Care to Think Big?

AMD Licenses 64-bit MIPS Architecture

New Arm Design to Extend Beyond 1GHz

Apple Unveils the eMac

ECS Still Top Dog

Mario writes, "DigiTimes reports the motherboard makers Q1 results, some of which are estimates. ECS has the largest pre-tax sales, which should enable it to claim to be the most profitable Taiwanese motherboard company. ECS is definitely making inroads with its low-price strategy. This can only mean good news for AMD, because ECS manufactures more Athlon boards than P4."

AMD All 64-bit???

Spencer writes, "This article at El Reg references this intriguing piece of work by Josh Walrath at Penstarsys.  Could AMD really be planning a massive 64-bit top-to-bottom coup?  The Register piece has several others AMD related links."

Intel Will Continue to Lose Market Share

AMD/Ferrari Dream Team

Eating Food Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

Nils sends us this link.

All of Greece’s Schools Shutdown by Fatal Mystery Virus

Microsoft To Support AMD's 64 bit Hammer CPU

Asustek to Introduce Low-price Motherboards

Mario writes, "Asustek, which lost the number one Taiwanese motherboard spot to ECS, will follow ECS and enter the low-price motherboard market. This may be good news for AMD, because ECS's low-price model is currently shipping more Athlon product (up to 20%) than P4 because of Athlon's lower cost. Asustek's strategic change is a clear response to ECS's success. As the performance of the same chipset motherboards becomes less distinguishable between the different manufacturers, cost will play a bigger role in determining who wins the biggest slice of the pie.

Why Consider Open Source?

VHJ Quicks

Intel's Willamette-128 will be a Massive 210mm^2

ECS: More Revenue from Notebooks than Motherboards

And Don't Forget The Carbon Nanotube Thermal Paste

Spencer writes, "In recent testing, the addition of carbon nanotubes to epoxy adhesive increased the strength of the cured product by a factor of three and more than doubled its thermal conductivity.  These miniscule, one atom thick structures that are about 1/10,000 the width of a human hair, are perhaps the best thermal conductors ever discovered.  One of their possible future uses may be as an additive to the existing thermal pastes we use to grease the interface between our CPU's and HSF's."

Mario writes, "AMDZone was quick off the mark to link AMD's latest updated roadmap that shows Barton as having 512KB of level two cache, but no SOI. I have to say that I'm surprised and very pleased. With AMD saying that Thoroughbred was only a die shrink, it got everybody thinking that Barton would be the same but with SOI. We were proved wrong. 640KB of total full speed cache really puts the cat among the pigeons, and must be Athlon's defense against Intel's 533 MHz FSB P4. Those who were thinking that AMD's resources were stretched need to think again. The second half of this year will see these parts debut in mobile and desktop solutions. Multi-processor devices appear next year. This can't be good news for Intel on the day that they announce their quarterly results."

VHJ Quicks

New Memory Type

Another Microsoft Freak-Out

Ferrari Picture Update

Hammer Names: 'Athlon Pro 64' is the One

AMD's Thoroughbred Shipping To Manufacturers

Chris Tom of amdzone.com writes, "CNet has a story on CPU price cuts that includes information about AMD now shipping Thorougbreds to manufacturers for an introduction characterized as 'soon'. PC's may suggest these CPUs are destined for the desktop."

The Pit and the Pentium

Phil Trent writes on the struggle between AMD and Intel for dominance in the 64-bit arena.

Mario writes, "Ferrari and AMD again proved dominant and outstanding at this weekend's San Marino Grand Prix. At Saturday's qualifying session, both Ferrari drivers set the fastest times with Michael Schumacher just edging out Rubens Barichello to take pole. On race day they repeated this feat with Schumacher taking the checkered flag. This was Schumacher's third victory in four races this year, and extends his lead in the championship to 14 points. Up to this point in the season, AMD looks to be backing a winning horse. And what of Intel you may ask? They've as per usual backed the less successful thoroughbred. The team that Intel partners is BMW/Williams, which is the second most successful team in Grand Prix racing, after Ferrari of course. I've found the best picture yet that clearly shows the AMD logo on the rear aerofoil of Ferrari's dominating Grand Prix car. Click on the zoom button to get a perfect view."

Interview with VIA's CEO

Mario writes, "Tecchannel has a very interesting and frank interview with VIA's Wenchi Chen. A large part of that interview is spent discussing VIA's chipset performance. Discussion then moved on to future products and VIA's desire to grow and diversify. Tecchannel has also updated a story it ran last December about how VIA chipsets slow down PCI cards. This update reviews the latest driver patch that seems to fix this problem."

