Category: Geek service

The new processors from Intel have arrived.

For a fantastic overview of the road to Conroe, check out this retrospective from Tom’s Hardware. Intro:

History may credit AMD almost as much as Intel with the creation of the Woodcrest, Conroe, and Merom architectures, the latter two of which Intel released today. In 2004, AMD effectively threw down a very sizeable gauntlet, challenging Intel on every conceivable front, including retail outlets and courtrooms, to innovate or perish. In good time, Intel responded, with a marketing program and technology initiative that many felt was contrived, inconclusive, lacking vigor.

Intel’s Israel design team spelled out for the company the extent of what it had to do to meet AMD’s challenge: The NetBurst architecture was a physical and thermal dead end. Intel had to stop, repurpose itself, and build the most convincing low-power, high-performance architecture in history, from scratch. It would be an impossible task for any other company. Whether Intel has actually succeeded will depend on the next few months of extensive user testing. But we’ve seen the power of Intel’s new launch vehicle, and the capability for it to meet and probably exceed anything AMD ever anticipated, appears to be there.

Giving credit to AMD for Conroe might just cause Sharikou‘s head to explode 🙂 But the benchmarks are pretty clear: Core Duo 2 blows the Athlon FX away – with no sacrifices in price, performance, or power consumption. The time has come for mobile-on-desktop computing.

anyone remember having to use a special mail prefix for sending email to Compuserve or Prodigy users? If not, count your blessings. Though, if the evil forces opposing net neutrality have their way, we might yet see such abominations arise in our URLs…

Well, instant messaging has been in that particular limbo for many years. Decades, in fact. Until today. A while back, Google announced total compatibility with the Jabber chat protocol; that finally set off enough alarm bells of fear at Miccrosoft and Yahoo to set in motion the grand plan of cross-platform chat once and for all. And today, those plans come to fruition.

Behold – cross-platform chat, on Yahoo Messenger and MSN.

DailyTech has a fascinating and accessible summary of Intel’s CPU designs beyond the Conroe processor (the desktop version of the 64-bit Merom, itself the successor to the 32-bit Yonah that launched this January replacing the Pentium M). Lots of interesting details, but this in particular caught my eye:

According to Intel’s long term roadmap, Penryn will become the last “Core” (NGMA) microarchitecture, but it will not become the last 45nm generation. A new architecture, based on the Nehalem core, will make an appearance in 2008. This Core successor, dubbed by many as NGMA2, will essentially take all of the 45nm manufacturing principles of Penryn and apply them to the totally new Nehalem architecture. This transition will be very similar to the P6+ transition with Yonah from Dothan to Conroe.

If P1266 was radically different from the 65nm Core CPU, P1268 takes what is normal on Penryn and throws it out the window. The first P1268 processor is what Intel has publically announced as Nehalem-C. Nehalem-C is still based on the Nehalem (NGMA2) microarchitecture, but is a die shrink from 45nm to 32nm. P1268 employs all of the neat manufacturing techniques found on P1266, but uses a totally different lithography process called EUV, or Extreme Ultraviolet. Although it sounds trivial to swap a traditional DUV lithography setup with an EUV one, there is a fundamental problem with EUV that prevents foundries from doing so; the EUV wavelength is so small at 13.4nm that virtually every material absorbs the wave including the lenses and atoms in the air. EUV must be done in a vacuum with reflective surfaces instead of lenses to focus and redirect the lithography.

The photo is an SRAM sample under the 45nm process. But it’s just cool – today’s latest chips are at 65nm. And as the article mentions, EUV will take us down past 32nm to 13.4 nm! We are really at the cusp of nanotechnology-scale there. And all within five years. Neat stuff.

But remember, Intel is dooooomed…

My wireless Microsoft mouse – which I’ve owned for years – just emitted a gigantic POP that scared the crap out of me. The batteries inside appear to have exploded somehow. I guess I’m lucky it wasn’t worse – I just threw the mouse outside the front door and will let it sit out there for an hour to calm down before I try to open it up and peek inside. Good thing I have a couple of extra wired optical mice lying around.

And I was all set to make fun of mac users for their woes, too. Well, MacBooks DO cost about two orders of magnitude more…

Let me pile on to Kevin’s mini-rant:

The worst offender on this score (to my knowledge, anyway) is Fry’s Electronics: their customer service for returns isn’t bad out of laziness or bad management, it’s deliberately bad because they want to discourage people from returning things. So screw ’em. Their prices aren’t all that great anyway. I do all my shopping at Micro Center, and I do it there solely because they’ve always been decent and efficient at processing my rare returns.

Fry’s maintains the illusion of low prices almost exclusively via rebates. The rebate process is one of the most stealthy scams in existence. And, I have never, ever asked a question of a Fry’s associate to which I received an informed answer. They seem to recruit sales representatives who are almost willfully ignorant of technology fundamentals. And what others say is true – when asked a technical question, Fry’s associates tend to make it up or outright lie rather than admit they don’t know.

Their advertised specials are the only reason to shop there – I watch the ad copy every week in the local paper. So there will always be a reason to shop there. But if you do need to shop at Fry’s, beware. Daniel Fishman’s rules for shopping at Fry’s is really quite good – and, I am sorry to say, entirely accurate. If you’re going to go to Fry’s for any reason, you need to read it. Fry’s goes out of its way to put obstacles in your path, misdirect you, and bank on your laziness. But by far the best advice is the summary:

Think of shopping at Fry’s like a competition. There can only be one winner of a Fry’s visit, you or them. Like any sport you need to be in both good physical and mental condition.

At least the stores are cool. The Clear Lake store has a NASA motif – I’ll try to sneak some pics.

Microsoft is making webcams now:

The new product announcements are straightforward. The US$100 model will feature a wide-angle lens with a 1.3 megapixel sensor, while the US$50 model comes without wide-angle and with a VGA resolution sensor. One interesting feature of both is a large button on the top of the cameras that users can tap to bring up instant access to a buddy list, which should make placing a call as simple as a making a couple of clicks. The whole idea of the new cameras is to make videoconferencing and blogging as simple as possible for less technically-inclined users.

This is interesting news. Continue reading “webcams and IM”