Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Here’s a link to a soon-to-be-released OLED keyboard. The price is just a little steep. $1564 is more than most of us budget for an entire gaming system. Needless to say, the expected market is pretty small.

The keyboard itself is a pretty cool device with a small LED array in every key. It allows for some pretty unique uses. Unfortunately, the uses don’t live up to the price tag.

Like I said, for the geek who has everything… except a brain.

As anticipated, Intel is preparing to launch quad-core Xeons in November. Four cores will certainly increase performance, but they will not have twice the performance of a dual-core, or four times the performance of a single core.

For the foreseeable future, there will be no reason for the average home user to go with anything more than a dual core, and even that should be reserved for power-users and gamers. The current state-of-the-art in software development makes very poor use of multiple CPU’s. Until programmers understand the implications of having code running in multiple places at the same time, this situation is unlikely to change.

After having said all of that, I’m still wondering what AMD’s response will be. C’mon guys… get back in the game!

For those of you interested in what’s next in the world of hardware, Toms Hardware has a review of the upcoming quad-core Intel chips.

If you check out the comparison results, you will notice that the 3.33GHz quad really smokes the competition, but it doesn’t offer too much of a boost to games. It’s a pity that game developers haven’t yet figured out how to harness the power of 4 CPU’s working on the same problem.

It looks like Dell isn’t the only company with laptop battery problems. Apple has announced a recall of 1.8 million laptop batteries sold from 2003 through this year. Sony claims that this will be the last recall of its crotch cooking devices. Imagine what it would feel like if one of them exploded on your lap. OUCH!

Intel is making the very welcome move of open-sourcing the GMA 3000 video drivers for Linux. This goes completely against the standard graphics OEM convention of excessive paranoid secrecy about their video drivers. Hopefully, it will allow the Linux community to tune and tweak the drivers for the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, graphics chip makers usually keep their drivers extremely secret. The claim is that they do so to protect the chip design. Most of us know that this is a bogus excuse, and that the real reason is so that nobody will see the “optimizations” (read as “cheats") that they put in for specific games and benchmarks. They certainly have the right to keep their trade secrets… even if they are dishonest about why. I just wish that they would release the drivers to the Open Source community and let their hardware stand on it’s own merits. Then again… maybe that’s what they are really afraid of.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you already know that Dell has purchased Alienware, the worlds best known supplier of mega-expensive gaming machines. Sadly, I fear that this is more likely to cause a decline in Alienware than a rise in the pizazz of Dell machines. Who knows… maybe Dell will leave them alone as promised. One can hope.

Intel released a new 3.73MHz version of the P4EE called the 965 Extreme Edition yesterday. Most of the hardware reviewers yawned. That’s what Intel gets when they have a hugely successful demo of the Conroe, then release something that is essentially a minor speed bump for an old design. It’s probably a perfectly good chip, but it doesn’t have a prayer of being a sales success now that everyone is waiting for the Conroe.

Bill Gates had some very unflattering things to say about MIT’s $100 laptop project. It sounds pretty mean-spirited to me. I’m sure that if the project were going to sell a new copy of Windows with each and every machine, he would be much nicer about it. Unfortunately, the copy of Windows alone would exceed the $100 budget. Please Bill, don’t put down a valiant attempt to do good. Jealousy makes you look ridiculous.

An apple a day keeps the doctor rich. Well, that’s what a Louisiana man suing Apple for hearing loss caused by an iPod might say. His claim is that listening to an iPod on full volume for more than 28 seconds a day can cause hearing loss. Funny thing is… he isn’t claiming that he actually suffered hearing loss. Looks like another “deep pockets” lawsuit is upon us. There is a really good solution to the whole problem… Turn the damn thing down!.

Whats next, something like this? : Microsoft Corporation was named in a lawsuit today by a West Virginia man claiming that Windows caused irreparable damage to his IQ. Film at 11.

Jeez.

As expected, ATI released its X1900 series based on the R580. I’ve dug up a few reviews online, and I find that there is a lot of opinion and a little fact. Of the ones I’ve read so far, the most detailed is the review Tom’s Hardware released today. You might also want to check out what AnandTech has to say about it, and FiringSquad’s take on the x1900.

