Top Spec

Futuremark have finally replaced their Benchmarking tool 3DMark06 with 3DMark Vantage. This has been a long awaited release but hopefully for all those enthusiasts out there its worth the wait. Gamers and enthusiasts alike can now get official results for their latest hardware whether it be buying, selling or just looking at the competition .Vantage has been created for the gaming market, the new benchmarking tool isnt just a GPU benchmark that calculates Tera and Giga Flop calculations.

Vantage has now included four subtests for the user. These include Jane Nash, New Calico, AI and Physics. All of which should benchmark different parts of the graphics card capabilities.

The default testing environment is 1024 by 768, 1280 by1024 and 1920by1200 for all ranges low, medium and high resolutions. The High and Extreme setting uses AA x8 and 16x for extreme. The ending score will be tagged with the letter E, P, H or X followed by a four digit number. There are four versions available from free to at least $500 => £250?

Bookmark Article:

Cray has decided to develop its future HPC around Intel’s silicon. This has become a problem for AMD. Cray did in fact have fabrications from AMD which included XT3, XT4 and XT5. Unfortunately for AMD the organisation was hoping that Cray would strike a 5 year deal with the company securing their current status in the market. Cray have now made a 5 year deal with Intel for HPC which is a massive blow for AMD.

Crays development has been centred round building custom interconnects supporting multiple AMD chips through hypertransport (AMD interconnect). Intel has a rival technology called quickpath possible for their new Larrabee and Nehalem products.

Cray are hoping to combine their efforts. Cray will be using Intels Quickpath along with their own high-bandwidth memory subsystems. They are hoping this will give them a significant leap forward in high performance computational tasks. The result? an exaflop! One quadrillion operations a second, I’ve only heard of TeraFlops!

Bookmark Article:

Samsung and Sony have come together to create the eighth generation of the TFT-LCD production. S-LCD already has the eighth generation glass but the designers are looking at increasing the capacity due to LCD demands.
The production will cost $2 Billion Dollars and the release date is due half way through 09.

The 8th generation Glass Line is called 8-2, Tangjeong in South Korea are expected to create 60,000 Glass lined based on the 8th generation. Dimensions are expected @ 2,200mm by 2,500mm.

Current production: 7th generation S-LCD glass 100,000 a month at 1,870 mm by 2,200mm compared to the 8th gen figures. Start recycling your glass bottles!

Bookmark Article:

ATI are about to fight back with their latest editions of their graphics cards the 4800 series. The products are based on the RV770 Chip process. The 4870, 4850HD and 4850PRO all use GDDR3. The graphics cards are built on a 55nmand have 480 stream processors.

The 4870 is built with high-end GDDR5 memory something that Nvidia Lacks. The processing clock will run at 850 GPU and 1050 Mhz Memory clock. The slower card will spec at 650/850 Mhz.

They may be released in May, but don’t count on it!

Bookmark Article:

I’ve always been interested in Apples stand in their product architecture, when Apple decided to make the move to the x86 platform openning new leases to Linux based OS not to mention being able to run windows. Any way moving back to the topic!

Apple have bought the Chip manufacturer PA Semi. On behalf of Apple they current develop low-power processors for their PowerPC architecture. Apple have used the firm for previous products such as the PowerBook and Power Mac.

As you are all aware Apple have used Intel Processors for their current x86 architecture systems. Apple have decided to use Intels Atom microprocessors for their future IPhone release, the iPhone currently uses the ARM-base microprocessor. The ARM-base based iPhone owned by StrongARM have been integrated into Intels organisation so the move to the x86 architecture is appropriate.

The migration to the new architecture ‘x86′ is problematic. There are many advantages of moving to the architecture from a developers point of view, create once and run forever, using the Atom based processor! compare this to the ARM processor, it has been created by different manufacturers causing incompatible software between versions, no future/ backward compatibility, in conclusion causing entirely separate versions of applications and Operating Systems. The consumer must also note that the architecture will run on any desktop and laptop system, well the majority, x86 based.

With the Apple buy out of PA, Apple has now said in their future specification of products they will influence PA’s future product base.

Bookmark Article:

Western Digital created a drive capable of 10,000 RPM for fast data access. No other hard disk company has created an enthusiast hard disk at the same speed for the consumer market.

The VelociRaptor pictured above has twice the capacity of the older Rapter hard disk which currently have 150Gib. The new hard disk has shrunk to 2.5″ so how will the hardisk fit into the current 3.5″ drive bays? Well Western Digital have decided to enclose the hard disk within an IcePack. The Icepack shown in the picture has a built in heat sink to increase the size to the current standard drive bay dimension.

