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No BS Podcast #118: We Welcome a Guest

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:47:54 -0500

This week, we welcome regular Maximum PC contributor Loyd Case to the show to chat with Gordon and Will about IDF, the sassy new Radeon 5870, and Intel's first Larrabee showing. After a too-short trip to the lab, we jump straight into reader questions, before closing with another installment of Gordon's Rant of the Week.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

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Intel's Light Peak Optical Cable Technology Has 100Gb/s Potential

Ryan Whitwam — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:24:28 -0500

If you thought USB 3.0 was going to be fast, just wait for Intel’s Light Peak technology. The new optical interconnect standard was just shown off at IDF. Light Peak is capable of 10Gbps of bandwidth, with a theoretical upper limit of 100Gbps. At the initial offering of 10Gbps, you could transfer an entire Blu-Ray movie in about 30 seconds.

The standard would also be capable of multiple operations on a single cable. This is all possible over a cable that can be up to 100 meters long. The Light Peak technology consists of a controller chip, and an optical module that converts light to electricity and vice versa. Intel claims that current electrical cabling is reaching the limits of speed and cable length, something Light Peak can circumvent.

Intel hopes to see the technology adopted for use in PC’s as well as handheld devices. They believe adoption could happen quickly, as Light Peak is complementary to existing technologies. As for a shipping date, Intel claims components could be going out as soon as 2010.

Intel Announces Production of 22nm Chips for 2011

Pulkit Chandna — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:53:48 -0500

Intel announced Tuesday that it will begin producing chips on a 22nm process in 2011. Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini flaunted a silicon wafer containing the world’s first working chip built on a 22nm process at the ongoing Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco. "At Intel, Moore's Law is alive and thriving," an upbeat Otellini said. The 22nm chip has around 2.9 billion transistors tightly packed into an area as small as a fingernail.

Besides parading silicon, Otellini announced that the production of its 32nm “Westmere” chip is underway and remains on track for a Q4 2009 release. The new chip will combine a 32nm CPU and a 45nm integrated graphics core in the same package, though on separate dies.

But Sandy Bridge, a new microarchitecture that will be introduced in late 2010, will feature “a sixth generation graphics core on the same die as the processor core and includes AVX instructions for floating point, media, and processor intensive software.”

Image Credit: Anandtech

SGI Unveils "Personal Supercomputer" Octane III

Paul Lilly — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:12:42 -0500

If you've ever dreamed about owning a supercomputer, SGI has your back. During the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that kicked off today and runs until Thursday, SGI introduced what it describes as a "personal supercomputer" called the Octane III. More than just marketing hype, the Octane III comes ready to accommodate up to 80 high-performance cores and just shy of 1TB of memory.

"This new product takes high-performance computing to a new level by combining the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance deskside cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation," SGI said in a statement. "The Octane III is uniquely suited for workplace environments and supports a vast range of distributed technical computing applications."

The Octane III will ship with a pre-installed platform with support for several HPC applications, including fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, CAD, and a bunch of other geeky stuff that has nothing to do with running Crysis or gaming in general.

Cost of entry will start at around $8,000.

Image Credit: SGI

New Mini-SATA Interface Designed for Netbooks

Jason Barry — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:29:22 -0500

The SATA International Organization (SATA-IO) is planning to introduce the latest SATA connector at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF). The new platform, named mini-SATA (mSATA), is roughly the size of a business card and is similar in size to the PCI Express Controller.

Primarily aimed at manufacturers, the mSATA connector was designed for smaller storage solutions, such as 32 to 64GB and meant to supplement primary storage. The folks at SATA-IO anticipate that the new module will allow systems makers to provide more creative storage solutions such as dedicated OS or application drives.

Toshiba and SanDisk also announced they would be debuting mSATA modules in various storage sizes at their booths at IDF. Overall, the new platform will create smaller netbooks and mobile products and "Smaller is always better,” says Steve Duplessi, tech analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Intel Slated to Make Big Announcements at IDF

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:08:18 -0500

The San Francisco leg of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2009 will kick off on September 22. The chipmaker is expected to make some key announcements regarding its 32nm “Westmere” chips and the keenly anticipated Larrabee platform. According to PCMag, Intel is expected to announce that the manufacturing of the 32nm die shrink of its Core microprocessor line is underway.

Its next-generation microprocessors, which are based on its Westmere microarchitecture, are codenamed Clarkdale (desktop version) and Arrandale (notebook version). The “Dales” chips are a multi-chip solution featuring 45nm integrated graphics cores. Intel is also expected to shed light on a new system-on-chip technology, besides announcing transistor improvements. The event might also feature some updates on the company’s Larrabee platform.

Image Credit: PC World

32nm Westmere to be the Focus at this Year's Intel Developer Forum

Paul Lilly — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:05:34 -0500

Move over quad-core and make room for six-core chips. Intel is ready to start promoting its six-core Westmere processors, which the chip maker plans to talk at length about at this year's Intel Developer's Forum (IDF) in September.

Aimed at both desktops and notebooks, the 32nm Westmere processor will be built around Intel's Nehalem architecture. Production will begin before the end of the year with a formal launch expected in early 2010.

"Where Nehalem was new chip architecture design, Westmere is the next design being used to build processors that feature two 32nm cores with 4MB of cache that sit next to a memory controller and integrated graphics built on a separate, neighboring 45nm chip, all in one package. Westmeres will be the basis of upcoming all new Core chips (Core i3, i5, and 7) over the next few months," Intel wrote in a blog post.

Intel also has an eight-core Nehalem EX processor planned for later this year, but those will be aimed at two-socket servers, not home desktops.

Image Credit: Intel

IDF: Intel Pimps SSD to Hardcore Gamers

Chris Moody — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:47:47 -0500

Intel is going to need to start dressing up in a tricked out leisure suit with lots of bling and a plumed hat if it keeps pimping SSD technology. On the last day of IDF 2008 Intel wanted to hammer home the reason why hardcore gamers should be interested in its mainstream and Extreme SSDs and it worked to dispel the myths that have sprung up with SSDs.

Chris Saleski from the Storage Technologies Group showed off some pretty spectacular benchmarks with 500 GB, 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda drives in a RAID array, that were getting just under 550 IOPS versus a single 80GB X25M Mainstream SSD that was posting 44,000+ IOPS. Holy frack! I have to wonder just how accurate that figure is and I’ll keep an eye out for independent verification.

Falcon Northwest’s general manager Bradd Berdelman did another demo. He put a pair of identical FragBoxes together with one containing two of the vaunted 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptors in RAID, and the other FragBox ran an SSD setup. The SSD system turned in 32.65 FPS versus 16.76 FPS for the Velociraptor system.

Intel is preaching to the choir here. System enthusiasts like SSDs and we want to buy them, but when a single modern game can hog 6GB of drive space, we aren’t going to buy them in 80GB sizes for a king’s ransom. Put the products in our hands and if they start turning in those sort performance scores and we see a size increase/price decrease you’ll get us to buy them in droves. No pimping required.