Vista successor has a name

The project previously codenamed "Vienna" is now... Windows 7!! Let's see... Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista. Yep, that's six, so the next would logically be seven. Good thing the folks over at Microsoft can count. Of course, 7 probably won't be the actual release name. At least I hope not. 7 is slated to be out around 2010, just three years after Vista. Not much news on new features yet. It looks like MS is back on their more regular launch schedule for new operating systems.

John Carmack poo-poos PPUs

John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, co-creator of industry defining video game titles such as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3d, DOOM (and its sequels), and Quake (and its sequels), and whose graphics engines have been used in games such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Half-Life, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and many others, spoke on his belief in the unimportance of Physics Processing Units (PPUs) which are dedicated physics processors for the PC. At the moment Ageia's PhysX card is the only PPU on the market. Current hardware can't handle the computational load that complex physics calculations place on the CPU. PPUs are there only to handle physics calculations, similar to how a graphics card takes the load off the CPU for graphics rendering. Carmack believes that future multi-core CPUs should easily be able to handle these types of physics calculations. ATI/AMD and nVidia also have plans in the works to use additional graphics cards as physics processors in the future, though it would require 2 or more graphics cards in a system.

I would tend to agree with Carmack on this one for three reasons. First, because he is a freaking genius, and he knows what he's talking about. If Carmack says PPUs are unnecessary, he's probably designed a system with his newest graphics engine, or a future prototype, to circumvent the problem. Second, at the rate that CPU and GPU technology is increasing, I don't think realistic physics will be a problem before long, with Intel coming out with 8 core CPUs here in the next couple years. Third, the market for these kinds of add-in cards is very small. The hard-core gamer who needs everything looking spectacular on a 30" monitor is about 1% of the total computer user market, and maybe 5% of the gaming market. These are the people that shell out $1,000 for dual graphics cards, $700 on a CPU, 4GB of RAM, etc... That doesn't leave a lot of opportunities for sales for companies like Ageia. The casual gamer with a mid-range graphics card, a gig or two of RAM, and a $100 CPU, who plays their favorite games 2 or 3 days a week, isn't going to shell out $300 more on a card that just makes physics better. This is the large majority of gamers. These types of people care more about the fun factor of the game, not so much the eye candy.

I know I won't be buying one of these PPUs anytime soon. I don't game nearly as much as I used to anymore, and I'd rather wait until nVidia and ATI/AMD get their physics processing technologies out. I'd rather have 2 graphics cards with 1 set of drivers, than a graphics card and a physics card, each with their own drivers. Fewer different devices and fewer drivers leads to less complications and headaches, which is just fine with me. :)

source: Engadget

AMD Q2 financial stats released

AMD posted their financial earnings and losses for the 2nd quarter of this year on July 19th. Total revenue was $1.378 billion, up from $1.216 billion in this quarter of 2006. Unfortunately, increased revenue was offset by increased expenses, and AMD's net losses totaled $600 million this quarter, despite a 38% increase in CPU shipments.

AMD's rival, Intel, reported their Q2 earnings just the day before. With a revenue of $8.7 billion, and net income of $1.3 billion for the quarter.

source: Dailytech

My take:

So AMD has had 2 consecutive quarters of fairly large losses. $611 million in Q1, $600 million in Q2. That's pretty bad for a company that brings in a total revenue of just above $1 billion per quarter. A lot of talk across the geeky areas of the interweb the last 6 months or so has been centered on AMD's financial troubles. The Intel camp sees this as the demise of AMD as a company, probably to be bought out by a large corporation like IBM. The AMD fanboys (which I am sometimes) are quick to point out Intel's anti-competitive practices, such as giving OEMs like HP and Dell large price cuts on CPUs if they didn't buy AMD CPUs. Of course, that has obviously been stopped recently, as about half of all HP PCs are equipped with AMD CPUs, and Toshiba, Dell, Acer, and Gateway/Emachines all use some AMD CPUs in their systems now.

