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Monday Intel officially unveiled its newest line of processors, the Core 2 Duo. It looks like Intel will also be launching Merom, the mobile variant of Conroe, during the middle of August. If I remember correctly Merom was about 25% more efficient, clock for clock, when compared to the Core Duo. With healthy price cuts, strong performance, and great overall value it looks like Intel’s new line of processors not only plan to compete with AMD but are willing and able to completely bury AMD. The fall will probably be very bleak for AMD fanboys as Intel processors start crushing all previous world records held my the faithful K8 from AMD but just remember your time will come. It took Intel nearly 3 years to catch up, I am sure the young guns over at AMD will have something fresh to serve up in about 6 months.

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You may have noticed that I haven’t written anything substantial in the last two days or so. This is mainly due to the fact that it is practically finals week at Georgia Tech and I am being slammed with a huge project and two finals. I would love to write a large and indepth report on what the project is about but it isn’t all that interesting to the average person and I suspect talking about assembly code wouldn’t be too intersting for you guys either. In other news I passed my ethics class with flying colors meaning I can now ethically kill people or maybe it was maybe it was condemn ethnic killing… Just 4 more days of preparing for the last final and I’ll get back to my “normal” routine of posting and building stuff. Hopefully within the next two weeks I’ll have the autocascade off the ground and mated to a Conroe so there should be some interesting news happening here. Thanks for sticking around guys, it is nice to have a readership.

About two weeks ago rumors of ATI and AMD merging spread like wildfire across the Internet. These rumors were quickly squashed with people wondering why AMD would pick up ATI and alienate Nvidia. Last night once again rumors began popping up that a combined cash and stock deal would occur for AMD to acquire ATI. This morning AMD released a press announcement confirming that they would indeed be merging with ATI. More rumors have sprung up now that Intel has not renewed its license with ATI to create Intel chipsets so it looks like AMD won’t have a chance to create Intel chipsets. I don’t know what AMD is thinking by joining forces with ATI, AMD’s primary chipset manufacturer’s opposition. Perhaps we will see a new wave of chipsets for AMD from ATI and Nvidia putting more attention into the Intel chipset market. This would also make SLI the dominate Intel multi-gpu platform and Crossfire the dominate AMD multi-gpu platform. Oh how times have changed.

Late last week I was cruising around Digg.com and I picked up an article talking about how the top 100 Digg users submit over half the content to Digg.com. When I read through the article I couldn’t help but going “duh”. On Thursday I found another post that discussed a very familiar topic called the One Percent rule. I thought I’d share my thoughts on these two topics and I would love to hear some feedback from you guys.

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It looks like Q2 will be chalked up as a transition quarter in Intel’s camp. Despite the release in June of the 51xx series Woodcrest Xeons and the anticipated launch of Conroe and Merom Intel’s Q2 profits are down by 57% from Q2 2005. With the desktop business slowing and the tight margins of the current mobile and desktop processor markets it is no wonder that Intel has seen a drop in profit. Conroe/Woodcrest/Merom should help boost up sales in Q3 but Intel still has a huge stockpile of now obsolete Netburst processors. Look for these “old” processors to be let go at very low prices as Intel slashes prices to clear inventory.

Something to keep in mind for the future is the introduction of the first quad-core processors from Intel. Kentsfield and Cloverton have been pushed up from Q1 2007 to Q4 2006 in hopes to counter AMD’s new 4×4 platform. With initial reports of 40% to 50% overclocks capable on the LGA775 Kentsfield it looks like Intel while have quite the beast to unleash once Conroe gets settled in. Look for this processor to become the flagship LGA775 processor and have a price similar to the 965EE and 955EE processors.

Generally when someone mentions hard drive enclosures I associate this phrase with plastic external enclosures with USB or Firewire connections. What I don’t think of is a 5.25″ bay hard drive enclosure like the item I have to review today. The people of ICY DOCK sent me one of their single bay enclosures for review, the MB122 Internal Enclosure. Before you dismiss this product as another useless fluff product I would suggest that you think of instances where this product could actually be helpful. Off the top of my head I can think of a few, so keep this in mind as you read.

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Earlier in the week OCZ, maker of high performance RAM modules, signed a deal with Wal-Mart. This deal will make OCZ products available online at walmart.com. Besides the exposure that OCZ will gain from joining up with Wal-Mart I don’t know what they will gain. Wal-Mart has never been a good venue to purchase electronics at as the prices tend to be considerably more expensive than even BestBuy and look terrible when compared to online retailers. If you need a good example of this, check out the hard drive section of walmart.com. Maybe if OCZ can push enough volume at decent prices we will see a decrease in the prices for OCZ’s products. I would love to see a 15% reduction in OCZ products, but I have a feeling that the volume Wal-Mart will push won’t be enough to put a dent into OCZ’s production.

I really haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Vista as Conroe has been on my mind but I decided to take a step back and give Vista a little bit of my attention. To some people Vista is just another bump in the operating system road but for others Vista is a new wave of thinking. Vista tries to fix all the problems that have plagued previous editions of Windows and it seems to do this rather well while being rolled up into a fancy package. I decided to install and play with all the Vista targeted programs that I could find which included Microsoft Word 2007, Windows Media Player 11, and Internet Explorer 7. This suite of programs will be what greets the world when Microsoft finally launches Vista so why not take an early peek?

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