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News archives from April, 2003
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AMD 2500+ Barton |
April 29th, 2003 - With the release of the Barton series of CPU''s, a new debate has taken the forums by storm. Does the increase in L2 cache from 256K to 512K, bringing the total on die cache to 640K up from 384K, really warrant another upgrade to your system? Today we are going to look at how the 2500+ Barton performs, and throw in the 2100+ T-bred AIUHB to see what improvements, if any, to expect.
Read this article at OCAddiction.com....
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Ace's Hardware reports Opteron Unreal Tournament benchmarks! |
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April 29th, 2003 - Ace''s Hardware reports Opteron Unreal Tournament benchmarks! I think every gamer is wondering about the Opteron''s performance in a non-server environment. While these tests might be premature, they do give us a look at the chips potential.
"..... With the data I have right now, I think we can speculate that an Athlon 64 1.8 GHz will perform more or less like a 2.8 GHz - 3 GHz Pentium 4. The Opteron 1.8 GHz seems to be at the level of a 2.7-2.8 GHz P4, but it wouldn''t surprise me if the Athlon 64 1.8 GHz performs better than the Opteron 1.8 GHz we tested today. The reasoning is that the Athlon 64 will not have the ECC performance penalty and will most likely have access to DDR400. The lower latency of DDR400 compared to DDR333 ECC is much more important than the small bandwidth advantage the Opteron might have. Lower latency will help with each L2-cache miss, more bandwidth will only help if there are so many L2-cache misses that bandwidth becomes a bottleneck. In other words, lower latency (DDR400, Athlon 64) will always improve performance, more bandwidth (Opteron) will only improve performance, if you are running out of it. With a 1 MB L2-cache, that is less likely."
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Serial ATA II is here already |
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April 29th, 2003 - [Inquirer - Monday 28 April 2003, 15:51]
THE FIRST Serial ATA devices are only just starting to make themselves known. Only a very brave motherboard manufacturer would dare launch a product with SATA as the only drive interface. Which makes it a bit of a surprise that Marvell has already started sampling SATA II chips.
The new SATA II bridge chips as Marvell calls them pump data back and forth at 3gigabits per second. That''s twice the speed of the current SATA devices and chips. It should be noted that, while the speed increase is undoubtedly a good thing, there aren''t any hard drives that come even close to delivering that kind of constant throughput.
Marvell claims it was the first to market with a SATA I device in 2001. The company makes interfaces for both sides of the cable, motherboard/card based host controllers and drive-side.
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Manufacturers use Intel compilers to make AMD Opterons fly |
April 29th, 2003 - [Inquirer - Monday 28 April 2003, 09:32]
SYSTEM INTEGRATORS making Opteron boxes to sell against Intel Xeons are using every trick in the book to improve performance, it has emerged.
And one such system integrator has revealed to us a cunning plan that speeds up performance of what AMD hopes is a Xeon-killer and Intel hopes is just a flash in the pan.
One integrator told the INQ today: "The Intel compilers are by far the best for optimising X86 but of course do not recognise an AMD Opteron."
He continued: "The Opteron has SSE2 support, but to get a binary calling SSE2 one has to compile the binary on a Xeon machine. Move the binary over to the Opteron box and it flies." Further the integrator, who sells Intel server machines too, he claimed that the SMP performance is excellent on the Opteron platform. He said: "Typical SMP benchmarks in HPC show about a 30% gain with 2 CPUs over one on a Xeon/P4 platform. The same tests on Opteron show an 80% gain".
* Meanwhile, an article by microprocessor maven Andreas Stiller at c''t magazine in Germany has released performance figures that appear to show that the 32-way NEC Express 5800, a 32-way Itanium system, seriously underperforms the 32-way Hewlett Packard GS1280, the latter using the Alpha microprocessor, currently in its death agonies. You can find that here, and you should also click on the "SAP-SD-Benchmark-Werten" link.
