Updated ATI and Intel acceleration results. Do you hate how painfully slow Flash video playback can be...
November 19, 2009
119 comments |
With 2 Cypress chips on 1 card, today marks the day where AMD completes their takeover of the high-end video card...
November 18, 2009
107 comments |
New Update on TRIM fw.Intel and Indilinx SSDs now have TRIM support - we put it to the test. At the same time...
November 17, 2009
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blog post by Liz van Dijk
If you've been keeping up with our articles for a while, you might have picked up on vApus Mark I: the virtualized stress test we created for internal use at the Sizing Servers testlab.
As detailed in Johan's article, this bench consists of 3 separate applications, all of which we are very familiar with due to extensive optimization and stress testing efforts. Although we believe the results published based on this bench speak for themselves, the problem remained that it was impossible for anyone outside our lab to verify the results, seeming as how two out of three of the applications used were owned by private companies and were entrusted to our lab under rather strict conditions (distributing them to the rest of the world sadly not being one of them).
Secondly, vApus M1 being a bench that focuses on fairly heavy VM's, we feel the need to create another point of reference. One that will back up the results of the original, but with a completely different mix of VM's.
Thus began the process of creating vApus For Open Source, or vApus FOS, as we like to call it in the lab.
The idea behind vApus FOS is that the VM's can be freely distributed to any vendors that wish to...
November 17, 2009, 9 comments
cpuchipsets
We have a winner! We've also got AnandTech offered on Amazon's Kindle and a preview of the new AnandTech site redesign. I hint about a call to writers and a potential reader meetup in India. ...
November 13, 2009, 97 comments
cpuchipsets
Today marks a monumental day in the CPU world, as AMD and Intel have settled their differences and dropped all suits against each other. The ramifications are monumental: AMD will officially go fabless...
November 12, 2009, 62 comments
cpuchipsets
Could this be AMD's comeback? It sure looks bold at a high level......
November 11, 2009, 66 comments
cpuchipsets
There's not much to talk about from a CPU standpoint with AMD in 2010, so AMD is heavily focused on 2011 and what it plans to do with its first on-die GPU in Llano. Bobcat and Bulldozer also make it back into the headlines as AMD is long overdue for another microprocessor architecture. Bobcat stands to be AMD's first competitive mobile architecture while Bulldozer may ensure AMD will be competitive at the high end....
November 11, 2009, 54 comments
mac
Over the summer we discovered that Apple's newly redesigned MacBook Pro offered battery life to die for. Approaching 8 hours of battery life on a single charge we were curious to see how the rest of the lineup fared. We won't see any new MacBook Pros until 2010, so if you're buying a new MacBook Pro read on to see the 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch compared....
November 10, 2009, 111 comments
blog post by Ryan Smith
As we mentioned in our previous edition of The Cable Chronicles, Microsoft and CableLabs have come to an agreement to allow the installation and use of CableCARDs on unapproved and non-OEM systems, allowing for the wider proliferation of CableCARD equipped HTPCs beyond the handful of OEM systems that CableLabs had previously approved. With Windows 7 implementing a complete DRM scheme for TV tuners – the Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture – computers running Win7 would be the first to be able to take advantage of these relaxed restrictions.
The limitation at the time was that computers did not come CableCARD-capable out of the box. A Digital Cable Advisor tool was to be released by Microsoft, which would check a computer to make sure it meets all of MS’s and CableLab’s requirements, before going ahead and enabling CableCARD access. That tool was supposed to be released in time for Win7’s launch, but it ended up being AWOL at the time. As Microsoft was not going to publish the complete system requirements for using a CableCARD, this tool was the only way to find out the system requirements.
The tool was finally released this...
November 9, 2009, 32 comments
mb
In our first P55 Overclocking showdown we take a look at the top boards from ASUS, EVGA, and Gigabyte. One failed, the other three made it through our torture tests. Find out which one deserves your attention if you are into serious overclocking on the P55 platform....
November 6, 2009, 58 comments
blog post by Ryan Smith
It’s not often we write about prices going up.
Last week there was a rumor going around that AMD intended to raise prices on the 5800 series. At the time we wrote this off as yet another highly-speculative rumor based on shaky evidence. Official price hikes are virtually unprecedented, after all.
Then things changed.
