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Since the heyday of the UMPC, Intel has dominated the mobile PC market, from the Intel Celeron M in the Samsung Q1 to the current Atom processor which is present in nearly every netbook on the market. According to market…
Our Intel Arrandale / Clarkdale review bonanza was sprinkled with a few graphics benchmarks, but there was never a concerted effort to break down the specific upgrades on the 45nm GPU that comes as part of the new CPU package. That omission has now been corrected by Bit-tech, who’ve delved deep into the murky waters of embedded graphics and report that Intel’s focus appears to have been firmly on video playback. Noting full bitstreaming, (our HD editors inform us that’s a big deal), Blu-ray with picture-in-picture, and HDMI 1.3a support, the lads commended the “very smooth” 1080p playback of h.264-encoded video. While their conclusion about gaming was less glowing — finding that Intel’s latest gen only keeps up with older hardware — they couldn’t help but recommend the new processors on account of their feature-rich video playback and energy efficiency. More benchmarks at the source link.
Intel GMA HD graphics review deems them excellent for video, mediocre for gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What we know as the astronomically expensive Toughbook laptops over here, the Japanese know as the wildly spendy Let’s Note machines over there. Their nomenclature is today getting upgraded by one, as the F9, N9, and S9 Let’s Notes make their debut housing a Core i5-520M processor. We like the F9’s 14.1-inch display and 1440 x 900 resolution best — those are pretty much ideal dimensions for a portable workhorse — but the real new hotness is the R9, which crams a Core i7-620UM into essentially the size of a netbook. 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 250GB storage drives are standard across the range, and the Japanese release is scheduled for February 17. In other news, a 17-inch Dell Inspiron with Core i5-430M guts is now up for sale on Staples for a measly $649, while a similarly specced HP dv4 can also be found for a Benjamin more. Hit those source links for more.
Core i5 / i7 roundup: Panasonic fits Core i7 in netbook chassis, Dell and HP machines spotted at Staples originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It has been a long, and at times, ominous road for number-two chip maker AMD, however, we are happy to report that there is reason for the underdog to celebrate. After 13 consecutive quarters of operating in the red, AMD…
We suppose industry analysts must be paid on account of just how grand their prognostications are. ABI Research know-it-alls have come out with their own spectacular claim today by asserting their expectation that x86 processors — still dominant the world over — will be swept aside in the rapidly developing “ultra-mobile device” space by the ascension of ARM-based processing architectures. That the Cortex CPUs have grown in popularity (and power) is undeniable, but who realistically expects Intel to sit back and watch all this happen? The x86 patriarch has even gone and created an Atom SDK, so we hardly expect the forecast table above to become reality. We’re just happy to see that ARM’s lower power profile is attracting investment — it’s always good to see a threat to Santa Clara’s chokehold on the CPU market, and AMD’s sleepwalking through the past few months hasn’t helped things. Now if only those Tegra 2 smartbooks were on retail shelves instead of inside prototype shells, we could get started on this supposed revolution.
ARM-based processors to overtake x86 competition in netbooks and MIDs by 2013? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Corsair and speed generally run in the same circles, so it follows logic to see said memory outfit cranking out the planet’s fastest Intel XMP-certified RAM. The 2,333MHz Dominator GTX now has Intel’s stamp of approval, and it easily surpasses the company’s 2,000MHz stuff that was king of the castle just yesterday. As the story goes, each module is “hand screened” and tested to the hilt before being shipped to end users, which apparently explains the $200 per 2GB stick that you’ll be asked to lay down. Speed kills… the wallet.
Corsair pushes speed envelope with 2,333MHz Dominator GTX RAM modules originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Speed. Toughness. Efficiency. Silence. That’s why we want solid-state drives in our computers. But we worry about the zoom-zoom performance degrading over time, and the fact that SSDs might eventually wear out. Here’s what you need to know about ‘em.
To understand what’s great about SSDs, let’s start with HDDs (you know, old-fashioned hard drives). On a basic level, a hard disk drive works thusly: Inside is a magnetized recording surface called a platter that spins around really fast, with a head that zooms across disk to read and write data—think kinda like a record player, except the head never touches the surface, ’cause that would be very, very bad. So, you can see the problem with hard drives: They’re fragile (don’t drop your computer) and they’re slow to access stuff because the head has to physically move to where the data is.