In my opinion, this is definitely a bad time for AMD, but by no means is it the end. At the moment, Intel is almost 2 generations ahead technologically, but AMD hasn't put out a truely new product to compete with the Core 2 Duo in a long time. That will hopefully change later this summer with the launch of Barcelona. If Barcelona flops, or AMD can't get production up quick enough, they will certainly be bleeding red financially by the end of the year.

But will AMD be allowed to die? Would the US gov't, and the governments of the world allow Intel to snatch up AMD's market share to add onto the 70%+ market share they already have. AMD is Intel's largest and pretty much only competitor in the microprocessor market, and they have a lowly ~20% market share. My prediction, if AMD's financial woes continue, is this... I can see a situation similar to the Chrysler bail-out by the US gov't back in the 80's. Maybe AMD won't be saved by our gov't, but someone will do it. The US gov't saw the danger to the economy of losing one of three major auto builders. Of course, cars were the country's big booming business back then. Now computer technology is, and now there are only two major players instead of three. Giving Intel a market with essentially no competition would be horrible for consumers around the globe. They would have no reason to pour huge amounts of money into Research and Development. They would have no price wars to make their products affordable to the average consumer.

Let me tell you a story, if you'd care to listen for a bit.

The Pentium 4 processors were a good example of what could happen in this sort of market. Intel didn't see AMD as a threat in the market. At the time, they weren't much of a threat. Most of their CPUs were barely competitive with the new Pentium 4. Intel reused the same architecture (Netburst) for several generations of CPUs, adding small tweaks and features here and there. Netburst could scale to huge frequencies, up to 3.8ghz (not counting overclocking; some of these CPUs could hit 7ghz on exotic cooling like liquid nitrogen), but they were horribly inefficient. They were power hungry. They were so hot the higher end models almost required water cooling to run optimally. Intel ramped up the frequencies, and the populace began to believe that higher numbers meant always better. People shelled out big money for these Pentium 4 processors because they were told by Intel that a higher number followed by "ghz" was better. Then a few generations later, along comes AMD with its Athlon XP processor. Not anything amazing, but a worthy competitor performace-wise to the P4. But nobody notices. Then AMD becomes the first to market with a 64 bit CPU, the Athlon 64. Again nobody notices. Why? Intel has outmarketed and hypnotized the computing population with higher numbers. The numbers were higher, but the performance wasn't. A 2.0 ghz Athlon 64 is the equal of and even marginally better than a 3.2 ghz Pentium 4. Slowly AMD starts gaining market share on Intel. The wool is pulled off the consumers' eyes. At the release of the Athlon 64, AMD is sitting at ~15% share. By 2005, they're up to ~28%, their highest ever. Intel is finally taking notice. They realize they can't shove their outdated Netburst architecture down the throats of consumers anymore. People have realized that AMD CPUs are faster, produce less heat, provide longer battery life in laptops, and are just generally better. Over the last year or two they've dumped their savings into R&D on a new architecture, and in a short amount of time, leap three generations technologically over their own current CPUs, and are suddenly back on top.

This tells me that they believed that they were the king of the hill because their marketing machine was holding their old technology on top. When AMD started digging the hill out from under them, they finally saw that they had some real competition, and kicked things into high gear. This scenario would play itself out again if Intel no longer had any competition for real.

Anyway, that's enough ranting for tonight. I tried to be as little of an AMD fanboy there as possible.

Right now, Intel is on top because they have a superior CPU. If I had money, I would probably have a Core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad. I tend to go for the best bang for the buck, because I'm a broke college student, and I enjoy overclocking. But I will always root for AMD, because for several years, they have provided superior technology at a lower price than Intel. And I like rooting for the underdog. It keeps things interesting.

Awesome new Logitech webcams!

Before the end of this month, Logitech will be launching a new duo of webcams featuring Carl Zeiss Tessar lenses. This is similar to what Sony's higher end digital cameras pack, namely the W, T, and H series cameras. Sony W series cameras are simply amazing. The Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 and Quickcam Pro for Notebooks will feature full 2MP video recording at 30 frames per second, less than 3 second auto refocus, and compatibility with all major instant messenger programs and Skype. Still shots can be taken at up to 8MP. The Quickcams will also be equipped with Logitech's RightLight technology, and an integrated microphone with RightSound technology. You can read more HERE at Logitech's site.

source: Engadget

Wow IBM... Wow!!