The Rapter drive still uses the 10,00 RPM but uses SATA II which increases the sata data transfer to 3 Gb/s. The drive also delivers 16Mb Cache Memory. As mentioned before the heat sink built into the drive will help tremendously to increase performance and help increase heat transfer . The drive has RAFF a new implementation to Western Digital products and a life expectancy of 1.4 million hours.

Bookmark Article:

Its Monday again. Over the weekend I thought I’d do some research into the current top specifications of motherboards and other related components. I looked at many sources over the weekend, totally for my own research. My main concern was trying to find value for money and this was something that was hard to find.

I looked into Skull Trail by Intel and Nvidia’s Top player the 780i. Skull trail obviously has the dual sockets compared to Nvidia’s single socket approach. The two boards had their differences; the Nvidia board used the faster dd3 memory channel. I was also surprised to see that Intel had four pci-e slots for four graphics card support, SLI or CrossFire using Nvidia’s chipset for PCI-e communications to the north bridge.

This may be an obvious point but Skull Trail is brilliant in show off mode but does it really give you the edge you need within the gaming markets? I found a number of benchmarks from third-party sources using GX2 systems with dual extreme Intel QX9775 yorkfield socket 771 not 775. I noticed that the skull trail motherboard used a different socket to the mainstream 775 boards but the above was obviously Intels anwser to feeding the Skull Trail architecture.
The dual C.P.U’s used are priced at £998 EACH, bargain right? I thought not! The motherboard also comes in at a staggering £384 not to mention the two GX2 at £400 each. Lets consider the outcome. To run COD4 at the max 22″ resolution 1920 by 1200 without filtering comes in at 150 FPS. Brilliant! When running Crysis at high detail with AA and AF at 4x the result? 50 60 FPS.

So is 50 to 60 FPS max for your new rig and new game? For your £2000 system? I didn’t think so. IF you got the cash then go a-head, I’m jealous! Otherwise if you want breath taking gaming platform with a good budget then wait for Q1.

Bookmark Article:

The University of Manchester (My Home City) have managed to carve transistors using the material Graphene one atom by 10 atoms in size.

Graphine is a one atom thick sheet which consists of a densely packed honeycomb crystal lattice. In basic terms under a microscope it is said to look like chicken wire! Simple.

By using this material they used a technique by chopping the honeycomb shaped material into quantun dots

“A quantum dot is a semiconductor whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. As a result, they have properties that are between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules”

This gave a switchable conductivity which gave the graphene technique its transiting properties. By using this technique has Moore’s law been shattered? Will this process decrease the amount of transistors needed in microprocessing?

“Moore’s Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper.The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.”

There are other techniques like the graphene implementation but the transistor run at such high temperatures a extreme method of using volatile gases for cooling has to be used.

The advantage of Graphene allows the transistors to work within room temperatures. The technique is so new and in prototype form that there is no current industrial production for the technology. Only time can tell the fait of Moore’s Law and the current transistor implementations.

Bookmark Article:

Hacking software is said to be the old technique to gaining access to someone else’s computer system. The University of Illinois say the next level is for microprocessor hacking itself.

The research found that altering the processor could actually leave computer systems helpless to back-door attacks. Apparently hacking the chip was the easy part. The process requires few changes to only few parts of the processors circuitry.

The process of hacking the processor was executed by altering 1,341 logic gates of the chips one million logic gates. From the software aspect the processor would then need to be sent a special network packet which loaded a malicious firmware giving complete access to the attacker.

The only problem with the attack technique the attacker would need to physically get access to that computer. The likely way of using this technique would be to implement the hack during development stages of the processors. Would any employees be bribed to do so?

Bookmark Article:

AMD have claimed to have created the first workstation graphics card with Display Port support. The AMD/ATI graphics cards are from their FireGL range which are aimed at computer aided design.

ATI stated that they would create the first display port at the start of 2007, it looks like ATI have made their so called dead line. The ATI Fire GL product range is adaptive for all price ranges.

Albert Xthona stated “The ATI Fire GL product line has the accuracy and speed needed for medial imaging applications like mammography screening” he further explains “Mammography viewing uses 10-bit precision to help deliver the most information to the eye of the radiologist and increasingly other medical applications will rely on the 10-bit gray and 30-bit colour rendering.”

The card features 512 MB of memory and a dual link DVI output creating dual monitor support. The board uses PCI-E which will help with high data bandwidths. The graphics card can pump out 5000 pixels wide (sub 2500 width resolution?) and each workstation is capable of running two cards. Four monitor support anyone?

Bookmark Article: