July 20, 2004

Back From China! - Josh

Ok, after a couple of really long flights, we are finally back home from China as a family.  My new son (Tai) is doing well, but is having a heck of a time adjusting to all the new things.  He was on a pretty steady schedule at the orphanage (which was actually an amazing place; very clean, they treated the children very well, and all of the caretakers were very professional yet loving to the children).  That place had been his home since he was about 2 months old.  From what we have been able to learn, Tai was abandoned in front of the main hospital in Shanghai.  He was very ill, and it was assumed that his parents were very poor and could not afford adequate medical care for their child, so he had to be abandoned for him to have a chance to survive.  Once he became a ward of the state, he was able to get the medical attention he needed (he had ASD and VSD, which are septal defects in the heart).

Anyway, we live at 7200 feet, and he was used to being near sea level, so I think he is a bit sick from the altitude.  Not only that, but apparently at night most adopted children do a lot of grieving due to the radical change in their environment (and add to that getting used to being 15 hours behind Shanghai local time).  We are all getting used to each other, and things are improving (last night was one of the first full nights of sleep I have had for a while).

Now that things are getting settled, I have a few things that will be posted in the next few days.  Keep tuned!

July 7, 2004

Hello From China! - Josh

Just thought that I would do a quick update and say hello from Shanghai!  We picked up Tai on Monday, and have been spending several interesting days with our new son!  It is pretty crazy here, but then again I am from Wyoming (and we have no big cities).  Anyway, things are going well here, and we have been kept busy with lots of paperwork.  Our son is very healthy, and very curious!  I guess that is expected.  We are just happy to be here!  I will eventually throw up some pictures of the trip, so keep watch if you are the least bit interested.

July 2, 2004

Off to China! - Josh

Well, today is the day that my wife and I have been waiting for this past year.  We first considered adopting from Eastern Europe, but we were quickly scared off by some of the policies (and scandals) that are going on there.  We instead looked to China, which probably has the most regulated foreign adoption program in the world.  Not to mention very affordable!  If you didn't know, we are adopting a little boy from China (his name is Tai).  We will be flying on Singapore Airlines (and I have heard that they have amazing overseas service) to Hong Kong, and then on into Shanghai.  I will be bringing my laptop with me, so hopefully the hotel we stay at will have some kind of internet connection that I can use.  We will see what kind of time I have on my hands!

Jun 30, 2003

SLI, AMD, and Dell - Josh

If you had by chance read my article on the NV40, I had stated the every chip that NVIDIA had released since the GeForce 4 was capable of mutli-chip functionality.  Now it seems that NVIDIA has put that into action.  NVIDIA has re-introduced the concept of SLI, except now they are calling it Scalable Link Interface (vs. Scan Line Interleave).  This solution requires 2 x PCI-E x 16 slots on the motherboard to work properly though.  NVIDIA's upcoming nForce 4 chipset supposedly will feature the ability to run a 16 x PCI-E slot, as well as a 8 x PCI-E slot- though physically the 8 x PCI-E slot will appear as a 16 x slot.  Intel's Tumwater chipset will also have the ability to run 2 x 16 x PCI-E slots.  NVIDIA's solution will allow one board to render the top portion of the screen, while the other card renders the bottom (no scan-lines or band-lines this time).  The amount of screen rendered will depend on the complexity of the top or the bottom, and each card will be dynamically allocated to render either larger or smaller portions of the entire screen.  NVIDIA says they have seen upwards of 1.87 times the performance over a single card.  This is not bad news at all, but the solution will undoubtedly be VERY expensive!

NVIDIA also appears to be producing a new version of its SoundStorm audio functionality, and I believe we will see this implemented in both integrated and standalone form.  The nForce 4 PCI-E chipset for the Athlon 64 will probably feature SoundStorm 2, which most likely will have all of the features of the original SoundStorm, but will probably add 24 bit playback as well as some other new surprises.  The standalone version could in fact be one of the first PCI-E soundcards available (as the current SoundStorm solution can take upwards of 100 MB/sec of bandwidth alone).  Adding higher bit-rates and functionality could in fact increase this number to 150 MB/sec, which definitely requires the bandwidth that a PCI-E x 1 slot can deliver (250 MB/sec, 500 MB/sec bi-directional).  Of course I could be totally off base here and the chip will be only offered in standard PCI form, but somehow I doubt it).