It looks like ATI has taken the performance crown back from NVidia, although it cost them 378 million transistors to do it. It’s nice to see that there are actually X1900 cards available on launch day. Hopefully, availability will not disappear within a few weeks as has happened after some of the recent graphics card launches. Now if they can only do something about the price.

It’s interesting to note that the rumors of 48 pixel pipelines were only partially true. The chip actually has 16 pipelines but 48 pixel shaders. It’s too early for me to push an opinion either way about how the 48 shader architecture will benefit the consumer. As far as I can tell right now, there isn’t really anything out there that can take advantage of all of the shaders, but many experts think that games will be able to utilize all of that power in the near future. You can judge for yourself.

UPDATE:
Not to be outdone, the boys at ElReg have tossed their $.02 in about the X1900’s. Thanks for the pointer Rally.

According to the slashdotters, The upcoming release of Windows Vista will only allow digitally signed drivers to install. There are, of course, exceptions based on the unwillingness to update code for 32 bit versions of the OS. The digital signing will require a “free” license from Microsoft, which will require a digital certification that is currently priced at $500 per year.

Before seeing this as some kind of saviour mechanism that will stop the installation of rootkits, remember that it probably wont take hackers more than a week to crack the system. In exchange for that week of security, you will have to pay by seeing the end of open-source and shareware drivers, the loss of the ability to get around unfair DRM restrictions, and SERIOUS hardware compatibility problems.

I, for one, won’t believe any of it until I actually see it happen. Can you imagine Vista coming out to a large amount of fanfare, but only running on a small percentage of the installed PC base due to hardware compatibility issues? The whole thing would be so close to IBM’s OS2 fiasco that we would all end up with Macs running Linux. I think Microsoft knows that too.

There is a lot of buzz about the possible announcement of a Google branded PC. You can find mention on a few online rags, but they all seem to point back to this Jan. 1 article in the LA Times. We’ll see about whether this one actually happens. Seems less than likely, but I’ve been wrong before.

As far as I can tell from the widely varying articles out there, speculation is that Google will sign an agreement with a major distributor (Wal-Mart is most often mentioned) to distribute a very basic, Internet-capable PC running on a Google-designed Linux variant.

An intriguing idea, but not quite original. (anyone remember Lindows… er… Linspire?) Even if this rumor turns out to be true, it is likely to go no further than any of the previous attempts.

I haven’t seen much online chatter about Fedora Core 4 having display artifacts, but I certainly was. It wasn’t a huge problem, but it was a big annoyance. Basically, if the display was mostly black (ie, if I used the default Fedora background image), I would see random horizontal streaks of white flashing through the display. This did not seem to happen if I put up a few white terminals, or if the majority of the pixels on the screen were non-black.

The good news is that the 5.12 version of Catalyst (X.org version 6.8.20) has completely eliminated the problem. If you have seen the same streaks, I would recommend the upgrade. Note that this is an ATI proprietary driver, so you may want to watch for “tainted kernel” issues if you intend to do Open Source development.

The machine in question:

• Athlon X2 3800+
• Sapphire X800 Pro
• Fedora Core 4

Ati released Catalyst 5.12 today, with a claim of significant performance increases for multi-core and HT machines. I downloaded and installed the new package. I’ll let you know if I see a difference.

There is also a new ATI driver for Linux available. This one appears to have a self-install utility that will cost you about 57MB. I’ll let you know how that one works as well.

New Scientist Breaking News - $100-laptop created for world’s poorest countries plus you get a workout at no extra cost.

The much awaited ATI X1000 release is here. It looks like the jury is still out on whether ATI has regained the high performance graphics crown. The X1800XT certainly looks to outperform the 7800GTX in most cases, but it won’t be available for another month. That gives Nvidia about 30 days to come up with a suitable answer.

If you are looking for a pretty comprehensive article about the new cards and their architecture, check out ExtremeTech’s X1800 review. For those of you into hardware designs, you might find the ring-buffer memory architecture interesting. You might also be able to identify with the fact that an elusive hardware bug caused the whole delay. Everyone else will appreciate the comparison of the high end ATI and Nvidia cards.

