ok

The just-launched E7 xeons (westmere-ex) are Sandy Bridge, I believe, or the newest microarchitecture, in any case. (I can't always keep track of codenames for architectures vs. implementations). Or am I wrong?

I was strictly keeping things on a per-socket basis, to avoid complete madness. But AMD will give you 32 cores in a mainstream 2-socket system and it looks like Intel will give you 16 or 20 cores which are faster by some as-yet unknown fraction.

In terms of FP, which is what I care about most about it looks like Bulldozer cores are equal, clock for clock, with the newest Xeon cores on SSE2 code and somewhere closer to half as fast with AVX, when that becomes important.

No, not so much.

I understand they hand out press releases but there's no need to smoke them up and inhale so deeply, while washing it down with Intel Kool-Aid.

I don't see Intel's slicing up of the chipset family as a benefit to anyone but Intel - OEMs can build systems with varying storage options without needing multiple silicon parts. It's Intel's attempt to grab a larger chunk of the price of higher cost servers. Nice to see as many as 8 x 6Gbps SAS ports, I believe AMD offers 6 x 3Gbps SATA at present, requiring additional chippery many times.

C32 only seems to make sense in low-end single socket, but with Bulldozer it offers 8 cores against the 4 Intel offers in the E3 Xeons. AMD looks to be equal/ahead in memory bandwidth per socket with G34 vs Intel (4 channels vs 3 or 4) and a bit behind in ultimate capacity (8 DIMMS vs 9 or 12) The AMD chipsets have as many or more PCIe lanes.

Intel will give you 8 cores in an E5 or 10 in a pricey E7, AMD offers 16. Who can say about performance until things are released, but AMD's CPU prices are relative bargins.

and so it begins...

> I would like to see triple parity from ZFS and an option to bypass hardware error correction.

Self. Foot. Shoot.

Enjoy the extra 20% capacity while you can.

Don't stop the fuel pump

I don't imagine GM means to actually shut off the fuel supply bang-full stop. There's safety issues as CBarn notes, and some fuel injection systems would be trashed running dry like that.

Many (most?) vehicles have "throttle by wire" nowadays, so a progressive limiting of the throttle plate opening would do the job gradually.

Failing throttle-by-wire, some manipulation of fuel injector pulse width or ignition timing would bring you to a crawl safely.

Reg is consistant

Should have know there couldn't be a science article without the "B"-word.

Keep it out of the title but work in into the first sentence. Sigh.

pulsed power

A 500KW radar is not particularly huge. The power rating is the peak amplitude of a rather short pulse - average power over time is probably a few 10's of KWs.

Erm, wrong

The dinner guest was not the same person as the neighbor. If you're going to write a long rant you might check the facts in the story? Or maybe not.

This cache is managed differently

To Oliver, the first commentator:

This is a non-volatile cache, so it's ready after being shut-off. The transfer rate from flash is not really better than a hard drive, but access is so much faster that by putting the most used bit of start-up libraries and favorite applications in flash the overall performance feels much snappier at the times when the waits are most annoying.

It's different from a traditional most-recently used cache scheme (CPU cache and filesystem RAM cache) in that once you shown a pattern of commonly used files, they'll live in flash with relatively little turn over.

rational comments

The 6100/6150 _are_ Nvidia's current integrated parts, though they've been out at least a year. The clock rate for the 6150 is ~10% faster than the 6100. The 6150 does much better at scaling video for full screen playback, that's the real difference, not 3D performance.

The G965 is the only Intel integrated solution that supports Shader Model 3.0 in DirectX, and that's the critical feature. Anything with a Q965 or GMA-xxx (G945, etc) will not have the same appearance with Vista. AMD is not incorrect to make their claims - there are lots of mATX boards being sold with 945 chipsets, and driver support for G965 is currently very spotty.

The same image quality difference comes up in a game like World of Warcraft, where SM 3.0 chips give you greatly improved views in and around water, because the surface transparancy is enabled. The 6150 manages ~20fps in WoW, but they're really pretty frames...

What about ATI's integrated chipsets? are those available for Intel as well as AMD, and do they support SM 3.0?