The big news for AMD is that it looks like Dell is seriously looking at producing Opteron servers.  If you can remember some years back there was some very good evidence that Dell was looking at producing an Athlon based system, and had in fact commissioned MSI to design (or provide) an Athlon board to Dell's specifications.  This was during the time where AMD had surged past 1 GHz while Intel was stuck with 1 GHz processors, the the 1.113 GHz P!!! had turned into an unmitigated disaster.  At this time AMD was selling 90% of all 1 GHz and above processors, and the pressure on Dell was pretty significant.  Intel did finally release the Pentium 4, and Dell was of course the first to get these new chips.  The AMD Athlon based Dell never made it out of the design stage.  Now we are hearing reports that Dell is engineering a dual Opteron based server, but whether it sees the light of day is a good question.  As stated above, Dell has designed AMD based systems in the past, but these never made it to market (Dell had also taken great interest in the K6 series of processors, but the introduction of the Celeron and Celeron A stopped that in its tracks).  With rumors of Intel's IA32e (iAMDX86-64) performance being sub-par to what AMD has, Dell may have to seriously contend with an underperforming Nacona based Pentium 4 Xeon when using a 64 bit OS and application.  Dell of course does not want to be in this situation, so I can see them hedging their bets by engineering dual Opteron solutions in case Nacona does indeed turn out to be a dud in 64 bit applications.

The big problem with AMD right now is providing enough parts to fulfill demand.  Currently only Fab 30 is producing Athlon 64 parts, and so far only on the 130 nm process.  This leads to big dies, which in turn means less dice per wafer.  Once AMD hits 90 nm, then the situation should improve in terms of dice per wafer, and AMD could gain some significant marketshare.  Add to that the ability to incorporate dual core Opteron processors in the current Socket 940 architecture (making your dual processor Opteron server into a quad processor server), and the technology starts to look very attractive for enterprise buyers.  Fab 36 should have revenue generating production by mid-2006, and that will be at 65 nm.  So, by the end of 2006, AMD should have two full size mega-fabs producing a significant amount of product at 65 nm (plus one of those fabs using 300 mm wafers), and would have the ability to perhaps be able to successfully supply up to 35% of the processor market.

June 27, 2004

Off to China Soon! - Josh

Not sure how many of you are aware of some of the personal things going on in my life, but I thought that I would share a bit with you.  My wife and I are in the final stages of adopting a little boy from China.  His name is Tai.  Exactly one week from today we will be meeting him for the first time in Shanghai.  This of course means that we will be traveling over to China for about 2 weeks.  We are very, very excited about this.  Not only do we get our son, but we get to see China!  I was thinking of stopping by the Abit factory (which is about 1.5 hours from Shanghai), but I don't think I will have time for much sightseeing like that.  Would be nifty though, as Abit has a very state-of-the-art factory.  From most indications, their quality control is now among the tightest of the industry (which is very good news for us).

We leave this coming Friday at 5:35 from Denver, through San Francisco, onto Hong Kong, and then to Shanghai (I would be curious if any PenStar readers are from Shanghai- if so, post in the forum!).  We get there Sunday morning at around 10am- which means a very long time in the air.  Thank goodness it is basically an overnight flight (the sun will chase us and overtake us).  While there I will try to finish up a couple of articles, and hopefully I can get at least two up this week before I leave.  We shall see...

June 23, 2004

D-Link DWL-810 Review - Josh

Keith had the chance to sit down and really "work" hard on this review.  The DWL-810 is a wireless bridge unit that works smashingly with the X-Box and PS-2 consoles.  Keith takes it for a spin to see how it performs, as well as how robust it is for those using the X-Box Live subscription.  Here is a quote:

The current generation of consoles is taking gamers into a new area, the arena of online gaming.  Bringing online gaming to the consoles has moved the action from the den or computer room to the living room.  However, this poses a significant problem.  Most people don’t have their Internet connection in their living room.  There are a few solutions for most people in this dilemma: 

You can read the entire review here.

June 20, 2004

Quick Thoughts on Intel Launch - Josh

As you have most likely read by now, Intel launched their new 925/915 series of chipsets, along with PCI-Express, DDR-II, and the new LGA 775 processors (now based on model numbers- 5x0 series for the LGA-775 Prescotts).  Many are viewing this launch as both a success and a failure.  In ways, I would have to agree with them.  Lets break down my thoughts.

PCI-Express:  This is definitely the wave of the future, and the bi-directional nature and increased power that can be supplied are very good things.  The downside is that currently no application will really take advantage of the speed aspect.  Power is always appreciated, as we can see by the latest GeForce 6800 Ultra boards.  AGP 8X will be around for a long time, and its performance will be more than adequate for the foreseeable future.  Having working hardware that does support PCI-Express will help the industry move to it a little faster, but then again these PCI-Express boards (both motherboards and video cards) will not be available for some time yet.

