing Can Sell At 1500% Margins

How many businesses can sell chips at 1500% margins?? I bet you won't believe to buy processors at that price even if you were in Zimbabwe's inflation... But that doesn't stop Intel to sell its upcoming Atom processors at those margins, if you were to believe TGDaily. TGDaily noted earlier that Intel produces these  small processors at $8 including packaging and shipping. And according to the latest pricelist, Intel hopes to sell these at $135!!

Atom is the upcoming generation of low-power processors meant for MID (Mobile Internet Devices) that come in really small packages. I noted earlier about how much noise Atom has been generating even though its not the best performing part out there. But according to Anand, it seems Atom is some special change in architecture that's gonna change the future of computing. May be Anand's seen that 'Crystal Ball' of the future, but it still got me wondering about the hype and the pricelist just added up to the hype.

The price list is as seen below:

- Atom Z500, 800 MHz clock speed, 512 KB L2 cache, FSB400, 0.65 watt TDP, $45 (including chipset)
- Atom Z510, 1.1 GHz, 512 KB, FSB400, 2 watt, $45 (including chipset)
- Atom Z520, 1.33 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyper-threading, 2 watt, $65 (including chipset)
- Atom Z530, 1.60 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyper-threading, 2 watt, $95 (including chipset)
- Atom Z540, 1.86 GHz, 512 KB, FSB533, Hyper-threading, 2.4 watt, $160 (including chipset)

Hyper-threading is back and just like James Reinders had told me to expect it in every upcoming Intel chip, it isn't really a surprise. Technologically, there are quite a few new things in Atom, but claiming all of them to be path-breaking doesn't make good sense. Its more like bringing the original Pentium back to a new fabrication and adding some lessons learnt from Pentium M. I think any ARM design without much dramatic changes would easily be able to beat Atom today. And if we had Intel giving x86 licenses away, then we would really have an 'apple vs apple' comparison (pun intended!!)... But I'll talk about the architecture some other day...

Is Intel Playing Bully Again ??

You must be thinking Intel has gone crazy with the pricing on this one, but there is some logic behind it. And the logic is called Intel marketing... Intel has been known to sell processors that are not the best performing in the market at higher street price during 'NetBurst' era. AMD alleges that Intel sold its processors at lower prices to PC vendors on the condition that they would sell Intel-only machines. It had major market share then, and I don't think it will be any different now!! If you go by the same logic, probably that margin is only for the lame buyer and not for Intel buddies.

AMD Working With Intel

As odd it may seem, the story holds ground and is one of the useful steps for the Centrino 2 platform of notebooks. Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla claims that AMD is working hard with Intel to develop switchable graphics in future Centrino laptops. AMD is doing this in the notebooks with Puma and wants to have similar technology in notebooks with Intel chips and ATI/AMD graphic cards.

The thing about switchable graphics is that when your laptop is connected to the power unit or had good battery, it will use the graphics card. When the battery is low, it will switch to the onboard graphics. This will save power and make your battery life increase a little. Its generally close to 5-10% improvement, we heard the last time. But for the dying moments of laptop battery, I have experienced that you always remember the important work.

If you look at the image above, you'll see that the plus sign is red, just like red-cross... That's because it's one of the good things being done on the battlefield between Intel and AMD. This news makes you think how bitter rivals AMD and Intel are working together?? But actually its ATI which is working with Intel and I'm sure AMD has told its engineers not to look, talk, have lunch or discuss anything with Intel engineers. They just make faces when they meet and exchange some white documents with each other... Infact, news is that some even show the "middle-finger" to each other :))

Intel Works With 'Water Inside'

If you thought the guys from Intel wearing white astronaut-like suits and dancing was as stupid as Intel marketing could get, then you are for a surprise. Intel TV ads got even worse, when I saw their Centrino advertisement today. Instead of 'Centrino Inside' ...they should call it 'Water Inside'.

Intel is showing an advertisement on Indian television channels which shows that an assembly line equipment sprays colored-water at the back of an Intel chip and fits it into a laptop. The laptop then displays all the colored elements of GUI in a more vivid manner. Actually, the advertisement is meant to celebrate Holi, a festival of color and water in India. But when a chip manufacturer shows spraying water on its processors brings out better colors, its surely a little hard to digest.

And that brings me to the point whether Intel processors are water-proof and water-resistant. To try it out, I poured some colored-water on the pins of the processor and pinned it on my motherboard. I plugged the PC on... and BOOM... I had just burnt and blasted the Centrino!!

I'm still trying to find that TV on Youtube, but no one's uploaded it yet... May be I'll need to record it and upload it... Will do it as soon as they have it showing again!!

Reasons Why Intel Atom Is Getting Press Coverage

Intel Atom, earlier known by its codename Silverthorne, has got a lot of press coverage lately. And the odd thing is that people have talked so much about it although it isn't seen inside any machines, no one knows its performance and Intel hasn't told which UMPCs will end up with this processor. Also its not a killer processor in terms of design or performance. Then why all the press coverage??

According to me, following are 5 reasons why the Intel Atom is getting so much press coverage:

4.) It's CeBIT Time:

The big trade show from Germany, CeBIT is being held and it's that time of the year when all the hardware journos want to write about something. Motherboard and the CeBIT lobby/booth images are the staple from CeBIT, but there is always buzz around one or two special products. Intel got it right and told the world about Intel Atom just before CeBIT. Journalists were just waiting to write about something and a new Intel product is just what the doctor ordered. Throwing in names are enough. So you have Silverthorne as Atom; another variant with higher TDP called Centrino Atom; another chipset name Poulsbo...