Well, yes and no… read on for details.

I ran into a couple of reviews you might be interested in. The first is FiringSquad.com’s review of Crossfire technology and the second is ExtremeTech’s comparison of SLI and Crossfire. Both articles provide benchmarks using some reference hardware supplied by ATI. Both articles come to the same conclusion… wait a while.

Though Crossfire will certainly improve your framerate when compared to a single ATI card, the performance isn’t that much better than a single 7800GTX. This isn’t surprising, since the X850 is a generation older than the 7800. It’s best to wait until you see what ATI’s new R5xx chips are capable of.

The first generation of Crossfire also has a limitation imposed on it by the single DVI channel that it uses to share video between the two cards. Though I’m certain that this won’t get in the way of most people, it’s bad news for anyone who wants to “future proof” their machine.

So… Too little? Well, we really won’t know until we see how the R5xx plays with Crossfire. Too late? Yep. About a year.

Update:
AnandTech has a list of recent Crossfire reviews that you can browse at your leisure. No sense reprinting them all here.

Better late than never… ATI has announced a new X800 GTO chip that looks a lot like the X800 Pro with higher memory bandwidth. Or was that a lot like the x800GT with more pipelines? Or was that a stub of the X800 PE? How is it different from the other X800’s? I’m So Confused!

But seriously… The PC gaming enthusiast community, has been driven to wild fits of yawning. Nobody is going to pay any attention to another X800 launch with the R520 release only a few weeks away.

ATI’s models may be confusing, but you can’t accuse them of limiting your choices. Unfortunately, it is easy to choose one card thinking that it is another, pushing you into a purchase that you didn’t want. Though I understand that they want to hit all of the different segments of the market, ATI should try to come up with a better way to distinguish between models than to add a meaningless character or two to a shared name.

I have a X800 Pro, and I no longer have any idea how it compares to the other models. The sheer number of cards that are * kinda * like it can make performance charts impossible to read. I guess I won’t worry about it until I need to buy another card in a couple of years.

Extremetech has this comparison of XP64 and XP32 on a dual core Athlon. As expected, running 64-bit versions of games really has very little impact on performance. The interesting thing to note is that running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit version of Windows doesn’t seem to hurt performance.

The author’s conclusions about it being best for most people to wait for Vista before changing over to 64-bit is dead-on. It’s also the obvious answer for anyone with a single core 64-bit system too.

It isn’t all that often that a dispute between tech companies makes national news, but that’s just what is beginning to happen with the AMD vs. Intel lawsuit. Analysts are starting tolook closely at Intel’s business practices and wonder if they are illegal, and if not, whether they should be.

I don’t know if AMD will be able to prove illegal activity, but they have certainly proved that there are too many easy ways around the anti-trust laws in this country. Can it be that MS and Intel will re-create the business environment of the industrial revolution? I certainly hope not.

As a followup to my previous post, Intel’s CEO Paul Ottelini wimped out on AMD’s server CPU challenge. Booo! The fact that Intel doesn’t really have a dual-core server chip yet shouldn’t let chipzilla off the hook. I would love to see a challenge between the two chipmakers in any CPU arena. Let’s not limit things to dual-core servers… Lets enter everything!

It looks like AMD has challenged Intel to a dual-core server duel. Normally, AMD’s marketing department looks intellectually challenged, but this might just be a good move. While the spotlight is on Intel at IDF this week, they will be unable to dodge AMD’s challenge without serious damage to their rep. If Intel refuses, there really isn’t any excuse that will get them out of it. If they accept, AMD will most likely kick the chips out of them.

Though all of the experts seem to agree that AMD is a shoe-in for this one, don’t count chipzilla out. Nobody is really sure what they have up their sleeve yet.

I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

Update:
Here’s AMD’s challenge in the form of a press release.

MacWorld is showing a picture of what they claim is the worlds first interactive 3D display. It looks like it could be a cool thing, but the company website is slammed, and I can’t get any more info. I’ll post as soon as I see something.