New AMD Desktop Roadmap

Mario writes, "VHJ reported on Intel's desktop roadmap last Wednesday. Today it's AMD's turn. X-bit Labs has unofficial details of AMD's desktop roadmap through to and including Q4 2002. This quarter debuts Thoroughbred at speed grades from 2000+ to 2400+, which backs up an inquirer story that Thoroughbred will debut between mid-May and June. Palomino will receive one last speed grade increase to 2200+. The Athlon XP 1600+ transfers from the performance category to take pride of place as the top value processor until it is displaced in Q3. Q3 removes the top two and bottom two Palomino speed grades and all Morgan Durons below 1.3 GHz. Appaloosa Duron debuts at speed grades from 1600+ to 1900+. Q4 unveils two more Thoroughbreds at 2600+ and 2800+, and the last Duron Morgan exists no more. They didn't mention Hammer, but this also debuts in the fourth quarter. More AMD roadmaps can be viewed here."
 

Xbox Sales Not Cutting the Ice

Mario writes, "Microsoft's Xbox is not selling as well as Microsoft would have liked. Sales in Europe and Japan have been poor, and in Australia, Sony's PlayStation 2 is outselling Xbox by two to one. Price is definitely an issue in Europe. In the UK, Microsoft charges British shoppers $430 (at today's currency rates) or $131/$167 more than US/Japanese consumers for the pleasure of owning an Xbox. I don't think the Europeans are too enamored to be subsidizing Xbox sales in other parts of the world, which may explain the European rejection of Xbox. We now live and work in a global economy, prices now need to reflect this."

LostCircuits: The Register, Tom's Hardware and Windows XP all Thieves?

Condemnation over "apologist" piece.

Mario writes, "the inquirer has an exclusive on up and coming Intel desktop products through to and including Q2 2003. Q2 and Q3 will be equally busy quarters for new desktop launches this year. This quarter will see the launch of the last PIII based Celeron and the debut of Willamette-128, Celeron's replacement. On the P4 front, the 533 MHz FSB product also debuts.  Q4 reveals just one P4 addition. Q1 2003 transfers all Celeron product to Willamette-128, and the P4 passes 3 GHz for the first time. More details can be read here. More Intel roadmaps can be viewed here."
 

A resurrected version of the groundbreaking computer is rumored to use AMD's Hammer.

Astronomers claim seven-mile star is made entirely of its constituent quarks.

Participation in our new message boards has exceeded our expectations.  Regarding our newly relocated forum, Dave relays that a there is a "massive server upgrade going on," and that "the message boards will be unavailable until this afternoon."  Sorry for the inconvenience, but thank you for the interest.  Because of the enthusiastic participation we are determined to provide message board services for our readers.  UPDATE: The Van's Hardware Forum is tentatively up again.

Spencer writes, "Nearly 8 billion miles later (twice as far as the orbit of Pluto) Voyager 1 is still functional and has yet to reach the heliopause.  After 25 years of continuous operation it's pretty amazing that we can still "talk" to this spacecraft, although the time delay due to the extreme distance for a command/response sequence is 24 hours.  Talk about latency!"

Kathy writes, "Our move is mostly over, so we'll be posting more regularly our web watch. Here are some reviews posted in the past 2 days." nVIDIA Video Card Overclocking with CoolBits, Asus A7V333 Review, ASUS P4S533 SiS645DX Mainboard Exclusive Review, ASUS 645DX Mainboard pictures, ABIT AT7 pictures and more.

The new Diablo-esque role player from Chris Taylor, the creator of Total Annihilation (perhaps one the best games ever), delivers beautiful graphics and engaging game play.  Controls are generally intuitive (bordering on clever) and camera pans are seamless and silky smooth.  However, be warned that this program demands a lot of CPU muscle.  Running on an Athlon 2100+ using a GeForce4 Ti 4600 at 1024x768x32 with maximum detail, frame rates often dropped to around 30 when under attack.  Worse, we witnessed considerable jerkiness on lesser gaming systems.  If your system has the power, Dungeon Siege rewards with rippling shadows, rainbow auras, sparkling reflections and detailed animation in what might be the handsomest RPG ever.  PC gamers have been beaten down to expect bug ridden new games.  Unfortunately, there are a number of unintended insects creeping around the Dungeon Siege code base, but we have yet to encounter one that has softened our very positive impression of this excellent, thoughtful and well-executed product.

Mario writes, "Much has been written about Intel's FUD-ing of AMD and the associated smear campaign that has swung into action. Geek.com has two pieces of interest. Their first has a very funny skit about a computer sales person trying to explain the difference between AMD's model numbers and Intel's GHz. Their second is the first of a three part response to the Aberdeen Group's white paper. AMDZone unveils Intel's FUD machine in action. ZDNet reports on the training classes offered by Intel for its channel customers that directly targets AMD's model numbers. the inquirer reports that Dell, Intel's close buddy, is also playing its part but in a far more subtle way. They're running ads that basically says: 'Beware of imitations, buy a real 2 GHz machine, a Pentium 4 from Dell.' It sounds like the cola wars between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. We'll soon be hearing that Intel's P4 is 'the real thing'. It's unfortunate that we don't have the same price parity between Intel and AMD as we do between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. These are after all commodity products. If Intel and AMD were selling cola, would you pay twice as much to drink the Intel brand? "

P4 integrated solution looks very weak in comparison to the Athlon XP’s NVIDIA nForce.

