Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I have won a baseball shirt in a raffle here at IDF that's been autographed by Gordon Moore.

You can't get more geek cred than that!

Another IT Pro blog post, this time looking at the next generation of processors from Intel and AMD:

The end of January set the scene for a year in which new processor technologies from both the main hardware vendors look set to battle for the server crown. Intel's new Penryn processors move it onto new 45nm processes, while AMD's Barcelona offers single die quad core as a drop in replacement for many existing servers.

While Penryn is only just starting to sample, and is unlikely to ship until the later half of the year (though there are rumours of earlier ship dates), Intel's Clovertown quad core processors are already shipping. AMD is hoping to leapfrog Clovertown's performance with its new Opterons, and expects Barcelona to offer 40% better performance than the equivalent Clovertown. With Intel having stolen back the performance crown with its Core 2 architecture, AMD needs to offer big performance gains to win back flagship customers like Sun.

Read more.

...in our news stories for IT Pro:

Intel outlines a terascale future
Intel launches Quad Core processors
Certification program for Wireless USB launches
PCI Express grows up with Geneseo
Intel's Santa Rosa notebook platform to include 802.11n before standard
Intel previews future instruction set for server developers

Lots learnt, and much to think about over the next few months (and probably turn into more articles).

You know, I really love my job. I get to meet interesting people, learn lots of interesting things, and then get to share it all with people all over the world. It's ideal for a lazy geek like me...

I also get to score cool widgets in the trade show, but that's a whole 'nother story!

IT Pro has my report on the reasons behind the merger of ATI and AMD.

In the wake of the announcement of the merger between AMD and chipset and graphics powerhouse ATI, IT PRO sat down with AMD's chief administrative officer Thomas McCoy and ATI's EMEA managing director Peter Edinger to learn more about the deal - and what it'll mean for the industry.

It's all about the strategy - and that strategy is all about competing with Intel on the desktop. AMD needs to increase its volume sales, and the only way to do that is to get a bigger share of the desktop and mobile computing market (as well as moving into home entertainment equipment, and providing low-cost hardware for emerging markets).

A surprisingly open conversation (within the limits of US financial regulations).

...as AMD purchases ATI.

It's an interesting fit with AMD's plans to build on the success of its Opteron chips and open up HyperTransport for the development of dedicated co-processors (including physics engines and Java machines). AMD needs the expertise of a motherboard and chipset manufacturer to get this project, code-named Terrazzo, working well, and to drive the development of 64-bit servers.

It'll also counteract the Intel push to own the home PC platform, with a strong media PC alternative to Viiv. ATI's a strong player in the Windows Media Centre space, so it should give AMD more traction with OEMs and other hardware manufacturers.

All in all good for the industry. But I'm not sure what it'll mean for Nvidia in the short term.

Yesterday we went out and bought a new PC.

Nothing fancy, but something to eventually replace my current desktop, which is slowly failing after a PSU went "phut", let out the magic smoke, and took out a chunk of the motherboard. It still works, but there's going to be a day soon when it finally kicks the bit bucket.

We wandered down to PC World, where we picked up a small Athlon 64 machine. The specifications weren't too bad: 2GHz 64 bit processor, on-board ATI Radeon graphics card, and 512 MB of RAM, a dual layer DVD burner, 160GB of 7200RPM SATA hard disc, built-in gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 ports, firewire, and a whole pile of media readers. It's quiet and small, and in a reasonably attractive mirrored black case. The days of the beige box are long gone.

Not bad pricing, either. Including VAT it cost us around £360. We didn't need a monitor (they'd have sold us a 17" LCD for another £100).

That's over £130 cheaper than a Mac Mini, for a machine that's significantly more powerful - and with enough expansion capability to turn it into a nice little media box, too. (I have made one change, dropping in an extra half gig of RAM, but I'm currently using it to run a beta version of Windows Vista, with lots of debug code still in place, and it's performing comparably to a hyperthreaded Pentium 4 machine.)

With Apple rumoured to be announcing its Intel Mac Mini in a week or so, it's going to need to seriously consider its pricing structures. People are going to walk into PC World, look at the specifications of a hypothetical Intel Mini, and compare it with a generic Intel or AMD PC. It's going to be (as they say) Apples to apples - not G5 to P4. In which case, prices are going to need to come down some. Sure, Apple will be able to initially have some uplift thanks to the brand name, but the days of high margins on branded hardware will be behind them, and the market will force them to parity with the HPs and Dells of the world.

Interesting times.

...with two Guardian articles in which I introduce the term "arphid" into the mass media and marypcb and I cry "The Pentium is dead, long live the Pentium" at Intel's Fall Developer Forum.

Oh, and I seem to be Server Management magazine's new messaging columnist.

There's a lot happening here at the Fall IDF in the Moscone Centre. However I did want to bring Intel's new advertising slogan to your attention: "Welcome To The Parallel Universe".

And it's in a very skiffy font...

...about a hacked OS X 86 than runs in a VMware image?

They're true. It's bloody slow though - even on a 3GHz hyper-threading box.

I decided to put on my journalist's hat and track the image down. It's not difficult to find - it's well seeded and carried on many BitTorrent trackers. The 2GB image takes a while to download, and then requires considerable unpacking. Once unpacked, you can open the image and start running. Some of the VMware device locations in the image need to be changed, and there's no networking, but it boots. And runs.

Well, "runs" is a bit of a misnomer, I think I prefer "crawls".

The lack of speed (the hype from the Wired article is best ignored) isn't surprising, VMware and Virtual PC need to know quite a bit about the OS they're running in order to optimise the virtual machine for the client OS, and this is only a hack of something that's actually intended for a specific hardware platform.

The hack has removed the current link to the developer motherboard TPM chip, which Rosetta needs to run. As Apple intends to preserve its hardware margins, we can expect that the final OS X for x86 will use TPM for a lot more than the current developer release - so the hacks used here are unlikely to work for anything else.

It's still rather odd seeing Aqua starting up on my PC.

Apparently Apple are head-hunting Sony's Vaio designers.

Now, I like Vaio designs, but the systems themselves have always struck me as compromises, with far too much proprietary hardware that isn't supported from one Windows version to the next.

Let's hope they don't keep up the tradition at Apple...