IBM announced a new revision of its Blue Gene supercomputers last week, the Blue Gene/P. The current revision, the Blue Gene/L, owned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is currently the world's most powerful supercomputer, with 131,072 700MHz IBM PowerPC 440 processors for a total processing power of 280 teraFLOPs, or 280 trillion floating point operations per second. The average consumer desktop PC can do about 3 gigaFLOPs, or 3 billion operations per second. So the older Blue Gene/L is about 140,000 times more powerful than that box sitting under your desk. Blue Gene/P on the other hand, is fully capable of pushing 1 petaFLOP! 1 QUADRILLION operations per second.

That's a 1 with 15 zeros. Three times more powerful than the current most powerful supercomputer on the planet. And IBM has already released plans for an alternate configuration capable of 3 petaFLOPs! The petaFLOP version of the Blue Gene/P has 294,912 850mhz IBM PowerPC 450 processors. The 3 petaFLOP version has 884,736 of the same 850 mhz processors. The Blue Gene/P is also at least seven times more energy efficient than any other current supercomputer, according to IBM. The first Blue Gene/P system will be used by the US Dept of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, right here in the great state of Illinois.

source: Dailytech

John C Dvorak, your dream has come true...

If any of you read PC Magazine, as I do, you know who John C Dvorak is. If not, well, he's kind of a big name in the PC industry. Every issue, he has two seperate columns in PC magazine, along with several other publications, and his own blog. Anyway, for the last several months, one of his biggest gripes with the industry has been the lack of what are called Hybrid Hard Drives (HHD's for short). HHD's utilize flash memory for the disk write cache, instead of a small RAM chip, like standard HDD's (Hard Disk Drive)....

The disk write cache holds data that is frequently accessed from the HDD by the system RAM, so that data can be accessed quicker than reading it straight from the HDD. Standard HDD's have caches of 2MB, 8MB, 16MB, or 32MB with some of the newer 750GB to 1TB (TerraByte or 1,024 GigaBytes) drives. HHD's on the other hand use flash memory which is cheaper to produce in larger capacities. A HHD could have a write cache of 128MB, 256MB or even up to 1GB. This would reduce the amount of time the hard drive would have to be spinning to seek data, as it would all be written to the cache at once, and the hard drive could be in an idle state for longer amounts of time, decreasing wear on the drive, and decreasing power consumption. Unfortunately, these HHD's are only supported in Windows Vista by the Vista ReadyDrive feature. The good news is this could potentially increase battery life in a laptop by as much as 30 minutes. For desktop users, it should still mean better hard drive performance, as data would be retrieved directly from the cache , and the disk platters themselves would have to be accessed less often .

CMS products is taking pre-orders right now for the first of these HHD's, produced by Samsung. This version of the Samsung MH80 is a 2.5", 160GB drive carrying a price tag of $299. The MH80 has 256MB of flash cache. Samsung has also announced 80GB and 160GB versions of the MH80 drive. Drives are expected to ship no later than July 2nd.

Buying a printer soon?

For anyone who's looking to buy a printer in the near, or far, future, this guide is for you. The folks over at PC World have put together this great guide on what to look for when buying a printer, whether it's a cheapo inkjet for printing twice a year, or a massive color laser all-in-one machine that will be printing 200 pages a day. Some really good info to help you make your decision. It's all right HERE!

Also, PC World's list of their Top Ten choices for best printers in all categories, HERE.

Who knew a table could be so awesome??

This has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It's Microsoft Surface. OK, so the name isn't all that cool, but that's exactly what it is. A surface. It can take the place of any surface. A table, a desk, a counter-top in a store. It responds to touch, can sense items laid on it, and best of all, it can sense multiple touches and items at once, unlike a traditional touchscreen, which can only sense one. Beyond that, it's kinda hard to explain. You really just have to visit the Microsoft Surface website to check it out.