Spencer writes, "Doesn't anyone bother with the book of Revelations?"

Many, many thanks to Dave Graham. Problems with Xsorbit, although it had a lot of nice features, just not enough server/bandwidth resources, made us look for other options. Dave Graham graciously offered this solution and set-up the forum site for us. It looks great. Thanks!

Mario writes, "DigiTimes reports that Intel and SIS will both launch 533 MHz FSB RDRAM chipsets in Q2 and Q3 respectively. Intel will launch the 850E in April and SIS is planning to debut its R658 chipset in the third quarter. This refutes all those claims that Rambus was dead on the PC. This may also be a cunning plan by Intel to try to head off Hammer. Intel doesn't know the performance advantage that Hammer will deliver, so this may be insurance to cover for that unknown."
 

Win a trip to this year's Computex by coming up with innovative applications for the teeny-tiny VE1500 EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard.  VIA will pick up the tab for the flight as well as six days of accommodations in Taipei, Taiwan.  The island of Taiwan is among the most naturally beautiful places in the world.  Running from June 3rd to the 7th, Computex is one of the biggest computer hardware shows of the year.  If you need a starter idea, there are videos on the signup page for putting together a computer in a shoebox.  Application deadline is April 16th, so hurry!

Mario writes: The Alchemy Au1100 processor is the first fruits for AMD since its purchase of Alchemy Semiconductor last February. This processor is based on a MIPS32 instruction set and will be sold alongside its older siblings, the Au1000 and the Au1500. The Au1100 is a System-on-a-Chip (SOC) processor that has a core around which there are a custom set of integrated memory controllers and industry standard communication interfaces. With three speed grades being offered, 333, 400, and 500 MHz, this product will be targeted at the non-PC mobile Internet appliance market. Reduced power consumption is the most important improvement that this design brings to the table. The 400 MHz device reduces power by half, 250 mW instead of 500 mW for the Au1000 part. These new parts are currently being sampled and the 400 MHz device will be priced at $29.50 in 10,000 unit quantities. Full tech specs can be read here.

Joel writes: Rector Hall did not burn to the ground--only the 5th and 4th stories were destroyed. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, though extensively water-and-smoke damaged, will eventually be repairable. Even more thankfully, the fire did not spread to Lucy or Mason Hall (the two halls connected to Rector) so the fire ended up destroying the homes of about 120 students--not the nearly 500 we originally feared. Also, no one was hurt in the fire.

Among the Old Guard, Dr. Schuette is one of the few remaining trustworthy and insightful hardware reviewers.

An intense fire struck Joel's alma mater displacing roughly 40% of the student population.  Joel, who continues to work for the university, is helping prepare his fraternity's hall, Sigma Nu, to temporarily accept roughly thirty of the evacuated students.

Are AMD Clawhammer powered Apple Macintoshes coming?  Steve Jobs' adoption of the AMD chip would definitively give Apple the world's most powerful and sophisticated desktop CPU, while AMD would benefit from Mr. Jobs' uber-marketing.  Link courtesy Jerry.

IndyMedia has been publishing eyewitness reports critical of recent Israeli action against Palestinians.  IMC claims that as a consequence of their reporting, the organization is now the target of varying “Cyber Attacks” including flood attempts and disinformation uploads.  The war to control information rages, and is similar to message board contamination conducted by corporate operatives.

…so claims fertility specialist.  Disregarding the profound ethical issues, considering the high rate of abnormalities among cloned animals, this seems reckless.

Spencer writes, "Holographic storage, where information is represented in a physical medium as the interference pattern resulting from the phase relationships of multi-path coherent light sources, gets a big reality boost next week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas. InPhase, a Lucent spin-off has developed a 100GB holographic disk recorder which has potential to go to over a terabyte in capacity.  By using a spatial light modulator (a two dimensional light valve similar in function to an LCD) they record bitmaps as holograms.  Playback is done by projection to a sensor array and the data is read in parallel, thus giving extremely high bandwidth (vs.the single stream serial nature of existing CD/DVD technology).  Although you can get 2GB on a postage stamp there is no indication of how much of that data would survive a tortured journey through our postal system."

Van answers Bryan's questions.

It looks like some of our articles have miraculously been republished.

EverCrack kills...  Do as I say, not as I do...

We apologize for being offline for the last week.  We have moved and our lab is still only partially reassembled.  We will ramp up again over the next few days.  Thank you for your patience.