With an SSD, on the other hand, we’re talking straight silicon. What’s inside is a bunch of flash memory chips and a controller running the show. There are no moving parts, so an SSD doesn’t need to start spinning, doesn’t need to physically hunt data scattered across the drive and doesn’t make a whirrrrr. The result is that it’s crazy faster than a regular hard drive in nearly every way, so you have insanely quick boot times (an old video, but it stands), application launches, random writes and almost every other measure of drive performance (writing large files excepted). For a frame of reference, General Manager of SanDisk’s SSD group, Doron Myersdorf, says an equivalent hard drive would have to spin at almost 40,000rpm to match an SSD. And, you can drop it—at least, a little.
Typically, what you’ve inside an SSD is a bunch of NAND flash memory chips for storage—the same stuff found in memory cards and USB thumb drives—along with a small cache of DRAM, like you’d find on most current hard drives. The DRAM is also flash memory, but the difference between the two is that the storage memory is non-volatile, meaning the data it holds won’t go poof when it loses power, while the faster DRAM is volatile memory, so “poof” is exactly what happens to DRAM data when the power goes out. That’s fine because it’s the faster DRAM is just for caching things, holding them temporarily to make the whole system work faster.
So, let’s talk a bit about flash memory itself. I’ll try to keep it straightforward and not lose you, because it’s key to the benefits and problems with solid-state storage.
Flash memory is made up of a bunch of memory cells, which are made up of transistors. There are two basic kinds of memory: With single-level cell (SLC) memory, one bit of data is stored per cell. (Bits, the basic building block of information, if you recall, have two states, 0 or 1.) The SLC type is fast as hell and lasts a long time, but it is too expensive for storing the dense amounts of data you’d want in a personal computer. SLC memory is really only used for enterprise stuff, like servers, where you need it to last for 100,000 write cycles.
The solution for normal humans is multi-level cell memory. Currently, up to 4 bits can be stored per cell. “Multi-level” refers to the multiple levels of voltage in the cell used to get those extra bits in. MLC SSD drives are much cheaper than SLC but are, as I mentioned, slower, and can wear out faster than their pricier counterpart. Still, for now and going forward into the foreseeable future, all of the SSDs you could come close to owning are of the MLC variety.
Structurally, flash memory is divided into blocks, which are broken down further into pages. And now, we get into one of the major problems with flash. While data can be read and written at the individual page level, it can only be erased at the larger block level. In other words, suppose you have a 256k block and a 4k page, and you want to erase just one page worth of data, you have to erase the whole block, and then write all the rest of the data back to the block.
This is a huge problem, for one, because MLC flash memory wears out after 10,000 write cycles. Two, as the drive fills up, performance significantly degrades. (Anandtech has a pretty great illustration, amidst a massively deep dive on SSDs you should read if you’re interested at all, showing this.) That’s because without free blocks to write to, you’ve gotta go through that intensive erase and rewrite cycle, which, as you’d imagine, entails a lot of overhead. Problem numero three is that, according to SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, there’s “a brick wall” in the near future, when storage at the chip level could stop increasing in the not-too-distant future.
The thing is, you actually probably still want an SSD in your next computer, to make it run awesomer. Because where there are problems, there are sorta solutions. Remember how I mentioned up above the other major component in an SSD, besides the flash memory, is the controller? They’re a big part of what differentiates one company’s SSD from another’s. The controller is the secret sauce, as SanDisk’s Myersdorf told me. Because the game, for now, is all about managing flash better, both physically and logically. In other words, it’s about algorithms.
The first standard technique for long flash-memory life is wear leveling, which is simply not writing to the same area of the drive over and over again. Instead, the goal is to fill up the entire drive with stuff before you have to start erasing blocks, knowing that erasing and re-writing will use up precious cycles. The problem of “Write amplification”—say you have a 1MB document that ends up causing 4MB worth of writes to the drive because of the whole block and pages problem described above, where you wind up reading, erasing and re-writing a bunch of extra blocks and pages—that is being lowered, says Myersdorf, because drive management is shifting from being block-based to page-based. More granular algorithms with caching and prediction means there’s less unnecessary erasing and writing.
The biggest thing is what’s called TRIM. As you probably know, when you delete something from your computer, it isn’t instantly vaporized. Your OS basically just marks the data as “Hey it’s cool to pave over this with new stuff.” Your hard drive has no real idea you deleted anything. With the TRIM function, when you delete something, the OS actually tells the SSD, “Hey you can scrub this crap.” The SSD dumps the block to a cache, wipes the pages with the stuff you want gone, and copies the stuff you want to keep back to a new block, leaving you with clean pages for the next time you want to write something to the disk. This means better performance when you’re saving new stuff, since it handles the read-erase-rewrite dance ahead of time. Windows 7 supports TRIM, and Myersdorf says Windows 8 will be even better for solid-state storage.
