Posted 08/25/08 at 11:47:47 AM by Chris Moody

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.

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intel, hard drives, hardware, IDF, ssd, build a pc, Solid State Drives, X25M SSD

Posted 08/25/08 at 08:21:16 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Intel’s CTO, Justin Rattner, delivered a pretty phantasmagoric keynote at the IDF in San Francisco. Invariably most keynotes by tech honchos are about future technologies. But Rattner just didn’t concern himself with the imminent future – the Nehalems and Larrabees - but he allowed his imagination take unbridled flight. He pictured what the world might be like in 2050, where computers would be smarter than us frizzled, frayed Homo sapiens.

“There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future,” Rattner said.

Rattner even demonstrated a couple of personal robot prototypes, which employ razor-sharp sensing technologies, though only crude precursors to the “2050 machines”. The first robot – a robotic arm actually - was equipped with electric field pre-touch technology that allows it to sense objects before even touching them. And, just for your knowledge, fish are bestowed with this capability. The second robot is capable of recognizing faces and performing simple tasks as commanded.

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intel, Software, hardware, IDF, robots, justin rattner, 2050, a.i, machines

Posted 08/22/08 at 09:51:03 AM by Pulkit Chandna

DreamWorks Animation and Intel announced at IDF that, beginning next year, films under the DreamWorks banner will all be in next-gen 3D. Last month, the studio had announced that it was going to replace its AMD hardware with Intel’s future chips with multi-processing cores. Now it has been confirmed that Intel’s upcoming Larrabee (codename) graphics chip will form the crux of the partnership. The two partners even unveiled a 3-D movie image brand called InTru 3D. The technology is also targeted at the video games industry and the internet. AMD has also been touting its Cinema 2.0 tech that it claims will pulverize the wall between movies and games.

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amd, intel, Software, movies, hardware, IDF, Larrabee, Dreamworks, Cinema 2.0, intru 3d

Posted 08/21/08 at 04:30:00 PM by Norman Chan

During a private briefing with Intel at IDF yesterday to talk about Nehalem, we were given a demo of some cool software in development that makes good use of the multi-threaded cores of the new CPU. Francois Piednoel, the Senior Performance Analyst (ie. benchmarking guru) at Intel describes Deep Viewer as a "science project" of sorts. It's an image sorting application that they acquired from an independent software developer that reminds us of Microsoft Live Labs' Seadragon technology (which is used in the recently released Photosynth online app). We're talking about near-infinite scaling of visual data (in this case photos and videos) being processed in real-time on your display.

See Deep Viewer in action after the jump.

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intel, Software, nehalem, multi-core, IDF, hands-on, Intel Developer Forum, core-i7, deep viewer, technology demo, image sorting, IDF 2008

Posted 08/21/08 at 12:53:36 PM by Paul Lilly

One of the biggest sacrifices power users must make when picking out a notebook inevitably comes down to battery life. Lugging around a desktop replacement isn't just heavy, it also means portability becomes a PITA, as you better have a power outlet nearby when the battery loses its juice. But what if enthusiasts could have their portable cake and eat it too?

Intel looks to serve up such a dish as part of its Centrino 2 platform with switchable graphics. From within the OS, gamers and other power users will have the option of switching between discrete graphics during intense fragfests and internal graphics when hashing out that less demanding TPS report.

The power savings, according to Intel, will be as much as one-third, which in some cases could add up to an hour (or more) of battery life. More than just lip service, Intel held an onstage demonstration showing a laptop consume about 25 watts of power while using discrete graphics. Switching to integrated graphics dropped the consumption down to 15-16 watts.

Is this the feature power users have been waiting for?

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mobile, notebook, laptop, battery, IDF, ultraportable, netbook, integrated graphics

Posted 08/21/08 at 09:32:49 AM by Chris Moody

Tom’s Hardware reports that Intel will demonstrate Hynix’s just announced 16GB 2-rank DDR3 DIMM at this year’s IDF. This comes on the heels of Elpida Memory’s 16GB FB-DIMM in DDR2 flavor that I covered a few weeks ago.