Toshiba and AMD: Together at last

Toshiba, the 4th largest manufacturer of laptop PCs in the world, announced earlier this week that it would begin purchasing AMD CPUs to put in their laptop computers. Toshiba says it plans on putting AMD CPUs in about 20% of its laptop lineup. This breaks many years of exclusivity to Intel by Toshiba, which is a great thing for everyone. Intel's current Core 2 Duo processors may be faster right at the moment, but AMDs Turion chips have been show to be more energy efficient and create less heat, which is great for laptops especially. And competition is never a bad thing, especially in an oligopoly like the CPU industry. Toshiba plans to have several models with AMD processors out this summer. Systems with AMD chips sell for up to $82 less, on average, than a comparable model with an Intel chip.

Source: ZDNet

Dell goes retail!

Those of us with an above average interest in computing will most likely make weird faces at you if you ask one of us our opinion on buying a Dell. It's true, we're not big fans. They use cheap components, have completely inadequate tech support (if you can even get someone who speaks passable english), and their advertisements are deceptive to say the least.

So who would make a great partner for Dell's first venture into the retail world?? None other than.... Wal-Mart!! That's right. Dell announced Thursday that it would start selling PCs via America's #1 retailer in June. Starting June 10th, Wal-Mart will start carrying 2 models of Dell's Dimension desktop computers for under $700 bundled with accessories. Dell has been selling computers for 23 years, none of which have been through retail stores. This is probably in response to losing the top spot as the world's #1 computer manufacturer to Hewlett Packard last year. Hewlett Packard has been very aggressive in its retail sales through stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, and Wal-Mart as well. And it might have something to do with HP's decent tech support and customer service. I think a lot of people have finally thrown in the towel on dealing with Dell and moved on to greener pastures. Maybe this is exactly what Dell needs to regain the top spot though. Only time can tell...

Phenom, Fusion and Stars! Oh my!!

The folks from AMD have recently released new names for upcoming projects they're working on: the AMD Phenom processor, the new Stars CPU naming, and the Fusion platform.

First off, we have the new Phenom CPU. This is simply AMD's replacement for the Athlon name on their high end desktop CPUs. Instead of the Athlon X2, X4, and Athlon FX, we'll now have the Phenom X2 and X4, and Phenom FX. The Athlon and Sempron names will stay where they are on the mid-range and low end respectively. The Phenom name should start coming on packages when the Agena (aka Barcelona) core CPUs start shipping later this year. It's gonna take this geek a little time to get used to saying he has an AMD Phenom CPU now... AMD also announced a new naming standard for all their processors. No longer will you have to tell everyone you have an AMD Athlon (or Phenom) X2 4400+ 1MB L2 Toledo core. According to Dailytech, it will be more like "Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 45W 1MB L2 Brisbane" to "AMD BE-2400." For more info on the full lineup of Phenom CPUs, check out this article from Anandtech.

Stars, on the other hand, is a much wider name change. The last several generations of AMD CPU cores have all had city names. Barcelona, Winchester, Windsor, Brisbane, Venice, etc... Now AMD is switching to star names for its CPU cores. Agena, Kuma, Rana, and Spica are among the first. Pretty cool, eh? But that's not all. With the new names comes new technology too. The Stars CPUs will incorporate the new HyperTransport 3.0 technology, replacing HyperTransport 1.0. HT 3.0 will still be backwards compatible with HT 1.0. HT 3.0 should provide about double the memory bandwidth of HT 1.0, and will also allow the integrated memory controller and CPU to run at different frequencies. This should provide a great deal better performance with new PCI-Express 2.0 and multi-CPU systems in the near future. Stars processors will also introduce a 128-bit floating point unit for each core of the CPU, and support for DDR2-1066 RAM. Also supported are SSE4A instruction sets. Another big new feature is the addition of a shared L3 cache on Agena and Kuma core CPUs. All Stars CPUs will be compatible with both socket AM2+ and AM2.