DDR-II:  Intel really took a plunge when it decided to support DDR-II so early.  The technology, while being used in video card memory for some time now, is still very new for the motherboard environment.  One of the biggest drawbacks to DDR-II is the greatly increased latency required to access main memory.  While PC3200 modules are running at 2:2:2:5 latencies, DDR-II has to run at 4:4:4:12.  Also, DDR-II can be viewed as a QDR solution (quad data rate).  From my understanding the memory bus actually runs at 133 MHz, but since it has a quad data rate, it is counted as 533 MHz (giving each channel 4.2 GB/sec of bandwidth, and in a dual channel architecture 8.4 GB/sec).  The increased bandwidth is nice, but since most memory accesses do not involve streaming the data, the increased latencies have a detrimental effect on overall performance.  Many in the industry are saying that we really won't see many performance increases until the memory hits 667 MHz (166 MHz quad pumped) and latencies go a notch lower.

5x0 Series of Processors:  These LGA-775 processors are all based on the Prescott core, and the i925x and i915 series of chipsets are designed to work most effectively with the Prescott core.  This chipset does help the overall performance of the 5x0 series of processors, much more so than the older i875 and i865 chipsets did.  The Northwood based Extreme Edition processors will also be ported over to LGA-775, but their performance is not as exciting as it once was on the i875 platform.  Still, Intel is moving forward with its Prescott based cores, and once they start hitting 3.8 GHz and above, few will remember the growing pains these products suffered upon release.

If there were ever a poster child for paper launches, this would be it.  The four main aspects of this launch are not available as of yet (LGA-775 processors, LGA-775 motherboards, PCI-Express video cards, and DDR-II memory modules).  In fact, there are some interesting ramifications at the moment about Intel's processors.  First off, we have yet to see the 3.4 GHz Socket 472 Prescott in the marketplace in significant quantities.  Also, major resellers like Dell no longer offer 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition processors (though you can still find these models online).  There have been whispers that the 550 and 560 processors from Intel (the 3.4 GHz and 3.6 GHz Prescotts) will not be available until late Summer/Early Fall.  If a person were to go out, the most robust processor at a decent price from Intel is the Northwood based 3.4 GHz Pentium 4.  Putting that into a i865 or i875 based motherboard will give more than adequate performance to any user wishing to build or purchase an Intel based machine.

In many ways this launch was a success.  Not very often do so many new technologies come together at once, but Intel has pulled this all off with great success.  Getting all of the different technologies to work together as a cohesive unit for the first time took a lot of engineering work, and the fact that the entire combination is not slower than the more mature i875 based technology shows that Intel did a very good job.  The platform will get faster once more tweaks have been applied, as well the faster DDR-II memory.  Eventually we will see 800 MHz DDR-II products, and by then its performance will far surpass PC3200 DDR-I.  So, while the technology is good, it is unfortunate that we will not see these products hitting the shelves anytime soon (perhaps the beginning of August).

AMD is still sitting pretty with their new Socket 939 architecture, and the Athlon FX 53 processor still remains the top dog.  Both motherboards and processors for this architecture are available today, and AMD still thinks that DDR-I has a lot of life left to it (which I agree- dual channel, low latency DDR-I is a potent combination, especially when the memory controller is on the CPU itself).  3rd party chipset providers look to have PCI-E/Athlon 64 products by the end of this summer, and AMD has basically said when PCI-Express video cards are widely available, they will have a motherboard solution to address that market.

Still, Intel did a fantastic job in getting all of the different aspects of the new platform together, and working in a cohesive manner.  It should bode well for things to come.

June 17, 2004

More AMD Athlon 64 and Dual Core Information - Josh

I was able to squeeze some more information from Damon Muzny at AMD about their recent spate of press releases.  Quite a bit of information was supplied here, so those interested in learning more about the current state of AMD's manufacturing and design capabilities, read on!  Here is a quick quote:

Fab 36 is well on its way towards completion, and AMD is projecting that it will start 65 nm test wafers in mid-2005.  As you may know, AMD recently held a ceremony at Fab 36 celebrating the fact that it is now fully enclosed and they can start work on the inside (placing machinery, setting up the lines, etc.).  The jump to 90 nm was a great one for the entire industry, but I think that AMD may be overly optimistic here in saying that they will have 65 nm working by mid-2005.  Initial full-scale production is not scheduled until mid-2006 though, so this can give them some time to work out the kinks in the process.  Also, Fab 36 is based on 300 mm wafer production, which more than doubles the surface area for die production.

