NVIDIA 790i Problems
Published by Codrut Nistor, on April 21st, 2008, in the categories: Mainboards
According to NVIDIA, the mainboards based on their 790i chipset "provide the perfect combination of price and performance for 1600 MHz FSB Intel CPUs. With an arsenal of SLI® technology, high-bandwidth DDR3, unmatched DirectX® 10 gaming, and extreme CPU overclocking, you will smoke the competition." So far, so good, but I don't think they thought people would find themselves in smoke, instead of smoking others...
Fortunately, no 790i-based board caught fire because of overcloking, as far as I know, but a lot of problems involving data corruption appeared, and now even NVIDIA admitted it, posting in its technical forum the following message:"Nvidia has received reports of data corruption when using certain high speed memory and overclocking the front side bus. Our engineers are currently investigating this issue and as soon as we have more information, we will provide an update to this knowledge base article."
Finally, someone admitting such a problem! I am sure this is not the first time, but in most cases, early boards with problems had their issues fixed by later BIOS updates, all being done pretty quietly. Finally, someone is honest. Be sure we'll let you know as soon as more details about this problem arise - hopefully the information that NVIDIA managed to fix it...
Fortunately, no 790i-based board caught fire because of overcloking, as far as I know, but a lot of problems involving data corruption appeared, and now even NVIDIA admitted it, posting in its technical forum the following message:"Nvidia has received reports of data corruption when using certain high speed memory and overclocking the front side bus. Our engineers are currently investigating this issue and as soon as we have more information, we will provide an update to this knowledge base article."
Finally, someone admitting such a problem! I am sure this is not the first time, but in most cases, early boards with problems had their issues fixed by later BIOS updates, all being done pretty quietly. Finally, someone is honest. Be sure we'll let you know as soon as more details about this problem arise - hopefully the information that NVIDIA managed to fix it...
AMD’s 45nm Lineup
Published by Bogdan Alex, on April 21st, 2008, in the categories: CPU
What’s been going on at AMD lately? Everything looks OK, but there’s always room for improvement, as they always say. Phenom X4 CPUs are selling pretty well, but I’m really interested in the upcoming 45nm lineup AMD is preparing for a Q3/Q4 2008 launch. Here’s some more disclosed info on this matter.
Codenamed Shanghai, as you probably already know, the 45nm AMD CPU seems to be nearly identical to the B3 stepping of Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) that was launched several days ago. However, there’s one big difference between the two: Barcelona has its HyperTransport 3.0 clock generator fused off, while Shanghai is supposed to have it unblocked.
Motherboard manufacturers confirm that, with the advent of the Shanghai series, the HT3.0 will only be used for inter-CPU communication. According to DailyTech, AMD engineers even claim that inter-CPU communication is going to be a big deal with the 45nm refresh. The first breadcrumb comes with a new "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently codenamed Istanbul. Of course, AMD has to have its own response for Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor.
An interesting tidbit of info disclosed to DailyTech by AMD is the fact that Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment. No more nonsensical “native-core” bragging from AMD, when Intel still doesn’t have native quad-cores and manages to beat the Phenoms X4 CPUs pretty easily.
With this perspective in mind, it looks like we could actually see twin-die Istanbul processors integrating 12 cores in a single package. Each of these cores will communicate to each other via the now-enabled HT3.0 interconnect on the processor. But in order to take full advantage of these novelties you are supposed to make the leap for Socket 1207 mobos. So the Shanghai CPUs will be more server-oriented, but we might see some decent desktop derivatives as well.
Codenamed Shanghai, as you probably already know, the 45nm AMD CPU seems to be nearly identical to the B3 stepping of Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) that was launched several days ago. However, there’s one big difference between the two: Barcelona has its HyperTransport 3.0 clock generator fused off, while Shanghai is supposed to have it unblocked.
Motherboard manufacturers confirm that, with the advent of the Shanghai series, the HT3.0 will only be used for inter-CPU communication. According to DailyTech, AMD engineers even claim that inter-CPU communication is going to be a big deal with the 45nm refresh. The first breadcrumb comes with a new "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently codenamed Istanbul. Of course, AMD has to have its own response for Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor.
An interesting tidbit of info disclosed to DailyTech by AMD is the fact that Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment. No more nonsensical “native-core” bragging from AMD, when Intel still doesn’t have native quad-cores and manages to beat the Phenoms X4 CPUs pretty easily.