Anandtech has detected the presence of an ATI Radeon X800GT in the wild. The X800GT looks to be a competitor for the Nvidia 6600GT, though it is a touch more expensive. The shame about this is that the first one released is a Powercolor card. You probably won’t ever catch me buying another one of those. Yuck!

In a move that is sure to multiply the pressure on chipzilla’s legal department, EU competition officials raided several of Intel’s European facilities. Even though there have been rumors of dirty dealing, and a few investigations have been kicked off, the latest round of legal trouble was started by AMD’s recent anti-trust lawsuits against Intel.

I’m a little unsure what I think about this legal wrangling. AMD’s technology caught up to Intel around the time that the 1GHz Athlon was released. In recent years, AMD has pummeled Intel when it comes to performance, efficiency, and price, yet AMD has made no traction at all with large vendors. The whole situation smells really bad.

On the other hand, it all may be a case of social inertia. Big vendors may be stuck with Intel because joe everybody has no idea that AMD processors are that good. There is no sense in offering a product to the public if the public won’t buy it.

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the evidence like everyone else does.

Verizon has signed a deal with Time Warner to carry it’s Turner Broadcasting stations on it’s new fiber-based FIOS network. To be clear about this: Most of us geeks don’t want the TV service (well, maybe a little), we want the 30Mb download link. So… When are you going to run fiber to my house? A couple of my friends have it, and I’m already Jealous!

So… do you think that the cable companies are sorry that they antagonized the telco’s by offering cable modem service? It looks like the cable guys might just have a little trouble dealing with the competition that they stirred up.

Intel finished it’s transition to 64-bit CPU’s by releasing the 64-bit Celeron D yesterday. That’s not bad for a company that once said that there was no reason to go beyond 32-bits yet. With the release of a scaled-down version of the EMT64 architecture, Intel has also completed it’s transition to a company that offers value-priced versions of a CPU with an instruction set initially released by AMD. My how times have changed.

It looks like AMD has filed an anti-trust suit in Delaware charging Intel with coercing various customers into avoiding AMD products. Though many of us in the industry have suspected such practices since the release of the first Athlon, It looks like this is about to be introduced to the general populace.

My biggest hope is that the end result of this litigation will be an increase in competition between the two chip makers. If Intel truly has been arm twisting, an end to that kind of behavior will probably give large PC manufacturers like Dell an opportunity to sell AMD products.

My biggest fear about this suit is that we’re seeing another attempt to cover a slumping business by way of litigation. AMD makes superior CPU’s, but they will continue to lose market share if they don’t find a way to cut their prices. That last statement seems odd because undercutting Intel prices was how AMD got as far as they have come.

That burning sensation you get when using your laptop may not be something you need penicillin for. According to TheRegister.com, Fujitsu has recalled 250,000 laptop batteries because they could possibly overheat. I can only begin to speculate on how many jokes will float around the net about geeks with flaming laps.

According to ExtremeTech, Intel has added 64-bit architecture to all of it’s Pentium 4’s. The new numbering scheme creates a 64-bit version of each of the 6xx models and numbers it 5x1. As the article states, the 64-bit versions have the exact same price as the 32-bit versions, so it appears that 64-bits is for free. This is likely the last nail in the 32-bit coffin. The future of these older CPU’s is probably going to be limited to the embedded market.

AnandTech has published a look ahead at the next few versions of the Catalyst software. I like the way that ATI is looking ahead with their .Net interface, but they seem to have completely forgotten about Linux support again. The last few versions I’ve seen haven’t been able to do anything more than trash my RPM database and forcing me to backtrack to older versions of X windows.

Needless to say, I’ve been VERY disappointed in their support for the alternative operating systems… and have I mentioned lately how disappointed I was in their 9600Pro? These factors will probably drive me toward Nvidia when I build my next system in August.

Rumor has it that Apple will use the Pentium M for it’s Macintosh line. As of this moment, it is only speculation, but it is the only speculation that makes sense. If Apple remains true to their nature, they will go with the only current Intel chip that can hold a candle to AMD. If they try to jump on the MHz bandwagon, they will find that it is broken down.

