Sony Retracts Bloatware Removal Fee

-from The Washington Post
So A few days ago Sony announced that they wouldn’t instal all the crappy software that slows down for computer slower than molasses in the Alaskan winter. The catch? They would do that for 50 buck. Yep, you pay them not to instal something on your computer. Well Today they announced that they are no longer charging you the $50. All because people were angry about it. I guess the power of the people finally worked for once. Click the link at the top for more info.

MSI ECOlution motherboard transforms chip heat into fan power

-from engadget

Okay, try not to let your mind get blown by the possible time-space paradox we’re about to illustrate, but MSI’s supposedly introducing a new ECOlution motherboard at CeBIT with an “air powered cooler” that operates on the Stirling Engine Theory to transform the thermal output of its chipset into the kinetic energy necessary to power that same chipset’s fan. Of course, as the fan cools the heatsink it deprives itself of energy, supposedly the piston affixed to the crankshaft pulls back down, giving it another potential surge when its heat rebuilds. Supposedly it works at 70% efficiency, so we’ll just let the thermodynamics geeks in the audience mull over the possibility and audacity of it all — they certainly seem to have given up on Steorn at this point.

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Safari Beta 3 for Windows?!?!

So now the Safari Beta 3 is alavible to all windows users, and I’m not to sure if my windows/linux comp will explode if I do this (I kid, I kid) but I’ll try it out for the sake of reviewing and being unbiased.
here is the link if you haven’t heard about it yet
http://www.apple.com/safari/

Samsung’s New HDDs are Fast, Silent

No one likes noisy electronics. That’s why Samsung’s new SpinPoint S Series of HDDs is great; they’re fast and quiet. Perfect for devices that are better seen and not heard, such as DVRs and, ahem, Xbox 360s. They’re rated at 2.4 bel in idle mode and 2.75 bel in seek mode, with 1 bel being equal to 10 decibels. That’s pretty quiet, I guess.

The drives come in 80GB and 160GB models and both sport 7,200-rpm speeds. No word on pricing as of yet, but they should be arriving later this month. –Adam Frucci

Samsung [via The Raw Feed]

Evolving Computer Developed; We Are Doomed

-from gizmodo
Researchers at the University of Oslo have developed a computer that evolves on its own using genetic algorithms to boost performance. See?

What their hardware does is par up “genes” in the hardware to find the hardware design that is the most effective to accomplish the tasks at hand. Just like in the real world, it can take 20 to 30 thousand generations before the system finds the perfect design to solve the problem, but this will happen in just a few seconds compared with the 8-900,000 years it took humans to go through the same number of generations.

Neat. Who knows how many practical applications this will have, but the idea of a computer evolving on its own to do what it needs to do is both cool and kind of terrifying. –Adam Frucci

Intel spills beans on Core 2 successor: SSE4, faster virtualization, bigger caches

-from ARS technica

By Jon Stokes | Published: March 28, 2007 – 02:23PM CT

At a press conference today, Intel’s Pat Gelsinger revealed fresh details of the company’s forthcoming 45nm processor family, codenamed Penryn. Penryn is the 45nm successor to the Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest microarchitecture that underlies the popular 65nm Core 2 Duo processor line.
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Gelsinger opened the briefing with a discussion of the success of the company’s “tick-tock” model of processor innovation, a model in which process shrinks and major architectural revisions are rolled out on a staggered two-year time scale. “Today’s disclosures clearly lay out that this engine is delivering and delivering on track,” said Gelsinger, responding to what he characterized as initial skepticism that the model could work.

Gelsinger then moved on to discuss Penryn, which is the first product that will be produced on Intel’s new high-k dielectric 45nm process. Penryn is more than just a shrink—it’s a derivative of Core 2 Duo (codenamed Merom) with a number of improvements. Gelsinger laid out those improvements in more detail than we’ve seen so far, so I’ll outline them below.
Penryn’s improvements: SSE4 support, better virtualization

Penryn’s back end boasts two major advances over its predecessor. First is a new radix-16 divider that offers a 2x performance improvement on division operations vs. Core 2 Duo. The fast divider also speeds up a range of operations that depend on the divider hardware, like the square root function. Penryn’s SQRT operation is 4x the speed of Core 2.

The other major back-end improvement is support for the SSE4 extensions, a group of 50 new vector instructions aimed at speeding up media and other data-parallel applications. SSE4 will be paired with a new “Super Shuffle Engine,” a full-width, single-pass, 128-bit shuffle unit. This will enable Penryn’s vector hardware to perform 128-bit shuffle operations (e.g. pack, unpack, packed shift) in a single clock cycle. The beefed up shuffle capabilities will help Penryn align incoming vector data in the SSE registers so that the execution hardware can go to work on it.

Intel claims that SSE4, in combination with other new features that I’ll describe shortly, will offer Penryn a performance improvement of as much as 40 percent over Core 2 Duo on some software like video codecs, and as much as 20 percent on games.

A big part of this performance boost will no doubt be due to the higher frontside bus speeds that Penryn will support. Penryn-based Xeon systems will sport frontside bus speeds of up to 1600MHz. Intel estimates that the increased FSB speed could yield up to a 45 percent speedup on bandwidth- and floating-point-intensive applications on the fastest Penryn-based quad-core systems.

To go with the faster FSB, Intel has also upped the cache on the Penryn processors. Dual-core parts will have 6MB of shared L2, while quad-core products will have 12MB. These caches will also be paired with an enhanced version of Intel’s Smart Cache technology. The new Smart Cache will let Penryn speculatively execute across cache lines, eliminating the typical stall associated with non-aligned loads.

