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...
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. ...
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...
cpuchipsets
Could this be AMD's comeback? It sure looks bold at a high level......
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...
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....
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...
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....
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...
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....
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...
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....
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
...
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...
If you read our last article, it is clear that when your applications are virtualized, you have a lot more options to choose from in order to build your server infrastructure . Let us know how you would build up your "dynamic datacenter" and why!
{poll 157:440}
...
Last week NVIDIA released their first set of end-user OpenCL drivers. Previously OpenCL drivers had only been available for developers on the NVIDIA side of things, and this continues to be the case on the AMD side of things. With NVIDIA’s driver release, the launch of AMD’s 5800 series, and some recent developments with OpenCL, this is a good time to recap the current state of OpenCL, and what has changed since our OpenCL introductory article from last year.
A CPU & GPU Framework
Although we commonly talk about OpenCL alongside GPUs, it’s technically a hardware agnostic parallel programming framework. Any device implementing OpenCL should be cable of running any OpenCL kernel, so long as the developers take in to account querying the host device ahead of time as to not spawn too many threads at once. And while GPUs (being the parallel beasts that they are) are the primary focus, OpenCL is also intended for use on CPUs and more exotic processors such as the Cell BE and DSPs.
What this means is that when it comes to discussing the use of OpenCL on computers, we have two things to focus on. Not only is there the use of OpenCL on the GPU, but there’s the...
Our good friends over at GSkill passed along this press release about their 4GB DDR3 kits being used in the winning P55 system in the F1OC overclocking competition. We have had great success utilizing their Ripjaws and Perfect Storm kits in our P55 testing.
"G.Skill wins the F1OC
SuperPi 32M on Intel P55 contest.
Taipei,
Taiwan?2nd October, 2009?G.Skill International Co. Ltd.,
manufacturer of extreme performance memory with solid quality, wins the
ultimate overclocking contest, F1 OC,
in the second stage competition.
G.SKILL
wins the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 7th places in F1OC competition, which is held by
two of the most famous overclocking communities, xtremesystem.org and
Hwbot.org. All the participants in the F1OC contest are the world’s top
overclockers and they have the world’s best hardware to compete with each
other. In the second stage of this competition, the rule is to make the fastest
super pi 32M on P55 platform and G.Skill has won the 1st,
3rd, 4th, and 7th place among the top ten places.
This
result once again proves G.Skill’s leading technology on developing extreme
performance computer...
We had a significant amount of requests for Flight Simulator X results in our Core i5/i7 and P55 coverage. I was able to run some quick comparison results between the Bloomfield and Lynnfield platforms last night to answer most of the email and comments requests. However, I am still running the Phenom II and Core 2 Quad benches. I do not know if we will be able to have those results in our P55 roundups that start in a couple of days. If not, I will follow up with these particular performance updates in another blog.
Test Setup-
We are utilizing our standard P55/X58 setups for this test. The 920/860/870 platforms are using 7-7-7-20 1T DDR3-1600 memory configurations. The 750 platform is running at DDR3-1333 with 6-6-6-18 1T timings since the 12x multiplier is not available on the i5/750. The X58 platform is equipped with 6GB of memory and the P55 with 8GB. Turbo mode and Hyper-Threading is enabled as designed and shipped from Intel. All other BIOS settings are at stock ratios.
We enabled DX10, AA/AF, set the Aircraft, Scenery, Weather, and Traffic sliders to Ultra High, and then measured a pre-recorded six minute flight around Honolulu with FRAPS at...
A couple weeks ago, we posted our review of the Acer 751h. The claim to fame of the 751h is that it uses the Poulsbo chipset (US15W) with integrated GMA 500 graphics. We definitely experienced some growing pains with the 751h, in particular trying to get the integrated graphics to properly support HD video decoding required some effort. Once configured properly, however, we felt that the 751h was a viable alternative to other netbooks.
Unfortunately, we experienced some instability and we have heard complaints from a few users stating that stability on the 751h is, in a word, horrible -- that quality control at Acer must be practically nonexistent. Obviously, frustrated users are more likely to post complaints, but there are definitely people out there looking for an alternative. One alternative would be the ASUS 1101HA, which offers the same basic components but allows overclocking up to 1.73 GHz on the Z520 processor. Today, MSI has announced the Wind U110 Eco with immediate availability.
The U110 Eco has a lot in common with the Acer 751h and ASUS 1101HA. It uses a Z-series Atom processor, this time going with the faster Z530 (1.60GHz compared to 1.33GHz on the Z520). It...