After years of rumors and speculation, Apple has decided to switch from IBM to Intel for CPU chips. This is a major architecture shift, and will eliminate one of the few alternatives to a Win-Tel machine. I’ve never been much of a Mac user, but I was always glad to know that there was an alternate architecture out there.

Fear not PowerPC fans. You can always find your favorite CPU in one of the new game consoles.

A report at NewScientist.com tells of a “Self-wiring supercomputer” being built at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. Now if only they can invent a machine to take care of Shameless Geeks that does not require constant attention, so that they can move out of their parents house.

Yesterday, ATI announced their Crossfire Multi-GPU technology. Crossfire is ATI’s answer to Nvidia’s SLI technology that was released about 6 months ago. Although this is the latest in whizzbang gaming tech, I’m always hesitant to waste time talking about anything that is prohibitively expensive. If you don’t mind paying for a ultra-high end motherboard and a pair of $350+ video cards, you may want to check out these options.

As expected, AMD released their dual-core X2 chips to the public today. As mentioned here before, the X2 is a much better performer than Intel’s dual-core offerings, but also suffers from a much higher pricetag. In the game of CPU wars, the ball is still in AMD’s court. I’m hoping that they make some kind of reply before August, when I start building my new system. A $200 dual-core version of the fx-55 would be really nice.

In what has to be one of the biggest computer hardware switcheroos of all time, Intel and AMD have completely switched market segments. This is based on the announcement that Intel has priced it’s new dual core CPU’s at half of what AMD has projected for the X2. It now looks like AMD is in the high-performance high-price category, while Intel has taken over the budget segment of the market. Now the ball is in AMD’s court. I’m hoping to see a nice price war start.

If you would have suggested a few years ago that this could happen, most IT people, me included, would have laughed at you. Color me amazed.

Infineon if forming a team to explore a new type of computer storage called Phase Change Memory. In this type of memory, the material changes from amorphous to crystalline in order to store a 1 or 0. Sounds like a cool technology. We wish them luck.

According to Reuters, Apple is talking to Chipzilla about using Intel chips in Macs. No word in the article if this would be the CPU, or peripherals. If Apple is really going to try to build a x86-based Mac, AMD would be a better choice.

It’s all just speculation, but it’s a little scary to see a near-monopoly increase it’s market share.

UPDATE: If you care to hear why some people put very little stock in this rumor, check out the Forbes.com view of why Apple is unlikely to go with Intel. Sadly, I have too little experience with Mac’s to form an opinion. I just think that IF they went x86, AMD would be a better deal.

According to InfoWorld, you can expect AMD to Launch Dual-core Athlon 64 chips on May 31. This comes on the heels of Intel’s Dual-core P4EE release last month. Initial tests show AMD’s running faster and with less power consumption than the Intel offering, and do not require special motherboards. Most comparisons so far tout the Athlon X2 as much better than the P4EE. Whether AMD can actually turn this into a market share gain is yet another matter.

I’ve posted two articles that I previously released for preview. The first is a new Shameless article titled What I Learned About Life from Video Games, and the second is a rewrite of the PowerNow posting from a few months ago.

The re-posting of PowerNow is in advance of my releasing a source code snippet that does real-time monitoring and control of Athlon-64’s running Fedora Core 3. Surprisingly, the code was not difficult at all, but the explainantion isn’t as easy.

Gizmodo is reporting that the geek quest of having Linux booting on anything is going strong. They report that the Nintendo DS is now capablable of booting to BASH prompt. Following onto the DSLinux.org site they say that you can play some text games as well. You definitely are a Shameless Geek to buy a dual display game system and then play text games. Go Geeks.

After weeks of no real news from graphics chip makers, there is finally something new to say, although it is admittedly only a rumor at this stage. Hexus.net has an exclusive look at ATI’s upcoming dual-card technology. Unfortunately, we can’t yet confirm that this is anything more than a rumor, considering that ATI has not made it official yet. The cool thing about the technology (if it is real) is that you will be able to buy the Mobo and a single graphics card, using your old graphics card as the second GPU. An easy upgrade path like that could go a long way with gamers on a budget.

Now if only these guys would get around to some reasonable Linux support.