Further topics covered are 90 nm die sizes, PCI-Express, and Sempron.  You can read more here.

June 15, 2004

AMD Tapes Out Dual Athlon 64 Core - Josh

AMD has reached a significant milestone with their X86-64 architecture in the taping out of their initial dual core design on the 90 nm SOI process.  AMD has been making some noise lately about implementing dual cores on a single processor, but until now that architecture has not exactly been feasible.  With the transition to 90 nm, AMD had essentially two choices: bloat the processor like Intel has done with the Prescott to achieve higher speed and try to hide the latencies of a longer pipeline with more cache and other design decisions, or go with the current design and do a dual core implementation.  I think in this case a dual core implementation is the better idea of the two.  I guess that this can be viewed as AMD's answer to Intel's Hyper-Threading!

By the middle of 2005, the current AMD roadmap shows that most desktop and workstation products will be based upon the dual core design, and this should give a pretty hefty boost in performance across the board.  While clock speeds will increase over the next year, the introduction of the dual core processors will allow AMD to increase their model numbers to keep up with Intel and its products.  The big question is how many applications are being coded for multi-threading?  Here is where Intel has been paving the way with its Hyper-Threading technology.  Many current workstation type applications already support multi-threading, and compiling technology is making its way into being much more multi-threading aware.  In the next year we can probably expect many other consumer applications and games to become multi-threading aware.

The big question that we should be asking is what kind of memory subsystem should we expect with this new core?  Obviously it will be a dual channel affair (most likely each core will get its own memory channel to maximize granularity and processor efficiency), and there will be a high speed interconnect between the two cores.  Will DDR-1 PC3200 still be the memory of choice at this time?  Or will DDR-2 667 (and possibly above) be the initial specification?  Or is there a 3rd possibility?  I know that many around the industry are not exactly pleased with the overall architecture and performance of DDR-2, so perhaps AMD and JEDEC will push for a new memory specification?  If so, then it would be eerily similar to what AMD did with the original DDR memory spec (remember Intel at that time had just released its RAMBUS based products and was pushing that architecture, but it was very unpopular with many around the industry also).  AMD pushed DDR very hard, and had the first architecture to support it, and now look where DDR is today.  Will AMD be that forward thinking again, or will DDR-2 satisfy their needs?  Or will we see the rise of the QBM (Quad Band Memory)?  I would imagine that answers will start to trickle out over the next six months.  Until then, we can only speculate.

June 14, 2004

News About Town - Josh

After a flurry of activity in the months of April and May, June has slowed things down a bit.  It seems the industry is catching up with itself in terms of product shipments, so we have heard very little for the past couple of weeks.  ATI has been successfully shipping its X800 Pro since the middle of May, and now solid quantities of this product are becoming much more widely available.  Several distributors are now showing the X800 XT PE in stock also, so we should start to see those trickle into the marketplace (but the pricing on these cards is still going to be very high until supply catches up to demand).  On the other side of the street NVIDIA looks to be finally shipping significant amounts of chips to its partners, and we should start seeing these 6800 series of boards hit the market within the next week and a half.  NVIDIA expects to have its full lineup shipping by the first week in July.  We have seen only a trickle so far, but by July there should be a good amount of product in the channel.

ATI has done a very good job with their product release, but it appears that the availability of GDDR-3 may be holding back the release of all of these products.  It is a new memory technology, and so far only a few manufacturers are releasing product built on that specification.  Still, there could be manufacturing difficulties with the production of the R420 and NV40 series of chips from TSMC and IBM respectively.  Both are very large and very complex chips, and yields are probably not terribly exciting at this point.  The only saving grace for either company is that early Summer is typically a very slow buying time.  Once August hits, then both OEMs and retail consumers will be picking up these products in anticipation of the new school year.

In terms of AMD and Intel, we should be seeing the official release of the Socket 775 very shortly (I do not have any products supporting this however, so no reviews from me!).  Quite a few complaints have been popping up about the durability of this socket architecture, and motherboard manufacturers are very mad at Intel for implementing it.  It seems that a good portion of all defective chips returned to Intel come from broken pins on their processors.  To solve this situation Intel created the LGA Socket 775, which puts the burden of support for broken pins on the motherboard manufacturers.  This has made these manufacturers somewhat angry because their margins are thin enough as is!  This is further exacerbated by Intel having revenues last year of approximately $31 billion US and a gross profit of $17 billion US.  The extra financial pressure put on these motherboard manufacturers is definitely not appreciated.

