Archive for the 'CPU & memory' category

Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:

• Upgrade your gear
• Dim your screen
• Consolidate and virtualize computers
• Turn off peripherals
• Kill unnecessary processes
• Get a smart power switch
• Enable energy saver settings
• Unplug energy vampires
• Spin down your hard drive
• Shut down the computer

Another trick: Power saving remote computing.

Do you remember 2004? In this year, we saw the birth of FarCry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3, three games that really redefined PC gaming. This year, in November, we will see a blooming of new games which are set to retrace the PC gaming industy.

Expect no less than:

• Hellgate: London is for multiplayer action
• Gears of War brings more action on the PC
• Crysis is expected to be the First Person Shooter of the year
• John Woo’s Stranglehold is already on the market and looks impressive on wide screens at 1920×1200 resolutions (or more) if you have a good hardware

I can forecast that you will be buying some of these and that it will mean that you will look into multi-core CPUs, new graphics cards and possibly a new Windows Vista (for DirectX 10 compatibility).

Microsoft would have us believing that the hybrid disk drives (containing a standard magnetic disc drive, some Flash memory and the usual cache memory) are the solution to all world’s problems (including hunger and poverty), the culmination of technology finally allowed by Windows Vista.

The basic principle of adding Flash memory to a disk drive is to provide some kind of cache memory buried less deeply into the disk system and that the Operating System (Windows Vista) would be able to use at will to improve disk system performance.

Thanks! But no thanks! It increase the cost and the complexity of the whole PC system. Where cache memory was a simple mean for the disk sub-system to optimize its operation without asking anything from the Operating System (it only sees a slightly faster drive), Flash memory of hybrid disks add one more task to Windows. Even worse, Windows already use several cache systems to optimize disk susb-systems. They all rely on the DRAM central memory of your PC; They are able to adapt to the size of the memory, to the user behaviour, to the list of active tasks/programs. But here, without even removing any of that feature (which is easily forgotten because it is nicely embedded) another layer is added.

Seriously, rather than buying a hybrid disk drive with all its added costs, I recommend that you go and invest into some more central PC memory. A little more SDRAM is what has the best impact on your PC performance (including the visible performance of the hard disk drive).

Last minute: Now, disk manufacturers are willing to explain that this is not because of thechnology that the hybrid disks are not more common. It’s merely that Flash memory prices are too high (!) and you should put more than the ususal 256MB usually found nowadays in hybrid models currently on the shelves [1].

THe news of the week on the CPU front line is definitely the arrival of new triple-core CPUs from AMD. There is an obvious wish to take the marketing and technical lead again on a ground where Intel was starting to appear as the unchallenged leader. But there is also an interesting technico-industrial approach.

When you manufacture a quad-core CPU, it is quite common to find on that it not working properly during the tests. So, what do you do with this slice of non-functional silicon that you cannot sell as a quad-core CPU? A triple-core CPU! Instead of loosing the silicon slab that they wanted to sell to the highest bidder, they can sell it for a definitely lower price while grabbing a lot of media attention. It puts AMD on the fast track again!

The latest news from the markets for the electronic components for computers are quite diverse currently. NAND-Flash memory should see its prices raise (or no longer fall) because of a production stop at a Samsung plant that will pressure the offer. But more oddly, DRAM memory prices seem to be aiming low even if some European markets (incl. UK) did not react quickly, while the price of motherboards is stable (or high) with suppliers like Asustek, MSI and Gigabyte congratulating themselves for climbing revenue during this Summer.

Along similar lines, sales of LCD screens are very brisk despite prices that do not lower since the beginning of Summer (all LCD panel manufacturers saw their shipments increase except HannStar).

Source: DigiTimes Asia.

The unreadable figures used to describe the performance of DRAM memory certainly need to be explained precisely. If you are ready for some technical reading, I invite you to DRAM latency explained on The Inquirer.

This is quite surprising. After about a month of DRAM memory prices going up (this was quite surprising), the market analyst DRAMexchange tells us that this is now the end and the prices will fall again. Apparently, despite the vows of manufacturers like Nanya whose CEO is confirming that he would not try to limit any price increases, the weak market demand (Microsoft Windows Vista is obviously still very far from creating a bear market) combined with the large manufacturing capacity is going to keep pushing prices down at a pace that will probably become painful for those with small margins.

Even if you don’t go the the extremes of CPU overclocking, you may sometimes wonder whether your CPU is too hot or not. For example, my own Athlon XP 2600+ currently displays 62°C. Is it too much?

Chris Hare comes to our help with his table of CPU characteristics. You will find there (among other things), the official max temperature of your CPU. Don’t even try to reach that temperature: It is merely the hottest point before failure (AMD and Intel will not warrant anything past this) and you should have a cooling fan or system good enough to maintain the CPU far from this, but it is an important data.

If you never entered a electronics plant, seeing how one of the biggest PC motherboard manufacturer builds them may be interesting.

Competition is tough at this level (sub-$200 dual-core processors). That is the reason why TechWareLabs decided to compare both CPUs: Intel’s E6420 vs. AMD’s 5600+. This is a confirmation that prices are set to make CPUs quite comparable. There is a slight performance advantage to Intel but for a slightly higher price.

Now, we had announced them: Summer sales. AMD started with nearly all its CPU products, Intel followed immediately, AMD announced that they would not go further for now. Today, Intel does it again for quad-core processors (but prices are already so high that you need breathing assistance to observe them in the rarefied air of this altitude, and you and I don’t dwell there).

AMD just announced two things nearly simultaneously : loosing $600 millions in operations in the last quarter (the financial balance is not good, but the message in there is: “it’s gonna be better soon”) and receiving a €262 millions from the German government (approved by the European Commission) to support the investments in their Dresden plant.