Eco Factor: AMDs new triple-core processor is energy-efficient. High computing power meant high energy usage, until AMD released their Phenom X3 8450e Processor. This newbie from AMD is a triple-core processor, which features reduced TDP of just 65 watts. Based on the 65nm Toliman core, the CPU offers a clock speed of 2.10 GHz with 512KB per core of L2 cache and 2MB of shared L3 caches. Retailing in Japan for $107, the CPU comes in the AM2+ package and a HyperTransport 3.0 system interface of 3600MT/s. The Dark Side: The processor is energy-efficient when compared to other dual,...
When folks find out that I still use a first-generation Apple iPhone for my primary handset, the first question out of their mouth is usually, "why didn't you upgrade to the iPhone 3G?" I've covered that before but as a quick rehash: adding 3G and true GPS capabilities didn't appeal much to me for a few reasons. First: I spend $599 for the handset, although I did get $100 back that I put towards the purchase of Leopard. Second, I purchased and pay a monthly fee to Verizon Wireless for a USB 3G adapter... I'd rather have the 3G...
So far about every major and niche computer maker has announced a Core i7 desktop platform this week and ASUS is not to be outdone. The ROG CG6190 pairs up the powerful Core i7 Extreme Edition with the Intel X58 chipset. The press release isn’t exactly clear but it seems that the box can support up to 12 GB of triple channel DDR 1333 memory and 4TB of hard drives with the graphics being provided by a 3-way SLI and ATI CrossFireX graphics. All this computing power has to come at a price but ASUS didn’t announce how much it will...
Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offering. Today, they unveiled the beta version of that service, named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery. Sponsor In a day and age where more and more applications are built on the Web,...
High performance computing specialist Silicon Graphics has created a concept computer called Molecule using mostly off-the-shelf consumer electronics components that packs in 10,000 cores into a single rack. While the computer sounds like a powerhouse, it isn't real. But its a demonstration of how chips and memory using in personal computers can be brought together to create a powerhouse, says SGI. Engineers at the company's research labs say they drew up the system to show how consumer electronics technologies could be applied to overcome some of the limits supercomputers face today. The Molecule computer can handle 20,000 threads of...
Ever heard a software engineer refer to a problem as "NP-complete"? NP-complete is fancy computer science jargon shorthand for "incredibly hard": The most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known; that is, the time required to solve the problem using any currently known algorithm increases very quickly as the size of the problem grows. As a result, the time required to solve even moderately large versions of many of these problems easily reaches into the billions or trillions of years, using any amount of computing power available today. As a consequence, determining...
Filed under: Desktops, LaptopsWe already got word of AMD's new 45nm Shanghai Opterons this morning, but it looks like that was only just the beginning of a deluge of news out of the slightly troubled company today, which includes the expected announcement of its netbook platform, the introduction of its new ATI Stream brand, and word of a delay to its much-vaunted Fusion platform. On the netbook front, AMD is hoping that its "Conesus" processor will prove to be a formidable competitor to Intel's Atom, with it apparently existing only in a 45nm, dual-core version that includes 1MB of cache...
While we wait for Mobile Internet Devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon solution, the chip company isn't sitting on the sidelines. Today, Qualcomm announced their Kayak PC alternative to help emerging markets navigate the web's choppy waters. According to the company, "the Kayak PC alternative fills the niche that exists between desktop PCs, which normally require landlines or seperate accessories for connectivity, and Internet-capable wireless devices." Based on the reference design features, the quote sounds like another name for a small and portable 3G-connected low-end net appliance. The design is powered by Qualcomm's dual-core Mobile Station Modem MSM7xxx-series chipset which...
I was reading Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom on Freedom to Tinker and thought of the different concepts of cloud that he was describing and was thinking of a Hyper or Meta Cloud for such things as storage or computing power. One of Stallman’s objections - which I tend to agree with - is that you have no control over the service being provided remotely. This is the same as when I get network services from a Level 3 or MCI WorldMob, for more control I would distribute my traffic over multiple independent network vendors. In this way I can mitigate...
NVIDIA is rolling out some serious graphic crunching power with its latest Quadro graphics card. Still, with a $3,499 MSRP, only pros with a company credit card and a real need for such computing power should apply for the 240 CUDA-programmable parallel core card. Just check out the Quadro FX 5800 capabilities though: Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second That’s a whole lot Photoshop power....
"Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters." — Walter Jon Williams, interviewed by...
The clouds are aligning: Salesforce.com Monday unveiled plans to make its “cloud” work with Facebook’s and Amazon’s. Clouds: The go-to metaphor for the Internet “Cloud computing” is the hottest tech buzzterm since “Web 2.0.” It’s come to mean more or less anything having to do with the Internet: A service from Amazon.com that rents out its excess computing power is cloud computing; so is Facebook’s social-networking Web site. But the company that has embraced the term most passionately is Salesforce.com, which broadened the meaning to include all software accessed over the Internet. (Complicating matters, from a jargon perspective at least,...