AMD on the other hand is sticking with the traditional pin for their CPU's, so this is one less thing for the motherboard manufacturers to worry about.  Since Intel hasn't brought forth a processor faster than 3.4 GHz, AMD continues to have the luxury of charging a very high price for their range of Socket 939 processors.  With the cheapest being the Athlon 64 3500+ at around $500, AMD is showing some very nice margins on their high end processors.  The 3400+ and below have shown no signs of price erosion since the 3400+ was released (though the 2800+ and 3000+ have very strong sales at the sub $250 price points).  There have only been a few Socket 939 boards available up to this point, but I would imagine that in July this number will increase significantly.

One area where AMD is lacking is in the PCI-Express support.  In the past AMD has typically lead the way with chipset design for new technologies (the AMD 750 chipset for the new Athlon, AMD 760 for DDR and 133 MHz FSB support, 760 MP for multi-processing, and all the HT tunnel chipsets for the Athlon 64/Opteron series), but they are not releasing a chip so far that will support PCI-Express (though they do have a very robust support for PCI-X, and PCI-X 2.0).  They are waiting for this support from VIA, SiS, ULi, ATI, and NVIDIA.  Unfortunately that support won't be showing up until Fall of this year (and it looks to be late Fall at that).  This will give Intel quite a leg up when it comes to PCI-E support, and will in fact win over quite a few customers and OEM's that want the latest and greatest graphics technology.  So far it appears that the performance differences in today's applications will be minimal, so when benchmarks start hitting the web there shouldn't be much of a difference.  What will be interesting is if Intel fails to release a faster processor to keep up with AMD and their 3800+ model number (and of course the FX-53).  This could very well be the case, especially considering the problems with the 90 nm Prescott's.  While the process is improving, the design still has a ways to go before it can be run faster without melting the motherboard.

One final thing is that I have finished installing the MSI K8N Neo Platinum on my main machine.  This is one of the first NVIDIA nForce 3 250gb motherboards to hit the market, and so far I am very impressed by its stability and overall speed.  One small problem I had is with a clean install with a Serial ATA drive, the IDE drivers included in the Forceware 4.24 package cause WinXP Pro SP1 to lock upon bootup.  I have not heard anyone else having this problem, but I am hoping I am not unique here.  Otherwise, the board has been a dream to work with.  I do have an Athlon 64 3400+ installed, but the system becomes flaky when I enable the HT bus with the 5x multiplier (this particular processor officially supports 4x).

June 2, 2004

AMD Releases New Processors - Josh

Yes, the day of Socket 939 is now upon us.  As you have probably read, the new processors running on the new socket are very, very fast.  Of course they hold a very hefty price premium.  The three new Athlon 64 processors are priced above $500, with the 3700 and 3800 sitting in the $700's.  The Athlon FX-53 (S939) is sitting pretty at $799.  This is quite a change for AMD, as their previous top end Athlon 64 3400+ was introduced at $430.  This means that the entire Athlon 64 lineup will not drop down in price with the introduction of these faster models.  This also keeps the Socket 754 as a viable and high performance solution for desktop users.

Performance for these top end parts appears for the most part to top the Intel offerings in most situations.  There are of course some applications that run faster on the Pentium 4, but the majority of benchmarks show the AMD parts taking charge.  We should start to see new Socket 939 motherboards hitting the market rather soon, and with the release of the new K8T800 Pro and nForce 3 250 products, the lineup should be pretty robust.  Several online stores have these processors in stock, though the Socket 939 motherboards are a bit scarce at the moment.

May 27, 2004

Possible Fix for Gigabyte Motherboard and X800 Pro Problem - Josh

I was able to contact Eric Demers from ATI today, and he said that one of their product specialists had found this problem, and had actually been able to get a work around that solves it.  You can view the solution in the thread I started.

Corsair Releases Xtreme Low Latency Products - Josh

Since the demise of the beloved Winbond BH-5 chips, very few products have been able to run at 2:2:2:5 latencies at PC3200 speeds.  Other companies have made products that run at 2:3:2:6, but very few would clock well at aggressive latencies.  It appears that Samsung is releasing a new product that will not only run at the extreme low latencies of the BH-5 chips, but also appears to be able to clock to very high speeds (250 MHz+ with solid timings).  Corsair is one of the first memory manufacturers to acquire these chips and put them into a product, now to be called 3200XL family.  The majority of these DIMMS will be packaged in dual combinations (TwinX 1024- 1 GB in size).  There will be three offerings, the Pro series (with LEDs), the classic black heat spreader, and the newer platinum heat spreader.  It is about time that a memory manufacturer started to produce chips that will run at high speeds and low latencies again!  You can find out more about these products here.

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