4/4/2007 News
04.04.07 - 05:02pm
Once again I’m going to try and spare you from RSS spamage by combining all these little tidbits together in one tidy post. For starters I went to New Orleans this weekend and I must say it was very depressing to drive through the city. Unlike two years ago nearly to the day, this time New Orleans had the feeling of a destroyed city, so much of the downtown area around the French Quarter is in a state of decay. When I visited in 2005 there weren’t much if any boarded up shops and buildings but this time around a large portion of the downtown area was still boarded up. The hotel I stayed at last time was one of those places, a real shame. But no matter, Bourbon street was still active and there were plenty of hilarious individuals to watch, it was quite the relaxing weekend. Enough about me though, you don’t read this to read about me ;).
Apple
There were enough Apple announcements and product launches in the last week that I feel they deserve their own little header. To kick things off, the AppleTV launched and was quickly hacked to bits. Honestly, I think Apple wanted the AppleTV to be easily modified as this will help extend it’s userbase. Originally the AppleTV was strictly limited to playing material purchased from iTunes however after tearing down the AppleTV and scanning the harddrive it was quickly revealed that a stripped version of OS X was running the AppleTV. Enter creative nerds and voila, codecs for any media were immediately available. For a nice teardown of the AppleTV check out Anandtech’s article and for a bunch of tips and tricks then head over to appletvhacks.net. In another media related event Apple has started offering DRM free music from the iTunes music store. I don’t need to stress how important this is but I am going to anyways, THIS IS HUGE! Hopefully April 2nd will be the day that DRM died. Traditionally if somebody wanted to hack your software/media/hardware then there is damn near nothing you could do to stop them asides from stop selling the stuff. I don’t know of a single form of DRM that has managed to stand up to the test of time, there are simply too many angry computer users willing to find work-arounds and hacks to disable the stuff. Besides being DRM-free, these new iTunes tracks will also be supplied in a 256kbit bitrate which is nice considering how Apple had been passing off 128kbit music for the price of CD tracks. With a 30 cent premium on these DRM-free songs users will be able to purchase new songs for $1.29 or pay $0.30 to update their DRM’d songs to DRM-free songs. If I had an iTunes library you bet I’d drop those 30 cents easily. The next step will be for the remainder of the music industry to follow suit, the greatest frustration using iTunes is browsing your roommates iTunes library to find it all locked out via DRM.
The MacPro line received a performance bump this week with the release of the 8-core MacPro. Honestly I’ve been wondering when Apple was going to jump on this, being able to say you have 8 cores in your Mac while your Dell buddies only have 2 cores should have been enough incentive, not to mention the enormous performance increase you’d see in benchmarks. The new MacPro is based on dual 3GHz Cloverton processors, the same 2P processors that I have raved about in the past. While it took 6 months from the unveiling of the Cloverton processors they are finally here with a basic 8-core MacPro costing you at the least $3997 before taxes. The $1498 premium on the quad-core processors is understandable considering how you are dealing with the 3GHz variants, I don’t understand why Apple won’t offer the lower power and lower cost Clovertons, I would love two of the 1.6GHz Clovertons coupled with 2 gigs of ram, the thermal output from these little guys would pale in comparison to the 3GHz beasts and with a price of ~$350 per chip it’s a verifiable steal. I need somebody to purchase the MacPro motherboard/chassis for me so I can see what sort of hardware overclocking can be performed, I know for a fact that BSEL mods could be performed. Wouldn’t it be wicked to own the ONLY overclocked MacPro?
Intel/DAAMIT
Core 2 has finally hit the single-core market with the introduction of the Conroe-L cores for Celerons. I don’t know if these are native single-core processors or simply neutered Allendales but the results were still very interesting, you can’t chop out all of the Core 2 architecture. Equipped with a miserable 512kb of L2 cache and a singlecore the Conroe-L won’t be breaking any world records but it also won’t be breaking any bank accounts. Price estimates slot it around $60 which is incredibly competitive with the Pentium D’s and low-end Sempron and Athlon X2’s. For the complete review head on over to X-bit Labs, if anything browse through it and see the new chip that Dell will be consuming in large numbers. While the overclocking results were a bit pathetic(who uses a Zalman heatsink for overclocking now..) I imagine these chips could do a great job in low-power markets. With a few tweaks, a decent heatsink, and a properly designed case this processor could easily be passively cooled, hello HTPC market.
It has been known for a little while now that Intel will be pushing out an entirely new processor architecture every two years but to hold them over they will be shrinking down their design process from 65nm to 45nm next year. DailyTech has a great read talking about the future for Intel and their product timeline, I just can’t wait to start seeing samples of Nehalem. First up though will be AMD’s Barcelona processor lineup which should launch “sometime soon”. Considering how DAAMIT has been missing deadlines since the merger I wouldn’t be surprised if Q3 comes around and there aren’t even ES samples on the market for the curious to pick up and play with. AMD however is cutting prices across the board, they must be desperate to secure even more marketshare with little regard to profit margins. I don’t know if the chart below is accurate or not but some of these price changes seem to already be in effect, especially the X2 3600+ and X2 3800+. No matter what though I would suggest holding out until Barcelona releases or going with a Core 2 processor considering the performance gap between the architectures.
AMD’s R600 may actually release by the end of this year! According to Vijay Sharma, Director of Desktop Discrete Product Marketing at AMD, the R600 launch has been pushed back so that an entire product line could be launched, not due to hardware problems. I suppose this is good news as that means that AMD has had enough time to stockpile R600 cards however the fact that they mention launching an entire product line makes me nervous. When Nvidia launched the 8800GTX and 8800GTS they just had to focus on a single PCB, a single core, and they just had to deal with speedbinning the cores and memory. With AMD launching multiple PCBs, multiple core variations, and multiple generations of memory (GDDR3 and GDDR4) this seriously compounds the chances of errors occurring. I guess only time will tell, supposedly there will be the R600 family launch later in April, this better not slide into May or June.
Those Europeans finally got a taste of Sony’s P$3 and it looks like after a week of brisk sales the desire has slacked off a bit completely. Apparently after selling out 80% of the stock allotted to the UK in the first week, sales plumetted 83%. This is sort of a “duh” moment however to drop that much after just one week goes to show exactly how many individuals have had the desire to purchase this behemoth. I guess having months of competition from Microsoft and Nintendo have put a dent into Sony’s sales, I wonder if the Vista launch impacted sales at all.
That’s about it, that’s a bunch to digest but it is just a drop in the bucket. School is wrapping up for me and that means projects are piling up, looks like it’ll be another long night with Matlab. My second testbed is currently down due to a lack of a video card, I forgot to order one :-\ Once that is up then I’ll finally be able to get some software testing done, I need a hardware budget badly.
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