Intel will take advantage of the 45nm process not only to increase the amount of cache, but also to raise clockspeeds without significantly boosting power dissipation. Penryn parts will eventually reach the 3GHz mark, and may go even higher. The TDP numbers for Penryn desktop quad-core parts will be 95 and 130 watts, with desktop dual-core parts coming in at a 65W TDP. The TDP numbers for the 45nm Xeon will be 50W/80W/120W, depending on clockspeed. For dual-core, the numbers are 40W/65W/80W.

For Penryn-based mobile parts, Intel will introduce a new low-power state that they’re calling Deep Power Down. In the new state, the core clock is turned completely off, along with the L1 and L2 caches. Process state is saved in a special part of the processor so that the system can be restored on wakeup.

The other big power-related news about Penryn is that it will an enhanced version of Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration Technology. The new version will let Penryn detect when one core is largely idle—and thus not drawing much power—so that it can boost the clockspeed of the other, more active core while remaining in the same power envelope. For single-threaded applications where only one core is used, this will enable Penryn to speed up that one thread by devoting more power to the core on which it’s running.
Penryn boosts virtualization

One of the major features that Penryn brings to the table is a pretty important improvement to the performance of its Virtualization Technology (VT). Specifically, the performance of its virtual machine (VM) exit and VM entry instructions has been boosted so that VM transition times decrease by an average of 25 to 75 percent.

Right now, a lot of folks who’re testing out VT have been disappointed that its performance isn’t much better than existing, non-VT-based virtualization solutions like VMware. Specifically, VMware products use a binary translation engine that ingests regular x86 OS code and produces a “safe” subset; VMware claims that this binary translation approach is as fast as, or faster, than VT-based approaches because the OS doesn’t have to do costly VM transitions in order to execute privileged instructions. (These claims are debated; I’m merely reporting the fact that they are made.)

A major decrease in VM transition times will help the performance of VT-based solutions like Xen, and it would make the “which virtualization package to use?” debate even more about managment and less about relative performance than it already is.

All told, Intel will introduce six Penryn products this year, spanning the full range of segments from ultra-mobile to server. A full fifteen Penryn products are currently in development.

IBM doubles CPU cooling capabilities with simple manufacturing change

-from ars technica
By Joel Hruska | Published: March 25, 2007 – 10:03PM CT

According to a new paper released at the IEEE Semi-Therm conference, IBM has discovered a way to dramatically improve processor cooling. Unlike some other recent cooling breakthroughs, IBM’s discovery appears to be one that should be relatively inexpensive to implement, and could have a significant impact on consumer microprocessors in the near future. Without fundamentally changing the approach to CPU cooling today and without the use of more advanced setups like water coolers, IBM says that they can double CPU cooling capacity while making it easier and safer to do so.

IBM’s find addresses how thermal paste is typically spread between the face of a chip and the heat spreader that sits directly over the core. Overclockers already know how crucial it is to apply thermal paste the right way: too much, and it causes heat buildup. Too little, and it causes heat buildup. It has to be “just right,” which is why IBM looked to find the best way to get the gooey stuff where it needs to be and in the right amount, and to make it significantly more efficient in the process.

A CPU’s heatspreader is normally attached directly to the core by use of a paste or glue that has been enriched with micrometer-sized ceramic or metal particles. These particles then form heat-evacuation bridges between the core and the cooler, and it’s these bridges that carry heat into the heatspreader.

Diagram: Layers of cooling. (Source: IBM)

In its current form, the process is quite inefficient: IBM’s says that up to 40% of a CPU’s total thermal budget (i.e., the cooling capacity available to draw heat away from the core) is consumed by these particles. This inefficiency is made worse because the particles aren’t truly spread evenly throughout the paste. Instead, particles clump together, forming what IBM refers to as the “Magic Cross”, as shown below at Figure 1. This thickened area is a non-homogeneous mixture of paste and particles that dramatically worsens total cooling efficiency across the core.

Figure 1: the Magic Cross. (Source: IBM)

IBM’s solution was to design a series of micrometer-length trenches into the copper cap that sits above the CPU core, as shown in the top diagram (“hierarchical branched channels”). These larger and smaller trenches allow for paste to be evenly distributed at precisely the points where it would normally pile up and form a Magic Cross-like structure. Utilizing IBM’s new technology allowed researchers to spread thermal paste into a far more homogeneous and efficient pattern, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Gettin’ groovy. (Source: IBM)

The results are quite impressive. Paste thickness could be reduced by a third, and the pressure required to properly fit a CPU cooler on top of a core was cut in half. All of this, and IBM says that cooling capabilities are effectively doubled.

Manufacturing tools to define the micrometer channels are already in development. IBM offers no specific details on when we might see chips using this new procedure in the wild, but they say that the new technology can be quickly integrated into current manufacturing plants at a low cost and using existing process technologies. Whether or not the AMDs or Intels of the world will buy in remains to be seen, but the potential is undeniable.

Newest Quad Core AMD Revealed for First Time

Procare e|Share ES-8068: Dedicated BitTorrent Client Fetches Booty On It’s Own [verdict: arrrrrr!]

-From Gizmodo
Personally, I don’t care about what Adam says, I just can’t tolerate all those evil criminals, those potential terrorists who insist on stealing music and movies from their rightful owners by using BitTorrent in their computers. Shame on them!

I mean, why waste computer processing time when you just can do it with style and use this Procare e|Share ES-8068, a dedicated BitTorrent client that you can set up using a Web browser? After that, without using your PC at all, it will connect directly to the Internet using Ethernet, storing files in a USB 2.0 hard drive, and Bob’s your uncle. Or Blackbeard. Or Captain Sparrow. Or Geena Davis. Whatever floats your boat, matey. You can buy it for $85 plus shipping, patch and parrot not included. – Jesus Diaz

Product page [Procare via PC Watch]