Gomeler.com

Yay Classes, boo lack of time. I’ve been slammed for the last couple of days but just thought I’d drop a line here. BioShock is an amazing game, played the demo and now I’m waiting for 2K games to fix all the small issues such as the Field of View issue and the Securom issues. Lots of ATi GPU rumors are floating around, sounds like the 2900XT will be getting some neighbors in the lineup with a 2900GT and 2900Pro launching and then closely followed by a 2950Pro and 2950XT. The 2900GT and 2900Pro will be 256-bit cards with unknown amounts of stream processors, the 2950Pro will simply be a die-shrink of the 2900(R600) core. Hopefully these new “upper-midrange” chips will provide decent cost/performance ratios as currently there is nothing from the DX10 camp worth looking at besides the 320MB 8800GTS. Today is the 30th anniversary of the NASA Voyager program, those twin probes are still flying about roughly 9 billion miles from the sun and still putting down 1 million miles a day or ~42,000 MPH. DamnInteresting.com had a slightly related (rockets, probes, close right?) post about rocket transported mail, if you want an interesting 5 minute read then check it out. I just got Photoshop installed on my laptop and I’ve set up a little repository for all my prototype designs, soon this place will get a nice facelift as I make time in my unusually busy weekdays. That is all, back to hacking up C code. edit:just noticed that my CSS makes the asides ENORMOUS

Today I received in the mail my Scythe Ninja heatsink and the weather has been cooperating and has brought down the ambient temperature to ~0 celsius, in fact at 10pm tonight it will be -4 celsius outside with a dew point of -13 celsius. I don’t know about you guys, but to me that spells perfect overclocking weather, all condensation will immediately turn to ice and with a little bit of dry ice to help things along it could be a very exciting night. I know it is a friday night but this weekend will probably be the only time it’ll be this cold in Atlanta and I’ll have free time. I’ll have a flavorful post in a few hours if the weather holds out.

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.

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.

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.

It looks like the super chip from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba may actually be too complex to easily manufacture. Since each Cell processor contains a single controlling Power Processor Element and then 8 “Synergistic Processor Elements” or SPEs there are a lot of places were mistakes can be made in the manufacturing process. With a tradition PC processor there either one or two processing cores, but with the Cell having essentially 9 cores problems begin to arise very quickly. Intel, IBM, and AMD shoot for achieving the highest success rates in manufacturing and in general a 90% yield rate is considered a realistic goal and success. Reports have come out that the Cell processor is currently achieving yields of 10% to 20%. This rate is for all 8 SPEs and the PPE are operational. Fortunately for Sony and unfortunate for consumers the PS3 only requires 1 PPE and 7 SPEs meaning consumers could end up with partially “defective” chips in their PS3s. While processors ship with minor defects all the time, this is still rather unnerving. The future does not look good for Sony and the Cell processor, they may have just bitten off much more than they can possibly chew. The Cell processor is quite a remarkable piece of machinery but sometimes the market just isn’t ready for huge jumps in technology.

Here is an interesting article on the Cell Processor

In June I heard that Intel has a working sample of Kentsfield, it’s new quad-core processor. Kentsfield was just another bump in Intel’s product line as it simply combined two Conroe’s together just like the Pentium D (Presler) simple combined two Cedar Mill processors together. Now Intel has announced that they are aiming at having 32 cores on a single die in a similar fashion to how Conroe works. These 32 cores will all be interconnected with a shared 24 megabytes of L3 Cache. With the inclusion of 8 onboard memory controllers this processor will be a heavy hitter when it releases. Now let’s pray it doesn’t also require supercooling to run at any decent clockspeeds. For the entire read, check out Toms Hardware.