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Cisco bug hits Windows servers |
April 27th, 2003 - NETWORKING GIANT Cisco told its customers there''s a security bug that could lead to a Denial of Service attack on some of its software.
The problem affects Cisco Secure ACS for Windows including versions 2.6.4, 3.0.3 and 3.1.1, the firm said in a statement.
Cisco Secure ACS for Windows can be affected by a buffer overflow on the admin service over port 2002, the firm said.
No Unix products are affected by the Achilles'' Heel.
Malicious exploitation of the problem could lead to not only Denial of Service but to remote administrators hijacking sysadmin access, said Cisco.
There are both workarounds and patches and Cisco is telling people to get those done forthwith.
There''s full detail of the problem and the answers to the problem here.
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NVidia Releases new Detonator drivers |
April 1st, 2003 - NVidia released its new Detonator driver pack for its GeForce and TNT line of GPUs on march 27th. The new revision - 43.45 - looks like a winner. There has been a lot of positive reaction from the enthusiast community, but mostly in regards to 3DMark2003 gains.
Everything ran very smooth for me, although my 3DMark2001 SE score didn''t budge at first glance (perhaps by a small margin, I have yet to run any real rigorous tests). This tells me the new driver pack contains many DirectX 9.0 optimizations, and the GeForce 4 Ti-4600 I''m running doesn''t support DX9. But with no evident problems, and no obvious loss in speed, the 43.45''s look fairly promising so far. I''d be interested to hear how these drivers help all of you lucky GeForceFX owners 
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April Fools Day set to be cancelled |
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April 1st, 2003 - Citizens of the US have long enjoyed the simple pleasures that April Fools day brings to us. It might not be the most significant of holidays, or the most celebrated, but what other day are you supposed to make fun of your friends? Well make the most out of, because this may be the last year we can lawfully enjoy this fine holiday.
In sixteenth-century France, citizens would celebrate the New Year on April 1st. At least, that is, until Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar in 1562. This placed the ''new'' New Years on January 1st, but for many of the French Christians it was not observed. Whether they didn''t hear about it, or they simply didn''t believe it, many folks continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st.
Friends, family and others came to make fun of these people for not observing the new date; while it would always be in good fun, it became commonplace to pull tricks on friends and family on April 1st.
Today in France April Fools day is referred to as Poisson d''Avril, or "April Fish", and the same traditions are followed around the world. The life of April Fools day might come to an abrupt halt for residents of the US though, as Bush Jr. takes time away from war-time duties to lobby for the new bill:
"April 1st has long taught us that it can be okay to make fun of your family and peers.", Bush stated, "It has shown us that it is okay to disrespect the people around us, and to scoff at the stupidity of our fathers, and mothers, brothers and sisters. While I recognize the need for humor in such difficult times as these, it is only an insult to the integrity of this great and beautiful country. It is an insult to play juvenile pranks on one another, and it shames me to think I may have ever celebrated April Fools Day in such a way. But most of all, it shames me to know that we are celebrating a holiday created by the French. Not only the French, but the stupid French!" Bush continued.
"At this moment it has never been more important to ignore the French community. We are a nation fighting for liberation, and any country that chooses to disagree with us no longer exists in our eyes. To celebrate this day of idiocy, is not only an insult to myself, and to the country, but it shames you under the eyes of God."
"April Fools Day is a day of heathens, a day of Pagans and Godless fools." the US President exclaimed.
The Bush Administration is moving fast to completely abolish the holiday "April Fools". Considering this is the first and only coverage of the new initiative, it has done well at keeping under wraps. Officials agree that if things proceed on schedule, April Fool''s Day will be officially banned within 4 months.
Small protests have begun already, mostly on the northern border of the US. Candidates for a replacement holiday....
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Is this just Microsoft trying to push its next breed of 64-bit OS with the only likely candidate for a cheap 64-bit CPU? Well, you never can quite see through the fog of MS propoganda, so let''s move on to the reviews.