Alive and well :)

by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 14, 2006 9:32 AM EST
Hey guys (and according to our stats: the 2% of you that are gals), I've neglected this blog for far too long and I know it's bad when I'm getting emails asking if I'm still alive.

I'm pretty beat from the Conroe article, but I'll at least give you a brief update on what's been going on over the past couple of months:

1) We're out of Connecticut and back home (at the new place!) in NC. There's not as much traffic, roads are better, weather is better, I'm overall a happier camper these days.

2) Vinney is hard at work studying for the bar, giving me a constant reminder that under no circumstances could I ever be a lawyer.

3) Core 2 is off of my shoulders finally, I hope you guys enjoy the article. I could've done better but Intel wanted to launch now instead of at the end of this month, which really cut into my benchmarking time.

4) Right before I went to bed, at around 3AM, one of our servers died and my heart stopped. Later I found out that it was apparently just Windows update rebooting the system, I laughed and went to sleep.

5) I'm working on a review of Sony's UMPC (terrible) as well as the first generation set top Blu-ray (eh) and HD-DVD players (not as terrible as Sony's UMPC, but still pretty disappointing).

6) I haven't asked this in a while, so let me do it here: what articles would you all like me to be working on?

7) There are a wealth of follow up articles I am contemplating doing based on some of the data in our Core 2 piece. I will at least be looking at AMD's new EE/EE SFF processors, and at best I may be able to do some more investigative work with Core 2.

I think that's the brain dump for today, I will get back onto a regular schedule with this thing. I know I say it a lot, but this time I mean it...maybe ;)

Take care and have a great weekend :)
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  • Whohangs - Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - link

    I would love to see more enterprise reviews. The server reviews with the db benchmarks were excellent, and are something that few other sites are doing. A review of SAN storage devices would be great also. Large USB storage, NAS (like Infrant's ReadyNAS products), and SAN system reviews would be great. There are very few good reviews of these devices and these devices are quickly moving into the home and small business market.
  • OBCT - Monday, July 17, 2006 - link

    How about some reviews of the ATI AM2 motherboards? Heh.
  • Patsoe - Monday, July 17, 2006 - link

    Hi, great to see a new blog post!
    Ofcourse we knew you were alive, cause if something had happened that would be on every major news website...

    My request would be that you write a usability review of the net VT/Pacifica goodness in the Core2 and AMD's socket AM2 chips. The stuff that other websites have produced on this topic is completely incomprehensible for a techy without a computer-science degree :)

    Please? Thanks!
  • Patsoe - Monday, July 17, 2006 - link

    typo... net -> new
  • Jeff7181 - Monday, July 17, 2006 - link

    For a while now I've considered AnandTech's overclocking tests lacking compared to other sites. You don't need to break out the liquid nitrogen every time a new model or core revision comes out... but it would be nice to see AT push a processor to it's limits and put up some insane numbers just for kicks like other sites do.

    Along with that idea, I'd like to see more enthusiast type articles. For a while now AT has felt like a news site, not an enthusiast site. Show us minimum frame rates, image quality comparisons, and some nerdy stuff like an article about the Core architecture and what makes it perform better than other architectures... and what could or should be changed about other architectures like the K8 to make it competative with Core. Would be nice to see that kinda stuff here so I don't have to go to other sites like Ars or HOCP.
  • VinDSL - Saturday, July 15, 2006 - link

    I've been reading/studying everything I could find on the 'Conroe' for the last month or so -- blogs, boards, clocker sites, press releases, you name it. Your Core 2 'birthday' report was 'dead nuts on' Anand! Best one on the web, IMHO! Really! Kudos, my friend!

    Truely, 'The Empire Strikes Back', both Intel and Anandtech!!! :)
  • contractcooker - Saturday, July 15, 2006 - link

    I know that this isn't a typical anandtech article but I've been dying for a comparison between macs and pcs running OS X. I've messed around some with OS X on my PC but my hardware config has a lot of components which are incompatible with the Apple OS. It would be really great to be able to build a hackbook pro at a greatly reduced price.
  • Illissius - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link

    As awesome new video cards aren't coming before autumn, new Apple things aren't coming before WWDC either, and you just reviewed the Core 2s, which are the only other exciting things I can think of right now, I don't have many ideas. Maybe do a preview of Vista (with actual substance, benchmarks etc. even if the OS is still beta, not just another regurgitated press release).

    Or switch to Linux for a while (I'm thinking Ubuntu), and then do a big article about it, like you did for the Mac. I assume this would be beyond the scope of 'what article should I write', though. I can probably guess the conclusion, too, (tons of progress, not quite there yet), but I'd love to see an independent analysis from someone I can trust. (Which is basically you, and the Ars Technica folks. And TR, but they don't do OS reviews, or anything besides Windows for that matter.)
  • athfbum - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link

    I would like to see an overclocking guide to the Core 2 Duo E6300
  • vaystrem - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link

    Welcome back Anand and fantastic work on the Core 2 Duo Launch article! I can't imagine how much work that took.

    I was wondering if someone at Anandtech will be looking into the supposed RAID issues and IO performance problems 'supposedly' plaguing the Woodcrest/Conroe. The only things I've been able to dig up on this is from the following two links, it'd be interesting to see a good writeup/exploration of this issue I think. The Inquirer is always 'interesting' but I'd like to see some actual testing done to confirm or dismiss all of this.

    http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32818">Article 1
    http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32...">Article 2

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