With this perspective in mind, it looks like we could actually see twin-die Istanbul processors integrating 12 cores in a single package. Each of these cores will communicate to each other via the now-enabled HT3.0 interconnect on the processor. But in order to take full advantage of these novelties you are supposed to make the leap for Socket 1207 mobos. So the Shanghai CPUs will be more server-oriented, but we might see some decent desktop derivatives as well.
Terahertz CPUs
Published by Bogdan Alex, on April 20th, 2008, in the categories: CPU
The chase for Gigahertz ended somewhat abruptly when AMD decided that the multi-core technology is the way to improve CPU speeds. Intel already hit the 4GHz barrier and was experiencing problems with the circuitry of those times, which wasn’t capable of providing stable results at +4 GHz. Everybody embraced the multi-core technology and the current maximum clocks swirl around 3 GHz. This is an energy efficient way, no doubt, but scientists already have ideas to ramp up the clock speed at a faster pace again. From their point of view, Terahertz CPUs may be within reach in the near future. This would be possible if the current electronic circuitry could be replaced by optical technology.
Remember what Intel’s Pat Gelsinger said back in 2001? He claimed that 30 to 40 GHz may be reached by 2010. He forgot to mention that those CPUs might require mini nuclear power plants to actually be of any use. Intel’s predictions are known to be quite inexact from time to time. Anyhow, Ajay Nahata, from University of Utah, predicts that in about ten years, CPUs could be running at Terahertz speeds witht the aid of some advanced far-infrared optical circuitry.
“Electronic circuits today work at gigahertz frequencies – billions of cycles per second,” Nahata stated. “[…]we’ve demonstrated the first step toward making circuits that use terahertz radiation and ultimately might work at terahertz speeds or a thousand times faster than today’s gigahertz-speed computers.”
The first setup that was used to achieve 0.3 THz speeds included pieces of stainless steel foil measuring 4” x 1” in area size and 625 microns thickness - or 6.25 times the thickness of a human hair. The scientists perforated the metal with rectangular holes, each measuring 500 microns by 50 microns. The rectangular holes were arranged side by side in three different patterns to form “wires” for terahertz radiation – one of which “successfully” carried terahertz radiation in a straight line, while other two changed the direction towards the terahertz radiation was moving through splitting or coupling.
This is only part of a scientific demonstration, but Nahata says there’s always room for improvement and in several years, the Terahertz barrier could be broken.
Remember what Intel’s Pat Gelsinger said back in 2001? He claimed that 30 to 40 GHz may be reached by 2010. He forgot to mention that those CPUs might require mini nuclear power plants to actually be of any use. Intel’s predictions are known to be quite inexact from time to time. Anyhow, Ajay Nahata, from University of Utah, predicts that in about ten years, CPUs could be running at Terahertz speeds witht the aid of some advanced far-infrared optical circuitry.
“Electronic circuits today work at gigahertz frequencies – billions of cycles per second,” Nahata stated. “[…]we’ve demonstrated the first step toward making circuits that use terahertz radiation and ultimately might work at terahertz speeds or a thousand times faster than today’s gigahertz-speed computers.”
The first setup that was used to achieve 0.3 THz speeds included pieces of stainless steel foil measuring 4” x 1” in area size and 625 microns thickness - or 6.25 times the thickness of a human hair. The scientists perforated the metal with rectangular holes, each measuring 500 microns by 50 microns. The rectangular holes were arranged side by side in three different patterns to form “wires” for terahertz radiation – one of which “successfully” carried terahertz radiation in a straight line, while other two changed the direction towards the terahertz radiation was moving through splitting or coupling.
This is only part of a scientific demonstration, but Nahata says there’s always room for improvement and in several years, the Terahertz barrier could be broken.
Lite-ON DH-401S Reads PS3 Discs
Published by Bogdan Alex, on April 19th, 2008, in the categories: News
Blu-ray might have won the format war, but it looks like this technology still struggles to get massively adopted by the HD-hungry fans. Prices for BD-players are still high, blank discs are too pricey, the content is not yet varied enough and Blu-ray PC drives don’t seem to be needed as of yet. You could get a PS3 or a laptop that has a BD drive for a more effective way of spending your money. Wait, if you have a PS3 and a PC BD drive, would it be possible to use PS3 discs with your PC rig? They say it won’t, but Lite-ON has a different opinion.