Hynix’s new DDR3 DIMM uses MetaRAM’s DDR3 MetaSDRAM technology letting manufacturers pack four times the amount of mainstream DRAM onto these sticks and still be a drop in solution, using the standard DIMM power and thermal envelope.

Intel will also demonstrate a server with 160GB using Hynix DDR3 R-DIMMs and Meta SDRAM technology in the Advanced Technology Zone.

DDR3 MetaRAM is similar to the previous generation of DDR2 technology that enables significantly more memory in a server. An added benefit of the DDR3 MetaRAM technology is that enables larger memory capacity without negatively impacting the operating frequency of the DDR3 memory channel. It is the only technology that has been demonstrated to run 24GB of DDR3 SDRAM in a channel at 1066 million transactions per-second (MT/s). Using 3 of 16GB DIMM, users can achieve 48GB per channel running at 1066 MT/s, while other competing solutions max out at 16GB per channel at 1066MT/s.

I thought we’d never have machines using Vista’s (Ultimate and Business) 128GB RAM limit in it’s lifetime, but perhaps there is hope! If you have deep pockets you could fill the average 4 slots in an enthusiasts machine with 64GB of RAM. It most likely would be overkill. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the performance stats would look like?

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intel, hardware, IDF, DDR3, DIMM, Hynix, MetaRAM

Posted 08/20/08 at 10:39:32 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Monday, we told you about the forthcoming SATA Revision 3.0, also known as SATA 6Gb/s. Given the fact that conventional hard disks still don't saturate the original SATA 1.5Gb/s bus, let alone the mainstream SATA Revision 2.0 3Gb/s bus, why bother with another speedup?

In a word: SSDs. The Inquirer reports that the new Intel solid-state drives introduced this week at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) come very close to saturating the SATA 3Gb/s bus with 250MB/s read speed, while blowing the doors off conventional hard disks and third-party SSDs. And, they're not alone. As we reported Monday, Indilinx isn't far behind, offering the 230MB/s Barefoot SSD drive controller.

To learn more about why some SSD drives are faster than others, and what else SATA-IO is working on for the near future, join us after the jump.

So, what makes some SSD drives faster (or slower) than others? SSD drive performance is affected by two factors: the speed of the controller and the speed of the SSD memory chips. Currently, the fastest SSD drives use single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash, while drives using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash trade higher capacity for slightly slower performance. As capacities climb and performance zooms, it's going to be an interesting fall and winter in the SSD business.

That's the good news. The Inquirer also reports that the SATA-IO's Power over eSATA initiative, announced in January, is now expected to be released in early 2009 (rather than late this year as was originally expected). Power over eSATA will enable eSATA drives to pull their power from the eSATA port, just as many USB drives get their power from the USB port. Whenever Power over eSATA appears (and let's hope they come up with a cooler acronym than the logical "PoeSATA"), it will be very helpful in getting eSATA to become mainstream.

Illustration courtesy The Inquirer.

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intel, storage, IDF, consumer electronics, ssd, Intel Developer Forum, hard disk

Posted 08/14/08 at 09:04:36 AM by Chris Moody

Toms Hardware reports that Intel’s "Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB" is now available. This is a good indicator that we might see the first USB 3.0 demonstrations at next week’s IDF in San Francisco.

xHCI draft specification provides hardware component designers, system builders and device driver developers with a description of the hardware/software interface between system software. It is being made available under RAND-Z (i.e. royalty free) licensing terms to all USB 3.0 Promoter Group and contributor companies that sign an xHCI contributor agreement.

It doesn’t appear that the new spec will be backward compatible past USB 2.0. I find it hard to believe that USB 1.1 devices will be out of luck, so I plan to keep an eye on that aspect. USB 3.0 at 600 MB/s will offer a ten-fold increase in the bandwidth of USB 2.0 at 4.8 Gb/s. That is pretty impressive if it approaches it’s spec yield. USB 2.0 spec rate is 480 Mbit/s but typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 280 Mbit/s.

Will you be wanting USB 3.0 on your future system?

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intel, usb, IDF, USB 3.0, build a pc, xHCI, SuperSpeed