3.) Super Low Power:

Although the world does not know the exact performance of Intel Atom, Intel PR told that its a super low power chip. It claims a TDP of 0.6W - 2.5W, which is commendable. Its targeted towards the small devices where battery life is extremely important. But what about performance?? and what about the chipset power?? A new design and package, completely different set of devices - Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). Its changing a lot of stuff...

2.) Intel Marketing Rocks:

Is there any tech company that can beat Intel in marketing? "Intel Inside" was the best one in the tech industry and Intel really sold many chips on the back of that campaign. Centrino is also another great one from Intel. The same has to be said about Intel Atom. Codenames on the processor started coming early and the hype was created. Then came the design goals and the target market for the chip. Then slowly info trickled on its architecture and then the logo and roadmap. Perfect information release timing and just about perfect marketing. 

1.) Who Via ??:

If Via was a slightly bigger name and had the same marketing strength, then I guess the Intel Atom story would have been played down. The VIA Isaiah is a great CPU with excellent performance and good power usage. The Centaur (a Via design-lab) guys have an out-of-order processor which is lot more powerful than the Intel Atom. They are targeted at different power usages, but Via could have waited for an Intel announcement and got back at Intel like AMD used to do at IDF. Via didn't do much to publicize and Intel Atom got the coverage.

Intel To Release Hex-Core Processors

According to Maureen O'Gara from sys-con.com, it seems that Intel is all set to release a processor with Six cores. Yes, you heard me right...six. I think Intel understands that if AMD can start making tri-cores then may be six cores isn't a very bad idea.

The six core or hexacore processor goes by the codename "Dunnington" and has been designed at the Intel Design Center at Bangalore. It is a successor to the Harpertown processors of the Xeon-line of server processors from Intel. It is again supposed to be a sandwich of 3-dies, but this time its 3 dual-core processors that have been stitched together. The cores are sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Like other Penryns, Dunnington still uses a front-side bus. Dunnington is supposed to come at different clock speeds, with a total power consumption of less than 120W.

Intel will be releasing these just before the Nehalem are out and should be an interesting development. AMD on the other hand is just struggling with speed of the processors as well as the manufacturing and releasing of its products. Intel seems to be double of whatever AMD wants to do. AMD Tricore Vs Intel HexaCore.

Intel With Core 2 Duo At 3.3Ghz - Great Overclocker

Intel has won this round of the processor wars, but does not want to sit down and watch AMD. Instead, Intel has made up its mind that its going to continue to hammer (... pun intended) at AMD with better processors. Intel will be releasing a 45nm based Core 2 Duo working at 3.33Ghz on the codename-Wolfdale architecture in the next few weeks. Intel already has these in production and you can expect these sometime in Q2 2008.

The model number for these processors is E8600 and will have a total cache of 6MB. These processors will be manufactured on 45nm and are likely to have a TDP of 65W, which is something of an achievement considering these are 3.3Ghz processors. A 65W TDP ensures that there is enough potential for this processor to overclock and the processor won't mind a little more heat that overclocking causes.

By the looks of it, the E8600 is expected to be a good buy since Intel is pricing it lower than the quad-cores. Intel will also be releasing a few mainstream quad cores in March and hence the E8600 will have great price-performance ratio. AMD is going to struggle again to sell its Phenom Tri-Core and Quad-Core chips in Q2 with the E8600 around!!

Complete Nehalem Details Leaked

True to the earlier reports about Intel's next chips having HT (Hyper-Threading) and integrated-GPU, some more details about Nehalem appeared on the web, courtesy of Japan's PC Watch.

The architecture diagrams mention about 2 threads per core, which was what I had heard from James Reinders earlier. The PCWatch page also has pictures of the updated Intel roadmaps. It also has features of all the different variations of Nehalem that Intel is going to release. The code names of these are Beckton (Oct-core MP), Gainestown (Quad-core DP), Bloomfield (Quad-core, EE-Desktop), Lynnfield (Mainstream Quad-core) and Havendale (Mainstream Dualcore)

 

If you can understand Japanese, then go here and read all about it or use a translator and try to figure out what it means!!

Intel Releases Peryn To Make Life Tougher For AMD

Guest Blogger: Steven Parker
12th Nov, New York

Its been tough time for AMD already, since Core2 Duo was launched. Intel then stuck two of these together and created Quad Cores. These Quad Cores have  been selling like hot cakes, and Intel's making lots of profit. Intel today released its 45nm Peryn processors which are smaller in size and cheaper for Intel to manufacture. This means Intel can earn bigger margins on the same quad core processors. On the other hand, when AMD releases the Phenom its margins will go down because of the large size and competitive pricing as Sunny observed here...

The Intel Peryn is basically the same quad-core but built using a completing new process as well as substrate and gate transistors. Intel manufactures the Peryn using Hafnium-Based High-k Metal Gate Transistors, which seems to be reduce current leakages through gates. Infact, Intel's founder Gordon Moore called the technology "the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years". This technology would allow Intel to make faster processors in the short-term.

From Intel: (click here to read the press released)

New to the Intel line-up of server processors are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2GHz up to 3.20GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 12MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, an FSB of up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 6MB.

The 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors are compatible with server platforms using the Intel® 5000 chipset family. In addition, Intel is launching three platform solutions to support 45nm processors, including:
   The Intel® 5400 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Stoakley") that is optimized for high-bandwidth applications such as high-performance computing (HPC).
   The Intel 5100 Memory Controller Hub chipset and Intel ICH-9R I/O controller (previously codenamed "Cranberry Lake"). These are cost-optimized solutions that support either one or two processors and also provide reduced power consumption using native DDR2 memory.
   The Intel 3200 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Garlow") that is specifically designed for single-processor entry servers.

Supercomputer On A Graphics Card (1 TFlops)

Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...

Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.

But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??

Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.

Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!

All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??