Posts by Greg Glawitsch10 posts • joined Friday 4th August 2006 17:58 GMT
...only available as an external model. It's is (gasp!) 14.8mm thick, thus won't fit into the vast majority of notebook computers, but it **will** fit into these Supermicro or Chenbro rack-mount enclosures that have 24 disks side by side (2.5" disks, of course).
Of course, buying 24 of these 1.5TB drives would be a tad expensive...
Anyway, I can't wait till they make a 14.8mm 2.5" drive out of four 500GB platters, for a total of 2TB.
Seagate announced their external 3TB drives (which, unfortunately, only feature a USB 2.0 interface out of the box) more than 3 months ago and they are available everywhere.
I have, so far, bought two of them, and removed the disks from their enclosures and stuck them into a Linux-powered computer. After formatting, each drive has about 2.7 TB net capacity, for a total of (so far) 5.4 TB.
Thus, the line "Seagate has some catching up to do" is just plain wrong - right now it's Hitachi and Samsung who have some catching up to do.
...'nuff said.
9.5mm height...2 platters. 15mm height...3 platters. The excellent review site run by a certain Mr. A. Shimpi even has a table that states "200GB per platter".
...after considering the Honda Insight and the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius.
Note: The following is from the U.S. perspective, though I'm not a Yank - I just live and work there.
Prius: +best fuel economy of any Hybrid.
- butt ugly. 'nuff said.
- Hybrid tax credit (goes by manufacturer) already exhausted.
Insight: + least expensive Hybrid on the US market.
- interior small
- base trim (LX) does not include cruise control. Excuse me - no cruise control?!?!?
- Hybrid tax credit (goes by manufacturer) already exhausted.
Civic Hybrid: - I already have a Civic (natural gas GX) and it's time for a change
- more expensive than the Insight
- Hybrid tax credit (goes by manufacturer) already exhausted.
Altima Hybrid: + 200 hp (when gasoline engine and electric motor work together)
+ $3250 factory rebate
+ $2350 Hybrid tax credit
+ a bit larger than any of the others
Thus, for me the Altima Hybrid was the logical choice.
It's roomy, fun to drive and not as pious as the Prius.
We have to differentiate between Hyper-V-that-comes-as-a-part-of-Windows-2008-Server and "Hyper-V Server". The latter will be free as in beer once it is released (it hasn't been released yet). The former, requiring the purchase of Windows 2008 Server, is not free.
Of course, if you want to run some Microsoft operating system on top of Hyper-V Server: The guest operating system has to be licensed. But that doesn't make a difference - if you run a Microsoft operating system on top of the free-as-in-beer VMware ESXi, it ALSO has to be licensed.
Of course you can run Linux on top of any of the free Hypervisors (Hyper-V Server, ESXi, Xen, Virtualbox, you name it) and get everything (Hypervisor and the guest operating system) 100% free.
Hope that clarifies it.
I just ordered a 16 channel Highpoint SATA RAID controller for $412.
TI laid off 500 engineers because their 45nm process is completely developed and TI has decided not to pursue 32nm.
The recent EETimes front page article sums it up nicely:
You need to have a certain revenue (EETimes estimates 13 billion dollars PER YEAR) to be able to amortize a 32nm fab and literally only a handful of companies (Intel, Samsung and the consortium led by IBM) are expected to ever get a positive ROI out of a 32nm fab. (Note the absence of AMD from this list - the EETimes article implies that it is very unlikely that AMD will ever build a 32nm fab of its own.)
Intel has no interest to nurse an architectural competitor on its figurative breasts - after all, SPARC is one of the reasons why Itanium is not taking off as hoped. If at all, Intel would try to rent out only EXCESS fab capacity (i.e. amid one of the periodical industry slumps), but even then they'd think twice to rent it out to a competitor in the processor industry.
The reason the SUN - TI partnership worked so nicely is because
(1) TI is not a competitor in the 64 bit microprocessor market
and
(2) TI is (up till now) not trailing far behind with respect to fab technology
With TI gone from the 32nm market, SUN has few, if any, options to find a fab partner who is not a direct competitor.
The logical option for SUN seems to be to abandon SPARC, probably a better option than seeing it (stuck at the 45nm node) becoming outclassed by Intel's and IBM's 32nm processors.
The saying is: "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight." Trying to compete against 32nm processors with a 45nm processor is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
TI has announced that they won't build a 32nm fab due to the exorbitant (an estimated 3 billion dollars just for R&D, excluding the fab itself, quoted in EETimes) costs involved. The last fab TI will ever build is a 45nm fab. That's a fact. Google it.
After that: Quo vadis, SUN?
Join the consortium around IBM - IBM being a major competitor in the server market? (Guess who will get priority at the IBM fabs, and guess who will get the leftovers.)
No, in my humble opinion, SUN is rapidly running out of road with their proprietary architecture and they would be best advised to drop SPARC and migrate over to the Intel/AMD platform. Maybe their quickly expanding Intel/AMD-based product lineup is already the first sign of SUN's "abandon SPARC" strategy, which will then become final after everybody and his dog has moved to 32nm and SPARC is stuck at the 45nm node.
...and I absolutely love it. (I have two of them.)
Besides, it only costs about $275 as a bare-bone without CPU / RAM / harddisk, bringing up the cost for a fully configured system to only approx. $450 (Celeron M 410 + 512 MBytes RAM + 60 GByte 2.5" harddisk).
It is basically a knockoff of the Apple MAC mini, but has a regular PC BIOS, not the 'weird' Apple BIOS, and is fully configurable from a Celeron M 410 up to a Merom T7600, up to 1 GByte [SODIMM] DDR2 RAM, up to a 200GB 2.5" harddisk.
The model numbers for the barebones are: MP945-X (with a CDR writer / DVD reader), MP945-VX (with a DVD writer) and MP945-VXR (with a DVD writer and a remote control receiver+transmitter).
-Greg
Just today, there was a test of four "Yonah"-based notebooks at www.mobilityguru.com, more precisely at: http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/08/02/four_notebooks_ready_for_business/
The performance charts can be found here:
http://www.mobilityguru.com/picturegalleries/gallery-200607315.html
The Lenovo Thinkpad T60 notebook eqipped with a 2.0 Core Duo "Yonah" processor scored a Mobilemark 2005 score of 227 and a PCmark05 CPU score of 4604, compared to 199 and 4073, respectively, for the Acer Ferrari 5000 featuring a Turion X2 TL-60 at 2.0 GHz.
In other words, "Yonah" 2.0 GHz is about 15% faster than Turion X2 2.0 GHz.
Adding insult to injury, "Yonah" is the "old" processor, to be replaced this very August by its successor "Merom" (Core 2 Duo).
Now, Merom is rumored to be another 10% to 15% faster than Yonah at the same clock frequency.
Conclusion: AMD has never achieved better performance than Intel in the notebook sector, not with the Turion and also not with the brand new Turion X2.
If you're in the market for a fast notebook computer, wait four weeks and get yourself a "Merom"-based one.