As for busting through the brick wall of limited storage, the number of electrons that can reside in a cell, increasing flash memory storage at a pace faster than Moore’s Law, right now, Toshiba, who invented NAND flash, is currently the chip capacity king. The company just announced a new 64GB NAND flash module that combines 16 4GB NAND chips. This would seem to be closing in on that wall, which we don’t want them to do, because we want the dollar-to-MB ratio to keep dropping. Myersdorf is optimistic (despite his boss’s gloomy pronouncement), “There have been several walls in history of the [flash] industry—there was transition to MLC, then three bits per cell, then four—every time there is some physical wall, that physics doesn’t allow you to pass, there is always a new shift of paradigm as to how we make the next step on the performance curve.”
Okay, the big question then: When are SSDs gonna get seriously affordable? A 160GB version of one of the one of the most acclaimed SSDs, Intel’s X25, retails for $470. OCZ’s Colossus is a verifiable brick of solid-state storage, and the 1TB model has an MSRP of $2200, though it’s going for much more. By contrast, a 1TB WD old-fashioned hard drive is like a hundred bucks on a bad day. Myersdorf says it’s hard to say when the SSD’s dollar-to-byte ratio is going to go down absolutely, mostly because of supply and demand, but he did predict that a lot of “mainstream” laptops are gonna have 256GB SSDs in the next 18 months. Oh good, I’ll be due for a new laptop right around then.
Thanks to SanDisk for helping us out! Still something you wanna know? Send questions about solid states, solid snakes, or solid shakes here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
Best Buy already stocked up on the Core i5-equipped VAIO S and Satellite E205, and now it seems that everyone else is following suit. Just weeks after Intel announced that it would be releasing Core i5 and Core i7 chips for the mobile realm, the usual suspects have already outed a number of refreshed rigs that include said slabs of silicon. Sony’s 14-inch VAIO CW is now available from $829 with a mobile Core i3, while the $1,120 version ships with a Core i5, NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 330M CPU and a Blu-ray combo drive. Dell has obliged by adding a 2.53GHz Core i5 to its 15-inch Studio (available now for $999.99), and there’s even a version that ships with Netgear’s Push2TV adapter for taking advantage of Intel Wireless Display technology. Over on the desktop side, Acer hasn’t wasted any time by updating its Aspire G Predator with a sultry black shell (as opposed to the old orange one) and a 3.06GHz Core i7-950 processor, though the $3,185 MSRP should scare away all but the hardest of hardcore. Seen any others get the Core i5 / i7 bump? Shout ‘em out in comments!
Core i5 and i7-equipped laptops / desktops emerge from every corner originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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CES is great and all, but one of the bones we choose to pick with the show is the typically long gap between the Vegas introduction and the mass market ship date. Thankfully for us, Toshiba has no interest in keeping us waiting for one of the world’s first Intel Wireless Display-equipped (or WiDi, as it were) laptops. The Satellite E205 — which comes stocked with a 2.53GHz Core i5-430M processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a dual-layer DVD writer, 14-inch display (1,366 x 768 resolution), 500GB hard drive and a Netgear Push2TV wireless display adapter — is now shipping from Best Buy. Of course, you’ll have to deal with integrated Intel graphics, but the inbuilt wireless display technology, multicard reader, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Ethernet jack and media buttons are nice inclusions when you consider the respectable $899.99 price point. So, what’s the hesitation?
Toshiba’s Intel Wireless Display-supporting Satellite E205 now shipping for $900 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We probably pour far too much time into dissecting the latest ThinkPad model or superphone, so to balance things out here’s some positive news coming out of Intel regarding its laptop distribution programme for the developing world. Still a for-profit venture, the Classmate PC project seems to have been developing rather well, which has led the chipmaker to announce it’ll be overhauling the case designs and internals of the machines it has on offer. Coming later this year, the new netbook models will offer Atom N450 and N470 Pineview CPUs as well as integrated 3G and WiMAX connectivity. Yeah, that’s pretty decent gear by anyone’s standards, so it’s no surprise that Argentina, Brazil and Turkey have signed up for a total of 426,000 units between them, adding to the two million devices already shipped globally. Maybe someone should tell the UK government about this netbook craze before it’s too late.
Intel Classmate PC is not forgotten, gets Pine Trail and WiMAX overhaul originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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