The Lite-ON DH-401S PC drive wasn’t advertised as being so smart, but some people actually reported that it has the ability to read PS3 Blu-ray discs. Now, all you have to do is buy one of these drives and figure out how to make PS3 games work on your PC with some kind of wonder emulator.
You’ve probably heard of some cool PS2 emulators that are supposed to let you play PS2 games on your PC, but the sad fact is these emulators are far from offering a pleasant experience. You could play some games that aren’t graphics intensive, but most games will fail to run smoothly o your PC, although the actual PCs should be faster than the PS2.
So it’s more likely you won’t be playing PS3 games on your PC anytime soon because emulators need to be specifically optimized for PC components, and this thing could take several years. However, I reckon that hackers everywhere are thrilled at this prospect. At least they can easily find a way to extract useful data, or make copies using this drive. Heh, I don’t really mean to give them nasty ideas now, I’m just talking about the possibilities. They’ll do what they know best anyhow.
The drive is sort of cheap, it only costs around $150. If you somehow feel the urge of hacking something, go with this drive and experiment a bit.
The Lite-ON DH-401S PC drive wasn’t advertised as being so smart, but some people actually reported that it has the ability to read PS3 Blu-ray discs. Now, all you have to do is buy one of these drives and figure out how to make PS3 games work on your PC with some kind of wonder emulator.
You’ve probably heard of some cool PS2 emulators that are supposed to let you play PS2 games on your PC, but the sad fact is these emulators are far from offering a pleasant experience. You could play some games that aren’t graphics intensive, but most games will fail to run smoothly o your PC, although the actual PCs should be faster than the PS2.
So it’s more likely you won’t be playing PS3 games on your PC anytime soon because emulators need to be specifically optimized for PC components, and this thing could take several years. However, I reckon that hackers everywhere are thrilled at this prospect. At least they can easily find a way to extract useful data, or make copies using this drive. Heh, I don’t really mean to give them nasty ideas now, I’m just talking about the possibilities. They’ll do what they know best anyhow.
The drive is sort of cheap, it only costs around $150. If you somehow feel the urge of hacking something, go with this drive and experiment a bit.
Largest Enterprise-Class HDD
Published by Codrut Nistor, on April 18th, 2008, in the categories: Hard Drives
Boys and girls, this is not something you're going to play with at home, unless you have a server in the basement, and it doesn't provide an insane capacity either, but since when we talk about enterprise storage solutions, speed and reliability come in first place, I am not surprised to see that the largest hard drive for this market has "only" 450GB...
Coming from Hitachi, the Ultrastar 15K450 has the following technical specifications:
450GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
183 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
4 platters, 8 recording heads
2090 Mb/s max. media data rate
3.6 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
15,000 RPM, 2.0 ms average latency
3Gb/s SAS, 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces
16 MB data buffer
25.8 mm in height (max)
750 in weight (max)
250 G/2 ms pulse non-operating shock
SAS: 13.3 watt idle power
FCAL: 13.4 watt idle power
3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
5 to 55 degrees C operating temperature
Related to this product, Dean Amini, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' director of enterprise market and strategy, says "With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacenter’s footprint and overall power requirements. Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environment."
Coming from Hitachi, the Ultrastar 15K450 has the following technical specifications:
450GB (GB = 1 billion bytes, accessible capacity may be less)
183 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
4 platters, 8 recording heads
2090 Mb/s max. media data rate
3.6 ms average seek time (with command overhead)
15,000 RPM, 2.0 ms average latency
3Gb/s SAS, 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces
16 MB data buffer
25.8 mm in height (max)
750 in weight (max)
250 G/2 ms pulse non-operating shock
SAS: 13.3 watt idle power
FCAL: 13.4 watt idle power
3.7 Bels typical idle acoustics
5 to 55 degrees C operating temperature
Related to this product, Dean Amini, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' director of enterprise market and strategy, says "With the higher capacity and performance of the Ultrastar 15K450, enterprises are able to address their throughput requirements using fewer drives, which reduces three things; the cost of ownership, the datacenter’s footprint and overall power requirements. Coupled with our intensive testing and quality assurance process, the Ultrastar 15K450 offers the highest available performance and reliability for mission-critical computing environment."
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