We’ve talked previously about TSMC – the foundry both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs are manufactured at – having yield issues with their 40nm process. This first surfaced with the Radeon 4770, which at the time of its introduction was being built while TSMC’s yields were below 40%, and this coupled with its popularity made for a significant shortage around its introduction. TSMC continued to improve their yields, and by the time of the Radeon 5000 series launch, AMD told us that they weren’t concerned with yields. As of this summer, TSMC was reporting yields of 60%.
On Friday the 30th, Digitimes broke the word that TSMC’s yields were back down to 40%. This we believe is due to issues TSMC is having ramping up overall 40nm production, but regardless of the reason it represents a 33% drop in usable chips per 40nm wafer. When...
November 5, 2009, 100 comments
cpuchipsets
That's right, just in time for the holidays we've partnered up with Intel to give away a complete Lynnfield Core i7 System....
November 4, 2009, 4251 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
First of all, we were pretty excited to see so many comments and votes (5000!) on our last IT poll. It is good to see that professional IT is so much alive at Anandtech.com. So yes, we should have updated this blog quicker, to keep the momentum going. The reason why this update comes rather late is -once again - that we are working on the much delayed hypervisor comparison. Hundreds of tests have already been done, but we have added more tests to check important I/O performance factors such as VMDq and iSCSI performance.
And of course, the virtualization market is evolving fast. There is a new kid on the block: KVM. Two of the three most important Linux vendors, Red Hat and Canonical, have ripped Xen out of their distributions in favor of KVM. KVM has an interesting philosophy: it simply adds two kernel modules to the Linux kernel to turn the latter into a hypervisor. As a result, KVM can leverage the huge amount of Linux drivers and the Linux kernel improvements such as power management. Still, a virtualization solution needs to mature quite a bit before it is ready. And that is more than a cliche. Xen's support for Windows VMs was for example supposed to work at the beginning of...
November 3, 2009, 31 comments
gadgets
A couple of weeks ago Marvell announced its ARMADA line of custom ARM based SoCs. We have a little more detail on one of its members: the 166E. Marvell hopes that the 166E will pave the way for affordable ebook readers in 2010....
November 3, 2009, 52 comments
storage
We take Seagate's latest drive technology for a quick spin and wonder if SATA 6Gb/s technology will ever benefit desktop based hard drives....
October 29, 2009, 58 comments
blog post by Ryan Smith
For those of you sticking with Vista, Microsoft has finally officially released DirectX 11 for Vista, after having spent the last couple of months in beta. This final release looks to be the same as the last beta released earlier this month.
The update is KB971512, which is being released as part of a larger Platform Update for Vista that includes a few other things that are being backported for Vista. Vista SP2 is the prerequisite, so if you aren’t already on SP2 you’ll need to update.
All of these updates should be available on Windows Update.
We ran a quick sanity check on our Vista install from our Win7 Performance Guide from earlier this week, and there are no surprises. Just like with DX10, DX11 titles (all 2 of them ) perform the same between the two OSes. In this case we’re using BattleForge, along with Unigine’s DX11 Heaven benchmark (it’s synthetic, but pickings are slim for DX11). We’ve also thrown in Crysis for good measure, although it's not a DX11 title.
...
October 28, 2009, 44 comments
blog post by Jarred Walton
Acer recently launched some updated laptops with Windows 7. For that matter, just about every laptop manufacturer out there has new laptops sporting Windows 7, but we're going to start our coverage of mobile press releases with Acer since they were kind enough to send us the pertinent details. (Ed: This blog may be a bit long, but we'll try to do them more often going forward so we can keep it short.)
Our intention going forward is to do more blogs on product announcements, letting you know what new items might be worth a look… or perhaps which ones you should skip. These blogs are not reviews, since we don't have hardware, but we'll try to cover the important details and let you know what we think of the various laptops. And if you're a PR representative from a different manufacturer and you have product information, send me an email. We don't have time to cover every laptop/netbook launch, but the more information we have to pass along, the better informed we can keep our readers.
We recently looked at ASUS' latest foray into the mobile world, the "UnLimited" UL80Vt. It uses a Core 2 Duo SU7300 CPU overclocked to 1.73GHz by default, plus giving users the option to switch between...
October 28, 2009, 40 comments
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