While Phenom and Stars are changes that will be made in the next year or so, Fusion is a way off, but no less exciting. Fusion, at it's core, is the combination of CPU and GPU onto a single processing chip, for massive processing power. GPUs currently have tremendous parellel processing power, which, along with the ability to generate realistic 3d images, gives them incredible floating point processing capabilities, which goes largely unexploited. CPUs on the other hand, handle data sequentially. GPUs are good at handling certain types of data that CPUs are rather slow at, and vice versa. Fusion aims to combine them, to create a chip that can handle all types of data, and handle it at speeds unheard of today. But, the success of this depends on software support of the system, among other things. Just like 64-bit CPUs today, which have largely gone unsupported by the software industry, Fusion may not gain their support either. If it does not, then it will merely be a CPU, with an integrated graphics processor built onto the same chip. The GPU will not be used to its full capability for running programs where massive parallel processing is ideal. It will stay much as it is today. A 3d rendering chip. This is seen by much of the industry as a big gamble by AMD. Will it pay off? Who knows. It certainly looks like the next logical step in technology to me though.

If you'd like to read more about Fusion, read these stories at TGDaily, and Anandtech.

Laptop hard drives get another boost

Fujitsu announced today that they are in the process of developing a 250GB 2.5" hard drive for laptops. The drive should be available in the 2nd quarter of this year. Fujitsi released in March the world's first 160GB 2.5" 7200 RPM hard drive. Exciting stuff for mobile users! More info here.

ATI X2900XT out finally!!

At long last, ATI's R600 GPU has hit the market in the form of the X2900XT! As of right now, Ewiz.com is the only etailer I can find carrying it. With 512MB of GDDR3 RAM onboard, a core clock of 750mhz, and RAM speeds hitting 1.65ghz, it looks pretty impressive. Preliminary benchmarks put it fairly even with the Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX, but I haven't seen any official benchmarks yet. The main addition to the X2K line is the addition of DirectX10 compatibility. It's sitting at $410 per card tonight, but should drop fairly soon. That's all I have for right now. Hopefully some official benchmarks will surface soon. Goodnight folks!


edit: The official name for this card is not X2900XT. It is in fact the HD 2900XT.

20 inch HP gaming laptop???

That's right... a 20" laptop. Can this even be considered a laptop? Who in their right mind would lug this thing around? Dell's 20" XPS laptop weighs in at 20 lbs!! For the sake of lumbars and shoulders everywhere, I hope this thing is lighter, but I highly doubt it. I hope it at least delivers on the promise of being a gaming machine. It's not on the market yet, but it's coming. Check it out here on Engadget.

Update: Dailytech.com has some new information on this monster. Apparently weighing in at 12 pounds, it should come equipped with a Core 2 Duo CPU, a Geforce Go 8000 series GPU, 4 speakers plus subwoofer, and the new Intel integrated Draft-N wireless adapter. All on the new Intel Santa Rosa platform. It also has a built in media remote, tv tuner, and HDMI output port. Wow. This will be way out of my price range, but a geek can still drool over things he will never possess...

AMD cuts CPU prices again

AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, dropped prices on their microprocessor chips again today. For those of you who don't know the name, AMD is the worlds second largest producer of CPUs, or Central Processing Units. They are now also the worlds second largest producer of GPUs, or Graphics Processing Units, after their aquisition of ATI at the end of 2006. ATI also produces the graphics processors for the Xbox-360 and Nintendo Wii, along with processors for devices like cell phones and HD TVs.

Some of the cuts on AMDs mainstream Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors were as large as 48%. You can now purchase a dual-core AMD CPU for a mere $73!! Those of you looking to build a budget desktop system with an AMD CPU, now would be a good time.

You can read the full story (here) at Extremetech and (here) at TG Daily.

First remote code execution virus hits Vista

This new virus, which is oddly enough carried by animated cursor files, allows a remote user to execute code on your pc if you become infected. Vista is not the only version of Windows affected, and is actually more resistant to the virus than XP, 2000, etc... But this is the first publicly announced remote code execution vulnerability for Vista. I know Cody is going to love this one.

You can read the story (here), and watch a video of a McAfee employee send Vista into an endless reboot loop via this virus. Be careful folks!


IF YOU USE WINDOWS, DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANY NEW ANIMATED CURSORS UNTIL MICROSOFT HAS FIXED THIS VULNERABILITY!!!