Gomeler.com

MTRON, undoubtedly one of the highest quality SSD manufacturers, has unveiled a new SSD controller that nearly doubles performance of current performance SSDs. Solid state drives may be out of reach for normal consumers in normal applications but the rate at which innovations are occurring in the field will soon make high capacity high speed SSDs commonplace in the market. MTRON’s newest controller pushes the complexity by increasing the number of channels from 4 to 8 and thereby pushing maximum reads and writes to 260 MB/s and 240MB/s respectively for single level cell modules. SLC drives are still considerably more expensive than multi level cell modules but hopefully the advances made on this controller will extend over to MLC modules. MTRON is originally targeting military, aerospace, and medical applications for these drives however they will hopefully trickle down through industry after launch.

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Today has not been a good day for Yahoo. Slowly but surely the Yahoo! boardroom is jumping ship while smart decisions about the companies future are not being made. The talks between Yahoo! and Microsoft over a Redmond acquisition fell through again, leading to a 10% drop in Yahoo! stocks. Four months ago Microsoft was offering $31 per share, nearly $5 over current prices and $7 over the price at the time of the offer. Yahoo! is going to either slowly burn out or break itself up and I’d rather see Yahoo! sell itself to Microsoft versus giving even more market share to Google. I fear if Google acquires Yahoo! we will see something similar to the current state of affairs with operating systems on computers. Come on Yahoo, don’t bet on the short-term and destroy your legacy.

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A little over 1.5 years ago I wrote about Asus launching an external graphics card for laptop consumers. Remotely locating the hot and power hungry GPU to a desktop located platform would bring laptops up to speed with desktops in the one department they are seriously lacking. Current performance GPUs easily chew through 75 to 125 watts which is easily double the power consumption of your average laptop computer. AMD is hoping to tap into the mobile market with an external graphics card with a custom graphical port permitting consumers to render images on both the internal laptop screen or up to 4 external displays.

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I just feel obligated to call to everyones attention that Nehalem looks to be a multi-threaded monster. While at Computex in Taiwan, Anandtech managed to snag two Nehalem systems, one at 2.66Ghz and one at 2.93GHz. Using pre-production boards with some serious bugs slightly impacted the scores recorded but even with these penalties, Nehalem bested an equally clocked Yorkfield. Roughly guessing from these results, Nehalem will walk all over AMD’s Phenom and quite possibly the 45nm Shanghai shrink unless the cache latencies are addressed. I look forward to the Nehalem launch, it promises to be as big as the original Conroe launch that seems to be so long ago.

For the last 3 days I’ve been sitting through orientations at my new job but today was a free day and luckily UPS dropped off my new QX9650. Sadly it’s a C0 stepping, looks like C1’s are limited to QX9770’s. I’m having trouble getting 460FSB stable though but it might be the motherboard. I received a new Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 and it’s acting funky, going to try a beta BIOS in a few minutes though and maybe that’ll calm it down a bit. Looking forward to benching tonight, haven’t benched in 3 weeks. Hopefully tonight will include some high speed HD3850 benching so I can retire the cards and then stock 8800GT benching. Cross your fingers for me, firing up the cascade in 2 hours.

I typically hate to get into the rumor industry however these figures posted over at NordicHardware sound very believable. They aren’t drastically larger than the past generation yet appear to offer enough performance to perform as expected. The RV770 core, which will form AMD’s HD4850, HD4870, and HD4870X2, will consist of 480 shaders, 160 more than RV670. There will be 16 ROPs, same as RV670, but 32 TMUs, double of RV670. The HD4850 will operate at 625MHz core with GDDR3 operating at 2286MHz on a 256-bit bus. The HD4870 will operate at 850MHz core with GDDR5 operating at a whopping 3970MHz on a 256-bit bus. Due to the sheer speed of GDDR5, RV770 will have gobs of bandwidth, 127 gigabytes per second to be precise. RV670 had only 72 gigabytes per second of bandwidth so this significant jump should help keep this larger core happily fed.

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During Gigabyte’s Spring Break they presented a slideshow to us, highlighting upcoming technologies in their P45 launch. P45 really will be a remarkable chipset but not due to the actual chipset performance itself but the features that come with it. Gigabyte has a slew of features that’ll be a part of their P45 series boards, some pertinent to overclockers and some to the average consumer. What I find most impressive about this entire slideshow though is the focus Gigabyte has turned towards the enthuasiast sector.

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At 4:15am today my QX9650 died. I purchased this chip on January 17th, 2008 and it lasted a little under 4 months under my control. During it’s lifetime though it brought me many good moments and really propelled my overclocking career forward, revealing new doors and opening old doors. Unfortunately, last night while benching 3DMark 2003, the system crashed hard midway through a test and refused to boot afterwards. Upon further investigation, and to my hearts joy/sadness, I verified the chip was dead. I say joy as I was deathly afraid I had killed another Gigabyte board, but thankfully this was not the case. That QX9650 was a decent chip though and it saddens me to see it move on, it was doing 5350MHz with 1.78v through 3DMark 2003 and 100% stable. That would have been a killer run, hopefully it’s successor can live up to and pass this chips records. If all goes well I should get a replacement quickly as I have a lot of gear here that needs to be tested. I’ve got one more night of HD3850 benching(close to a clean sweep on records) and then I start testing Gigabyte 8800 GT’s.