Posted by Hanners
on Mon 8th Sep 2008
Intel have been talking up their entry into the Solid State Drive market for a little while now, promising some impressive products in terms of both pricing and performance. Today sees the launch of the company's first SSD part, the 80GB X25-M. Several sites have taken a look at this SSD drive to see whether it can live up to expectations, so check out the comprehensive list of reviews below:
Intel is currently shipping 80GB MLC (multi-level cell) drives into the market, at $595 in quantities of 1,000. The 2.5-inch form factor is known as the Intel X25-M, while the 1.8-inch drives are the X18-M. End-user prices will probably be well north of $600. MLC NAND flash holds two bits of data per cell, and has traditionally been slower than SLC (single level cell) flash. Intel is also shipping 32GB SLC drives into the high-end server market, but those drives weren't available for testing.
Intel claims their drives are capable of a maximum read bandwidth of 250MB/sec and write bandwidth of up to 70MB/sec. Intel also specifies read latency of 85 microseconds,which is of course a fraction of even the fastest spinning hard drives at 4ms. or so. Intel also specifies a 1.2 million hour MTBF (mean time before failure), which is about on par with the average hard drive. Power consumption on the other hand is again a fraction of what most spinning discs are measured at. The average spinning drive weighs in with an active power consumption somewhere in between 8 and 10 watts, while most SSDs, including Intel's, offer sub-watt power consumption under "typical conditions", though as we'll show you in the pages that follow, that doesn't mean max power consumption is that low. However, as you can imagine, when you read from or write to an SSD, you don't have to light up all the flash memory in the drive to get at the data.
At launch, both the X25-M and X18-M will come in 80GB capacities only. A 160GB model will also be available as well, but won't likely be seen until the beginning of 2009 due mostly to pricing and drive production capacity issues. Both the X25-M and X18-M series drives are of a multi-level cell design - MLC NAND can store 2 bits of data per cell and thus allows companies like Intel to sell larger capacities for less money but at the cost of performance due to much more complicated error detection.
MLC memory is characterized by relatively slow write speeds, and the X25-M's 70MB/s sustained write rate lives up to MLC's reptuation. Calling 70MB/s relatively slow seems almost comical given that few 7,200-RPM notebook hard drives can match that speed. However, the Intel drive's whopping 250MB/s sustained read rate quickly puts things into perspective. That's more than twice the sustained read throughput of the latest desktop WD VelociRaptor and leagues ahead of the fastest mobile competition. (For comparison, the SLC-based 64GB Samsung FlashSSD we reviewed not long ago is rated for 100MB/s sustained reads and 80MB/s writes.) Finally, we have a drive capable of exploiting its 300MB/s Serial ATA interface.
Posted by Hanners
on Mon 8th Sep 2008
I'm sure all of you are more than fleetingly familiar with the reliability problems that have plagued Microsoft's Xbox 360 console from its launch, in the form of the so-called Red Rings of Death, and most likely equally familiar with the general reasons for those failures and the work done by Microsoft to try and rectify them.
Venture Beat's Dean Takahashi has written an excellent article, following the development process of the Xbox 360 through to its reliability issues and Microsoft's reaction to them, to build up a comprehensive picture of the console's gestation and lifespan.
But the evidence for the quality debacle was there to see even before Microsoft shipped any machines. In August, 2005, as Microsoft was gearing up production, an engineer raised a hand and said, "Stop. You have to shut down the line." This wasn't just a brief moment. The engineer spoke up repeatedly.
That engineer, who asked not to be identified, had deep experience in manufacturing. When production results were really off kilter, stopping a line and tracing a problem back to its roots was the answer. But the higher-ranking engineers, managers and executives chose to risk going forward. There wasn't a universal backlash from the engineering ranks, according to one engineering source.
Nobody listened to that engineer - who spoke on condition of anonymity - apparently because console launches are always hurried affairs. Yields - the percentage of working products in a given batch of total products produced - generally start low. As the manufacturers conduct statistical analysis and tight controls on every step in assembly, they learn how to drive the yields up.
Elite Bastards review: Foxconn DigitaLife ELA motherboard
Posted by Hanners
on Mon 8th Sep 2008
As you'd expect from Intel's current mainstream chipset, P45, there are already plenty of motherboards out there sporting its functionality at their heart. However, Foxconn's DigitaLife ELA motherboard is attempting to differentiate itself from the pack based more on its feature set, and indeed does succeed in bringing some interesting additions to the table in hardware terms. So, do those additions make the ELA a purchase worthy of consideration? We take a look to find out in today's review.
The expansion slot configuration is where the ELA gets really interesting - Aside from two PCI and two PCI Express 1x slots, this motherboard also offers up no less than three electrical PCI Express 16x slots. We've already covered that a standard P45 chipset motherboard can be equipped with two PCI Express 16x slots which both have eight lanes of bandwidth in a CrossFire configuration (with the full sixteen lanes of bandwidth available when using a single graphics board), so how have Foxconn managed to squeeze a third graphics board slot into this offering?
The secret to this is actually hidden underneath the heatsink you can see in the image above, and consists of an IDT PCI Express switch which provides the supplemental lanes required to run three PCI Express for graphics slots. Unfortunately we can't see what the chip used here is to get a full idea of its capabilities, but we do know that in a CrossFireX configuration featuring three AMD graphics boards, each card will get eight lanes of PCI Express 2.0 bandwidth to make use of, which should be enough in the vast majority of circumstances.
Intel delays introduction of CPUs with integrated graphics
Posted by Hanners
on Sat 6th Sep 2008
While AMD appear to be betting quite a lot on their 'Fusion' project that integrates a GPU onto the CPU die, Intel seem to see this as less of a priority. Indeed, a leaked slide from Chinese site Expreview suggests that Intel's own project of this sort, Havendale, has now been delayed until the start of 2010.
Intel Corp. has decided to postpone the release of its central processing units (CPUs) with built-in graphics core to 2010 because of the "customer feedback", according to a slide from a roadmap of the chipmaker published by a web-site.
"Intel remains committed to delivering stable, high quality, industry leading platforms on a predictable cadence. Based on 2008 client platform learnings and customer feedback, we have realigned our features and schedules for 2009 mainstream Nehalem chips," a statement published on a slide that resembles a slide from Intel's roadmap, reads.
Posted by Hanners
on Sat 6th Sep 2008
Intel's current CPU line-up continues to grow, with the company quietly releasing three new parts into the market - One quad-core, one dual-core and one Celeron offering.
The Core 2 Quad Q8200 is clocked at 2.33GHz, comes with 4MB of L2 cache and a 1,333MHz front side bus speed - it's listed on Intel's official price list at $224 per processor when purchased in 1,000 unit trays; Scan, meanwhile, has it on sale for £158.50 (inc. VAT).
What's more there are several features missing from the chip - at least one of those may please some of you out there. There's no support for Intel's Virtualization Technology and Trusted Execution Technology is also missing as well.
Posted by Hanners
on Fri 5th Sep 2008
The introduction of ASUS' Eee PC to the market has created an explosion in the market for so called 'netbooks', otherwise known as ultra-portable notebooks. As numerous companies have scrambled to bring their own Eee PC rivals to market, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Dell got in on the act, and that's exactly what they've done with the launch of the Inspiron Mini 9. Can they use their clout in the market to create a true Eee-killer?
The CPU of choice in the Inspiron Mini is Intel's recently announced Atom. I've gone through Atom's architecture before and also looked at its performance, basically what you're looking at is something that's around the speed of a 1.2GHz Pentium M on average. You're not going to be setting any speed records with this thing, but by no means is it slow. It gets the job done.
Once again we've got an Atom system without Poulsbo (Atom's ultra power efficient mobile chipset), instead we've got the Intel 945G, which not only increases the required area on the motherboard but also the power consumption of the system. I asked Dell why it opted against Poulsbo and I was told that it was a timing issue - in order to have the Inspiron Mini out today, the design had to be completed using 945G. I'd expect future netbooks to start switching to Poulsbo, but for now we're strictly a 945G shop.
Posted by Hanners
on Fri 5th Sep 2008
You'd be hard pressed to find many people who didn't like Call of Duty 4, but will its successor, World at War, bring similar success? It seems we'll be finding out on November 11th.
Activision announced today that Call of Duty: World at War will arrive in stores on November 11. The Treyarch-developed first-person shooter will be released for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PS2, and Wii on the same day alongside the DS edition developed by n-Space.
It was also announced that pre-order customers for the Xbox 360 and PC versions will be granted access to a multiplayer beta of the game in October.
Microsoft confirms Xbox 360 price cuts for September 5th
Posted by Hanners
on Thu 4th Sep 2008
It's been expected for a little while now, but Microsoft has finally confirmed that, as of tomorrow, their range of Xbox 360 consoles will be getting a price cut.
Today, Microsoft made its across-the-board price cuts official. The 120GB Xbox 360 Elite dropped in price from $449 down to $399. The recently introduced 60GB Xbox 360 Pro also took a $50 nose dive to $299. Finally, the Xbox 360 Core is now priced at a reasonable $199. The previous 20GB Xbox 360 Pro is now discontinued.
Intel X25-M 80GB Solid State Hard Drive reviews